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WillowOne's Positions

Naturopathy

My Positions

  1. Naturopathy is not a discipline but a shopping basket: homeopathy, herbalism, "detox", iridology, applied kinesiology, colonic irrigation, high-dose vitamins and whatever else is in fashion, held together by the appeal to nature and a shared suspicion of doctors.
  2. Its founding principle, the healing power of nature, is true of a cold and false of sepsis. Medicine exists for the second case.
  3. When a plant turns out to contain a drug that works, the drug becomes medicine and the plant stays in the health-food shop. "Alternative medicine" is therefore, by construction, the set of things that failed the test or never sat it.
  4. Licensing "naturopathic doctors", as about half of American states and most Canadian provinces do, grants an authority the training does not earn. I would oppose it here.

Notes

  1. What it is. The word was coined in the 1890s and bought by Benedict Lust, a German immigrant to New York who had been cured of tuberculosis, he believed, by the water treatments of a Bavarian priest, and who opened the American School of Naturopathy in 1901. From the beginning it was eclectic: hydrotherapy, fasting, sunlight, herbs, spinal manipulation and opposition to vaccines and drugs. The modern version adds whatever has come along since. A naturopath's toolkit is defined not by a theory of disease but by a mood, and the mood is that natural is good, chemical is bad and the body heals itself if you stop interfering. Each of those is a half-truth that kills people when applied to the wrong half.
  2. The components fail individually. Homeopathy is dealt with under Homeopathy. Iridology, the claim that disease anywhere in the body shows as marks on a map of the iris, was tested in JAMA in 1979: three iridologists shown photographs of patients with and without serious kidney disease could not tell them apart, and Edzard Ernst's 2000 review of every controlled study found the same. Applied kinesiology, in which a practitioner diagnoses an allergy or deficiency by how hard you can hold your arm out while holding a vial, collapses under blinding every time it is tested. Colonic irrigation rests on "autointoxication", the idea that the bowel poisons the body with retained waste, which medicine abandoned in the 1920s. High-dose vitamin C is Linus Pauling's legacy and is covered under Dietary Supplements. None of these is new, none has survived a fair test, and naturopathy's achievement is to have kept them all on the shelf together.
  3. Herbs. The one component with real content is herbalism, because plants contain pharmacologically active compounds. That is precisely why the honest examples all left: aspirin from willow bark, digoxin from foxglove, morphine from the poppy, and artemisinin from sweet wormwood, which won a Nobel Prize in 2015 and now treats malaria as a purified, dosed, trialled drug. What stays behind is the unpurified, undosed, untrialled version, which is either too weak to work, too strong to be safe, or, in the case of a good deal of imported "herbal" product, adulterated with the pharmaceutical it is supposed to replace. The naturopath's herb is a drug of unknown dose and content taken on the advice of someone who does not know either.
  4. The harm. Britt Hermes, who trained and practised as a naturopathic doctor in the United States before leaving the profession, has documented from the inside what the licensed version does: intravenous vitamin infusions, unapproved cancer drugs, a four-year degree in which the pharmacology is taught alongside the homeopathy as if they were the same kind of thing. In 2017 a thirty-year-old woman in California died after a naturopath gave her turmeric by intravenous drip for eczema. Cancer patients who choose alternative medicine instead of treatment die at about two and a half times the rate of those who do not. The naturopath's defining contribution is to be the professional who tells you not to go to the doctor.
  5. The rebrands. "Integrative medicine" and "functional medicine" are naturopathy with the vocabulary of a teaching hospital, and the word "integrative" is doing the work of the Motte-and-bailey fallacy: the motte is diet, exercise and listening to the patient, which nobody opposes, and the bailey is the reiki and the supplements that get integrated alongside them. The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital renamed itself the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine in 2010 for exactly this reason. As the integrative physicians themselves ought to say, there is no alternative medicine; there is medicine that has been shown to work and medicine that has not, and integrating the second with the first does not improve the second.

Sources

  • Simon, A. et al., "An Evaluation of Iridology", JAMA 242 (1979)
  • Ernst, E., "Iridology: Not Useful and Potentially Harmful", Archives of Ophthalmology 118 (2000)
  • Atwood, K. C., "Naturopathy: A Critical Appraisal", Medscape General Medicine 5 (2003)
  • Hermes, B., Naturopathic Diaries — https://www.naturopathicdiaries.com/
  • Johnson, S. B. et al., "Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival", Journal of the National Cancer Institute 110 (2018)
  • Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (2008), chapter 5 and appendix

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