How cute. Naturopathic oncologists are pretending that theirs is a real medical specialty.

# 1 BadlyShavedMonkey

+ 1

However we should not discount the Cargo Cult explanation either.

The last 15-20 years of Web 2.0 has equalised access to information but not equalised comprehension. We are paying the price for this in politics, science and medicine.

#4 Indeed. People too often show disdain for experts with years of study and work in a field as being “elitist.” Instead, too many people want to believe they are capable of googling anything and being the master of that domain in a day. It’s an ego thing.

Reading this leads me to think again that there’s such a broad spectrum of ‘not-sbm’ practice it’s useful to observe the differences, and not tar all of it with the same brush (though tarred it still may be). In this case, naturopaths calling themselves ‘oncologists’ strikes me as far more troubling than the sort of ‘Integrative Oncology’ now practiced at a number of well-respected clinics, which offer acupuncture, or rieki or other woos as pain management therapies but only that, and only under the guidance of real oncologist MDs. I know Orac detests this ‘quackademia’ but I looked at a website description for one IM-Oncology program recently, and while it had a variety of CAM ‘modalitie’ on offer, I actually found something comforting in the way they were described. The vibe (if you will) wasn’t curative, and certainly wasn’t at all ‘instead-of’ conventional standard of care, but rather stuff-to-do in addition to that to the end of coping with the often devastating physical and psychological effects of chemo, radiation, surgery etc. etc. I found myself asking whether, in good conscience, I could feel good about denying patients what was being described, and I concluded that in all honesty my answer had to be ‘No.’

At the same time, I felt this reaction was specific to the description I had read, and thought I might have reacted quite differently, and far more negatively, to a different framing of the CAM stuff.

While it seems that some of the ” integrative and not alternative” language from the naturopaths is gesturing in this direction, I don’t at all trust naturos to do this well. For one thing, that would include sincerity, humility, and understanding their own limitations (or, rather, flaws), and I don’t see much of that in naturos. For another, the whole ‘natural remedies’ schtick of herbals/supplements/homeopathy has no use I can see in terms of the sort of ‘supportive care’ effects of those other ‘modalties’, which basically derive from patients spending time with sympathetic people who have skills in getting their minds off the awfulness of their situation.

As such, I have the suspicion OncANP is just a sleazy attempt to ride the coattails of approaches that have far more limited and legitimate (humanistically, anyway) ends into a wider acceptance and increased authority for naturopathy in general. And I do think that is very, very bad.

@ Lawrence

I really appreciate seeing someone stand up for historical context on RI. Bravo! You also make an excellent point in noting that sitcoms rarely if ever show the true nature of anything.

I’m not really into the genealogy thing, but in a moment of curiosity I looked up the census data on my paternal grandmother’s family. She had never mentioned having any siblings, and I’d kind of imagined her as an only child. But it turns out she had (iirc) 3 brothers and sisters who didn’t make it to adulthood…

Michael beat me to it 🙂 I looked up the same sources for the same reason.

I also looked at the question structure using Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is what nurse educators apply when writing NCLEX-RN style questions for nursing exams.

Most of the questions in the review sample are at the Knowledge and Comprehension level, which means rote memorization. A few are at the Application level (use of good clinical judgement in handling a common patient care situation). None were of the Analysis and Synthesis level, which involves coming to the correct conclusion from breaking down information or putting it together to come to a correct plan of care.

Equally interesting, a website I found that offers a practice test bank for the NPLEX noted that the most difficult section of the exam was section 1, which includes the anatomy and physiology sections of the examination. Small wonder; these are the concepts that are actually science based, and include some very difficult concepts. An article on the Arizona Naturopathy Boards exam showed the state wanted them to address the fact that their pass rate was 100% after “adjusting” scores of applicants, the reasons for which were opaque. One student had 90 questions “adjusted.”

The review sample on a patient with acute coronary syndrome was as equally frightening as the questions on the kid with croup that Orac dissected not too long ago.

I would really love to see an item analysis of the actual test. I simply can’t see how it measures any kind of competency for anything.

@ Panacea
“I would really love to see an item analysis of the actual test. I simply can’t see how it measures any kind of competency for anything.”
Simple: if you prescribe Rhamnus purshiana and Podophylum peltatum instead of Ricinis Communis, it’s eliminatory.

@ Julian Frost
Here it’s not a question of knowledge, but of understanding : they “know” that Rhamnus purshiana is better than Ricinus communis for some disease.

I had excellent, evidence based naturopathic treatment for stage 3 uterine cancer in concert with surgery and chemotherapy and am cancer free

Fortunately, I live in Seattle, where we have excellent integrative naturopathic oncology and extensive research bringvdone. My MD oncologist wisely recognized the value of my naturopathic treatment and encouraged me to seek help from my naturopathic doctors on several occasions, even modifying my chemo regimen based on the naturopathic doctor’s recommendations.

I’ve seen dozens devastated by conventional cancer treatment, and many die. I’ve seen great success with naturopathic treatment when conventional treatment failed.

Cancer patients deserve the opportunity to evaluate and combine treatment options that will give them the best chance of success. We are not widgets and therefore few perfect answers for cancer yet.

One ND of note:
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/bothell-cancer-naturopath-accepts-license-suspension-long-probation/

My disgust with that article moved me to construct a little slogan

That’s pretty honking big for a slogan.

In one episode of the Quackcast, Mark Crislip (the world needs more Mark Crislip), an infectious disease doctor, reports that he’s never seen a case of Mumps.

I was sitting in on a conference call during a mumps outbreak in our county (2015) listening to an APRN thank the county health department’s CD department for sending out clinical information about the disease. She’s head of a local prompt care and she’d never seen the mumps. Nor had any of her medical staff.

Made me feel old.

Melody: “…likely a big pharma-paid fear monger.”

How boring, it is the old stale worthless Pharma Shill Gambit.

Perhaps you should try with something new and exciting: providing actual evidence for your claims. You can start with the PubMed indexed case reports of naturopathy curing cancer without any surgery, radiation nor medications. There are many stories of those who did not do so well with homeopathy here:
http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html

@melody – yet Cancer survival rates continue to improve. Certain cancers can be cured quite regularly and we now have vaccines which prevent Cancer…..

Which of those were the responsibility of naturopaths?

“Some results are so different that any benefit is notable to the patient. Even if ignored by std medicine, again.”

You what? Think you need to calm down on the big words and settle for clarity.

With alt med / integrative medicine, sometimes one can achieve effects or conditions simply not possible with conventional medicine for these situations. Situations where doctors might say less than 1 in 100 or 1K or 100k patients (actually their reaction tends to I’ve never seen (20-30 yrs), or some form of sudden denial of original problem).

Pancea@31
Most CAM components are previously recognized as safe.
Your rather fixed ideas about proof of efficacy are about communication and administration, rather than the

Case histories are a very weak form of evidence. for “proof” (or general acceptance) …because of inadequate stratification, diagnosis and description.

I don’t need proof on a treatment, I need (multiple) methods to yield adequate minimum results, what is for me a one-off problem.

As predictive diagnostics improve, individual cases become more analyzable, comparable. There are many kinds of analysis and misc data a good experimentalist can use to improve the odds of success, sometimes dramatically, especially with multiple processes.

You can compare them with superior data all you want, but by themselves they only serve to drive interest and create the research question. The superior data from stronger forms of research is how to prove safety and efficacy.

I don’t care how transparent the pricing of quackery is. Without firm evidence of ….efficacy, you’re still getting your pocket picked.
You seem to conflate proof of efficacy in unstratified heterogeneous groups as a requirement for to achieve any efficacy in very specific circumstances. Mission critical, one time solutions for a specific, time critical case often aren’t worked that way.

Also I daresay my pocket leaks about 100x less than the more conventionally tx’d patients billed at $25k – $80k per month, where they died-out in ~3 years, OS<1% and this was not a case of zero or one wimpy, bottom 10% marker that shows up as the last survivor.

I was interested to see that when signing up for the practice NPLEX exam, that for a fee, one can get a “pass guaranteed”.
https://www.boardvitals.com/nplex-part-1-naturopathic-exam?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=nplex1freetrial

Melody: “Those patients who didn’t have the privilege, courage or knowledge to pursue other means of getting their bodies healthy haven’t fared as well, if at all.”

Some of them haven’t fared at all? How odd.

Must be due to their lack of “courage”. See, this gratuitous insulting of cancer patients is a major roadblock to my accepting alt med as a gentler and more holistic form of therapy. 🙁

Now it’s off to start celebrating the end of 2016. You are all treated to a round of expensive cocktails, courtesy of my giant roll of $hill Buck$.

When the time comes, you will be diagnosed with something awful that causes you to realize you actually are only made of live tissue that needs to be looked after. At which point your doctor will sit you down and give you the list of options they have at their disposal to treat you. You will take all the drugs they tell you too, then you will take the drugs they recommend to fix the side effects caused by their drugs. You will get sicker and weaker from their drugs, then eventually you will die within the time frame they gave you. You became another sad victim of a terrible disease, the doctors pat themselves on the back saying we did everything we could. And the pharmaceutical company gets paid for all the drugs the doctors used to treat/kill you. Personally i think attitudes like yours exist because people don’t want to admit their lifestyles and personal habits are the cause of their illnesses. You shouldn’t rubbish things until you have looked at them with an open mind. It is true that pharmaceutical companies are only interested in their bottom line, its in their best interests to rubbish therapies they can’t make money off.

To be fair, there’s no shortage of real world examples of ‘killing customers as a strategy that leads to riches’ – tobacco companies, gun manufacturers, Ford Pintos, Love Canal, TRIS… heck, you could make an Orac length comment form the list.

It’s also true that the pharmas do a lot of bad sh** that falls short of customer-homicide, and that “the biggest cheque book owns the science results.”

None of which actually supports Tonster’s theses that conventional medicine kills most of it patients, or more to the point, that alternative treatments are somehow superior.
You know, just because airplanes may not be maintained properly, and have to land and take off at too-short runways full of potholes, guided by non-union undertrained air traffic controllers who come to work hungover or tweeked – that not only don’t mean magic carpets fly, it also don’t mean getting dragged over a field of rocks on a magic carpet is without peril, either. Maybe even greater chances of peril than getting on the plane, which is hard to justify since the magic carpet isn’t really going to get you get you anywhere…

Let’s see…
Killing customers as a strategy that leads to riches:
Exhibit A: The Hippocrates Health Institute
______

Tonster is singing a familiar CT song: Natural remedies work and if people only knew the truth they’d embrace these effective and relatively cheap methods, which would put pharma profits into the sh**hole, and therefore the pharmas employ shills to “rubbish” their ‘competition’. The problem is, the pharmas aren’t exactly SPECTRE, they’re too big and too public to conceal all the facts about how they actually make money, and how they actually spend money in efforts to boost or protect the bottom lines that are their primary priorities – including their funding of people who actually are ‘pharma shills’. So you can find out a lot about who these people are, and what they do that gets the pharma overlords to keep sending them checks.

And if you actually check, you know, facts you discover those actual well-funded pharma shills don’t rubbish CAM at all. There are two primary categories of pharma shilling. The first is directed at promoting high profit meds to physicians and institutions in competition with similar products from other pharma manufacturers. Alt med never enters the equation in the day to day efforts of the sales reps who do this shilling. The second is directed at influencing government policy toward directions the pharmas find favorable. In this – even if it may seem counter-intuitive to some – the pharmas are all in free market ideology and de-regulation. Which basically makes them political allies of Big Cam. And sure enough many if not most of the pharma shills in politics also shill for the supplement industry.

Working back through the CT narrative, we’d find that the pharmas are making money from all signicant market sectors of health care – including OTC remedies of dubious benefit, supplements (if not directly making and marketing them, but in providing raw materials and facilities), etc. etc. ‘Naturopathic oncologists’ may be a potential economic threat to sbm oncologists, but to the pharmas, they’re just another target market.

And the reason the pharmas have a few toes in the less outre varieties of CAM is that CAM is not cheap, and there is, in fact, a lot of profit to be had there. If the profit motive sometimes leads to bad behavior on the part of Big Pharmas, that happens far less often there than it does in Big CAM. And, and their worst, the pharmas can’t touch the evil of Big CAM outfits like Truehope.

It’s misleading to frame the bottom-line thinking of the pharmas as only an interest in the bottom line. Which is to say that a lot of things go into the bottom line, there are very different strategies for maximizing profit that in contest both within large firms and between them, and so bottom-line interests become translated into all sorts of other interests. And for the pharmas, a lot of those interests are highly pro-social. The pharmas are evil sometimes. They’re also good more of the time. And more often than both the clearly evil and clearly good put together, they’re some mixture of both. In this, they’re not that different from other massive multinational corporations. The bad stuff they do represents a fairly small percentage of their activities, and considering all the failings endemic to our species, a not particularly surprising percent at that. It’s just that they are so massive and do so much that the bad stuff numbers still look ‘big’ to our everyday-life scales of evaluation.

Finally, the notion that ‘Big Pharma’ is sitting on cures to preserve long-term profit from treatment fits neither the facts of where the profit comes from, or the nature of corporate behavior. First and foremost, pharmaceutical companies not only compete tooth and nail with one another in the marketplace for pharma products, but with other capitalist firms in stock markets where shares are traded daily. Those relatively rare occasions where the profit motive leads to sketchy activities by a pharmaceutical company, that’s generally a response to competitve pressures from other pharmaceutical companies. And the reasons these firms will go forward with tactics that are potentially risky to them is that when corporate executives and managers aren’t focused on the bottom of the next fiscal quarter, they’re most likely looking at stock prices in an even shorter time window. The strongest imperative is always to get the money in the till now. If a pharma could market a cure for any common disease, they would be on that like white on rice full-bore as windfall profits would surely abound. All the major players would get big promotions and bonuses such that they could retire into the lap of obscene luxury well before any long-term consequences of lost income from mere-treatments-not-sold would show up in the company’s ledger. Not there actually would be profit-lowering losses. The pharmas are smart enough to know that every product has an economic life-cycle, and they have plenty of new products and new types of products in the R&D pipeline to fill the profit holes left by sometimes unpredictable obsolescence. Never mind that people who get cured of one disease and have their lives extended as a result will still develop other medical problems and have other health maintenance needs. Finding a cure for some nasty thing would not only bring short term riches, but expand the market of older medical-product consumers capable of buying all that new stuff the pharmas will be putting out to help them fend off hair-loss, wrinkles, wimpy weinies and all the ravages of Father Time…

Tonster @ #63: “May i point out to you that Holistic medicine is based on the whole body being healed, when the patient is totally focused and making all the changes needed, thats when the medicine works properly. its alot harder to measure than giving a patient a pill and collating the results.”

Actually, it’s not all that hard to measure at all.

You had cancer ten years ago. If you had been treated holistically you would be dead now. You are a walking, talking example of the success of conventional oncological treatments.

The fact that you live to spout nonsense about whole body treatment, your very existence, highlights the emptiness of your arguments.

It’s a classic case of spitting in the face of the people who saved your life. Your willingness to do so says all I need to know about your honesty, your courage and your integrity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hey, this argument by assertion is neat stuff! No need to worry about facts, research or anything! In under five minutes I was able to analyze your situation, assess your character and intelligence and adjudge you to be a worthless, ungrateful dumbass.

NOTE
Any parallels between the above comment and your approach to the issues and commenters on this post is purely coincidental.

Tonster: “May i point out to you that Holistic medicine is based on the whole body being healed, when the patient is totally focused and making all the changes needed, thats when the medicine works properly.”

Citation needed. Essentially prove it, but with some actual data… otherwise it more worthless “argument by blatant assertion.

Which is really boring, and useless.

Chris @ 65

Thank you for the kind words. It’s only been six weeks, so the magnitude of my loss is still becoming apparent. However, I have often drawn comfort from this:

May i point out to you that Holistic medicine is based on the whole body being healed, when the patient is totally focused and making all the changes needed, thats when the medicine works properly.

You may, but that doesn’t make the statement anything more than low-rent, blobovian occultism.

By the way I really truly appreciate the people who work at the various hospitals that my kid has been from the emergency departments to the wards. I actually have a way too long list of the amenities of our local hospitals where he has been taken to by ambulance or just for cardiac rehab.

I just wish that was not part of my life. Which is why one thing that makes me very angry at anti-vaccers is that they think it is “better” to treat vaccine-preventable diseases than vaccinate. I pretty much know none of these parents have ever had a child hooked up to a respirator. Yep, my kid has… along with an IV and a few other fun machines that go “beep!” and “boop!”

@Opus: my sincere condolences. I’ve been a very lucky person and have lost very few loved ones (grandparents, some HS friends). I can only say that I hope your memories of your time with your beloved wife give you comfort as time passes.

my replys and comments in the real #75,” are awaiting moderation”

Tonster: “May i point out to you that Holistic medicine is based on the whole body being healed, when the patient is totally focused and making all the changes needed, thats when the medicine works properly.”

And when the “Holistic medicine” doesn’t work, it’s gotta be the patient’s fault for not being “totally focused”.

Blaming patients for not being cured is such a predictably obnoxious trait of woo-promoters.

As always, I prefer medicine that works regardless of whether I’m mentally “focused” on the treatment, and whether I believe in it or not.

I might have to bone up on the subject matter a bit, but the company that e-mails me come-ons for primary care medicine jobs has come up with a real doozy.

Job Title: Family Medicine/Alternative Medicine Physician – Oregon Metro Job Summary: Greater Portland, Oregon Family Medicine 4.5-Day Work Week – 1 Year to Partner No Sales Tax – Tort Reform State Practice: Enjoy an outpatient only practice with a 4.5-day work week Base salary with partnership track of 1 year Work alongside 3 OB/GYNs, Family Nurse Practitioner and a Naturopathic physician Average patient load is about 16 to 18 per day-30 to 45-minute patient visits Have the ability to incorporate acupuncture or Osteopathic Manipulation Therapy into your practice-optional! Work with a team that combines conventional and alternative medicine to treat chronic diseases In-house lab, EKG and medical spa-ability to perform procedures once ramped up Be a part of a practice that believes in patient centered health care Hip, Urban and Affordable | No Sales Tax | Tort Reform Bedroom community to Portland”

Wow – hip, urban, affordable and less likely to be able to sue you into oblivion when the homeopathy backfires! Count me in!*

*on second thought, if you’re seeing that many patients for up to 45 minutes each, you could wind up working 13 1/2 hour days and needing naturopathic stress relief. 🙁

@ Opus:

I’m very sorry to hear of your loss.

Six weeks is an awful time in the roller coaster of an emotional schedule you’re currently riding..

HOWEVER it may be better than three weeks. I hope it is.

I wish you can find something intriguing/ important/ meaningful/ not totally horrible with which to occupy yourself over the next few weeks.

Perhaps DJT and company with oblige with some hilarity and, at the very least, NOT a new war or a nuclear attack.

I will make note of Melania’s / Ivanka’s outfits.
I need something to look forward to
( although, personally, I doubt I would ever wear anything like what they usually choose)

@ Ben
For a drug, I think that one clinical trial may lead to approval. The example of the vaccine was to show that you don’t need efficiency to make money. What you need is to convince governments to support basic research with a goal that politicians can understand. Then, if something emerge, make money until the drug is shown to be useless. Many anti-cancer drugs were successful in clinical trials without any effect in clinical practice.