The CIWA score has been around since 1989, has been externally validated multiple times and is recommended in the guidelines of many countries. However, the original author always maintained that it was not designed to be used as a recipe for pharmacological treatment (certain scores necessitating certain doses of benzodiazepine). It is also rather time consuming and prone to inaccuracy (many elements are scored from patient-reported subjective symptoms, which can be lied about or exaggerated)...Enter the SHOT score

 

Academic Emergency Medicine, October 2010