Earlier quoted context omitted.
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746426/ That article shows that people who regularly go to AA meetings are more likely to be sober (e.g. 67% people who went to one or more meeting a week were sober 16 years later). Because of the universal nature of AA, it is hard to randomize for it (if you just randomly tell an alcoholic to go to AA, they have already been told that by others, so that's not a very g…
AA works fundamentally by substituting an addiction to Alcohol to one for AA - This to me has always seemed like a workable (if in the short term) way to solve the problem.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/108107397127806
(Note that this is a paywall link. Here is a quote to give readers here a gist of that article: "acceptance of the tenets of AA may be associated with positive behavioral change"; the paper describes how working the AA program results in people having a more positive world view)
12-step meetings are not a short-term fix; I have already linked to a paper which shows that two out of three people who regularly go to AA meetings in their first year of alcohol treatment are still sober 16 years later. Here's the original paper with those figures: