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Bertrand Yersin, MD; Fred Paccaud, MD
Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine Lausanne, Switzerland

JAMA. 1989;262(6):772.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The recent article by Moore et al¹ emphasizes perfectly the urgent need for detection and treatment of alcoholism in hospitalized patients. Besides providing other important epidemiologic data, it demonstrates the underdetection of alcoholism by hospital physicians. On the other hand, it shows that physician intervention, whatever it was, had at least a short-term impact on the patient's behavior regarding alcohol consumption. These observations are of particular importance because alcoholism is frequent in populations of hospitalized patients and because physicians usually are undertrained and also reluctant to spend efforts for detection and initiation of treatment for alcoholism.

Since the French part of Switzerland is a region of high alcohol consumption, we studied prospectively the applicability and frequency of positivity of the French translation of the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (MAST) in patients from the departments of internal medicine of two hospitals in this country. We also recorded . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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