Unlike areas in medicine where the rigorous scientific evaluation of treatments before patient exposure has become standard, validating the effectiveness of various treatments for alcoholism is a fairly new enterprise. The study of the efficacy of lithium carbonate as a treatment for alcoholism by Dorus et al,1 in this issue of The Journal, is highly encouraging since it demonstrates again that modern standards of treatment evaluation can be applied to alcoholism treatment.2
Although earlier research in animals and in smaller-scale studies on human subjects had led to the hypothesis that lithium carbonate might be useful in treating alcoholics,3-5 Dorus and colleagues, in their large-scale, multisite evaluation, found that lithium carbonate did not affect the course of alcoholism in either depressed or nondepressed alcoholics. In conducting their study, the authors avoided weaknesses common to many alcoholism treatment studies. Principal among these weaknesses are having too few subjects to