Posts Tagged ‘naturopathy’
what is naturopathy?
see what i mean?
Here are a couple of quick definitions of naturopathy, found online, to get us started.
To judge from these, naturopaths put a lot of faith in the body’s capacity to heal itself, with minimal guidance and intervention. Conversely, they put little faith in drugs and ‘medications’, and there is no mention here of the various tools and terms of modern medicine; vaccination, viruses, antibiotics, antigens and the like. It all sounds very gentle and soothing, if a little too much so – not the sort of treatment you would seek for a massive head trauma or a dose of bubonic plague, or one of its modern equivalents. Rather, it’s the sort of treatment that just helps you through the day, when you’ve got a bit of a sniffle, some tummy trouble, the odd twinge, or you’re just a bit down in the dumps. Some particular treatment terms – reflexology, aromatherapy, massage, herbalism – seem designed to make you feel better already. Certainly better than chemo.
You’ll find naturopathy advertised in leaflets and magazines in your local pharmacy. They’re the ones featuring pastel colours and glowing, youthful bodies ready to float off the page, faces smiling blissfully at the sky.
Key terms are: natural, holistic, herbal, balance, toxins, spiritual, healing, and ancient.
So what’s there to criticize? Well, indeed, the body does have a great capacity to heal itself. The key is to understand just how it does so, and to understand its limits. Obviously, a severed limb won’t grow back, but can a cancer-riddled body rid itself of its cancer? Can a type 1 diabetic heal herself of her diabetes? What about schizophrenia? Amoebic meningoencephalitis?
Clearly, naturopathy has its limits. In fact it’s very limited indeed. In rejecting drugs, it largely rejects targeted treatment, and evidence-based approaches to medicine, which isolate the causes of an illness or bodily or brain dysfunction, and seek to understand the mechanism and pathways of dysfunction so that an intervention, in the form of a drug, or vaccine, or change of diet, or surgery, or whatever, can be effected. Instead it tends to rely on arguments from antiquity for the ‘healing powers’ of echinacea, aloe vera, or even garlic, as well as ancient ‘healing systems’ such as ayurvedism and TCM [Traditional Chinese Medicine].
I’m not necessarily denying that some of these treatments might work in some cases, But I’m overwhelmingly interested in how treatments work. And I’m interested in these questions in the context of how our bodies fight infection, how our immune system works, how things are happening on the microbiological and chemical level. I’m certainly not interested in practitioners who ignore as irrelevant and ineffectual the vast amount of insight we’ve gained into this level of function – really the cutting-edge – in the past century or so. If garlic ‘cleanses the body’, as I’ve often heard said, then how does it do that? What aspect of its chemical make-up performs this function [whatever the function of ‘cleansing’ actually means]? What are ‘toxins’? How many of them are there, what’s their chemical structure, and how, precisely, do they interact with the body’s chemistry?
For the most part, naturopaths seem reluctant to even ask these questions, let alone answer them, and in so doing they allow in obviously bogus ‘treatments’ such as homeopathy and iridology. If you’re powerless to explain how treatments actually work, within the context of our vastly improved understanding of how the body works [though of course there’s still plenty to learn], then it seems to me you’re more of a hindrance than a help, especially in serious and life-threatening medical scenarios.
Of course you could say that, outside of these scenarios, naturopathy is relatively harmless, and might do some good. Some herbs will work for you, and rarely will any do you harm. Aromatherapy will lift your spirits, a good massage will relieve some of your tension, etc. None of that, though, is particularly mysterious, it can all be explained in terms of modern knowledge of the body, and none of it will cure you of cancer or the next viral epidemic.
My response to naturopathy is to question and learn. What do we know of the body, its immune system, and how it works? Of course it would take a lifetime to get your head around only a small part of that knowledge, but it would be an enlightening journey. What do we know about particular naturopathic remedies and how they work? Well, seriously, it would take barely half an hour of research to eliminate some of them as worthless. Others would take much longer to research, and again, the journey would be worthwhile, because it would involve connecting claims with evidence, separating facts from myths, and bringing some depth and clarity to overly clouded and often deliberately obfuscating field of practice and belief.
alternative medicine, some introductory reflections
mmm, more snake oil, please
I rarely post about so-called ‘alternative medicine’ as there are so many people more qualified to do so. Steven Novella, David Gorski, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh immediately spring to mind. I seethe over it a lot, though, particularly as there are people I know who pedal the stuff to other people I know.
Several years ago a person very close to me trotted off to a ‘naturopath’ [who, I’m told, specialized in chiropractic, with a bit of iridology on the side] upon the recommendation of her daughter, a smart and well-informed woman in some areas, but with a strange sort of wilful ignorance with regard to medical science. Now, at that time, though I was sceptical of non-mainstream approaches to healing, I wasn’t particularly informed about them. If I’d been asked what iridology, raiki or homeopathy were, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. In fact my friend’s encounter with this naturopath prompted my first real exploration of an ‘alternative’ treatment. Not that it was a particularly awful encounter. She was told she should give up her favourite tipple, tea. I knew enough about tea to be aware that it’s a notoriously harmless beverage, and I knew enough about naturopaths, and human psychology, to be aware that the most simple trick in their reportoire would be to enquire about their clients’ diet and ask them to cut out or cut down on their most favoured indulgence – whether tea, chocolate, potato chips, scotch whiskey or heroin.
The naturopath came up with a scientific-sounding, chemistry-based explanation as to why the tea was very likely affecting her adversely, naming it as cyclo-something-ate – I can’t recall the term now, and the fact is that tea, like coffee, is an enormously complex beverage, chemically speaking, so there are plenty of chemicals to target as nasties, if you feel so inclined, or if your living depends on it. My friend took the advice seriously, cutting down on tea as much as her passionate relationship with it would allow, and even claiming that the reduction gave her renewed energy, but it wasn’t to last, and today she’s back to her profligate ways, drinking as many as four or five cups a day, with no apparent ill effects.
I’m afraid that I may have had a hand in my friend’s recidivism, too, because, as I said, her encounter prompted a bit of research on my part. The term I focused on was ‘iridology’, and what I came up with was so negative and scathing that I just had to share it with her. I will carry the guilt to my grave.
All of this is by way of an introduction to a series I want to do on alternative medicine, largely in order to educate myself about its various sub-divisions, its claims, and the evidence, if any, supporting them. I’ll have a look at reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture and various other approaches [but not homeopathy, which I’ve already dealt with] and of course the list won’t be exhaustive, nor will my treatment of them be as in-depth as what you’ll find in more specialist blogs [many of which I’ll be depending on in my research]. It’s just that I find that I learn more about things by writing about them. It keeps them in my head better.