Sequel Thread To Holistic Doctors, and medicine

I think the Wikipedia article on naturopathy sums it up pretty well: As long as people go to their naturopath for colds and "feeling poorly" there's probably little to complain about, but people with cancer, amoebic dysentery, emphysema, bowel obstructions, heart disease and so forth also go to naturopaths. The delay due to the journey from naturopath to effective medical treatment will vary, and this increases the probability of unsatisfactory outcomes, including fatalities.The poster child for alternative medicine gone bad died about 20 years ago in Massachusetts. His name was Chad Twitchell, his parents were Christian Scientists, and he died after several days when his bowel obstruction was treated with prayer. His parents fled the state to avoid prosecution and were found guilty of child abuse in absentia.I'm sad to see that time has forgotten Chad Twitchell. A few years ago you could still find his story on the Internet, but the only remaining mention now is from me earlier this year.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Spelling.

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Just as independent MD's have different philosophies in their practices, so do naturopaths.

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The thing is, this "vital force" is a basic tenet of Natuopathy that, as far as I can tell, is taught as such in most, possibly all schools of Naturopathy. Disease occurs, according to Naturopathy, when the "Vital Force" is "out of balance". Naturopaths are supposed to be helping their patients "free" their "Vital Force" so that health and "balance" can be restored and maintained.What you seem to be saying is, "Some Naturopaths accept the concept of the 'Vital Force' as one of the long-standing, basic, core concepts of Naturopathy as taught by their schools, and some reject that very core concept."My question is, how can they reject that core concept and still remain effective? Does the "Vital Force" matter at all when evaluating Naturopathic practice or not? If not, then why do they teach it as a core concept? If so, then why hasn't your Naturopath mentioned it?Now, by contrast, I can't think of any schools of thought of various MD's who differ that widely on the basic tenets of science and medicine, can you? I mean, can you find a MD who doesn't really accept the Germ Theory of Disease, for example? That's how basic a concept this is.

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Just like I can tell my MD I don't want surgery, I tell an ND I'm not interested in homeopathy.

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But PD, the fact that schools of Naturopathy actually teach that Homeopathy actually has any value whatsoever should give you pause, should it not?Clearly, if even the masters, the people so knowledegable about Naturopathy that they teach at the university level don't seem to understand that Homeopathy is pure, easily-spotted quackery, what makes you think they can tell if anything else is pure bunk? How can you trust anything they say?It would be if our medical schools started teaching that psychic surgery was an effective way to remove someone's appendix, or that bacterial infections can be cured with a precisely-administered foot massage. Sure, you can reject the foot massage, but any rational person would also be thinking, "WTF are they thinking?? Have they lost their minds?"Would you let an MD who believed that those things really worked treat you for even a hangnail? I certainly wouldn't, and I'd promtly report him to the state medical licensing board. Edited by nator, : No reason given.

One of the ScienceBlogs I frequent is written (pseudonymously) by a doctor named Orac.insolence | ScienceBlogsOrac makes a point of blogging just these sorts of tragedies. He's an oncologist, so he has a lot of material to work with."Adverse outcomes" are all too common in the naturopathic biz. Especially in oncology.This is one of many:Page not found | ScienceBlogs And another:Page not found | ScienceBlogs The influence naturopathic quacks have on cancer patients is understandable. And unforgivable.

1. Deborah Ray, Dr. Julian Whitaker, MD of the Whitaker Wellness Clinic whom my wife and I listen to along with other guest practitioners, weekdays for an hour a day continually cite clinical trials/studies.2. The difference is that the mainstream medical establishment and the FDA, even after doing clinical trials allow for thousands of deaths and adverse side effects resulting from the powerful pharms and treatments which they administer which have shown to be dangerous to the health and welfare of the patients.3. Your citing of one 20 year old case regarding the Christian Scientist youth is interesting in view of the fact that scores of thousands die each year from the powerful pharm drugs administered alone. Btw, the alternative healthcare science knowledge has mushroomed over the past 20 years, advancing at a much higher rate than standard healthcare. Doug Kaufman who has many knowledgeable naturopath healthcare guests on his show has also cited clinical trials as well as some of his guests. We watch his show, "Know The Cause" regularly on Dominion Broadcasting via the Liberty University channel.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

Then you cite them Buz so they can be examined.

Absolute numbers mean nothing.For example: There are over 9 million scripts written for penicillin each year, which makes the benefit:risk ratio for penicillin well below .1%. The ability to cite "studies" is useless unless one know where these "studies" were published.There are a number of quack journals that publish trash. http://www.masskids.org/dbre/dbre_9.html I will let that speak for itself.

It should be obvious that a superior alternative to medicines and treatments backed by clinical trials that rigorously apply scientific methods will not be found in anecdotal approaches. The effects of most naturopathic treatments cannot be distinguished from placebo, so in most cases seeing a naturopath will do no harm. But if one has a serious medical condition then naturopathic approaches can only delay effective medical care.The positive effects on health of all vitamin supplements and of most herbs on healthy people with relatively normal diets has not been established. Most good quality studies find no measurable effect. The absence of clinical studies demonstrating efficacy is a danger, as witness vitamin E, once touted as improving health and longevity due to its anti-oxidant qualities.At heart the problem of quackery is epistemology taken to the individual level. Most people acquire knowledge anecdotally, building up an internal database of useful but uncorrelated and often insufficiently supported information. They have knowledge in that they know, but they don't know how they know, because they don't know how the source of their knowledge, usually other people, knew. So you drink green herbal tea when your gout acts up because grandma said to, and sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't, and for most people this seems to confirm the advice.But scientific approaches, which represent a method of inquiry completely unfamiliar to most people, work to establish a couple of things when applied to the medical area. First, they work to establish cause and effect. If you try this treatment, how many patients get better, how many worse, and how many do not respond. Second, they try to identify mechanisms by which the treatment might be causing its effect. This is tough to do in trials involving people, who, of course, cannot be treated like lab rats, which can be tested and analyzed even to the point of mortality, so it often isn't possible to establish mechanisms.Most naturopathic approaches are lacking in both areas in that cause/effect has not been established in clinical trials, and no mechanism has been identified. The lack of a mechanism is not fatal to most claims, but it is fatal to some, such as homeopathy and therapeutic touch.It is interesting to note that this discussion is revealing what I'm sure many of us already suspected, that those who buy into one form of quackery are likely to buy into others, and it appears to all come down to how well one understands the difficulty inherent in reliably puzzling things out in a very complex real world.--Percy

I know I'm not Mod, but I'll attempt an answer anyway.If you synthesise L-Ascorbic acid, then it's identical to the natural form. If you synthesise D-Ascorbic acid (which is the opposite enantiomer) you have a form that has the same physical properties, but rotates the plane of polarised light in the opposite direction. If you did synthesise the D-form, you wouldn't make any money though, because it's biochemically useless.The third alternative is that you synthesised a racemic mixture of the two forms. If you sold this as Vitamin C, you'd be conning people, because only half of it would be biochemically active.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

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If you synthesise L-Ascorbic acid, then it's identical to the natural form.

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So if plane-polarized light is shown through L-Ascorbic acid and the natural, then it rotates the same direction. Correct?Is this true for any L- or D- form of vitamin or molecule? The L- would rotate the same as the natural and the D- form would not? (If I understood that right, anyway.)

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The thing is, this "vital force" is a basic tenet of Natuopathy that, as far as I can tell, is taught as such in most, possibly all schools of Naturopathy. Disease occurs, according to Naturopathy, when the "Vital Force" is "out of balance". Naturopaths are supposed to be helping their patients "free" their "Vital Force" so that health and "balance" can be restored and maintained.

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I'm not really sure why you're so hung up on the vital force issue. This excerpt is from an article that MBG provided in the last thread. So they call the power to self-heal "the vital force". These methods are not part of western medicine, so they are going to pick up the terminology of the culture of the method. Would you rather they call it "the healing force"?You don't agree that our bodies do the healing?
What is the physical healing process? Inner-Dialogue

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But PD, the fact that schools of Naturopathy actually teach that Homeopathy actually has any value whatsoever should give you pause, should it not?

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Am I reading these studies (found in PubMed) wrong or did the homeopathic treatment show an effect different from the placebo? Homeopathic arnica therapy in patients receiving knee surgery: results of three randomised double-blind trials.Anti-inflammatory, antinociceptive, and gastric effects of Hypericum perforatum in rats.Reliéva, a mahonia aquifolium extract for the treatment of adult patients with atopic dermatitis.If that is what they are saying (and that is how it reads to me), then your comment that homeopathy is "a thoroughly debunked, utterly quack idea" is questionable.Again, the average person is told to heed the studies. MBG said PubMed is no secret. So I've used PubMed and it shows that, at least in these instances, the homeopathic treatment isn't useless.I'm sure that MBG can dig up studies where the outcome shows it makes no difference, but doubt in your absolute position has already been cast for the average person.Remember all the wonderful threads dealing with absolutes? All I have to do is find one example contrary to your statement. You may have 10 studies for your point and only 3 against, but for the average person you've lost credibility. You have a better chance of success in this issue if you acknowledge those studies that are contrary to your position. By success I mean you are able to teach your opponent something new or important, instead of causing them to dig in.If you just want to score points by having more studies in your favor, then more power to you and MBG. You can crow winner, but you haven't accomplished much if you and your opponent still spout the same absolutes.I've already acknowledged that the CAM system needs work and that there are quacks. I still feel there are concepts that are worthy of consideration. I don't plan to argue absolutes in this issue. There are too many variables.You and MBG can scoff at our ignorance, but I can live with that. If you ever really want to discuss specifics with the idea of possibilities, then I'm open; but we already know we aren't going to agree concerning all encompassing statements.I toss in the towel. You're the winner. Enjoy! Musings of an Allopath

My understanding about isolated ascorbic acid is that the bowel tolerance of it is lower due to the absense of buffers found in the natural and the natural properties which slow the metabolizm so as to make it more assimilative. The Maximum Living C product we take has bioflavinoids and other beneficial bioactive ingredients in it for this purpose and to increase it's effectiveness. It's not cheap like some of the over-the-counter ones but cost effective due to it's superior quality. I'm sure there are other good ones out there as well.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

It's inevitably going to appear to onlookers that at a minimum LindaLou and PurpleDawn have battled you to an impasse, and that at worst you're engaging in moving the goalposts and even dissembling.This isn't a criticism, just an observation. How in the world are you going to going to explain to laypeople the questionable benefits of alternative medicine when LindaLou has found studies supporting the benefits of vitamin C therapies, and when PurpleDawn has discovered that there are journals like Complementary Therapies in Medicine that publish research papers citing the positive benefits of homeopathy, and that even has someone from Harvard Medical School on the editorial board.Most of alternative medicine, especially homeopathy, is obviously all bunk, but how are you going to make that case when the very sources of information you keep encouraging people to use include research that says it isn't bunk? Do you badmouth journals like Complementary Therapies in Medicine? Badmouth the researchers? That's likely to come across as ad hominem. Do you encourage accepting some research results while rejecting others? On what basis, one that laypeople would accept and understand and that doesn't seem like simple bias and cherry picking?Sure, scientifically you're on solid ground, but how do you help laypeople understand this while avoiding giving the impression of bias and close-mindedness?--Percy

I'd like to pick up the towel again for a little while myself here. There are a few things I'd like to add.First MBG, your info about Christian Science's attitude toward allopathic medicine. It appears to me that these people believe in avoiding it completely, and in things like faith healing. I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who prefers to use AltMed but who won't go to the hospital to get a broken leg fixed. Also, the 20-year-old anecdote didn't specifically say what kind of alternative cancer treatment was applied. As far as "nutrition" goes, he might have been told to eat nothing but brussels sprouts, and take some fish oil or a herb. There are non-drug approaches to cancer treatment that one can follow, but it's impossible to tell what happened in this case.AltMed is a blanket term for basically any practice that isn't traditionally part of modern Western medicine. It is criticised and ridiculed here as if casting doubt on homeopathy or a herb also casts doubt on every other AltMed practice. I personally have been saying that I wouldn't trust someone who wasn't an MD. And the most powerful healing tools I'd expect him/her to apply would be diet and nutrition. There are clinical studies that have been done on vitamins. It is important to read the whole study though. An abstract can claim one thing, though the actual data might be interpreted differently by someone else. Or, as is often the case with vitamin C, the study might use very little of the vitamin, or a less bioavailable form. Finally, I would argue that some studies are probably set up to fail, in order to feed the already-skeptical mainstream belief that vitamin therapy is pseudoscience.I read an article recently that said that most of the vitamin E studies that have been done in the past few decades have used too little of the vitamin to show any significant effect compared to placebo. The Shute brothers were as known for their work on vitamin E as Pauling was on vitamin C. All of these people were subsequently largely ignored or ridiculed, mainly due to studies done by others that were flawed. Fortunately today, with the growing interest in naturopathy, there seems to be some renewed interest in orthomolecular treatments.Vitamin C restores the contractile response to dobutamine and improves myocardial efficiency in patients with heart failure after anterior myocardial infarction.
Am Heart J. 2007 Oct;154(4):645.e1-8.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...Changes of terminal cancer patients' health-related quality of life after high dose vitamin C administration.
J Korean Med Sci. 2007 Feb;22(1):7-11.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...Effects of high dose ascorbate administration on L-10 tumor growth in guinea pigs.
P R Health Sci J. 2005 Jun;24(2):145-50.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...There are pages and pages of vitamin C research on PubMed.Why was it difficult for Pauling to gain acceptance? Or the others before him, with their vitamin C research? I believe that the Mayo Clinic studies, which used oral instead of intravenous vitamin C, irreparably damaged his reputation and any credence he might have had. He talks in his book about a colleague who had trouble publishing his research in the top journals. In one case, the reason for his rejection was given as the fact that the journal's sponsors would not have approved, since many of them were manufacturers of cold remedies.Journals can be biased, and studies can be flawed. I'll say more about this in my post to Percy.Edited by AdminAsgara, : changed long URLs to fix page width...PLEASE use peek to see how this was done and do it for yourself in the future.Edited by LindaLou, : Thanks for fixing the URLs.

As I said in my post, studies will need to start using larger amounts of vitamin E, as the Shute brothers did.But the problem here, Percy, is this. The establishment is very much biased towards a drug-based approach to illness. When I have suggested here before that pharmaceuticals have a lot of influence over what gets studied and the results of those studies, people scoffed. I would like to discuss this again. What truly frightens me is the degree of trust some people here place in the clinical studies published by prestigious journals. You could make a beautifully-reasoned, eloquent argument against anything, based on these studies. If these studies are the gold standard, what else can logically compare?What happens when the gold standard is flawed? How trustworthy is it, really? How many people here have seriously questioned it? Is it assumed that bias does not exist, and that there are enough safeguards in the system to be able to root out poor practice and fraud?Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote a book in 2004 titled The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. In it she says drug companies are "involved intimately in every detail of the research" for new drugs, and "they design the research so that their drugs look better than they really are."This was followed in 2005 by more criticisms of the pharmaceutical companies from another editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Jeffrey Drazen. In an article from the Wall Street Journal titled Medical Editor Turns Activist on Drug Trials, Drazen is reported to have accused three big pharmaceutical companies of "making a mockery" of a government database designed to provide accessible information about drug trials. He has also recently written, and his journal has published, pieces critical of companies suppressing negative information about drug trials. From the article: They are not the only high-profile figures to criticise how the system is currently operating. Richard Smith, ex-editor of the BMJ, had this to say in an article titled "Opening Up BMJ Peer Review: A Beginning that Should Lead to Complete Transparency": His solution is to allow studies to be reviewed online by a much larger audience which is less prone to bias. The BMJ continues to support his position.Surely this lends credence to people like Dr. Hoffer and Dr. Breggin, who knew they would be ostracised by the medical community for publishing in their own journals. The pharmaceuticals have enoromous control in every aspect, from the development of the drugs through the clinical trials, to the approval process by the FDA. It is a process that has little room for any alternative, non-drugs based approach to treatment. I suggest that if you base all of your arguments on the gold standard of prestigious peer-reviewd journals, you risk overlooking and even reinforcing the flaws in that system; and also being closed-minded to other approaches which are possibly more efficacious than the current paradigm would seem to allow.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Yes. Yes. But there can be more than one stereocentre in a complex molecule (a stereocentre is caused when you have a carbon atom that has four different groups attached to it). In which case you could end up with more that 2 different stereomers.For example, let's say the molecule has two different stereocentres, A and B. Then it will have 4 different enantiomeric forms: RA:SB; RA: RB; SA:RB; and SA:SB (R and S here mean effectively the same as L and D). If only the stereocentre at A is biochemically active, and requires the R form, then both RA:SB and RA:RB could potentially have the same effect.If RA:SB were the naturally occurring form, and you synthesised the RA:RB form, then you will have created a synthetic form that is different from the natural one, but that has the same biochemical effect. From reading Mod's email, it sounds as though this does apply to Vitamin E (although I'm not an expert in vitamins, so I'll just have to take his word for it).

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang