Optimism, Osteopaths and Homeopathics

I was about to walk away from the optimism/pessimism topic, when a couple more ways to sort the data tickled my fancy. I wondered if it mattered what protocols people were using, and what type of practitioner someone was working with. So today's blog is utterly about scratching my curiosity itch.

Knowing (as always) that we need bigger sample sizes, please take this one with the usual grain of salt. However, I was floored by a couple of these patterns and it seems very unlikely that it is all fluke and no substance.

Here's the numbers, when we sort optimism levels by practitioner type.

Patients of DO's call themselves optimistic in 75% of cases, compared with 46.3% of the general response population. That's a big difference. Only 3.6% are somewhat pessimistic, and none of them report being very pessimistic. In fact, across the board DO patients are the highest ranked in optimism and lowest in pessimism.

ND's look better than average as well, but not nearly so good.

Now, we know from a few blogs back that DO's are doing as well with their patients as the other categories; there isn't some night and day difference in success rates that would account for this. Somehow, though, DO's are doing a better job of instilling (or sustaining) optimism in their patients.

The least optimistic are those without lyme literate support. Again, we don't have the breakdown on who within this category is working with non-lyme literate practitioner support and who is really flying solo. But it does seem like this isn't a good emotional place for a lot of people.

It makes me want to ask how many are in this category because they've given up completely (in which case, it would make sense that someone wold not have a practitioner, and be very pessimistic about recovery.)

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Now let's see if the difference shows up in different treatment protocols. We'll use just 5 core protocols for this, for the sake of simplicity.

I went back to the raw numbers for this (rather than the percentages you see) and did a little fancy math, weighting the answers in a rough way as follows:

Very Optimistic              2.0
Somewhat Optimistic    1.0
Somewhat Pessimistic  -1.0
Very Pessimistic           -2.0

...and then taking the average rating. Here's what I got as my kind of "gestalt summary" of people's answers:

Homeopathics:        +.95
Herbs:                     +.88
Energy healing:      +.88
Antibiotics:            +.47
Rife:                       +.15

First of all, note that nothing tops 1. There isn't anything that can be said to be really inspiring a high level of optimism in people. We should pause on that for a moment...

Have I mentioned that the medical community still has some work to do on helping us find real, consistent cures?

Now within that context, there are some things that I found interesting here.

First, the three that often get called "unscientific" in a derogatory way are not clumped together (I'm lumping energy healing, homeopathics and rifing in that group). It isn't just about studies.

Does rifing rate low because it ends up being a last ditch effort of the hopeless and downtrodden when everything else has failed? Or does it mean that rifing just isn't clearly helping for enough people to boost the overall confidence rating? (But then why keep doing it as a core treatment?)

I also wonder what it means that antibiotics are not apparently inspiring the level of confidence in people that you'd expect, given a culture that holds them up as the answer.

Meanwhile, homeopathics look relatively good in this rating system, with herbs and energy healing close on their heals. Does this mean that generally optimistic people gravitate toward them? Or that they are really working well for people and contributing to people's optimism?

My more cynical and science-based friends would say that this just confirms that people who like "magical thinking" (represented by homeopathics and energy healing) are hopeless polyannas. They might be right (but then why is it not happening with rifing, too?) but I'm more interested in actually getting more info about what is going on that philosophizing.

And really, we could be asking those chicken and egg questions at every step with these questions. My commitment is this: we'll find out more.