This is an issue on which my opinion has changed a great deal over the years I've been sober, and here's why.
I do believe in the basic principle that we need to be honest with our health care professionals (lawyers too, but that's actually not the issue here).
At the same time, there is no doubt that the "alcoholic" or "alcohol dependent" label can have terrible consequences, and because of the notion that alcoholism is a "disease" that never goes away, these consequences follow you around literally forever. For example, life insurance. I am a very healthy person: I don't smoke, haven't had a drink in years, am at my ideal weight, exercise regularly, have perfect blood pressure, etc.....and yet I cannot get life insurance at preferred rates. I have to pay the standard nonsmoker rate, which is MUCH higher. And this will, according to my insurance agent, NEVER change. And it is because I went to rehab, where the ONLY thing they did was to tell me to go to AA meetings and charged my insurance for it. That puts it on my chart and it follows me like a barnacle.
Also, there's the issue of pain meds. I have been lucky enough not to need anything like that...yet...but I will tell you this: if I ever need pain meds, I bloody well want them, and I don't want them withheld because I had a drinking problem sometime in the last century.
So, in retrospect, I wish that I had not gone to rehab and that I had never told my doctors that I had a problem with alcohol.
Which of course goes entirely against my belief that one should be entirely honest with one's doctor, but there it is. Sometimes life is complicated.
OTT
PS: As far as the stigma issue: I do not call myself an "alcoholic", recovering or otherwise, in public, ever. Another thing I've learned. I'm a nondrinker, and that is really all anyone needs to know. I truly don't care to be defined by a problem I've resolved and left behind.