One View on The Doctor's Opinion

The little doctor who loved drunks, Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, is the first doctor in history to not only label alcoholism a disease but to address it as mental and physical.  

The Physical Allergy as he writes in the Doctor's Opinion in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous p. XXVIII and he says, 

       " We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the Phenomenon of Craving is limited to that class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found that they can not break it, once having lost their self confidence, their reliance on things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve." 

Without this man I may never have figured out my problem and that is that my body was sick and my mind was sick. Hence the Physical Allergy and Mental Obsession terminology was finally accurately described.