Naturopathy

Dunstan

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A couple of months ago I was at a friend's party. While pouring myself a beer I heard a woman I'd met a couple of times before -- I'll call her Kelly -- having the following conversation with another guest:

"So what do you do?"
"I'm a doctor"
[some follow-up question about whether she works in a hospital or whatever]
"Oh, well, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a naturopath."

Needless to say, this frosted my cookies a little. Not that she's a naturopath -- L.A. is the national capital of woo, so that doesn't faze me much anymore -- but that she tries to pass herself off as an M.D. (Yes, I'm sure she probably has a "doctor of naturopathy" degree, but so what? I have a "juris doctor" (law) degree, and I don't go around introducing myself as Dr. Dunstan. When you tell people you're a doctor, it's understood that you're representing yourself as a medical doctor or a dentist, not a doctor of philosophy or anything else.)

Anyway, I left the room before I could be tempted to start a fight. She's basically a nice person, and we're both guests in someone else's home, so it didn't feel right to me to cause a scene.

Last night I was at this same friend's house for a small gathering, and Kelly was there again. No problem, until this other guest starts talking about his dog who's had to go to the vet twice for allergic reactions to bee stings:

"Oh, you should get this homeopathic remedy, Apis."

She goes on about "like cures like" and how great it is that a $5 homeopathic product will do the trick instead of him spending 50-100 on a vet visit. Oh, and she's never actually heard of it being used on dogs, but she "knows" it works for people. The guy seems receptive.

Well, I still don't want to start a fight, but I don't want this poor dog to suffer or even die. My compromise with myself was to keep my mouth shut for the moment but pull the guy aside later and warn about off this nonsense. I did, and here's the happy part of the story: he laughs and says "yeah, I know. No way am I treating my dog with homeopathy." We make a few jokes about homeopathic beer and all is well.

I also overheard Kelly making a few references to her time in "medical school." I'm 99% sure that she really means "naturopath school" and is pulling her little "pass myself off as a real doctor" routine again. Next time I'm going to ask a few delicate questions about which medical school she was at and what her degree is.

Because we have some friends in common, I'm inevitably going to encounter Kelly again at some point. And given her knack for trying to make people think she's a doctor and offering unsolicited medical or veterinary advice, at some point I'm going to say politeness be damned and get into it with her.

Which brings me to my question. What are some good resources on naturopathy? I've read a few articles on Quackwatch, and SkepticWiki doesn't seem to have much. What are some good questions to ask? I want to be well-armed with information and not come across to any bystanders as just an angry "defender of western medicine."

Edited to add -- I just realized this might belong in Science, Mathematics, Medicine, and Technology instead. Mods please move if appropriate.
 
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According to the Quackwatch site there are only four accredited schools in the U.S., but more than 8 nonaccredited correspondence schools. Find out what those four schools are. If she got her "degree" from a correspondence school, that should help to discredit her in most people's minds. No one wants to see a "doctor" who's degree is from a mail-order diploma mill.

Steve S.
 
Dunstan said:
What are some good questions to ask? I want to be well-armed with information and not come across to any bystanders as just an angry "defender of western medicine."
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Next time she claims to be a doctor you could ask her what the latest diagnostic protocols for Addison's disease are and how she thinks the ACTH stimulation test compares for accuracy with adrenal ultrasound - as a vet I've no idea if that's how things are done in human medicine but it would be fun to see the look on her face!

Yuri
 
Yuri Nalyssus said:
Next time she claims to be a doctor you could ask her what the latest diagnostic protocols for Addison's disease are and how she thinks the ACTH stimulation test compares for accuracy with adrenal ultrasound - as a vet I've no idea if that's how things are done in human medicine but it would be fun to see the look on her face!

Yuri
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Appreciate the thought, but the problem is that I don't know the answers to that either. So if she said "well, western medicine prescribes XYZ, which treats the symptoms, but I give my patients ABC, which cures the disease," I'm screwed. I basically have to call her a liar, which makes me look like the jerk. Sophisticated concepts like sample sizes and confidence intervals are probably not going to cut it, either.
 
Dunstan said:
Appreciate the thought, but the problem is that I don't know the answers to that either. So if she said "well, western medicine prescribes XYZ, which treats the symptoms, but I give my patients ABC, which cures the disease,"
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Well, if she comes up with this sort of guff in relation to homoeopathy, you could point out that homoeopathy addresses nothing but the symptoms. Remedies are selected because they are thought to cause the symptoms that the patient is suffering from.

And Hahnemann (and hence homoeopaths) had some very odd ideas about what causes disease. The thing is, he predated the general acceptance of the germ theory of disease (as well as atomic theory and the calculation of the value of Avogadro's constant). Science and medicine have made great progress since 1800, but homoeopathy has largely stood still, and has simply ignored any developments that contradict Hahnemann's writings.
 
Also, another thing in relation to "homeopathy" and possibly a few other things like chiropracty, etc that are compared to "Western Medicine": ask how come Germany is not considered "western".

Actually, we have a relative who is bipolar. She decided to give up the meds that the county hospital gave her when she was released from their psyche ward and go back to her naturapath. The naturapath gave her homeopathic remedies... Our relative later wrote the family a letter that the homeopathic stuff didn't work (I spent some time with her dad trying to explain that homeoapathic remedies were essencially nothing).

At an earlier family gathering a couple years before she was hospitalized she told us that she had to limit her diet. Her naturapath told her to avoid foods that cause allergies (like milk and wheat), and to substitute soy. My jaw dropped... and I told her that soy was one of the big 10 as far as allergies were concerned (having recently had a conversation with a mom from Korea who was struggling because her daughter was allergic with soy... which she fortunately grew out of, but is still very allergic to peanuts).

Which leads up to another question (it has been discused on the healthfraud listserv over the past few days): How can a naturapath tell the difference between a real food allergy versus a simple intolerance? (my sister is lactose intolerant, she only has a bit of a tummy ache after eating cheese, she does not get a full rash like Eos of the Eons does with her milk allergy).
 
Could you target the kind of ailments that a GP handles often but would leave a naturapath blinking.

I'm thinking of things like physical trauma - Broken leg, lancing a boil, stitching a head wound etc. Proper doctors will have no problem with these. A correspondence school naturapath would be screwed.

The woo healers tend to specialise in "fuzzy" ailments - allergies, stress, insomnia etc. See if she's got the smarts to handle something gory and terminal.
 
steve s said:
According to the Quackwatch site there are only four accredited schools in the U.S., but more than 8 nonaccredited correspondence schools. Find out what those four schools are. If she got her "degree" from a correspondence school, that should help to discredit her in most people's minds. No one wants to see a "doctor" who's degree is from a mail-order diploma mill.

Steve S.
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Hmmm... are the "accredited" schools any better than the diploma-mills? It seems to me that being taught crap, is still crap even if taught by an "accredited" place.
 
Mouthfire said:
Hmmm... are the "accredited" schools any better than the diploma-mills? It seems to me that being taught crap, is still crap even if taught by an "accredited" place.
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I found this site through the Skepdic site. It quotes Dr. William Jarvis as saying...

The difference between more and less educated naturopaths is . . . . like comparing more and less educated witch doctors. It could actually be argued that less schooled naturopaths are safer because they may have a smaller bag of tricks and, because they don't consider themselves "primary health physicians," they are more apt to refer patients to M.D.'s for additional care.
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Steve S.
 
Ask if she has had any experience with applied kinesiology (also called muscle testing) or similar techniques, or the computerized or electronic versions like EAV, VEGA, Bioset, B.E.S.T. etc. It seems possible that she would include one of those methods in her list of techniques. If she uses one of those techniques for choosing remedies, see if she'd be game for trying a blinded test with you.
You could look her up online ahead of time; possibly she'd have an ad or website listing some 'modalities' she uses. I think live blood cell analysis or darkfield analysis is another questionable technique sometimes used by naturopaths. I'm not sure what would be an interesting approach to this technique.
 
StewartP said:
Could you target the kind of ailments that a GP handles often but would leave a naturapath blinking.

I'm thinking of things like physical trauma - Broken leg, lancing a boil, stitching a head wound etc. Proper doctors will have no problem with these. A correspondence school naturapath would be screwed.

The woo healers tend to specialise in "fuzzy" ailments - allergies, stress, insomnia etc. See if she's got the smarts to handle something gory and terminal.
Click to expand...
Also iffy, I'd have thought, assuming Dunstan doesn't have a large pool of medical knowledge to draw from - people who have overinflated pseudoqualifications (im my limited experience, that is) tend to fully believe they have been trained in everything.

I'm recalling in particular a conversation with someone who had a degree in something questionable, who had the conviction that she had been 'trained in research'. Although probing revealed she didn't in fact have even a basic knowledge about quantitative research methods or statistical concepts, nobody else present did either; so her justifications that, for example, "What? You should never manipulate a variable, because then you've just made your own results!", etc., created the impression that she simply came from a different 'school' of research, and my unfortunately long words and lack of opportunity to explain them, coupled with several times not even knowing where to start correcting, led to an impression that I was stuffy and pompous (I am), and that she was just trying to redress a scientific imbalance of some kind.

I can imagine the same happening with "how do you treat a broken arm?" - once the 'I'm trained in everything' program is activated, I'm sure she'll demonstrate a lay knowledge which matches that of the others present, based on ER and similar shows, and flower it up with an authoritative tone and impressive-sounding nonsense.



An alternate approach which I've found to be occasionally successful is a more passive style - remarking with a slightly embarrassed smile that "actually, I have to admit I'm a bit of a sceptic about naturopathy", and then seeing if she'll challenge you, thus removing the immediate disadvantage of you being the 'aggressor', and letting her seem like the bulging-eyed one directly disagreeing with your throwaway statement. Probably the next bit would see her either ignore the statement completely, or if feeling brave say "why?", which would give you the opportunity to say something very brief and simple about homeopathy, 'nutritional medicine', or whatever, and allow her to have the job of refuting your very simple point with something a bit more complicated. I also have found the phrases "wait, what does that actually mean? It sounds like a made up word!" and "What kind of energy? Do you mean gravity, electromagnetism, or the strong or weak nuclear forces?" to be servicable.

Just keep it simple, even over-simple, would be my advice, letting her make it more complicated as she needs to - this all assuming you're intending a general, public conversation because you're a bit worried about someone taking her advice, and a bit irritated at her passing herself off as a doctor in public.
 
Thanks. You guys rock. And Nucular is right -- me no know medicine too good. This will all help.
 
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