Science-Based Medicine

Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent “alternative medical system” here, after chiropractic of course, and perhaps duking it out with traditional Chinese medicine, although naturopathy does embrace TCM as part of the armamentarium of dubious medical systems that it uses. In any case, some sixteen states and five Canadian provinces license naturopaths in some form, and in some states naturopaths are fighting for–and in some cases winning–the power to prescribe certain real pharmaceutical medications and order real medical tests. For instance, in California, naturopaths can order laboratory tests and X-rays, which reminds me of a conversation I had with a mammographer from California at TAM last summer. He told me a tale of the dilemma he had when naturopaths and other “alt-med” practitioners ordered tests at his facilities. Specifically, the dilemma came about because he doubted that the naturopath knew what to do with the results. Meanwhile, in Oregon, naturopaths can prescribe certain types of pharmaceutical drugs (as opposed to the usual supplements, herbs, or homeopathic remedies they normally prescribe). Meanwhile, moves are under way to expand the prescribing privileges of naturopaths in Canada, as Ontario (which is, remember, just across the Detroit River, less than two and a half miles as the crow flies from my cancer center—a truly frightening thought to me).

Unfortunately, naturopathy is a hodge-podge of mostly unscientific treatment modalities based on vitalism and other prescientific notions of disease. 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 pseudoscience, 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. Naturopaths also really, really don’t like it when they encounter criticism that their “discipline” is not science-based. Indeed, the president of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians, Carl Hangee-Bauer, ND, LAc (he’s an acupuncturist, too!), wrote a revealing post on the official AANP blog entitled Science and Naturopathic Medicine.

Science. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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Via the magic of “legislative alchemy,” state legislatures transform implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into perfectly legal health care practices.[1] Without the benefit of legislative alchemy, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and other assorted putative healers would be vulnerable to charges of practicing medicine without a license and consumer fraud. Thus, they must seek either their own licensing system or exemption from licensing altogether.

Licensing bestows an undeserved air of legitimacy on “alternative” practitioners. Because a state’s authority to regulate health care lies in its inherent power to protect the public health, safety and welfare, the public understandably assumes licensing actually accomplishes this purpose. In fact, the opposite occurs. Any attempt to impose a science-based standard of health care becomes impossible when vitalism and similarly debunked notions of human functioning are enshrined into law.

Initial licensing is just a beginning. Once the beach head is established other benefits can follow, such as expansion of the scope of practice. If not granted in the initial legislation, “alternative” practitioners can return, seeking more goodies like self-regulation and mandatory insurance coverage.

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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 not through the validation of any of the cornucopia of pseudoscience and quackery that naturopaths apply to their patients as though picking “one from column A and one from column B” from a proverbial Chinese menu of woo. Naturopaths’ favored modalities include homeopathy (which remains to this day an integral part of naturopathy that all naturopaths are taught), acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), “detoxification” practices (a key precept of a lot of naturopathy) such as juicing, enemas, and chelation therapy, and the various other quack modalities that make up the practice of naturopathy. Treatments like these (especially homeopathy, whose precepts would require a massive rewriting of the laws of physics and chemistry for it to work) have not been and almost certainly cannot ever be scientifically validated with an evidence base of the quality and quantity supporting SBM.

So, instead naturopaths play a very clever game. In all fairness, naturopaths are not the only practitioners of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” who play this game, but from my observations they appear to be the most talented at it. Their skill at obfuscating the line between SBM and naturopathy is evidenced by the success they have had in state legislatures in expanding their scope of practice, most recently in Colorado, where, if there is not a groundswell of support urging the Governor to veto SB-215 (or, as Jann Bellamy aptly called it, the quack full employment act), consumer protections against quackery in Colorado will be laid waste. At the same time, there is a naturopath licensing act (HB-1111) sitting on the Governor’s desk as well that would license naturopaths and give them the path to mandatory reimbursement from insurance companies. Instructions to write to the Governor opposing both bills can be found here and here; they would be disastrous for efforts to keep full vaccination in Colorado. A direct link to write the Governor can be found here.
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EDITOR’S NOTICE: NOTE THE DISCLAIMER.

On “wholistic” medicine

If there’s one aspect of so-called “alternative medicine” and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is that its practitioners tout as being a huge advantage over what they often refer to sneeringly as “conventional” or “scientific” medicine is that — or so its practitioners claim — alt-med treats the “whole patient,” that it’s “wholistic” in a way that the evil reductionist “Western” science-based medicine can’t be. Supposedly, we reductionistic, unimaginative physicians only focus on disease and ignore the “whole patient.” Of course, to me this claim is belied by the hectoring to which my own primary care physician has subjected me about my horrible diet and lack of exercise on pretty much every visit I’ve had with her, but then maybe she’s an anomaly, along with Dr. Lipson on this very blog and pretty much every other primary care doctor I’ve ever dealt with. Anecdotal experience, I know, but since alt-med mavens appear to value anecdotal evidence above pretty much all else I thought it appropriate to mention here. Also belying the claim of alt-med practitioners that they “individualize” treatments to their patients in a way that science-based medicine does not is the maddening tendency of various alt-med modalities to settle on just One True Cause of All Disease, be it liver flukes as the One True Cause of Cancer, heavy metal toxicity as the One True Cause of cancer, autism, and various other diseases, or “allergies,” acid, or obstruction of the flow of qi as the One True Cause of All Disease.

Given the claim of “wholism” that is such an advertising gimmick among many of the varieties of woo, I’m always interested when I see evidence that alt-med is imitating its envied and disliked reductionistic competition. True, this is nothing new, given how alt-med has tried to seek legitimacy by taking on the mantle of science-based medicine wherever it can. Examples include the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), various organizations that try to confer legitimacy to pseudoscience by providing “certification” in various flavors of woo, and moves to push state medical boards to go further than that and confer legally protected status to practitioners by actually licensing them. This latter tactic has been very successful in that many states now license acupuncturists, while some states even license naturopaths and “homeopathic physicians,” the latter of which I find quite amusing because the term perfectly encapsulates what must remain of such a physician’s medical training after being diluted to 30C with woo. The only difference is that, unlike what is claimed with homeopathy, diluting MD medical knowledge with woo does not make it stronger. In terms of naturopathy, though, one of the most alarming aspects of the infiltration of naturopaths into the health care system is that some states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada are seriously considering allowing them to prescribe real pharmaceutical medications, even though they lack the training and knowledge to use such drugs safely.

Imagine my combination of bemusement and alarm, then, when I learned of a new specialty of pseudoscience, namely the field of naturopathic oncology.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. (I know I was when I first encountered this specialty.)
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The ancient Greeks posited a system of health and disease based on the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. According to this system, health is defined as a harmony of these four humors and disease is caused by an imbalance among them. Restore the balance, and health is restored. Bleeding is a familiar example of humoral medical treatment based on a diagnosis of an “excess” of blood. Fortunately, the humoral system of diagnosis and treatment died out with the advent of modern scientific medicine.

But as David Gorski asked (sarcastically, of course) in his presentation on quackademic medicine at CSICon in October, if supposedly ancient philosophies of diagnosis and treatment such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda are so beloved by CAM proponents, despite their implausibility and lack of evidence of effectiveness, why not the humoral model of health and disease? Why not include humorism in the CAM practitioner armamentarium?

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Yesterday’s post by Wally Sampson and an offline discussion with David Gorski have moved me to post something that I wrote in 2001. At the time, I was a member of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners. I’ve previously mentioned that experience here.

During that tenure I wrote a treatise on the tenets and practices of ‘naturopathic medicine,’* hoping to change the opinions of several others on the Commission (no such luck). In an early draft I included a section titled “The Political Philosophy of Naturopathy.” My ally on the panel, emeritus New England Journal of Medicine Editor Arnold “Bud” Relman, advised me to remove it, citing its tangential relevance and the possibility of it irritating rather than persuading. He was right, of course, but it now seems reasonable to hall it out of the mothballs. Here it is, with minor revisions and, I hope, a provocative postscript.

…………………

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A fresh season of state legislative sessions is upon us and with it comes the ubiquitous attempts by purveyors of so called “complementary and alternative medicine” (or “CAM”) to join the health care provider fraternity. Via the magic of legislative alchemy, state legislatures transform pseudoscientific diagnoses (e.g., “chronic yeast overgrowth”) and treatments (e.g., homeopathy) into faux, but legal, health care. Once the imprimatur of legitimacy is bestowed by the state in the form of a health care practice act tailored to their special brand of quackery, these newly licensed health care providers are free to foist their practices onto an unsuspecting public and charge them for the privilege. All of this is done under the false assumption that such legislation is necessary to protect the public health, safety and welfare.

We might well want to consider how far this whole thing is going. Will practitioners of CAM split into an ever-expanding number of CAM provider guilds, all with their own practice acts? First, chiropractors were the only CAM practitioners who managed to get themselves licensed in all 50 states. Then along came acupuncturists, who are now licensed to practice in over 40 states. A few states license homeopaths. Some states licensed naturopaths early on. Now the naturopaths, licensed in 16 states, are in a full court press to catch up and legitimize themselves with licenses to practice “naturopathic medicine.”

Why? Because, according to Lorilee Schoenback, ND, a Vermont practitioner and American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) Board member:

If the law [the Affordable Care Act, or ACA] is implemented as intended NDs in 16 states will immediately be covered by insurance.

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Two weeks ago, Canadian Skeptics United published on their Skeptic North site a piece by an Ontario pharmacist criticizing a proposal by the province to grant limited prescribing rights to naturopaths. The essay, which was reprinted in the National Post on Tuesday, outlines the intellectual and practical conundrum presented by allowing those with education that diverges from science-based practices to prescribe drugs.

The naturopath lobby came out in force and was relatively unopposed in the 54 comments that followed, primarily because the NP closes comments 24 hours after online posting. Therefore, those with a more rational and considered viewpoint based in facts were locked out from commenting. This is quite disappointing to me personally and professionally because of the wildly emotional appeals, strawman arguments, and smears and attacks on the author himself without, of course, addressing his well-founded criticism of the prescribing proposal before the provincial government.

At the Skeptic North post, the piece even drew a naturopath who equated the criticism of his/her field with the Nazis and Mussolini. However, you can’t write critiques of these practices without attracting attacks ad hominem, especially Godwin’s Law, that are the resort of those whose arguments are logically flawed.
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This week we’ll take a break from lambasting the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as worthy as that task is, in order to confront some of the latest events involving the pseudomedical cult that calls itself “naturopathic medicine.”* Intrepid nurse and anti-healthfraud activist Linda Rosa reports that Colorado is dangerously close to becoming the next state to endorse ”NDs” as health care practitioners, and Scott Gavura of Science-Based Pharmacy called my attention to a report that British Columbia is considering enlarging the scope of practice for NDs, who are already licensed there, and that Alberta is on the verge of licensing them. In each case, those whom the public trusts to make wise decisions have betrayed their ignorance of both pseudomedicine and the realities of governmental regulation.

To explain why, it will first be necessary to make a few assertions, which are linked to developed arguments where necessary:

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On Friday, one of my partners in crime here at Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Kimball Atwood, wrote an excellent Open Letter to Dr. Josephine Briggs. Dr. Briggs, as most regular readers of SBM know, is the Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). As most regular readers of SBM also know, we at SBM have been quite critical of NCCAM for its funding of studies of dubious scientific value, including one that I mentioned quite early on in the history of this blog, in which an R21 grant was awarded to investigators at the University of Arizona for a project entitled Dilution and succussion in homeopathic remedy dose-response patterns. The purpose of this project was to compare the effectiveness of a homeopathic remedy at different dilutions. It even compared remedies that are succussed (vigorously shaken) at each dilution step against remedies that were merely stirred. Although this is merely the most egregious example I could find at the time, two years ago I did catalog many more examples, as well as the “educational” grants disbursed through NCCAM in order to teach (and, by doing so, promote) CAM.

Given NCCAM’s long history of promoting pseudoscience, we were all quite surprised when early this year we received an e-mail from Dr. Briggs herself inviting us to NCCAM to meet with her. Unfortunately, due to our work obligations, Steve Novella, Kimball Atwood, and I were not able to coordinate our schedules to travel to Bethesda and enter the heart of darkness itself until early April. Our conversation with Dr. Briggs and her staff was cordial and mutually respectful, as Steve Novella described, and we assured her that we understood that studies such as the one I mentioned above were funded before her tenure. At the same time we were a bit disappointed that Dr. Briggs appeared far too eager to dismiss such problems as being before her time. Still, we understood and approved of Dr. Briggs’ stated goal of making NCCAM more scientifically rigorous, even though we did point out that there is nothing done at NCCAM that couldn’t be done as well in the NIH’s structure before NCCAM existed.

Unfortunately, not too long before or after Dr. Briggs met with us, she also met with a group of homeopaths, leading us to worry that perhaps in her quest to appear “open-minded,” Dr. Briggs was being so open-minded that her brain was in acute danger of falling out, particularly after we saw her infamous “science must be neutral” director’s newsletter a month later, which Dr. Kimball skewered as part of his open letter and I recently used as an example of misinterpreting what scientific “neutrality” means during my talk at the SBM Workshop at TAM8 a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I now wonder if I missed a little gray matter oozing out of Dr. Briggs’ ears during the meeting even though I sat right next to her.

Unfortunately, Dr. Atwood’s open letter gives me even more reason to despair, because in it he pointed out that Dr. Briggs will be speaking at the 25th Anniversary Convention of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) from August 11-15 in Portland, OR. (One wonders if Mark Crislip would be willing to make an appearance there for a Very Special Episode of his Quackcast and thereby continue to expand his Internet empire. I realize that doing so would really be “taking one for the team,” but think of the blogging and podcast material!) Kimball’s explanation why this is disturbing is excellent and detailed, as usual, but one thing he didn’t do as much of as I would have is to go into a bit more detail of what sorts of dubious medical modalities and even outright quackery Dr. Briggs will be associating herself with by speaking at this particular convention. He probably didn’t feel the need, given that he referenced his two comprehensive deconstructions of the quackery that is naturopathy, but I’m not as well-versed in naturopathy as he is, and, I suspect, neither are you. Dr. Atwood didn’t need to delve into the woo that will be presented at the AANP. I do. That’s why I thought a bit of a survey of what will be presented at the conference was in order.
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