/health
MORGANTOWN, West Virginia (AP) -- They are a mysterious, almost mythical group, the Rainbow Family of Living Light, gathering again this summer to party and pray for peace, many appearing wild and unwashed, barefoot and bearded, secretive and standoffish.
Zen, his wife, Storm, and son hike to their camp at the Rainbow Family of Living Light annual gathering.
Their annual pilgrimage -- this year to Wyoming -- is typically preceded by rumor, anxiety or fear among locals.
Yet beneath the scruffy surface is an opportunity that public health researchers say is perennially missed -- a chance to help people falling through the cracks, under-30 types whose risk factors suggest they're a danger to themselves more than anyone else.
Most are willing to accept outside medical help and counseling, say scientists Rob Bossarte and Ernest Sullivent, but delivering those services will require an unconventional approach.
"There's an incredible opportunity here ... but no one is stepping up to do it," says Bossarte, an injury and violence specialist who published a report on the group while working at West Virginia University's Center for Rural Emergency Medicine. He left last week for a new post at the University of Rochester.
"This might be a single point in time where you can count on this population being accessible," Bossarte says.
To study the Rainbows during their 2005 gathering in West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest, the researchers scrapped their white coats and scientific methodology.
They stopped shaving and changing clothes. They bought hats to cover their close-cropped hair. They ate the watery soups from the communal kitchens and used the same slit-trench latrines as the people they wanted to understand.
"Epidemiology is a strange science," says Sullivent. "It's kind of part detective work. You do what it takes."
The Rainbows, who fight the National Forest Service over camping permits every year, initially thought the researchers were cops, shouting coded warnings when they appeared. But the men returned day after day, chatting with respected Rainbow elders. Slowly, others warmed up.
"They didn't want to talk to us," Sullivent says, "but after a while, they couldn't help it."
Officially, this year's gathering is July 1-7 near Big Sandy, Wyoming about 350 miles northwest of Cheyenne. But every year, the hard-core and the hard-up gather a week or two early. They are usually the last to leave, dismantling tarps and tents only when every scrap of food is gone.
They are easy to distinguish from their well-heeled counterparts, Sullivent says. They do not wear gold rings, expensive watches or high-priced hiking shoes. They are young, skinny and obviously unwell.
"We're used to seeing the older homeless person, but when you see that in a 14-year-old, you know something bad happened to them," says Sullivent, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
Bossarte and Sullivent had approached the group, which has met every year since 1972, with plans to study injury and violence rates. What they saw quickly shifted their focus.
Many of the young people they met reported physical abuse by a parent, forced sexual intercourse and use of medication for depression. Many had run away from home.
At the Rainbow get-togethers, health care comes from within, at Center for Alternative Living Medicine tents staffed by nurses, midwives, medical students or physicians. CALM is a loose coalition of holistic healers -- from homeopaths and herbalists to social workers and shamans -- at least one of whom is always on call at the gatherings.
CALM members declined to respond to repeated e-mail and telephone requests for interviews.
As Bossarte and Sullivent learned, reaching out to Rainbows isn't be easy. They have little structure, no official membership and no leaders or spokesmen.
In pursuit of an unspoiled place to celebrate nature, they gather in remote areas with few resources. And because they reject authority, they give little notice of their plans.
Wyoming Department of Health spokeswoman Kim Deti says her agency has had few details to work with in the months before the gathering, so it plans to focus on communicable diseases.
At last year's gathering, officials saw the Rainbows as just another "group that came to Arkansas to visit," says Ed Barham, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Health.
That changed when someone from the gathering near Fallsville, Arkansas, in the Ozark National Forest showed up at a rural hospital emergency room with bacterial meningitis. Nurses from Little Rock, about 130 miles away, were dispatched to help.
The Rainbows were cooperative and willing to take the help that was offered, just as Bossarte and Sullivent concluded. The key to expanding that, they say, is offering that assistance instead of requiring it.
"This is a group that does not react well when you come in and force things on them," Bossarte says.
The researchers hope their May report in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved will inspire others to take the next step and plan outreach efforts.
"I don't think we necessarily need to think of it as this massive effort to put a hospital in the forest," Bossarte says. "Baby steps could help."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed |
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed |
From the Blogs: 
Sit tight, we're getting to the good stuff
