Salus Forum: May 2025

Similarly, Gay Teurman works with people who are struggling with trauma. I would assume, Gay, that part of your task is to help them create a narrative of post-trauma. If they have been living with trauma and they’ve been organizing their life around trauma, how do you create a narrative that relates to something beyond trauma?

This turns directly into today’s topic: what is it that’s compelling to people? Joe, part of what we’ve been dealing with almost from the first of our forums concerns the best way to influence people. Over the year, we’ve been asking ourselves: why is it that we have had little impact, even though abundant evidence has come out about how important family medicine and holistic practices are in bringing about positive health outcomes? Why hasn’t our evidence won the day? Why hasn’t everyone rushed over and provided all the funding for these forms of medicine that work very well?

Bill G, you’ve been talking about people participating in high-hazard activities, such as football. We know there are major health-related problems associated with many physical activities. Maybe the football players get the money and get the support, but what about all the other people who have experiences real assault and brain damage. Why isn’t the funding going to help these people? And particularly with what’s going on in the U.S. government right now, the challenge is about influence and how people come around to recognize what good medicine is. These are real challenges.

The related thing I want to talk about as a trigger concerns the relation between numbers and narratives. Essentially, there are two primary ways in which “facts” are being conveyed. One way is through the introduction of numbers. This approach is based on what’s often called an objectivist perspective. The objectivist perspective, as we’ve talked about during past sessions, is based on the assumption that there is a reality out there. Using credible scientific methods, findings can be validated concerning what the real world is. The primary challenge from an objective perspective is: what are the credible sources of validation? As we found in reading Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions, the validation sources are themselves subject to change.

The primary tool being used by objectivists (at least in the behavioral sciences) is statistics. And what’s interesting in the behavioral sciences and most of the medical sciences, is the reliance on tests of significance. The assumption is that you only get significant results if they can be reported at a 0.05 or 0.01 level of confidence. It’s always amazed me that this is  such an arbitrary criterion. If you have a 0.07 result, that’s insignificant, but 0.05 is significant. And 0.03 is even better. 0.01 is wonderful. And you can report a wonderful, significant correlation of 0.40. But in fact, that’s only accounting for less than 20% of the shared variance.