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The Role of Spirituality in Addiction Medicine

The Role of Spirituality in Addiction Medicine

The Role of Spirituality in Addiction Medicine is a work by Marc Galanter (2021).

Core claims

  • Galanter reviews the contemporary evidence for spirituality’s role in addiction medicine, arguing that spiritual engagement — whether through 12-step programs, meditation-based interventions, or other spiritual practices — constitutes a legitimate clinical modality with outcomes that justify its integration into mainstream treatment protocols.
  • The paper addresses the institutional resistance to incorporating spirituality into addiction medicine, attributing it to the field’s biomedical orientation and the perceived incompatibility of spiritual concepts with empirical science — a resistance Galanter argues is no longer evidence-based.
  • Galanter proposes a ‘spiritual recovery’ model that positions spiritual transformation not as an adjunct to pharmacological and behavioral treatment but as a primary mechanism of change that operates through meaning-making, identity reconstruction, and the activation of neurobiological systems associated with social bonding and reward.
  • Does Galanter’s ‘spiritual recovery’ model provide the clinical framework that Jung’s correspondence with Bill Wilson pointed toward but never systematized — a treatment approach that takes the spiritual dimension of addiction as seriously as the neurobiological?
  • How should addiction medicine reconcile the evidence for spiritual engagement’s therapeutic effects with the philosophical commitment to secular, empirically grounded treatment — is this a genuine tension, or does the evidence itself dissolve the boundary between the spiritual and the scientific?

See also

  • Library page: /library/recovery/galanter-spirituality-addiction-medicine/

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