TG,
I too fail to see where anything said here has been nasty or personal. Naturopathy, as you acknowledge, is often tightly associated by its own practitioners with pseudoscience, so if you claim to practice it in a different, scientifically validated way, then it seems appropriate for us to ask what exactly you mean by that.
I looked at your link on the tenets of naturopathy, and I see a lot of claims about how conventional medicine fails and naturopathy succeeds which I see no evidence to support. I also see a lot of claims for naturopathy that sound indistinguishable from conventional medicine, which again raises the question of why naturopathy is different if it too follows science. For example:
- First do no Harm- Clearly a universal principle of medicine, nothing unique to naturopathy. Of course, sometimes harm is unavoidable when the need or the benefit is greater than the risk, but that is due to the inevitable nature of manipulating something as complex and interconnected as a living organism. If you are altering the body in a meaningful way, then there is some risk of unintended consequences, and “natural” therapies are no different in this respect than any other.
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Naturopaths are far better trained in preventative medicine than conventional physicians, because it is a central principle of our practice.
Nonsense. Preventative medicine is the core of conventional medicine as well. Diet, exercise, body weight and condition, vaccination, dental care, etc. are all ordinary parts of primary care practice. If there is scientific evidence that something has preventative value, conventional medicine employs or encourages it. How is naturopathy different or better in this respect? It seems you are setting up a strawman of conventional medicine that is simply inaccurate, especially with phrases like “throwing pills at a symptom,” which is a silly stereotype of medicine often promoted by advocates of alternative therapies.
3. Symptom suppression- You go on about how suppressing symptoms is wrong and imply that this is what conventional medicine does. However, this is another inaccurate strawman. When I remove a cancerous tumor, give a vaccine, treat a potentially life-threatening sepsis with antibiotics, put a cancer into remission with chemotherapy, or employ any of a thousand other therapeutic interventions, I am not “merely” suppressing symptoms. I am often curing disease, and I am frequently saving life even when the disease is not curable. It is true that many times organisms heal spontaneously, which is one of several reasons why ineffective therapies sometimes seem to work. However, it is also true that before scientific medicine, spontaneously healing still existed and yet half of our children died before adulthood, death in childbirth was routine, and life expectancy almost never exceeded the early 40s. The body sometimes needs help, and not just good food and clean living.
4.
We humans have become increasingly removed from our animal selves, from instinct, from our sense of smell and our intuition.
Well, my patients are pretty well-acquainted with their “animal selves” and intuition. That doesn’t seem to stop them from eating poisonous plants, batteries, and socks, poking rattlesnakes or porcupines repeatedly with their noses until they get bitten, persistently chewing on themselves when they are itchy until they are raw and infected, and doing any number of other things not in the best interests of their health. The “appeal to nature fallacy” is what you are selling here, and it is just that–a fallacy.
5.
Treating the Whole Person involves understanding the whole person. This is no simple matter, nothing like throwing pills at a symptom. People are complex and layered. Treating the whole person involves providing support where there is weakness, encouragement where there is strength, and inspiration where there is hopelessness. This tenet is based on the Holistic premise that a person is an animal being, rational being and spiritual being all at the same time. The parts of a whole person are continuous with each other, interacting and in balance. A person is not just their body, or their attitude, or their spirit. A person is more than the sum of all these things. Our goal is to understand and to love the person, so that we can support his or her recovery in every way that matters.This would seem to contradict your claim not to have a vitalistic attitude towards health and disease. Are we to treat our patients as spiritual beings, and if so how? Is this science-based? And if this is all metaphor and you just mean we should be treat people's psychological needs as well as their physical disease, again how is this different from good conventional medicine? I still see only vague rhetoric in your attempts to distinguish naturopathy from science-based medicine. I don't see you advocating anything that is both scientific and not an ordinary part of good conventional healthcare.