That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: Belief in a higher power is among the best-known characteristics of the recovery programme of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
In my experience, non-believers can be reluctant to get involved with AA for that reason.
But now there is research to suggest that AA works just as well for non-believers as for believers.
The study, carried out in Boston and in Providence, Rhode Island, found, as you might expect, that believers were more likely than non-believers to join AA.
But for those who attended, the outcome was the same whether or not they believed in a higher power.
The researchers suggested that the social support provided by the AA is a key to its success - for instance, having a sponsor you can talk to when tempted to drink is a powerful aspect of AA.
The other interesting thing the researchers found - and I know this is old hat to AA - was that the more meetings people attended, the better they tended to do.
It's easy to regard people who go to a lot of meetings as having become dependent on AA instead of alcohol. Yet the more meetings you attend, the more benefit you are going to get, this research suggests.
But even going to a few meetings is better than going to none at all.
The study looked at the experience of more than 200 alcoholics over a three-year period. All had been involved in outpatient rehabilitation programmes so it is reasonable to assume that all had been very heavy drinkers.
The research found that it tends to be the people with the worst alcoholism problems who attend AA. Going to AA meetings was good for both women and men and for people who also had a psychiatric illness.
I find that people are also sometimes reluctant to consider AA meetings because of the image of the organisation as a last resort for people who are in extreme trouble with drink.
In other words, the act of going to an AA meeting is in itself an admission that you have a problem - and it may be the admission to yourself that is the most difficult to make.
One man told me he would not return for a second AA meeting because the people he met there were the sort he would normally cross the road to avoid.
It occurred to me that the particular meeting he had gone to was located in an area where there are a great many citizens of that ilk.
I suggested he try a meeting in an area where the people attending were more likely to be similar to himself. He did so, returned to a number of meetings and did well.
This is not to say that AA is the beginning and the end of everything. There are other routes to sobriety. Some people reduce or eliminate their drinking on their own. Others do so with the help of a counsellor.
Advice from a GP can get some people to stop drinking.
Even brief counselling sessions in hospital emergency departments has been found to encourage people to cut down on their drinking or to give it up.
Needless to say, you will not get that kind of counselling in emergency departments here in the world capital of binge drinking.
An Italian study which looked at the experience of more than 3,000 problem drinkers found that other interventions - counselling on relapse prevention, for instance - worked as well as AA.
The authors suggested that what is important is to pick the right approach for the individual.
But that assumes the availability of options. Despite the role of alcohol in our national life, we have failed miserably to provide a widely available range of options.
You will get more help if you are a heroin addict than if you are an alcoholic.
Alcoholics Anonymous has the great virtue that it is available almost everywhere and that it works for many, many people.
So if you have a problem with drink, do not dismiss AA out of hand. It may help you to get a life.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.