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Licensing naturopaths is a mistake

Thursday, February 22 at 5:10 PM

This Speakout has not been edited

By Al Bergstein, Port Townsend, Wash.

While I don’t live in the Rocky Mountains, I was made aware of your opinion column today. I want to take a moment to say “thanks” for a well written opinion. I too believe that licensing Naturopaths and others that are not “MD’s” is a mistake. Doing anything more to validate the hodgepodge of opinion, pseudo-science, antiquated procedures, and downright mistaken information that some naturopaths present to patients would be morally wrong. My opinions are based on years of experience both from my late wife, who also spent the last 5 years of her life chasing down phony treatments for her cancer, like Sean and his parents, to my own experience with NDs. I have been in the same kind of rooms that Sean’s parent’s were. I saw the same kinds of phony advice handed out. I don’t want these non-doctors treated like people who have spent enormous time, effort and money to become real M.D.s. A license from the state would only make this problem worse.

Certainly, there is much more to be done to make “western” medicine more transparent and accountable. However, validating a non- scientific approach to medicine, one that doesn’t use peer review, scientific methods or double blind studies to prove it’s hypothesis’, would be tragic. Another little discussed issue of naturopathy is that often the ND’s run their own ‘pharmacies’ attached to their offices, and sell the very vitamins and potions that they are recommending. That has always seemed a conflict of interest to me. I have never been to a MD that sold the drugs he/she was prescribing.

I would consider it a conflict of interest. I believe that doing more to educate the public to the differences between naturopathic practitioners and standard “western” medicine would be much more valuable. Most of the public has no idea what a naturopathic practitioner is, other than someone running an office that claims to do “alternative” healing. There is an enormous variety of naturopathic practice going on, from types that you and I would regard “western” in style (there are some MD’s who practice with certified NDs from Bastyr Institute in Washington State for example), to others who are promoting the wildest of bizarre “treatments". You only have to look at www.quackwatch.org to see the list of bizarre practices. Another question worth asking is, “I wonder why this family was feeling that they had to go to a naturopath over their primary care physician, if they even had one? “ Which brings me to my last point, which would be to spend time looking at real medical reform, so that driving the costs out of the system doesn’t mean driving the doctors out of the system. Add the fact that millions of Americans have no health care which helps push people to practitioners that make claims, with nothing to back them up. Treat the root cause, not the symptom.

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