A highly revealing quote from a naturopath

Excellent timing on this, Orac. Just this morning, I saw a brief news item on alternatives to the many cold remedies that are no longer on the market (mostly Tylenol products). They had a pharmacist, who also happened to be a naturopath, touting things like oscillococcinum and allium cepa 30C. Perhaps some well-worded comments on the video clip would not go amiss?

@Rene Najera

Not quite. As we learned from Wile E. Coyote, one must be unaware of what gravity is. Then, one can stand in thin air with impunity. On the other hand, we also learned from that scholar Douglas Adams that if you throw yourself at the ground and miss, you will fly.

@Todd

Maybe they don’t know what the scientific method is to begin with? You know, like all the people who whine about case-control studies for not being cohort studies, all the while not knowing the difference between them?

Maybe naturopaths are just misinformed. Maybe. Or maybe they know and are part of a… conspiracy.

@4
More frustating than “talking clients/patients down” is having clients/patients “talk down” to you, the stooge of the “conspiracy” (or co-conspirator).

After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority… Maybe it’s because, deep down, they know that science-based medicine is more efficacious. Who knows?

They want the ability to peddle all drugs based on their “superior” woo-ful beliefs. Heaven help us, someone not trained at least as a pharmacist peddling chemicals known to have biological effects… that there is a recipe for disaster.

Hmmm– naturopathy’s philosophical underpinnings.

My experience with them is indirect, but here’s what I’ve noticed:

1) Natural is always better. The definition of “natural” and that than which it is better varies by practitioner.
2) Yeast is the cause of nearly all your illnesses. Therefore you must remove from your diet all things that yeast eat: sugars, non-clear alcohol, bread, etc. Yes, alcohol is derived from yeast and toxic to them too, but that’s just the ineffable nature of the yeast monsters.
3) The other cause of nearly all your illnesses is undiagnosed food allergies. They’ll sell you tests to prove it, like cytotoxic screening. Sciency! Mysteriously, these allergies almost always tend to involve meats. The vegetarianism of the movement’s founder, by the way, is pure coincidence.
4) Food allergies can manifest themselves in any way, often with substantial time delays. If you have the sniffles today, it’s because of the lamb chop you ate five days ago. Same with arthritis, headaches, constipation, … you name it.
5) Everything unnatural attacks your immune system, which could always use a “boost.”
6) Those wicked allopathic physicians won’t listen to you, and will just push some toxic pills at you. Instead, you should take large doses of the following supplements, which just happen to be for sale in the front office.
7) Naturopaths have the answer to all “dis-ease.” If anything goes wrong in your body, you have only yourself to blame for not taking their advice and buying their stuff.

John FrumNIH no bring the cargo research grants because your arstreep sciency is no good.

You must have a line of little fires by the sides title like “MD” (“ND” is close enough?). And you must have a very tall bamboo sticking up like a tree list of mildly unpleasant physical procedures you perform on the body, like acupuncture, enemas, or bad tasting stuffs.

Keep trying, you will get it, and the cargo will be yours!

From a basic essay on Naturowatch by Barry L. Beyerstein, PhD and Susan Downie:

Naturopathy is the most eclectic of “alternative” practices. It has changed its methods in response to popular fads and beliefs. It practices no pool of consistent diagnostic or therapeutic methods. The most notable things that unite its practitioners are a penchant for magical thinking, a weak grasp of basic science, and a rejection of scientific biomedicine, which they refer to as “allopathy.” Because naturopathy lacks a coherent rationale, patients can encounter anything from commonsense lifestyle advice — eating a healthy diet, rest, exercise, and stress reduction — to an array of scientifically implausible nostrums and gadgets [1].

A corollary of Naturphilosophie is that in order to comprehend nature one must experience it as a whole — i.e., intuitively rather than objectively and analytically. Openness to one’s subjective feelings is considered the most reliable means of revealing the workings of the natural world. . . .

In other words, just go by whatever occurs to you.

@11 madder

You forgot to add that even if you are sillly enough to purchase all their supplements, vitamins, detox kits and follow all their directions-when you fail to get better the naturpath will inform you that your ‘disbelief and negative thoughts are interfering with your bodies ability to be healthy’.

I like the way he drapes a stethoscope around his neck in his photo.

Pierce Nichols, Jack,

Despite the illegality of marijuana and the difficulties the NIH has amassed over the years in providing funds for cannabinoid research, such research has been conducted both in this country (i.e., Eli Lilly) and abroad (i.e., Pharmos). Surprise, surprise! Despite promising results in experimental animals (for instance, brain protection against ischemic/hypoxic damage), none of these cannabinoids has really proved to be a Silver bullet or even an Aluminium one. We know the identity of the endogenous cannabinoids, we have much knowledge about the cannabinoid receptors, we do not really need cannabis to design the right cannabinoid for the desired effects. Look at the slew of modern opiates, none of which is extracted from the poppy plant. If the campaign of the medical cannabis users is about legalization, then, leave it out of medicine. If it is about medicine, do not promote a mixture of dozens, if not hundreds, of compounds, some of which are either poisonous or antagonistic to others, as medicine.

Look at the slew of modern opiates, none of which is extracted from the poppy plant.

“Opiate” technically means it comes from the poppy plant; “opioid” is the broader category which also includes things which didn’t come from the poppy plant but act in a similar way. Opiates include morphine, codeine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone; these are extremely popular, and are probably the most widely prescribed narcotics for pain control. There is also a global shortage of them; though the US has assured itself a nice tidy supply via Turkey and India (which had the bonus of eradicating the opium trade in Turkey, by giving poppy farmers a legal outlet for their crop), other countries aren’t so fortunate, and lately people have been looking to Afghanistan in hopes the successes in Turkey could be repeated there.

Non-poppy opioids include fentanyl, methadone, and tramadol. These tend to be more expensive, perhaps in part because of their synthetic nature. (Plants usually make cheaper factories than a team of engineers can.) One thing these have in common is that they were designed by attempting to mimic the structure of naturally occurring chemicals in the poppy plant.

The poppy is probably not a good example if you want to show why medicinal marijuana is not sensible. Poppies remain heavily cultivated to supply the global demand for pharmaceutical pain relief, and the efficacy of poppy-derived drugs is very well established. That’s not something which, in my opinion, is true of cannibinoids, but I’m willing to wait and see. I’m fine with continuing research.

Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing cocaine be used medicinally again. It was a century ago. If that could be resumed, albeit far more responsibly than it was in those pre-FDA days, perhaps we could free the growers from the tyranny of the drug cartels. But that does not appear likely anytime soon.

I noticed you are a surgeon. Why don’t you do a blog on the export of surgeons from God’s own country (that is the US) to the convict colonies (that is Australia). This surgeon has caused more death and destruction than all the worlds naturopaths put together. Let us get some perspective on these matters:

They called him Dr Death. A 15-year-old boy’s leg had to be amputated as a result of his poor judgement. He botched a procedure on a young man, leaving him impotent and urinating through his rectum – and with a 30cm surgical clamp embedded in his abdomen. Undeterred by the atrocities he was causing, Dr Death continued to deceive the patients who trusted him to fix their pain. At least 17 people in his care did not survive.

His patents suffered infections, internatl bleeding from nicked arteries, and mutilation of healthy organs – and they were the lucky ones. More than 200 Australians were adversely affected while in his care.

Dr Jayant Patel’s reign at Bundaberg Base Hospital ended after two years and he was banned from surgical practice in the United States. A life-threatening combination of the doctor’s manipulative personality and a hospital administration happy to look the other way as long as the dollars were rolling in, meant that Patel’s incompetence went undetected for some time

FORMER Bundaberg Base Hospital surgeon Jayant Patel has been sentenced to seven years in jail for the deaths of three patients

Showing the problems with real medicine and some practitioners does not prove naturapathy works. Showing that your methods work shows that naturapathy works. Squirrelelite has pointed out there is funding to do those tests. Go for it. You have no excuses to whine and moan until you prove your methods work.

A naturapath told a relative to get off her medications for depression and prescribed her homeopathic remedies (and she had been doing well before). Apparently it didn’t work. She committed suicide a few months ago.

Why should I not be angry at wanna-be doctors who believe in fairy tales?

squirrelelite, I was just referring to the fact that popular media (like this blog) loves to mention rouge people who make outrageous statements or practice dangerous medicine, whether they are naturopaths or surgeons.

I practice a very level headed, no-nonsense naturopathy/herbal medicine based on the traditional use of plant medicines supported by whatever scientific information I can find. I spend many hours every week reading scientific papers. Whenever there is good scientific reason for updating what I do, I will change. Unfortunately there are many poorly trained and misguided naturopaths but there are, I think, more who are doing a very good job with their patients. At least here in Australia.

I actually tend to call myself a medical herbalist rather than a naturopath because I do share the concerns of the sceptics that many naturopaths are poorly trained and may use ineffective medicines/devices or advice against medical treatment. I can assure you that I would never advice against medical treatment. That is clearly not our role. On analysis, one will have to conclude that naturopathy and herbal medicine is not dangerous in the hands of a well trained and registered herbalist/naturopath.

The list you refer to is very unscientific. There is too little information to assess those cases. Unfortunately naturopaths are not registered in Australia and I believe that is one reason why we do have some idiots like the two naturopaths mentioned on the list. One was cleared of the patient’s death but still found to be negligent. The second case from Australia concerns a fake naturopath in his mid-seventies who was not properly trained. I totally agree that such cases are tragic and should be prevented from happening. The last Australian case is in relationship to the herb black cohosh. The temporal relationship with the liver disease and the use of black cohosh has been dismissed in this case.
So the list has two cases from Australia. Both could have been prevented by better regulation of the profession. Both cases related to bad practices of two individuals. I, and my colleagues, do not share or condone those practices.
My point is this: you don’t condemn surgery because of the actions of Dr Patel, so don’t condemn naturopathy/herbal medicine as whole because of a few quacks.

In regards to the NCCAM grants. Unfortunately, millions of important research dollars have been wasted, also here in Australia where we have similar (much smaller) grants. Research as you know, are best done by institutions with the right infrastructure, personnel, experience and yet I see grant approvals for studies which are often not clinically relevant. There are studies of poor quality, irrelevant in vitro studies eg one study found significant denaturation of human sperm DNA and reduced viability from the in vitro incubation of hamster sperm with Echinacea…

The bad science here is not herbal medicine, but the whole idea of such as stupid study. Yet, the results are being used by sceptics to warn of the dangers of herbal medicine!

Forgot to mention iatrogenic disease:

225,000 iatrogenic deaths per year constitute the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from cancer and heart disease. The most significant number of these unnecessary deaths, 106,000, were due to the negative effects of properly prescribed drugs, making them the fourth leading cause of death in America.

Starfield B. Is US health really the best in the world? JAMA. 2000 Jul 26;284(4):483-5.

Another analysis concluded that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients experience negative effects in outpatient settings, with:
116 million extra physician visits
77 million extra prescriptions
17 million emergency department visits
8 million hospitalizations
3 million long-term admissions
199,000 additional deaths
$77 billion in extra costs

Weingart SN, Wilson RM, Gibberd RW, Harrison B. Epidemiology and medical error. BMJ. 2000;320:774-777

No matter how you look at it, cost/benefit analysis, economic, human cost, etc this is a far greater issue that needs fixing. If you apply your scientific minds to these figures, you would have to agree that this is what you should spend your time and energy fixing.

so Michael, let me get this right, your response to the suggestion that you try to get funding for these important research studies of yours is basically “well, they waste all the money on stupid stuff”? or is it “well it all goes to the Big Science Guys”?

anyone can easily find thousands upon thousands of studies concerning herbs and herbal extracts, and their efficacy against various diseases and conditions, and you being a “medical herbalist” should know that. in terms of your other comment, i have to say that i, as a tax payer, am much more comfortable with my tax monies going to the big leagues, you know, people who have actual equipment, facilities, and scientific training.

here’s really how i look at this. I have a nice, solid BA in Anthropology from a top 20 US university. not in a million years would that do a damn thing to help me get into med school, but after doing about 5 minutes of web searching, i can instantly qualify for a “Doctor of Naturopathy” program at any number of institutions. that is worrysome on many, many levels.

and the only thing i have to say about your iatrogenic death statistics — my god, think what they would be if it were all reiki healers and homeopaths!

Chris,
I am sorry to hear about your relative. I would never try to persuade a patient to come off an antidepressant, if however, they wanted to try an alternative and their doctor agreed, then we could explore alternatives such as St. John’s wort.

dram_reset,
sorry if I didn’t explain that clearly. I meant I can’t provide the evidence, I don’t have the research skills or the infrastructure. I am however encourage by the fact that young herbalists are now doing PhDs and trying to validate our medicinal plants and practices. But I am annoyed about the waste of taxpayers dollars going to bad science, hence my reference to the hamster egg and human sperm suggesting that echinacea makes you infertile.

and I totally agree about the problem of training and registration, but rather than getting rid of naturopaths, let us examine the training and registration issues.

in regards to reiki, no I don’t believe in reiki, I don’t believe in religion either, but we can’t ban everything. Reiki is a quack but it doesn’t kill people. The issue of recommended against proper medical treatment is related to the practitioner not the modality.

You want to be a real doctor, but you don’t have have the brains or guts to go to a real medical school. So you just pretend.

If you really wanted it to be real, you would actually apply for the tests at NCCAM, The rest is just pointless excuses.

A real doctor would know that St. John’s Wort is only good for transitional mild depression. Not the disease my relative had. You would know that if you had learned real medicine.

Mr. Thomsen, you should be aware that there are real scientists looking at the effects of herbs. Perhaps you might be interested in this blog:
http://cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/

I have been through the Medicinal Herb Garden many times, but I know it has limitations. The question is: do you?

What is obviously going on with a lot of these folks is that they crave the prestige, and maybe the income, that comes with being a “real” doctor or scientist. But for whatever reason, whether they didn’t want to do the hard work needed to master difficult material, or their circumstances just didn’t allow them to invest the many years of penury required, or maybe they aren’t all that bright, they don’t have the credentials or the intellectual mastery that goes with real training. So going to Bastyr “university” and calling yourself a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine is a cheap and easy way to get the status you crave.

I wonder whether Mr Thomsen believes in the germ theory of disease or in naturo-woo delusions about energy blockages and the body being able to heal itself of anything.

… I do believe that there is something in acupuncture but I don’t know enough about it to comment. Aromatherapy is not that effective unless the oils are taken internally.

So much for Thompson’s claim of following the science.

So much for Thompson’s claim of following the science.

I would cut him some slack on the acupuncture since there appears to be scientific evidence for it until you take a close look at the positive studies. As for the aromatherapy – it the oils are being taken internally it isn’t really aromatherapy anymore.

Mr. Thomsen’s comments reflect the accuracy of Orac’s original post – naturopathy is naught but a grab bag with a meaningless title. Is he a “real” naturopath because he tries to use science in his practice? Or is he NOT for the same reason? Doctors have science, biology, anatomy, clinical studies and other evidence-based practices as an underpinning to their practice so ultimately there is a bedrock upon which the edifice rests. Naturopathy has nothing comparable. The fact that Mr. Thomsen can define himself as whatever he wants while being ostensibly trained as a naturopath really illustrates the problem with the “profession” and in fact all alternative medical approaches – when there is no foundation from which to build, how can you tell a “good” naturopath/acupuncturist/homeopath/reiki practitioner from a “bad” one? Are the bad ones only those so incompetent and ideologically motivated that they manage to kill their patients, while the rest merely waste their money? Can it really be a good thing that there are practitioners who, for a nominal fee, deliver essentially untrained counselling combined with ineffective nostroms? Couldn’t Mr. Thomsen do his job better as a doctor who supplemented proven medication with proven herbs for mild conditions?

The invocation of Starfield 2000 and Weingart et al. 2000 is irksome – where would those patients be without modern medicine? What if instead of vaccination, surgery and medication they had only acupuncture, herbs and homeopathy? In many cases I would guess dead. Yes, iatrogenesis and medical error are problems that are addressed through better evidence, further research, improved practice, monitoring, certification and training. That doctors make mistakes in no way vindicates faith healing, whatever it’s specifics. I don’t claim that because tamoxifen treats cancer, acupuncture is therefore worthless. I recognize that each stands or falls on its own, evidence-based merits. The difference, of course, is that if evidence accumulates that tamoxifen is more harmful than helpful, its use will be abandoned.

Mr. Thompsen begins his serial diatribe with the following:

“we [naturopaths] help lots of people, not all of course, but many. It is not a burden to the health system, we don’t kill people (not very often anyway).”

I, for one, would love to see any data that support the three claims Mr. Thompsen makes in these two sentences:

[1] Naturopathy is better than placebo (with the caveat that “naturopathy” doesn’t include prescribing regular pharmaceuticals, as it too often does in the US).

[2] Naturopathy doesn’t kill its patients “very often” (which I would define as less often than real medicine does for patients presenting with the same type and degree of illness).

[3] Naturopathy isn’t a “burden” on the “health system”. [Note: Mr. Thompsen no doubt means by this that naturopathy isn’t covered by private or national health insurance – which is not true in the US, where are growing number of private health insurance plans now cover naturopathy and other magic-based medical care.]

In my part of the country, naturopaths are licensed by the sate and allowed to prescribe a limited number of real pharmaceuticals – which is a puzzle, since their dogma is that “natural” medicines are inherently superior to any “artificial” drugs. Apart from their use of real pharmaceuticals, however, it is unclear whether the “natural” remedies they use are any more effective – or safe – than the conventional treatments used by real doctors.

Naturopaths in my state generally stick to treating the “worried well” or provide “adjunctive” treatment for patients already receiving treatment from a real doctor. In this second role, naturopaths have been instrumental in relieving a number of people of their suffering by killing them through their failure to recognise dangerous interactions between their “herbal remedies” – which are often a poorly-characterised mixture of potentially toxic compounds – and real pharmaceuticals.

As one example, the number of dangerous intra- and post-operative bleeding complications caused by unreported use of “herbal remedies” has prompted the surgeons at my university hospital to require patients to sign a document stating that they are not taking any “natural, herbal or supplemental medications, drugs, or remedies” prior to having surgery. Because the effect on coagulation of so many naturopathic remedies are unknown, most of the surgeons won’t operate on a patient taking them unless it is an emergency.

This segues nicely into Mr. Thompsen’s claim that naturopathy is safe. Indeed, in later comments, he appears to be claiming that naturopathy is safer than real medical treatments. As I’ve pointed out above, this isn’t necessarily true, although the deaths may be misattributed because naturopathy tends to kill by unexpected drug interactions, clotting dysfunction and delaying diagnosis and/or treatment of serious disorders. Only rarely does naturopathy show up as the proximate cause of death (often through stroke, liver damage or kidney failure).

Another issue that Mr. Thompsen neatly sidesteps is whether naturopathy is “safer” – if it indeed is safer – only because it is largely ineffective. Unlike homeopathy, however, naturopaths – even when they eschew real pharmaceuticals – are prescribing compounds that often have real physiological effects. Any compound that has physiological effect can cause side effects, injury and death, especially when the person prescribing those compounds is unaware – as Mr. Thompsen appears to be – that this potential exists.

Finally, naturopathy does create a burden on the “health system” – even if insurance plans and governmental health programs don’t pay for it. Somebody must be paying the naturopaths and paying for their herbal remedies, right? When you add in the complications from herb-drug interactions, delay in diagnosis and treatment and direct complications from naturopathic remedies (not to mention the not-insignificant number of injuries caused by naturopaths mis-prescribing real drugs), the burden of naturopathy on the “health system” is very real.

So, I’d like to see Mr. Thompsen provide data supporting his claims that naturopathy is effective, safe and cost-effective (I won’t ask him to show that it doesn’t cost anything, since that is clearly nonsense.)

Not holding my breath, mind you.

Prometheus

As one example, the number of dangerous intra- and post-operative bleeding complications caused by unreported use of “herbal remedies” has prompted the surgeons at my university hospital to require patients to sign a document stating that they are not taking any “natural, herbal or supplemental medications, drugs, or remedies” prior to having surgery. Because the effect on coagulation of so many naturopathic remedies are unknown, most of the surgeons won’t operate on a patient taking them unless it is an emergency.

And the resulting complications and deaths get counted as iatrogenic injuries/deaths.

@46 I suspect that most of the aromatherapy oils are not compounds that were part of the “natural” (hunter gatherer or early agricultural) human diet.

@46 I suspect that most of the aromatherapy oils are not compounds that were part of the “natural” (hunter gatherer or early agricultural) human diet.

Is there an “Essence of Cinnamon Roll”?

Which is why people have been shifting to artemisinin. Artemisinin has actually been used as an antiparasitic for a long time, and not just in China; in fact, the English name for the plant is “wormwood”, and refers to its ancient use in killing intestinal parasites. (It’s also what gives absinthe it’s distinctive color.) Sadly, artemesia resistance is probably not that far behind quinine resistance; it’s really only a matter of time.

Mr. Thomsen–

The others having rebutted your claims quite thoroughly, I’ll limit myself to addressing your comment directed at me. I wrote that my experience with naturopaths was indirect, not that it was nonexistent; thanks for the obvious misrepresentation. I have never and will never visit one, but several people close to me have, and in my initial ignorance I was quite open to them. What I wrote above represents the aspects of their experience that are consistent at multiple practitioners. If naturopaths don’t believe those statements, why do their patients recite them so often?

This exchange merely underscores Orac’s main point: naturopathy has no consistent practice. Licensing people to practice under that label is therefore dangerous, and violates the entire notion of state-issued licensing.

Hello there. I thought naturopathic doctors were quacks, too…until I had my own child with serious health problems that over 5 years, no doctor, specialist – pediatrician or allergist or neurological dr., or hospital could help us with. We were prescribed pills, medicines, x-rayed, mri’s, told that she needed steroids injected into her breast bone (causing stunted growth), told that nothing was wrong, given inhalers, given antibiotics every 6 weeks, underwent surgery, …you get the picture. NOTHING worked. My child’s condition worsened over the years, and I never had any sleep because her breathing issues worsened. Well, thank goodness a friend mentioned a naturopathic doctor’s name which had been passed on because of his success… after another food was added to her allergy list, I couldn’t take it any more and tried the ND. I was ready to try even something I was afraid of. WELL – LISTEN CAREFULLY YOU ND HATERS HERE, WITHIN 4 WEEKS THE BLOAT WAS GONE FROM HER FACE AND BODY, NO WHEEZING, 20 POUNDS LOST -NOT FROM DIETING, BECAUSE WE ATE LOTS, JUST DIFFERENTLY. You get the picture. 3 years later, her month long colds turned pneumonia are 2 or 3 day light issues because her immune system is SO STRONG. NDs don’t do all the stuff you are saying up there, there are specialists though – like gps you have to find the right one. But we haven’t been back to a regular doctor in 3 years!! Because WE NOW DON’T NEED ONE. That’s what doctors are afraid of – 1st what they don’t know, 2nd of losing business!! Read this and weep.

In response to “saved by naturopathy”, let me write an anecdote that you’ll unfortunately never hear.

I went to doctors and they prescribed me medication for high blood pressure. I didn’t like the side effects, so I went to a naturopath. They told me the medications were harmful and didn’t do any good, so I should stop taking them. They prescribed acupuncture, homeopathy and herbs instead. Six months later my asymptomatic, uncontrolled high blood pressure blew out an aneurysm and I ended up on a long-term care facility unable to feed myself, control my bowels, communicate or think coherently. I died three months later from pneumonia caused by aspirating my saliva. NATUROPATHY KILLED ME!!!!

The reason we need controlled studies is to let the dead speak – they can’t give anecdotes for or against their experiences, they are dead and therefore you don’t get a true picture of circumstances.

“ZOMG NATUROPATHS TREATED MY ALLERGIES” is a trope I’ve heard before, and one that only suggests more research needs to be done on allergies. Once it is demonstrated that there are, or are not serious and/or undiagnosed problems in the population, an evidence-based approach can be used to address them.

An aside – in response to the rallying cry of “Big Pharma” as a stand-in for conspiracies to suppress “natural” cures or whatever, we should use “Little sCAM” (“so-called alternative medicine”). “Little sCAM” represents all the individual practitioners who use conspiracy theories and accusations of conflict of interest to profit from the sales of their often worthless, sometimes dangerous nostroms and diet/exercise advice that adds precisely nothing to the recommendations made by conventional physicians. There is no massive company to accuse, just a bunch of self-interested people who prefer quick profit and glib accusations over hard evidence and unpleasant truths.

Hamburglar — you can’t argue with success, is that what you’re saying?

Actually, you can — mostly because there is more to the story. There is always more to the story. The human organism is a very complex system, and just because A was done and then B occurred does not mean that A caused B. You usually need more information to know that.

Allergies, asthma, chronic childhood infections — these are all major cases in point. Kids are changing dramatically during the first ten to fifteen years of their lives, and it actually is not that unusual for allergies to fade or disappear during that period. I was allergic to peanuts and tree nuts as a child. I’m not now; I eat large amounts of both with no problems. However, I have developed a citrus allergy which I did not have as a young child. Things change.

Asthma, too, comes and goes. I have that; it runs in my family. It was bad for a while in grade school, then went into remission, flaring up again in junior high, fading so much I forgot how to care for it properly, and then becoming worse again in the last few years. This natural fluctuation unfortunately makes asthma ripe for exploitation because it is so easy to think something has cured it when it fact it has no effect at all. (Note: it is not, however, impossible to evaluate asthma therapies. It just means you need to focus on objective measures and recruit enough study participants to be able to tell if there’s a statistically significant difference. If five people in a group of fifty can be expected to get better anyway, then if only five in your study group get better, it doesn’t look good for the therapy. But if twenty do, then you’ve got something interesting.)

Childhood infections can be immensely frustrating. Some children are very prone to upper respiratory infections, especially when they are small; the various tubes and passageways and things change as the child grows and the head reshapes with age — this alone can change infection patterns. There is also the problem of populations of infectious agents — if you’re not killing all of the population each time, or if there’s some reservoir in the household, then the child will just keep getting recolonized. Eventually, the infection will probably get beaten, but I know when I get a bladder infection, I usually get several for a few months to a year before the population is finally killed, and then I may go years before the next one.

So do I argue with success? I don’t argue with the success itself — it’s always good to be well, especially when it’s a kid we’re talking about. But I do ask questions about some of the claims made. If you’ve tried everything but the kitchen sink, and then you go try the kitchen sink and get better, that doesn’t mean the kitchen sink actually fixed anything. It’s just the last thing you tried.

By the way, to “saved by naturopathy”, be cautious of assuming that your child’s allergies were resolved by strengthening her immune system. If the naturopath really did cure her allergies, it wasn’t by strengthening her immune system. Allergies are themselves an immune response — strengthening the immune system (for real) would make them worse, not better. One of the traditional ways to cure an allergy is desensitization therapy. In some cases, this can be done through diet, depending on the specific allergy, but one must be very cautious — one can also make the allergy worse this way. A naturopath could suggest this, but I would personally prefer working with an allergist — a person who’s entire professional career is devoted to this sort of thing.

Like Calli I have had many of my childhood allergies disappear. As a child I was hospitalized twice for asthma. Now my asthma has diminished to the point that my inhaler goes past it’s expiry date before it is empty. This occurred long after I stopped taking desensitization treatment and without any “help” from naturopathy,chiropractic or any other woo. Just the natural variation of the condition.

steroids injected into her breast bone

.WTF

I am not in any medical field, but this sounds like utter bullshit to me.

@Pablo:

And as we learned in the Autism Omnibus case, “suddenly” can even mean “before the shot.”

@whale of a time

And how did this get found out, assuming it’s even true and not simply shoddy reporting by a popular news agency? Research, with outcome measures, control groups, scientists, a hypothesis and underlying recognition of the complexity of the body. Not by individual pronouncements based on nothing but authority, hoary old wives tales and unquestioned beliefs in “energy” that can’t be measured.

Assuming your point has anything to it, that doesn’t vindicate naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, reiki, energy work, antivaccination advocacy, etc. Yes, modern medicine is flawed by conflicts of interest and a difficult subject – but that doesn’t mean we bury our heads in the sand and just swallow whole whatever Basyr University happens to publish. The two are unconnected. If depression can be cured by a placebo, then that’s great since it will be generally harmless. Doctors however, will state that openly and continue seeking an actual, effective treatment. Homeopaths will keep insisting their placebo is somehow magic and shut down their curiosity.

@ Whale to – So evidence that MDs can fool themselves into believing antidepressants are effective for mild to moderate depression when they are actually ineffective proves what about naturopathy. All it shows it that it is easy for practitioners to be wrong about the effectiveness of their treatments unless these treatments are validated by science rather than by tradition, anecdote and experience. This is hardly an endorsement of naturopthy.

And what was the article you cited based on? A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. You cna’t get more “Medical Establishment” than that.

I’m willing to argue on the assumpion that it’s accurately reported, merely because in my opinion, even if we take it at face value, it still doesn’t demonstrate any reason to conclude that naturopathy was effective in this instance or any other.

But yeah, one must remember always that not only are anecdotes not reliable as data, they aren’t even always true. That’s not to say anybody’s necessarily lying; it’s amazing the kinds of misunderstandings people can develop, even when their doctors are being as clear as they can (which of course they aren’t always).

@whale

Hey, if you’ve got evidence showing that naturopathy works, let’s see it! If someone presents evidence showing that a given therapy works (preferably replicated in multiple studies), great! If evidence is presented showing that a given therapy does not work (again, with results replicated in multiple studies), then chuck it. That is science-based medicine.

The anti-depressants that were shown not to work for mild to moderate depression should not be used for mild to moderate depression.

There is no double-standard being applied here, except in your own misunderstanding of what’s going on.

Whale:

You are claiming a double standard that I suspect exists more in your mind than in reality.

In the fulness of time, MDs and others who practice science-based medicine, however imperfectly, will update their practices to take into account findings such as those reported by Newsweek. Individual MDs who do not – or who fall in with woosters – are routinely excoriated on this blog and its comment threads.

Compare that to, say, naturopaths, homeopaths or chiropractors, who cling to discredited ‘treatments’ over a century (or more) past their sell-by dates.

The argument advanced by “Whale” condenses to the following:

Real medicine is not completely safe or completely effective and, in addition, medical practitioners make mistakes and are fooled into believing that treatments work when they don’t. Therefore, naturopathy must be both safe and effective.

For those who missed it, the “argument” – such as it is – doesn’t provide any proof that naturopathy is either effective or safe. It also provides no proof that naturopathy is better – in any metric – than real medicine.

Real medicine has its flaws and failures and the practitioners of real medicine are fallible humans, susceptible to all of the illusions and self-deceptions that humans are vulnerable to. However, much – if not most – of real medicine has scientific data showing that it works and is acceptably safe.

Naturopathy is – so far as I know – also practiced by humans who are just as fallible and susceptible to illusions and self-deceptions as real doctors. However, their dogma is based on nothing more than wishful thinking – that “Nature” has the cure for all human illness. Its treatments have not been tested for efficacy and safety.

So, the argument – which is endlessly repeated by those who think it is new – comes down this:

Real medicine, while safe and effective, is not 100% safe and effective. Therefore, we should accept naturopathy, since it hasn’t been shown to be either safe or effective.

Prometheus

Finding an error in something does not mean another method is correct. If you wish to show that your pet therapy works, you need to show that it works. That takes work.

True skeptics are objective, they get their facts right, and look at all evidence, not the savory cherry-picked ones.

Which you are not.

You said:

The pseudoskeptics always find a way to reason away the “mistakes,” i.e., fraud that big pharma is guilty of, which of course if committed by alt meds is “grounds” to dismiss the therapy altogether.

But you have obviously missed the post about Avastin and breast cancer, or the several posts on pharma ghost writing.

You write lots of stuff, but say very little of real substance.

My relative came out of the psyche ward after six weeks feeling the best she had ever been. This was where she got real meds, talk therapy and was actually forced to go on walks (she tended towards staying inside watching TV and avoiding any form of physical exertion). So when released and on her own, she went back to her naturapath who told her that the psychiatrist was wrong. She got off her meds, and then took some 200C stuff.

She got worse. And now she is dead by her own hand.

sorry about your relative.

if said naturopath told her to get off her meds cold turkey, then it was irresponsible. you seem to be implying that naturopathy doesn’t work because of one person’s apparent error in judgment? funny, it’s exactly what i just said in my previous post…mistakes for western medicine = no problem, mistakes happen people are fallible…mistakes for alt med = it doesn’t work.

pseudoscientific mind, chris.

daijiyobu re: “Science, science, science.”

In 1999 the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report “To Err Is Human” found that as many as 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors—a number many experts now believe is conservative. Since then, incorrect diagnoses, needless infections, drug mix-ups, and surgical mishaps have piled up as doctors face an onslaught of patients, an abundance of imperfect information, and an ill-served tradition of shaming and blaming individual practitioners when things go wrong. Health care, says Dr. Lucian Leape, a pioneer in patient safety and chair of the Lucian Leape Institute at the National Patient Safety Foundation in Boston, “remains fundamentally unsafe.”

Now let’s apply your science, science, science criterion and criticism back to western medicine, if you have the objectivity to do so…100 000 deaths/year from PREVENTABLE errors: incorrect diagnoses, needless infections, drug mix-ups, and surgical mishaps.

How good is this system of medicine based on sciecne measuring when 100 000+ people are dying from preventable causes?

“The rules of evidence used within science are blind to branding categories.”

right, titmouse, the rules of evidence are blind to branding categories…except in this forum when evidence showing that a major drug of SBM has been shown to be ineffective for mild to severe depression, that’s 87% of all depressed in the U.S., and then fraudulently milking patients of $8.4 billion when they could have saved their money and bought real tic tacs instead.

where is your blindness to the category of who’s drug it is.

i see no article on here in this “skeptic” blog on this major article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association because you folks here are simply incapable of being objective = The rules of evidence used within science are blind to branding categories.

but i guess that’s why you’re called pseudoskeptics..no capacity for objectivity and only the blindness of your own bias and agenda…of course as evidenced by the responses here.

Guess I should have hit preview first. Here’s the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACbfncBr_MQ&feature=related

Whale, you don’t get it. The real medicine which was a combination of talk therapy, proper pharmaceuticals and actually leaving the house for a walk were working. It was the naturapathy that did not.

Though that is one anecdote. If you have any real evidence that naturapathy is good for anything present it. Just saying something else is bad is not actual evidence.

whale keeps going on about the need to be “objective” which is laughable. Human beings by their nature cannot be objective. Fair-minded is the best we can hope for. Part of being fair-minded in whale‘s case would be the recognition that failings in mainstream medicine are routinely discussed here (and I’m sure Orac, as well as every other medical professional who posts here spends considerable time on the job dealing with quality assurance/quality improvement). At the same time, a major focus here is opposing quackery, which while it is not of concern to whale is a subject of considerable interest to us. Attempts at tu quoque distractions are unconvincing. Even if mainstream medicine was the worst thing in the world or even positively Satanic (as its altie critics would have us believe), it does not exempt naturopathy or any other form of woo from criticism and the need to be evidence-based, which it heavily is not.

whale: “As shown by the explicit criticism of drug companies by the authors of the recent JAMA paper

Could you cite us examples of explicit criticism of naturopathic practice and supplement companies by altie journals and naturopathic societies? Good luck with that. Woo typically prides itself on the fact that its teachings are handed down largely unchanged over the centuries and views self-criticism and debate within the medical community as a weakness.

Now, how about naturopathy (you know, the topic)? Do naturopaths have a mechanism for evaluating their therapies and weeding out those that don’t work or aren’t safe? Not really.

The cynic in me suspects that the reason they don’t is because if they did, they’d quickly weed themselves out of a job. Since there really isn’t ANYTHING they do that’s safe and effective, except for those bits they stole from real medicine…

what is so difficult with understanding that all i’m saying is that you folks here are biased?

perhaps your bias doesn’t let you understand it..

…and thus you keep up with the refrain that my argument is that a fraud in SBM doesn’t mean that naturopathy works (= incorrect pseudoskeptical minds at work).

let me repeat: you folks are too biased to be true skeptics and hence are pseudoskeptics.

…and that my friends is a fact…read over the # of errors given as responses to me, e.g.,

-the Newsweek article was criticized as “shoddy” reporting when given by a seasoned science writer who formerly wrote for the Wall St. Journal
-misquotes of what the JAMA article actually said, i.e., severe depression was shown in trials to be effectively treated, only very severe depression…c’mon, can we not get the simple facts write when this blog is dedicated to getting the facts write, calli and todd w?
-people talking naively and idealistically about the medical system and doctors immediately instituting any changes when needed.

…and the grand poohbah of your own biased woo-woo is that you apparently uphold science that shows when people are being defrauded by unconfirmed medical therapies in the noble cause of protecting the public, yet, if you were truly objective…there would have been an article in your “science” blog (lol) on the major deception of the multibillion dollar fraud being perpertrated by pharma companies in selling drugs that don’t work, as shown by the cherry-picked positive published antidepressant drug trials and the unpublished negative drug trials attained through the Freedom of Information Act.

you undermine and belittle your own cause with your bias.

again, my point is not that because acts of SBM fraud are alive and hurting people we can take this as proof that naturopathy works.

but i’ll say it again…because you are biased, you fall from true skepticism to the realm of pseudoskeptical woo and make a farce of objective science.

Yes, we are biased. We are biased in favour of evidence. Shame on us.

“Yes, we are biased. We are biased in favour of evidence. Shame on us.”

Yes, cherry-picked evidence. So flavorful and satisfying to the bandwagon.

Ah, I think I get it now. Whale’s got its panties in a bunch because Orac tends to focus on alt-med crap and doesn’t cover crappy mainstream treatments to the same degree. It seems that whale thinks that less coverage means total lack of criticism.

Newsflash, whale: Orac does occasionally write about mainstream medical treatments that don’t work as well as they were billed to be (or at all). True, he doesn’t cover those as often as alt-med probably for a number of reasons: a) his interests lie in discussing alt-med, b) alt-med stories tend to pop up more frequently, c) a lot of the mainstream medical crap is old news.

Also, you have created a straw man:

-people talking naively and idealistically about the medical system and doctors immediately instituting any changes when needed.

I don’t recall seeing anyone saying that medical practitioners “immediately” change their practice when new evidence comes out. Even Orac has said that doctors are sometimes slow to change. Eventually, however, most of them (and sometimes even all of them) do.

Go back and read the comments here again after you derailed it with the antidepressant stuff. You will see comments that if the evidence shows antidepressants don’t work for mild to moderate depression, then they shouldn’t be used.

When it comes down to it, though, this is Orac’s blog. He’ll write what he feels like writing about. If you don’t like that it isn’t all mainstream-criticism all the time, then don’t read it. Go start your own blog.

And yes, people have biases. Everyone does. If you ask anyone on this thread if they think that a given medical treatment should be changed or abandoned if the evidence suggests that it is useless or possibly detrimental, I bet that almost every one of them would say yes. The only one stuck in a rut, staring at the world through their “just-so” glasses is you.

Whale, we have our differences because you are misrepresenting people on this comment thread.

I would like to direct your attention to my post #99, where I pointed out how you misrepresented my statement ‘in the fullness of time’ to mean ‘immediately’.

You do it again in your post #106.

That is the straw man that Todd and myself have suggested you are setting up.

Both ‘Whaleofatime’ and the people replying to him are failing to have a conversation here.

Whale of a time is clearly under the impression that the examples of people coming to harm after abandoning medicine for naturopathy were being used to argue that naturopathy is rubbish and shouldn’t be used.

He responded with evidence of people coming to harm after continuing with medicine, and evidence of medicine that has been found to be inneffective. He reversed the argument he believed people were making and said “If you reject naturopathy on those grounds, you must now reject medicine!”

But the vast majority of responses have been responding to the argument they think he is making, which is “Medicine has had documented errors and flaws, therefore naturopathy is great”.

Allow me to clear up the confusion:

No one is arguing that naturopathy is bad because it has caused harm by drawing people away from effective treatments. But people have responded to the assertion that Naturopathy cannot harm you with examples where it has harmed people.

Whale is not arguing that medical errors mean that naturopathy is good He is trying to reverse the argument above that no one is making.

Whale of a Time– the argument for medicine and against naturopathy is not that one or other causes harm, but that medicine is designed to be tested and not instantly but eventually move towards only using treatments which have a known benefit, which have been proven to the best of our scientific ability, and that when treatments that we previously thought were effective are shown to be inneffective or dangerous we stop using them, whereas naturopathy is tested only by each individual provider and his impression of whether treatments are effective, each provider may move on when they discover a modality that is not effective, but the system stays as it is, stuck in a non-improving model and being left behind by medicine.

I wonder if any naturopaths prescribe oleander extract?

I watched an old NCIS episode last night where it was used in a couple of murders.

According to the Wikipedia article it was recommended in ancient medicine. And, of course, it’s All Natural!

Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia written circa AD 77 claimed that despite its toxicity Oleander was an effective snakebite cure: “…if taken in wine with rue…”.

Despite a lack of any proven benefits, a range of Oleander-based treatments are being promoted on the Internet and in some alternative medicine circles, drawing a warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, a Texas-based biotechnology company is researching oleander as a potential treatment for skin cancers and as well as an anti-viral treatment.

Oleander is one of the most poisonous plants in the world and contains numerous toxic compounds, many of which are deadly to people, especially young children. (Despite this fact, it is often grown in school yards.) The toxicity of Oleander is considered extremely high, and it has been reported that in some cases only a small amount had lethal or near-lethal effects. The most significant of these toxins are oleandrin and neriine, which are cardiac glycosides. They are present in all parts of the plant, but are most concentrated in the sap, which can block out receptors. High risk circumstances of exposure include children playing with the ornamental shrub, as well as adults or children tasting, chewing, ingesting portions of the plant, and inappropriate medicinal use of plant infusion. Oleander bark contains rosagenin which is known for its strychnine-like effects. The entire plant, including the nectar, is toxic, and any part can cause an adverse reaction. Oleander is also known to hold its toxicity even after drying.

Real medicine is a messy work-in-progress that at any given time has some treatments that will eventually be shown to not work and even a few treatments that have already been shown to be ineffective and are in the process of being abandoned.

I’m a little worried that we’re bending over backwards to concede whale’s point about antidepressants, which I’ll try to summarize as best I understand it:

If doctors were actually science based they would stop prescribing antidepressants to people with mild depression, as recent research showed no benefit for people with mild depression, though there was some benefit for people with severe depression. Given that only 13% of depressed patients are rated as severe, 87% of the people getting antidepressants now should no longer be getting them.

Yet even with full acceptance of the evidence showing no benefit for antidepressants in patients with mild depression, many patients with mild depression will still be offered the option of a medication trial. Here’s why:

1. Depression is associated with significant morbidity and mortality (some cancers are less deadly).
2. We know we will misjudge the severity of someone’s depression a certain percentage of the time.
3. The newer antidepressants are relative safe.

I wonder if any naturopaths prescribe oleander extract?

I watched an old NCIS episode last night where it was used in a couple of murders.

According to the Wikipedia article it was recommended in ancient medicine. And, of course, it’s All Natural. Nalai