A strong argument for this can be mounted from simply scanning the naturopath’s own websites and looking for pseudo-science, the websites are riddled with it. In an evidence-based society you would expect the treatments to agree with science, but no, through the judicial use of pseudo-science they try to make the science agree with the treatments offered. If science says there is no evidence how do you manufacture evidence and stay credible?

Because of the adoption of pseudo-science complementary medicine is an easy target for researchers such as Edzard Ernst. There is enough quantitative science papers already written to prove the efficacy of several herbs, and nutrition has been incorporated into mainstream medicine for many years. Can anyone argue that accurate evidence based information delivered in consultation, is anything less than invaluable?

How many lives has a practitioner, imparting accurate advice at an appropriate time spared? Dietary advice for lowering cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, obesity, high sugar levels has saved how many lives? During a consultation with a naturopath many people have learned to address their stress triggers and respond accordingly.

Some naturopaths become engrossed in qualitative science where the researcher commonly searches for meaning and insights in a given situation, the data is normally given in words rather than numbers. Quantitative science on the other hand relies on objectivity where some form of measurement or quantification is made in numerical terms. Qualitative science brings knowledge into view whereas quantitative researchers take something they know about and by applying numerical measures to data and using statistical techniques to analyse the results, researchers attempt to generalise their results to a wider population.

Quantitative research is used to prove whether a treatment works or not and how far it can be extrapolated into the wider community.

Different countries have different standards, Australia has a pretty high standard (not as high as I would like) for advertising health advice and products, in Australia you must hold proof, and supply it on demand, for every piece of advice or product that you advertise, and a first offence can attract a penalty as high as a $25,000 fine and they get tough after the first offence, the Therapeutic Goods Administration has the responsibility for this.

In the USA it seems to be completely different, the Food and Drug Administration will allow anything as long as it doesn't directly harm you, this allows 'shonks' to ply their trade of deceit by advertising absolutely useless products and advice, pseudo-science screams at you from every corner. Advertisers can claim cure for something with impunity from law enforcement as long as it doesn't harm people directly.

I will finish by adding something that I found sad, but funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9mNjEes-lM...feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKq2udn37j0...feature=related

Cheers

Hi,
This scientific report highlights what I have said in the first post, quackery spreads, unabated like wildfire.


Quack remedies spread by virtue of being useless

* 12:32 01 May 2009 by Ewen Callaway

Eating a vulture won't clear a bad case of syphilis nor will a drink made of rotting snakes treat leprosy, but these and other bogus medical treatments spread precisely because they don't work. That's the counterintuitive finding of a mathematical model of medical quackery.

Ineffective treatments don't cure an illness, so sufferers demonstrate them to more people than those who recovery quickly after taking real medicines.

"The assumption is that when people pick up treatments to try, they're basically observing other people," says Mark Tanaka, a mathematical biologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the study. "People don't necessarily know that what somebody is trying is going to work."

The World Health Organization is demanding better proof that folk medicines work before they can be approved. And the Malaysian government has rejected more than a third of the 25,000 applications to register traditional medicines it has received because the treatments are ineffective or dangerous.

Despite these efforts, quack medicine persists around the world. Some Nigerians treat malaria with witchcraft, a South African health minister recently claimed that garlic and beetroot treat HIV, and western health stores brim with unproven treatments for almost any disease imaginable. For instance St John's wort does nothing for attention deficit hyperactive disorder in children, a recent placebo-controlled trial concluded.
Contagious treatments

To understand why these quack medical treatments persist in the face of better proven remedies, Tanaka applied mathematical models used to measure evolutionary fitness to medical treatments.

His model accounted for factors including the rate of conversion to a treatment, the effectiveness of a treatment, the rate at which people abandon a treatment, the odds of recovering naturally, and the chances of dying. The model starts with a single person demonstrating a treatment – rubbish or not – and measures how many people are influenced to go on to give the treatment a try.

Under a wide range of conditions, quack treatments garnered more converts than proven hypothetical medicines that offer quicker recovery, Tanaka found. "The very fact that they don't work mean that people that use them stay sick longer" and demonstrate a treatment to more people, he says.

Bad treatments don't always win out. Recurring diseases are more likely to promote effective treatments than rare diseases because repeated demonstration weeds out bad treatments, Tanaka found.
'Just ask'

But is this model valid in cultures where evidence-based medicine predominates, and government groups such as the US Food and Drug Administration vet most medical treatments?

Tanaka thinks so, pointing to the popularity of alternative medicines and the debate over the effectiveness of FDA-approved drugs. "In many situations people will just observe and copy anyway, regardless what the official information is," he says.

And in some cases, one peer-reviewed study may conclude that a drug works, while another shows it doesn't. "Even where there is a bit of clinical research, we don't really know yet whether at lot of medicines are effective," he says.

"I think it's an interesting idea. It's quite clever", James Holland Jones, a biological anthropologist at Stanford University in California, says of the model. However, language allows people to vet unproven remedies without trying them, he adds – that is, you can just ask if a treatment was effective. "You don't necessarily have to copy everything."

Journal reference: PLoS-ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005192.s001)

Cheers

Good scientific report.Well done.

Hi Maomaochong,
Do you think it is proper to advertise gambling on here?WOW series is nothing to do with health, certainly not as I know it.

Cheers

Hi

Naturopathic Medicine Needs Good Research


What constitutes good research isn’t the research we have been seeing for the last decade, this is Clayton's research? Everything I read says evidence based medicine or best evidence available, even reports from government say this is based on the best available evidence. We know from past history that politicians wouldn’t lie to gain votes, or journalists wouldn’t lie by sensationalizing stories to sell papers, don’t we? What about pharmaceutical companies, would they lie? Pharmaceutical companies currently have a monopoly on research with governments cutting funding to Universities, it paved the way for big pharmaceutical companies to give millions of dollars in grants for research, this was like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.

Good research is research that takes all of the facts and produces a result based wholly and solely on what those facts or measurements tell them, bad results are published as well as good results, the participants for the research are not selected to give an outcome, and researchers are free to pursue interesting avenues that crop up along the way, setting the scene for serendipity outcomes, luck truly favours the prepared.

The last decade has been a disaster for any area that cannot match the big boys for dollars spent on research, and that is why “evidence based research” is a con for a lot of areas needing research. Manipulation of evidence has taken place on a grand scale to benefit the pharmaceutical companies, at the expense of truth, honesty and health.

The research produced by so-called evidence based medicine involving herbal medicine and nutritional supplements have to be viewed as suspect in this climate of deceit, the research maybe accurate or it may be false, we just don’t know, it all needs redoing to establish confidence in the results.

Cheers

Humorous. THanks for sharing this.

I love your articles.

Regards,
Suzette Marks, Health and Fitness / Weight Loss Writer:
[Colon Cleansing][Resveratrol Supplement][Acai Berries][Eye Creams][Mineral Cosmetics][Green Tea and Weight Loss]

Thank you!

Cheers

Hi Guys,

Naturopathy Moving Towards Registration In Australia

Everyday I see another compelling reason for Naturopaths to be registered, scams, shonks, practitioners claiming to have qualifications they do not have, blatantly advertising in papers, knowing no checks are ever made that would expose their fraudulent qualifications.

Naturopathy has come a long way since I became involved with it in 1976; this period was the beginning of an upward spiral in academic standards. Before colleges people were learning naturopathy from a Naturopath. These were the pioneers that started the profession; if you had a good teacher you became a good naturopath, similar to nursing before degrees.

Peter Derig was one of the pioneers that never seems to get enough recognition for his pioneering role in starting the “NSW College of Osteopathy and Naturopathy” in 1967, forty two years later this college now called “Health Schools Australia” is still going strong. Soon colleges were popping up all over the landscape.

Naturopathy now based in colleges quickly increased the pace of improvement in educational standards and mode of delivery, and just as quickly the public started to turn to qualified practitioners for treatment.

In 1984 Dorothy Hall, a very well respected herbalist was able to convince colleges to band together and form the Australian Traditional Medicine Society, another association called the Australian Natural Therapists Association had been running in Victoria since 1955, these associations successfully started to lobby the Government for recognition of the profession. Legislation to accredit educational institutions to teach to Bachelor Degree was passed in 1995.

NSW and the ACT both had institutions awarded accreditation in 1995 followed by Victoria 1997, Qld 1998 and the other states and territory after that. Reference: Judy Jacka “Natural Therapies – The Politics and Passion 1998.

In 2009 ARONAH was formed to lobby for registration of Naturopaths. www.aronah.org

ARONAH has formed a steering committee composed of people with training in naturopathic medicine and/or western herbal medicine who are committed to moving naturopathy and western herbal medicine into mainstream medicine through the process of registration. Registration and regulation will elevate these professions in the eyes of the public and guarantee much safer professions for the public. At this point in time anyone can hang up a shingle, call himself or herself a naturopath or herbalist and start consulting. ARONAH is committed to developing uniform standards of education and a high standard of excellence.


Cheers