Tag: naturopathy

2013 Legislative Review: placenta take out

It’s official in Oregon now. You can take your placenta, along with your new baby, home from the hospital. This was already a practice among the CAM set but apparently new mothers were running afoul of laws designed to protect us from bio-hazards. New legislation exempts “the removal from a health care facility . . . of a placenta by a postpartum...

/ January 9, 2014

The Detox Scam: How to spot it, and how to avoid it

Note to SBM’s regular readers: Today’s post revisits some older material you may have seen before. Happy New Year! New Year, New You, right? 2014 is the year you’re finally going to get serious about your health. You’re winding down from a week (or more) of celebrations and parties. You’re pretty much recovered from New Year’s Eve by now. It’s time to...

/ January 2, 2014

Cancer Treatment Centers of America: Revisiting the epitome of “integrative” cancer care

Three weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that the week of October 7 to 14 was declared by our very own United States Senate to be Naturopathic Medicine Week, which I declared unilaterally through my power as managing editor of Science-Based Medicine (for what that’s worth) to be Quackery Week. One wonders where the Senate found the time to consider and...

/ October 7, 2013

Naturopathic Medicine Week 2013, or: Quackery Week 2013

[Ed. Note: This is an extra “bonus” post from Dr. Gorski’s not-so-super-secret other blog. He thought the topic would be of interest to SBM readers as well. Fear not. There will be a post on Monday, as usual.] The vast majority of ideas and treatments that make up the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) specialty known as naturopathy are quackery. There, I...

/ September 14, 2013

Ask the (Science-Based) Pharmacist: What are the benefits of coffee enemas?

It might not occur to you, sipping your morning coffee, that you could derive tremendous health benefits by simply shooting that coffee directly into your rectum. Yet many people believe this. Suzy Cohen, who calls herself, “America’s Pharmacist™” and also “America’s Most Trusted Pharmacist®” is a proponent. Her syndicated column Ask the Pharmacist recently contained this question and response:

/ July 11, 2013

Six reasons CAM practitioners should not be licensed

States license “complementary and alternative” (CAM) practitioners (chiropractors, naturopaths, acupuncturists/TCM practitioners and homeopaths) via the magic of “legislative alchemy.” Ironically, licensing statutes are enacted based on the states’ constitutional power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. Yet these CAM practice acts actually increase public vulnerability to unsafe and ineffective health care practices.  It is, in short, a bad...

/ June 27, 2013

Naturopathic organ repositioning coming soon to Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania legislators need to know only one thing about House Bill 612 (licensure of naturopathic “doctors”) to vote against it: As a means of “naturopathic musculoskeletal therapy” the bill would allow naturopaths to “reposition body tissues and organs.” This is impossible. You cannot “reposition” tissues and organs of the human body by external manipulation. Why does this tell us everything we need...

/ May 30, 2013

A closer look at vitamin injections

Vitamins are magic. Especially when they’re injected. Roll up the sleeve, find a vein, insert a needle and watch that colourful concoction flow directly into the bloodstream. It may sound somewhat illicit, but that person infusing it is wearing a white coat, and you’re sitting in a chic clinic. There must be something to it, right? Intravenous vitamin injections are popular with...

/ May 24, 2013

The deceptive rebranding of aspects of science-based medicine as “alternative” by naturopaths continues apace

That naturopathy is a veritable cornucopia of quackery mixed with the odd sensible, science-based suggestion here and there is not in doubt, at least not to supporters of science-based medicine (SBM). However, what naturopaths are very good at doing is representing their pseudoscience as somehow being scientific and thus on par with conventional SBM. So how do they accomplish this? Certainly, it’s...

/ May 13, 2013

Fighting Back

As I hope I demonstrated in Legislative Alchemy: Naturopathy 2013, below, licensing “naturopathic doctors,” especially as primary care physicians, is a bad idea.  Unfortunately, the only people usually interested in opposing their licensing efforts are medical doctors and their organizations.  Of course, this allows naturopaths to pretend they are the victims of the evil, Big Pharma-controlled medical-industrial complex which kills and maims vast...

/ February 7, 2013