Narratives of Exceptional Survivors Who Work with Aboriginal Healers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The commonalities are described of 47 people who sought traditional aboriginal healers for help with their cancer. All had 10% or less chance of survival at 5 years given the site and stage of their cancer from actuarial table calculations. SUBJECTS AND DESIGN: The subjects were compared to a similar group of people who were also working with aboriginal healers and who did not survive past 5 years. Narratives were obtained from the people before and after their work with the healer. These stories were enriched through interviews with family members, friends, health care providers, and the healers themselves, whenever possible. Panels of naïve medical students, graduate students, patients, and health care providers were used to evaluate the stories and to pick themes that consistently emerged (dimension analysis). Once stable dimensions emerged, scenarios were developed to rate patients along these dimensions from "1" to "5." New panels did the ratings, with at least 3 panels of 3 people per narrative. Comparisons were made between these 2 groups of people, and differences emerged on the dimensions of Present-centeredness; Forgiveness of others; Release of blame, bitterness, and chronic anger; Orientation to process versus outcome; Sense of Humor; Refusal to accept death as immediate prognosis; Plausible (to the patient, his or her family, and the healers) explanation for why he or she got well, including a story reflecting a belief about how he or she can stay well; Supportive community who believes in the person's cure and protects the person from outsiders who think the person will die; People experience a quantum change, in which major improvements in self-esteem and quality of relationships occurs; and Spiritual transformation. CONCLUSIONS: The 2 groups of people reported equal increases on the dimensions of Sense of Meaning and Purpose and Faith and Hope, which may be intrinsic to the style of healing of aboriginal elders.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".