Amusing, but the superficial similarities are just that, superficial.
Homeopathy is based on two pre-scientific principles.
A substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person will cure a sick person of those same symptoms
The less of the substance in a treatment, the more powerful the treatment is.
Superficially, principle 1 sounds like vaccines, but it really isn’t. Instead it means that if you are nauseous, you should take syrup of ipecac. And the less you take, the more it will cure your nausea. Homeopathy is sympathetic magic, not medicine.
Yes, there’s lots of confusion, including in the linked article.
And yes, some people consider homeopathy a part of naturopathy, because theoretically they both involve natural substances being used to heal.
But as Mark says above, naturopathy is about substantive use of herbs, roots, teas, and food for healing and health (as some have pointed out, aspirin is an example). Homeopathy is about a weird mystical belief in the power of water to retain and amplify the memory of things that were once in it and the concept of “like cures like”.
I agree with he sentiment. We have to start somewhere. But we shouldn’t still treat people today the same way Pliny the Elder did. Sure, we may discover new medicines through their historical uses, but we should never apply them via those historical methods ever again. We know how to better research and apply those tools history (and nature) give us.
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I think the best naturopaths (and nurses in general) will recommend a path to health that includes modern medicine as well as traditional medicines that’ve been used for many generations. I know my nurse and doctor do and it works well.
Except both Mark and the article are demonstrably wrong. People hear the prefix “naturo” and assume it means herbs. That isn’t the definition of naturopathy. Instead, naturopathy is a random hodge podge of different alternative medicine modalities with no scientific standard to sort one from the other.
Also, the origin of Aspirin is an example of pharmacognosy, not “naturopathy”. And thanks to pharmacology, it consists of synthetically created acetylsalicylic acid rather than the more irritating salicylic acid found in willow bark.
Naturopathy isn’t the name of, or field for that legitimate area of science. That’s pharmacology. And specifically pharmacognosy.
Naturopathy isn’t an area of scientific study. It’s not a field in academics. It’s a modality of treatment that comes out of CAM/Integrative medicine. It’s not like it’s the technical term for herbal medicine either, the field utilizes a bunch of different types of herbalism (all of them debunked), but also uses homeopathy, energy healing, various healing diets, acupuncture, And chiropractic.
For anyone curious about the detail on Naturpathy and Naturopaths out in the world. I can’t reccomended Naturopathic Diaries highly enough.
Accounts and criticism from a former Naturopath, degrees “licenses” and all. About what is taught and how the field works. Found herself deeply in student debt with credentials not worth shit. And finally took a closer look at her chosen field.
That reminds me of the sugar cereal ads from my youth, that would proclaim them to be “Part of this nutritious balanced breakfast!” Yeah, the completely irrelevant part.
“Used for many generations” is a fallacious appeal to antiquity, not evidence of efficacy. People have been throwing salt over their left shoulders for centuries, but that isn’t proof doing so protects you from demons. I could open up health center that charges people to throw salt over their shoulders, then refer them out for actual health problems, call it “integrative medicine” and it would make exactly as much sense as many naturopathic referrals.
Again: okay. Feel free to believe that. Sometimes things that have been effective for hundreds of years are… gasp effective! And sometimes not. Talking to a professional and figuring out what works for you are better than being a Skeptic.
I agree with many of the comments here: Mark is way too kind to Naturopathy, an anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific scam that charlatans and fools use to prey on people who fear or lack access to real medicine. Of course there are efficacious compounds found in the natural world, but the way to use them isn’t to consult some loon who rejects science and then take an unkown quantity of what you think is a plant extract that may or may not contain them, possibly in a bioavailable form.
And science is the method we use to separate what seems true from what is actually true. It’s how we separate folklore from fact.
Professional experience and anecdotes instead of science is how we go with what seems true rather than what is proven to be true.
Talking to a professional instead of science is how we got Humorism and bloodletting, for centuries. It’s how we still have urine therapy (drinking your own urine for health!), iridology (diagnosing disease, including broken bones by looking at your iris), reflexology (the nonsense that every organ in your body is hardwired to specific places on your feet and that organ disease can be cured by the right pressure on those places, etc).
Science is how we got real medicine. It’s how we got anti-sepsis, anesthetics, antibiotics, vaccines, etc.
And that’s the thing there alt med loves to point out the treatments we use that legitimately come from plants and what have. But none of those treatments came out of alt med. Naturopathy didn’t identify them or develop them. While we find plenty of potential drugs (and far fewer that work) in the natural world. Very few of them were identified in, or are used in formal herbal medicine systems. Those that may have been (willow bark, bread mold). The classics of the genre. At best have a connection to folk medicine. Or early scientific medicine. And in large part alt med rejects them as bad because of their use in real medicine. Or because once they’ve been extracted and purified into a form that works reliably they’re no longer sufficiently crunchy.
I think the bridging field here is bioprospecting. I’ve always been under the impression that Pharmacology is more molecular oriented. Bioprospecting is the search for secondary metabolites in nature that could be used to create new drugs, and it’s a scientifically rigorous field.
As I understand it bio-prospecting is the term for doing such things as a business venture.
It’s not a scientific field itself. Nor is it limited to medicine. Though biotech/biomed is one of the major markets that engages in it.
So. Pharmacology is one of the sciences conducted by groups bioprospecting. But bioprospecting isn’t neccisarily anything to do with pharmacology. You’re bioprospecting for example when you look for a new edible or plant source of caffeine to commercialize. Or something you can extract alternative fuel from.
As has been pointed out to you several times in the past, aspirin is scientifically proven to have harmed many children due to Reyes Syndrome.
Willow bark tea (the medicine for which aspirin is a synthetic substitute) has never been proved to have harmed anyone, but has been shown to have analgesic effects - just as claimed by herbalists and naturopaths.
Sure, but treating science as a religion which can do no wrong is a rejection of science. Insisting that the only truths are in peer reviewed papers is just a faith-based dogmatism, not science at all.
And of course, medicine is not a science. And we wouldn’t want it to be! That way lies the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study, and worse atrocities. Medicine is a praxis, that’s why we say doctors practice medicine. Good doctors - regardless of how they label themselves - are informed by medical research and similar scientific endeavors. They aren’t doing dangerous experiments on their patient population.
Aren’t you just throwing labels on things to suit your thesis? I have been cured of various conditions by multiple different medical traditions (although nobody seems to be able to cure my serotonin problems) and I never noticed that it made any difference what label was on the door. Psyllium fiber prescribed by an osteopath clears the bowel same as that prescribed by anyone else.
