What Do You Expect?

If you suffered whiplash in a car accident, would you expect:

a)  The symptoms will soon fade and you'll make a full recovery.

b) You may miss a few days of work, but no more than that.

c)  The pain is going to have you sidelined for a long time.

d)  Windfall! With the right lawyer, your financial problems will be solved. 

If you answered, a, b, or c, then you are probably right, at least according to a new study. Researchers from Canada and Sweden reviewed the cases of 6000 adults with traffic-related whiplash injuries and found that those who were optimistic about their return to normal health, got over their symptoms more quickly, were back to work sooner and made a complete recovery in much less time than their more negative counterparts. In fact, expectation of recovery is a better predictor of how long a whiplash victim will suffer than the severity of the injury. Depending on your outlook, that's good news or bad news.

Linda Carroll, a researcher from the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, found that those with rosier outlooks about their recovery were, by their own account, “recovered” three times faster than those with less optimistic expectations.

Similarly, her colleague, Dejan Ozegavic, found that those who predicted they would be back to work sooner “recovered” 42 percent more rapidly than those with a more negative outlook. Taking the opposite approach, researcher Lena Holm looked at Swedish study participants who had low expectations of complete recovery and found that they were four times more likely to still feel symptoms six months later.

Getting back to the multiple choice, we'll leave it to a jury to judge the pain and suffereing of those who answered D.