http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/08/29/th-insinuation-of-naturopathic-quackery-into-law/
The insinuation of naturopathic quackery into law
If there’s one thing that practitioners of pseudoscientific medicine crave more than anything else, it’s respectability. Believing that science-based medicine is corrupt and that their woo is as good or better, they delude themselves into thinking that they can function as well or better than primary care doctors practice and therefore should be given the same privileges that physicians are granted. To them, it makes sense. On any objective basis, however, it does not. The reason is simple. The two most common “disciplines” that seek the same scope of practice as primary care doctors are chiropractors and naturopaths. By any objective or reasonable criteria, it’s utterly ridiculous to imagine that chiropractors, whose specialty is realigning nonexistent subluxations, would have the slightest clue how to take comprehensive care of patients—or even how to do anything other than infuse their variety of physical therapy with delusions of grandeur in which they imagine themselves capable of treating asthma, heart disease, and other serious conditions. Naturopaths, on the other hand, although just as quacky as chiropractors (perhaps even more so) tend to be able to make a case that sounds more convincing, not because their case actually is more convincing but rather because they can sound more convincing. After all, they have a wider cornucopia of quackery that, when combined with the mundane modalities of diet and exercise magically rebranded as being somehow unique to naturopathy and “alternative,” makes them seem like more comprehensive practitioners compared to the popular picture of chiropractors in the public mind of back crackers.
Unfortunately, naturopaths have been making inroads as well. They’ve actually been persuading some state legislatures that they know enough to prescribe medications and/or that their services are sufficiently valuable that it should be mandated by law that health insurance companies pay for them. Frequently, the argument is that they are cheaper than conventional medicine. Of this, there is little doubt. However, cheaper is not necessarily better. If the goal is to reduce costs by having more people die because they don’t receive appropriate science-based care, I suppose that empowering naturopaths to be roughly on par with primary care doctors makes a sort of perverse sense. That is not the sort of sense we should be invoking, though.
A recent development that’s been resonating through the naturopath community is New Hampshire House Bill 351. This is a bill that was recently passed that requires all private health insurance companies to reimburse naturopaths for their services.
Unfortunately, contrary to what Conte claims, naturopathy is nothing more than a hodge-podge of mostly unscientific treatment modalities based on vitalism and other prescientific notions of disease. It’s a hodge-podge, a grab bag of all sorts of unscientific and pseudoscientific medical treatments, most of which fall squarely into the “alternative” camp in every definition, particularly the part of the definition of “alternative” about either not working or not having been demonstrated to work. Naturopathy includes modalities that range from the relatively mundane appropriated from science-based medicine and magically rebranded as “alternative,” such as diet and exercise, to pure quackery, such as homeopathy, to downright dangerous pseudoscience, such as germ theory denialism and antivaccinationism.
As a result, typical naturopaths are more than happy in essence to “pick one from column A and one from column B” when it comes to quackery, mixing and matching treatments including traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, herbalism, Ayurvedic medicine, applied kinesiology, anthroposophical medicine, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Bowen Technique, and pretty much any other form of unscientific or prescientific medicine that you can imagine. Despite their affinity for non-science-based medical systems, naturopaths crave the imprimatur of science. As a result, they desperately try to represent what they do as being science-based, and they’ve even set up research institutes, much like the departments, divisions, and institutes devoted to “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) that have cropped up on the campuses of legitimate medical schools and academic medical centers like so many weeds poking through the cracks in the edifice of science-based medicine.
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