I can't say I didn't expect skepticism. =-] I did not however expect the tone to be nasty. Oh well, it is a sign of the times. Nastiness is normal on the internet, and in a world where political divisiveness sets the tone for much other discourse. I find myself put upon on all sides because the woo people think I'm an ass for being skeptic, and the skeptics think I'm an idiot because I sat through a naturopathic education which included a bunch of stuff that I don't believe and have no intention of practicing. You may label me a potential quack, and you may prove yourselves more than potential dicks. What binds all naturopaths together is a philosophy, no more and no less. Here I have written some about the six basic tenets of naturopathic philosophy, and you can easily enough see where I land. http://www.fundamentalmed.com/tenets-of-naturopathy.html You can assume that you know what I believe based on a degree that I hold, but you would be foolish to do so. I do not believe that "life" is a vitalistic, that is to say an immaterial or spiritual thing. To me life is a composite of biochemical and electrical processes, some of which we understand, many of which we have precious little information about. We take a stab at understanding things by way of scientific correlations, and clues as to mechanisms. That does not mean that we fully understand it. Conventional medicine is based on no more that this, and many conventional practices are based on the convenience of the medical provider, and not on firm evidence regarding true efficacy. Medicine and the science of medicine is biased by the money. It is not easy or obvious to discern what is real. It is my life work. As for exactly which treatments are effective for which conditions in which situations: this is the nitty gritty of medicine, and I am not going to give you an education in everything that I know and study. It is my project to understand what the conventional treatment is and how effective it is, and also to get a grip on alternative options and the evidence surrounding them. Evidence goes both ways, and no one study is proof of anything. Science is a process by which we continually challenge what we think we know and attempt to verify or dismiss theories. You can write me off, or you can consider that there could possibly be a person who is reasonable and educated who seeks the truth and also has the letters ND after her name. That is entirely up to you. My motivation is simply to put myself and my position out here in hopes of learning something, or perhaps sharing something of value. If all I get is pitched with a bunch of dirty bathwater, well, your loss. And my waste of time.Then you should leave the group. We operate on critical thinking and objective evidence. If that appears nasty to you, "Here's your hat, the exit is staight ahead."
Hi all. I do not mean to offend, only to say Hello. I am here. I am human and I am a reasonable person and a skeptic myself. I offer a handshake, the willingness to interact. I have plenty of friends who are MD’s and generally interact well with those who some combination of science and common sense as the basis for decisions. If you have some specific question for me, I beg of you to ask it, instead of telling me simply that I must “defend” myself. Against what? Against people who do not believe that I have a brain or any powers of discrimination? Please, ask me something specific. Then we can talk. I cannot and will not attempt to offer a medical education on in the form of a comment. I can however speak to your concerns if you can be specific about them.
Of course we are all subjective beings, with all the challenges that come with our human perspective. So be it. I am willing to look at my own and adjust it with new information. I am not an idiot and I am not a product of this particular field. I am myself, and a product of all that I have learned and experienced and studied in these almost 49 years. At this point I think I am forgetting things faster than I am learning them…so be it. Ask me for evidence of something specific and we may be able to have a conversation.
If you are interested in the slightest about the educational requirements for an ND degree, you can find them here: Professional Education - Naturopathic Medicine. The first two years are basic bioscience just like an MD. The next two years include a review of conventional standard of care and some divergent naturopathic diagnostics and treatments. The clinicals are similar, while in school, lots of patients seen, lots of interesting experiences. The greatest weakness of the education is the lack of residencies: most people go straight into practice. I was already an adult when I got the degree, with wilderness emergency medicine experience as a guide. Another great weakness of the field is that in states where a license is not required, anybody can claim to be a naturopath, hence the reasonable skepticism that a person claiming to be a naturopath has any education at all. All those people saying they are naturopaths who practice something “traditional” that has no basis whatsoever in science or reason certainly undermine my efforts at establishing credibility as a reasonable educated medical professional. Yet here I am.
My field may mix pseudoscience with facts, but that does not mean that I do. I am a person. I am not a degree. I do not represent all “naturopaths”. I have studied under quite a few rather woo woo MD’s. They thought that I would support their efforts to use homeopathy or energy machines or auras…because I am an ND. MD’s do not corner the market on science or on reason. Critical thinking exists where you find it and no degree will create or eradicate it. It depends on the person.
Ask me something of substance, see what happens. Tell me something of substance, maybe I will learn from you. I will not accuse you of nastiness when you address me as an intelligent reasonable person instead of as an idiot to be dismissed or chased off. I am listening.
Please forgive the interruptions, I have lots going on and am not going to answer here except at most once a day.
Headed out to the coast of Oregon in the morning!
Teresa Gryder
Human and Skeptic
PS and female
PPS Thanks TimB for being openminded.
PPPS We can talk about the “Parachute Study” next time.
PPPPS: ModMcKenzie this is a great quote: You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.
Johnathan Swift
Welcome to the forum. Looking forward to your posts. I would suggest (not demand) that you limit yourself to a few assertions. This would be in keeping with your request to ask you specific questions, so equal respect there. I have no interest in asking any Naturopath a question, so I won’t be doing that, but maybe others will.
As for apologizing for gaps, don’t worry about it. The best thing about forums is you get to think about your response for as long as you want. Or, you can go to the coast and not think about it all.
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.
-
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.
I hadn’t previously clicked through to the link mckenzie just referenced. Its actually TG’s own practice website. I find it interesting and somewhat hypocritical that someone who doesn’t want to be judged by her professional title makes a lot of incorrect statements and inaccurate generalizations about doctors who practice conventional medicine. If that site is an accurate representation of your position then it would seem you are not here for an honest discussion.
Hello Teresa,
Looking forward to your posts. There seems to be news breaking events in medicine every week now. And medicine is not just for humans today, seems like there is just as much going on in animal and plant medicine as well. Anyone who wants to help this living earth is OK by me. Welcome.
Its interesting that the Evidence-based Naturopath disappeared when she was asked for evidence and specifics.
Yes, she made strong claims with no specifics and then took offence and disappeared once asked to follow up. Not a very convincing case for the idea of “evidence-based naturopathy.”
I learned a long time ago that if you are not making mistakes then you’re probably not doing nothing. I think that some slack is justified with new people. I think Teresa made it clear when she stated, “We take a stab at understanding things by way of scientific correlations, and clues as to mechanisms. That does not mean that we fully understand it."
Let the new guy run up and down the court a few times and get use to the your game.
I would love to see more than text book thinking and remarks that have been honed to perfection by being used and stated a thousand times. Being human doesn’t hurt.
The way I see it is that the oldest generation took the miracle pills and surgeries that was to fix everything. When that failed the next generation went back to the basic natural healing. Then we got the now generation that lab test everything and are the main drug users in the country. But today the doctors are needing our help to keep the profession at the healing level and not at the industrial level. Before all the hospitals are operated by big corporations and English is the second or third language of the doctors and nurses you might want the help of people like Teresa and the people who believe in her healing methods. Because when that method doesn’t work, they will need doctors that they can believe in and not a corporation. The google generation will be more technical and should understand more and will be at a new level of thinking.
So asking someone who says “I practice evidence-based naturopathy” what exactly that means and what evidence they use isn’t being human?! Claiming that those of us in medicine are just suppressing symptoms and ignoring the “real” cause of disease is ok, but asking her to defend those accusations isn’t? I’m sorry, but I’m not buying the “Why you gotta be so mean” line here. False beliefs in medicine hurt and kill real people, and challenging them is a good thing.
As for your precis of the history of medicine in the 20th century, it doesn’t resemble the history I am familiar with. Here are a couple of visual reminders of what those “pills and surgeries” and the rest of science-based medicine (including better sanitation, nutrition, exercise, and most of the other things naturopaths try to claim as their ideas) have done for humanity. (Apparently, inserting these as images screws up the formatting of the whole page, so I’ll trust everyone to follow the links to the source instead : -)
So asking someone who says “I practice evidence-based naturopathy” what exactly that means and what evidence they use isn’t being human?! Claiming that those of us in medicine are just suppressing symptoms and ignoring the “real” cause of disease is ok, but asking her to defend those accusations isn’t? I’m sorry, but I’m not buying the “Why you gotta be so mean” line here. False beliefs in medicine hurt and kill real people, and challenging them is a good thing.
As for your precis of the history of medicine in the 20th century, it doesn’t resemble the history I am familiar with. Here are a couple of visual reminders of what those “pills and surgeries” and the rest of science-based medicine (including better sanitation, nutrition, exercise, and most of the other things naturopaths try to claim as their ideas) have done for humanity.
In a post, yes. In the introduction, a little more space should be given. I like your charts and agree with your information. There are several questions that I am on the lookout for when reading history. One is the burial practices, another is the life expectancy. The older stories tells us that man should live to be 120 year of age. And of course don’t use the bible for this. The main cause of mass deaths were the plagues. Which we don’t have today at the scale they had. Even though it has been a bigger killer than wars. The problems we are having verifying the information is that the people who stories were passed down and eventually written down, use sky burials, then the bones were crushed and burnt so the sprits would rise with the smoke. But the question becomes, if they did live that long, what was their medical practices? Then by the time of Egypt the well-off lived to be in the eighties. The greatest power was in the word of the past. Conquering rulers were known for taking a book of knowledge of the past over gold and silver, like they were trying to find knowledge that had been passed down from the past as if the answers were in the past and something had caused man to lose that knowledge. Most religions today believe that earth and everything else was created by using the “word", knowledge.
As the baby boomers are passing on today, I am seeing friends and family dealing with medical problems, and I am seeing the mental side of it is hard for everyone involved. Death should not be this hard. And doctors should not have to deal with the families’ mental stress. Religion has always taken up that task. And I don’t think that naturopathy medical deals with the families stress either, but I think people are looking around and trying different ideas. I know I am seeing to many people going to the hospitals and care facilities and drugged into the state of zombies. There just are not enough good doctors to take care of the aging problems.
As being in the medical profession I’ll tell you this story that just happen. A few friends and I are playing around in the marijuana movement. Trying to stop the dopers from representing the marijuana movement and give more light on the doctors and researchers. Ann who worked in insurance and I had the pleasure of working with in several business in the past had joined the team. Ann’s husband, Steve, is eighty years old and a couple of weeks ago woke up and could not sit up or hardly move. Both Steve and Ann take a handful of pills every day. But they were looking at alternate natural medicines also. Steve is in the hospital and Steve’s family comes to stay at Ann’s house. Now Ann is really worried because they now have nine marijuana plants growing in the back yard. They are allowed twelve plants in California. But Ann is worried about what Steve’s family will think and say. One member of Steve’s family, Mary, loves to drink coffee. But her hands shakes so bad that someone has to hold her hand so she can drink. It has been that way for several years now. When Steve’s family found the marijuana plants in the back yard, they ask Ann if she would give some marijuana to Mary to see if it would help her shaking, because they have tried everything else and have read stories about marijuana helping people. Ann made some brownies and called me with the story that Mary’s hands had stopped shaking, and she could now drink coffee by herself. It has been a week now and Mary’s hands has not shaken, Ann is a hero with Steve’s family. Steve is supposed to come home this week.
Doctors should have all tools and medicine to work with is my feeling and things like Mary’s shaking shows me that there is still more that needs to be learned when it comes to doctoring. And it would be nice to know if people of our past did live to 120. And what medicines did they use?
Checkmate, MacGyver. Yohe’s unsubstantiated anecdote trumps your years of training and researchers’ decades of hard work. Everybody must get stoned.
Checkmate, MacGyver. Yohe's unsubstantiated anecdote trumps your years of training and researchers' decades of hard work. Everybody must get stoned.Exactly and hence the reason I did not respond.
So asking someone who says "I practice evidence-based naturopathy" what exactly that means and what evidence they use isn't being human?! Claiming that those of us in medicine are just suppressing symptoms and ignoring the "real" cause of disease is ok, but asking her to defend those accusations isn't? I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the "Why you gotta be so mean" line here.False beliefs in medicine hurt and kill real people, and challenging them is a good thing.I like that, good job :)