The identification of adolescent substance abuse by health care professionals

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the frequency with which health care professionals identify alcohol and drug problems in an adolescent clinic population. The results indicated that the health care professionals were apt to judge far fewer adolescents as having an alcohol/drug problem than as having other problems common to this age group. Furthermore, adjusted citywide prevalence rates of adolescent alcohol abuse (12.7%) exceeded health care professionals' judgments (3.0%) by over fourfold.