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.)

++++++++

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.

At the Core

So far we've explored how treatment effectiveness, our enthusiasm for our treatments and what people have tried. Today, we look at a different angle on treatment options: what do people currently consider to be the core of their protocols.

This is different from what we were looking at in the last couple blogs because it is less about what we've tried out and more about what we are relying on, based on whatever level of experience we (and our doctors) bring to this.

We'll also look at a couple of the specific protocols we surveyed about to see how those are working for people.


Here's the data from the survey:

Now, I could spin these results in a myriad of ways. Here's a few:

• People who try more things get better at a higher rate (I spun one of my other blogs in just that way, remember? See how the purple line pokes out further on most things?) In other words, integrative medicine is the way to go, and the more angles you hit lyme from, the better off you'll be.

• People who get well are the ones for whom either antibiotics and/or herbs work well. (Given that there is lots of purple on both of those.)

• Given that the best outcome patients only rarely ventured outside this list of 6 things as their cores, if you are going to get well, you'll probably find it here. (This analysis is especially suspect: just because I surveyed about them doesn't mean they are all that special. If I'd asked, say, about hyperbaric chambers, they'd probably have a similar response to some of the stuff here.)

• In general, you are fortunate if you have access to antibiotics (a doctor who will prescribe them) and they work for you. Almost 80% of people doing well have them as a core, while only 62% of the worst outcome people do.

• The biggest gap between worst and best outcome patients is in the use of herbs. Therefore, herbs must be a key thing for getting well.

(Side note: see how much fun it is, playing with statistics? I could write a whole blog on how tempting it has been to spin data to fit my own preconceived notions biases. As a general media literacy rule, always be wary of how people spin data! Look at the graphs closely and see if you see a different interpretation.)

Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing which of those spins is actually true; or perhaps a better way to say it is that each of those spins is probably true for some people and not true for others.

I do find it interesting, though, that antibiotics are only core for about 70% of us. I regularly hear people on our support lists express surprise that there are non-antibiotic options out there, or that people are trying anything else. And here's some concrete numbers to say, yes there are other options, and not everyone is primarily focused on antibiotics as their core... in fact a significant minority are looking elsewhere for healing, a chunk of whom are doing really well.

Beyond that, this is one of those blogs where I invite you to pick your own spin. You've seen a LOT of data from me, and probably have looked at other people's as well. What do you think is going on?

+++++++

Now, I worried a little bit that there might be a built in problem here that related to time. We all know that chronic lyme cases don't resolve overnight, and it seems like the first thing that almost everyone tries is antibiotics. We also know that a lot of folks in this survey are relatively new to the treatment game (just over half of the people in this pool have been treating for 2 years of less).

So maybe people are doing best with higher doses of antibiotics just because they are on them longer? Or maybe people give up on certain protocols, or we put faith in different things depending on the time we've been in treatment?

(I actually fully expected that second thing to be true, that we'd see a drift away from antibiotics and toward more alternative things as people decided the first thing their doctors tried wasn't going to work for them. There's those biases rearing their ugly heads, eh?)

So I ran these numbers about treatments for longer and shorter term patients, and here's what that looks like:

If you can see something here you'd call statistically significant, I'll eat my hat. When you take into account that the sample sizes for rife machines and essential oils are pretty small, I don't see any significant differences here at all. So the differences we see in core protocols don't appear to be because people tend to gravitate toward one end of the antibiotics-alternatives spectrum over time.

+++++

I also wondered if the variations were more about who we see (or don't) than anything else. Here's the breakdown, based on what type of practitioner support we have:

Now this is interesting! Here we do see significant differences (and in the next blog we'll look at lyme treatment success rates among different types of practitioners). The bottom line is that MD's are far more reliant on antibiotics as the core for treatment than ND's and OD's.

And people who are either essentially self-treating or relying on less knowledgeable doctors (which in some cases is functionally the same thing) are more likely to try a variety of options. This is probably in part because most non-LL practitioners won't prescribe antibiotics for the long term, and so they are forced into looking at other things.

However, some people are in this category voluntarily; they are choosing (either based on philosophy or giving up on professionals) to do it alone, in spite of the fact that it reduces their treatment options by eliminating access to long term (or any) prescription drugs.

Most interesting, perhaps, is how many therapies have a high enthusiasm rating (see my "Healing with an Open Mind" blog) and are not being used by lyme literate doctors, and especially MD's. This isn't that surprising  because MD's (like every other group of humans in the world) tend to rely on what they know, and antibiotics are one of their primary tools in their practices in general.

This information can be particularly helpful if you are in the process of choosing a lyme literate practitioner (and are either fortunate enough to live somewhere that gives you options, or are going to have to travel no matter what). Considering what your own preferred approach would be to healing, it is a good idea to choose a practitioner who is going to support hat basic mode.

As a very general statement, here's what I mean. Fan of antibiotics? Look for an MD. Interested in herbs and other alternatives? Look to the DO and ND doctors for that. Of course, you always want to ask about how that specific doctor approaches it, and these are generalities. Still, they look pretty significant to me, and knowledge, as they say, is power.

+++++

OK, I want to go down a side street before we close today. I had asked survey questions about two particular protocols (and of course since starting this process a couple months ago, have come into awareness about many others I could have asked about... next time!)

I had meant to include this with the last blog, but spaced it out. (You know how that goes). Here's the info about those two protocols.

 I've included the info about antibiotics and herbals next to these specific protocols because these are basically subsets of the larger categories: Marshall uses antibiotics as the main bug killer (in conjunction with other things) and Cowden is an herbal protocol.

It looks like both protocols perform as well as their larger categories, but they don't generate more enthusiasm. It isn't surprising to see them tried less, as there are any number of variations on the theme of antibiotic and herbal protocols.

I don't think this reflects the same kind of belief biases I was discussing in the last blog so much as there being a plethora of choices within each other larger categories.