A special episode tonight as the entire PCP crew is re-assembled for an interview with The Doctor, Dr. Kimberly Hendrick that is. She put together the Pagan Health Survey and recently presented some results to the American Public Health Survey. Dr. Kimberly Hendrick is a cultural anthropologist investigating Pagan mindsets towards health issues. Tonight, we also discover a shocking secret about the Pagan community: we’re not all broke.
Regular Hosts:
Amber, Ashlee, Branden, Dave, Joe
Guest Hosts:
Lamyka and Dr. Kimberly Hendrick of the Pagan Health Survey
01:44
Cultural Ecology and Ethnology: the definition of. What Kimberly is and what she does.
03:18
Scurvy asks about the reaction Kimberly got from the other doctors and health care professionals when presenting the findings of her study.
03:47
About 1/2 the people had the response that one of the people they knew was Wiccan, but the other half seemed to be appauled that the idea of pagans were brought up.
04:21
After pagans were explained, people seemed a bit more interested about hearing about the pagan viewpoint on health and healing
04:44
There was a large number of professionals that said they feel they would be at risk for losing their job if they came out of the “broom closet”
05:07
You have practitioners wanting the patients to be comfortable, but yet can’t feel comfortable themselves being honest about who they are in the field
05:47
Branden brings up that pagans seem to have a lot of healing background in general, and yet there’s a lot of professionals that are practicing pagans but can’t bring it into the light because of it not being widely accepted
06:38
Branden askes about path details that came out of the survey
06:52
There’s a lot of data…Kimberly is still working on the details of the 1600+ respondants
07:35
Kimberly gives the overal results of the survey in regards to what faith path the individuals practiced
09:01
The individual interviews of some of the professionals pointed to that the reason there was hesitation of coming out of the closet was due to their superiors being consersvative Christian rather than a general non-acceptance
09:49
Scurvy asks if she had people try and tell her what she believes
10:02
What she was told once, Wiccan…yeah…those are the people that worship the trees. It shows that we need a bit if work when it comes to public definition
10:41
When people talk, if it’s not published fact, sometimes they only half listen. Having the survey helps people come out of their bubble because you have a greater basis
11:10
Branden asks if there was any opposition coming from the directors when looking to interview the individual doctors
11:45
Kim was hoping that while she was interested, it was also a hope that someone that was a bit more involved in the community that was “better qualified” to take over
12:43
Nobody stepped up to take over, so Kimberly took over and started asking questions. Starting wtih her little group of druids as well as professional opinion.
13:13
When it came to distrubution, there was a few large organizations, like the Wild Hunt Blog, to help spread the word about the survey
13:44
Clergy and other national organizations were also asked to spread the word to spread it further.
14:25
Scurvy asks what the general average for “how long have you been a pagan”
14:54
Average number of years for being a pagan (of those adults that took the survey) was 17 years with age range of 36-50
15:34
We have more people being pagan for longer, which means more children raised pagan, which means the numbers will change within 5-20 years
15:49
2001 survey said 330,000 pagans. 2008 said 1-2,000,000. That’s a whole lot of new pagans
16:38
Kimberly explains how larger interest groups make it easier for information and help to become more availble by using her druid group as an example
17:11
Lamyka asks where the funding for this amazing survey comes from
17:29
Kimberly did all of this on her own, between the time and the funding…as a gift. Kudos to you Miss Kimberly!!
18:29
Kimberly feels that being able to talk to some of the individuals that she got to meet and to get the gift of data was a wonderful return for the work done
19:13
There was a similar survey done in western Buddist, but they had a much longer survey. They also had a much lower completion rate due to it’s legnth.
20:08
One of the awesome things about the pagan community, we’re thoughtful, critical, and somewhat honest. So when Kimberly did her survey, we let her know what we thought…so she can improve on it later of course
20:32
Lamyka asks if this is going to be something we should look forward to every year, or perhaps five years
21:32
Maybe not every year, but evey 5 or 10 would be useful. But tackling the needs that has come out of the survey is more important than having the survey again.
22:19
People indicated a lack of trust when it comes to mental health professionals and Kimberly talks about that situation
22:39
Scurvy talks about his experience with federal work and a mental health provider
23:18
Pagans share that fear with other minority groups. Smaller groups have non-traditional beliefs that can cause some problems with the idea of cursing and things in the field of mental health.
25:18
Did the survey show that pagans were more likely to hide information from their doctor?
25:29
That wasn’t clear in the survey, partly because that wasn’t asked in the survey
26:01
The average American uses alternative practices, most won’t tell their doctor
26:32
Some don’t want to feel like the doctor is telling them they’re crazy. The other half of the time, the doctors aren’t aware of the alternative treatment so the patient had to sit and explain it and they felt that it wasn’t worth their time
27:14
There’s some progress in some schools that are pushing for some basic herbalism learning
27:34
There’s a lot of discrepencies in the kinds and qualities of education the practitioners recieve in alternative care
28:05
Scurvy relates his personal experience with a therapist and how the therapist worked with his meditation practices
28:34
The average pagain is not going to try and use just ritual to say fix a broken leg. Most pagans want to mix science and religion rather than pit them against each other
30:18
Lamkya brings up that insurance companies don’t cover many alternative or complimentary treatments
30:50
The survey shows that people felt insurance was important, but mainly for catastrophic reasons more than every day usage BECAUSE it doesn’t cover many alternative treatments
32:04
Many insurance plans only cover a small number of mental health visits as well, this is another thing that needs worked on with insurance companies
32:58
Listener asks if Kimberly feels that her coming out as pagan will effect her future career. Kimberly explains how it depends on the department, but she has come out as pagan from the start
34:06
Kimberly also mentiones that there ARE some places that she understand would not be OK to come out as a pagan, especially in the current work recession
35:03
Amber asks if there was any changes in perspective that Kimberly has seen so far when presenting her survey
35:24
Kimberly saw some individuals had a shift in how they saw pagans in general. While that may have been in people’s minds already, the fact that they were ready to listen to what she said was a good step in the right direction
36:23
There’s a lot of hope for people understanding paganism.
36:44
Hopefully by educating more health care professionals, we can promote a better care and understandings of their patients
37:27
These finding will help because what is found in the survey, tends to be common wants in most people such as being listened to and respected
38:07
Amber brings up the Yahoo group done by Michael Reeder that has the mental health practitioners that are pagan friendly and if that is something the pagan friendly physicians can set up
38:33
Kimberly isn’t sure if we can get physical health doctors to do something like that yet, but the community seems to be starting up a directory on their own
40:30
Dave asks Kimberly what inspired her to do this survey
40:42
Kimberly has been interested in health and healing for all of her adult life and goes into some of her education and experience background
41:56
Kimberly had a personal experinece of being misdiagnosed and mistreated, so it helped giving her a personal perspecive on the survey
42:32
Lamkya asks what funding, stucture, organization would be needed to start what may be an ideal end goal
42:48
Kimberly gives what she feels she’d need for a directory. Website, people to built it..ect…
43:35
Lamyka brings up other churches who have opened up their own free clinics. Could the pagan community do something similar?
44:45
Kimberly explains the positives and negatives of having a religious based structure like a pagan clinic
45:11
Good point is that we are tolerant of divirsity as a whole
45:47
From being so “small group” structured, we have a harder time organizing for rights and speak up as a cohesive unit
46:37
Pagans are distrubuted through different areas, but it may be easier in urban areas for pagans to set up some sort of structure where we can organize and set up information
47:46
We need to have better organization and better cooperation between each other to solve these problems
48:03
Lamyka asks if this should be a GIANT non-profit
48:18
Kim lets everyone know that these are just a lot of ideas right now. They’re just possibilities for people to think on so we can see what we can work on
49:10
Kimberly is not trying to say that the people that are working in the community need to do more. She’s trying to say there are national organizations that already have things in the works that need to be supported at a higher level so we can perhaps get somewhere with it
50:10
As far as mobile clinic, organization is needed. But perhaps we can create an alternate insurance plan within our own community. Kimberly gives an example of what a mega-church has tried before
51:07
We dont’ need to give up individualizm, but we can also say we’re ourselves but also part of the pagan group as a whole
51:17
Kimberly gives her experience of how and why she came to see that admitting you’re part of the pagan as a group is an okay, and perhaps necessary, thing to do
52:29
There is value standing together and supporting each other
52:59
Branden asks what was the most life changing realization, and what was most surprizing thing found out
53:16
As far as surprizing thing, the high concentration of what is considered a sexual minority was surprizing. We had about four times the national average of gay, lesbian, bi, or other sexual minority
54:28
What was life changing, was getting the large ammounts of participants.
55:36
Lamyka asks if what the results point to the fact that we don’t need to educate the public and need to focus on ourselves?
56:21
Kimberly explains how we do a combination approach. We work on the whole but we work on ourselves.
56:38
It can also get into individual purpose. Some may have a need to focus on the group and do so naturally, while others…it is better for them to just focus on themselves
57:45
Kimberly has found over the years in interfaith moderation, that the more you deal with others and the more we learn that our assumptions are incorrect, the more we will learn to question our assumptions
58:25
Branden hopes that we can have Kimberly on again to catch up on later findings!!
Credits
Post-produced by: Amber
List of websites and organizations mentioned
PCP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 US License.
Season 18 Credits:
[DH] Lethal Destiny
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/354802
_-={Everlasting Times}=-_
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/170554
_-={Forces United!}=-_
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/290238
Originally Published: Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Pagan Centered Podcast
Licensed with CC BY-SA 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/
