DRINKING PROBLEMS, THE MATCHING HYPOTHESIS AND A CONCLUSION REVISED

In this note we will first recapitulate certain findings from a paper which was published earlier from the Addiction Research Unit of the National Addiction Centre (Orford, Oppenheimer & Edwards, 1976). That paper described the differential characteristics of patients with drinking problems who at 2-year follow-up were abstinent or drinking in a controlled fashion. Some data reported in that paper have been quoted (Institute of Medicine, 1990; Sobell & Sobell, 1993), as providing evidence in support of the proposition that better treatment results will be obtained with alcohol problems if treatment type or intensity are matched to patient characteristics. We will briefly recapitulate the early findings and will then explain why a much more recent analysis of results deriving from the same patient group leads us now to reconsider those previous conclusions.