Archive for the ‘Naturopathy’ Category

As revealed in a previous post, we’ve recently implemented some fairly large additions to Lintbox and its direction.  Many may have noticed the newly-added Special Features section, wherein we will occasionally bring you a variety of special content.  Among these is the Panel Discussion, a biweekly compendium where the Lintbox staff and contributors alike may have their say on a singular topic of note.  This week’s topic is NHPs, or “Natural Health Products,” and the nature of the basic human freedom to consume what one chooses to.

March 2008 in Canada was met with controversy when an amendment entitled Bill C-51 was introduced by Canadian Parliament in an effort to improve the efficacy of the long-obsolete Food and Drugs Act.  The bill, though more of a compliment to the act than a modification, was met with a strong public outcry orchestrated by the website Stop C-51, a purported grassroots organization that claimed C-51 would implement draconian restrictions on natural health products and result in a proverbial police state.  The website was revealed to have been a front for Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd., an NHP company sued by the government for selling multi-vitamins as a treatment for bipolar disorder without a license. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it ethical to prescribe a placebo?

Glucosamine is a drug that is sometimes prescribed, and often recommended, to treat joint pain and arthritis. Extracted from the shells of shellfish, it isn’t toxic, and it’s relatively cheap to purchase. People who use it often notice a substantial decrease in their joint pain while they are on the medication. Unfortunately, glucosamine probably doesn’t work. Clinical evidence of its efficacy has been contradictory, at best (it’s a bit telling that the product is sold as a supplement, rather than a drug). However, in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, it was found to be no more effective than a placebo ¹. This would seem to indicate that any reduction in pain brought about by the drug is a result of the placebo effect, and not a medical effect.

In many ways, glucosamine is a lot like most other types of non-evidence based medical treatments. It has no proven biological effect, and any change experienced by the patient is identical to the placebo effect. However, glucosamine doesn’t exhibit most of the harms present in other quack medicine. It’s not toxic, and is relatively inexpensive; additionally, the illness that it’s meant to treat (arthritis/other joint pain) is both a) non-lethal, and b) incurable (meaning there is no harm from delaying seeking proper treatment). Treating the condition properly, one could only hope to reduce the pain — and this is already being accomplished by the placebo effect.

This creates a tough situation for the skeptically minded when we see somebody else using, or prescribing, glucosamine. On the one hand, belief in the efficacy of glucosamine is utter nonsense, and though it might not necessarily be the case, lack of skeptical thinking about one form of treatment could lead to a lack of skepticism concerning other treatments in the future. On the other hand, the harms in this case are relatively non-existent, and scientific skepticism not being too popular, skeptics are often forced to pick their battles.

What do you think?

I recently read this article on organic foods over at quackwatch.org. Following the article, the author had posted a reader protest complaining how it was unfair to lump organic farmers/foodies in with other “quacks”. The reader asks:

Honestly, is it so nutty to think we would be better off eating food that ISN’T full of chemicals and additives, preservatives and artificial colors?

Thinking about this question, I realized that the answer is “yes”. Nutty is probably not the word I would use to describe it, but it is a bit strange to think that we would be better off eating “food that isn’t full of chemicals, additives, preservatives, and artificial colors.” More accurately, it is a tad nutty to believe that so-called “natural” or “organic” products do not contain chemicals, additives, preservatives and artificial colors. The truth is that all foods — not just “artificial” foods — contain chemical preservatives and colors! The reader has simply assumed that because the chemicals found in organic foods are naturally occurring, they must also be safe.

This variation on the naturalistic fallacy is the foundation of naturopathy and a lot of modern new-age quackery. We have already explained in previous posts how natural is not always safe. Nature produces just as many harmful substances as it does nutritious substances… if not more. Furthermore, all “synthetic” compounds created by humans are merely variations on the chemicals we have already found in nature. The fact is that any distinction between the natural and artificial (insofar as it applies to the realm of biology and chemistry) is tenuous at best. In reality, human synthesis of chemicals usually involves nothing more than facilitating, or expediting, natural synthesis. Even when we create elements not found in nature, we produce them using other natural elements. Anyways, it is not as if you would find Ununpentium on the ingredients list of your favorite cereal. Conversely, finding all natural Uranium-238 on the ingredients list might be cause for concern.

Read the rest of this entry »

The CBC posted this article on naturopathic “medicine” by “Doctor” Lorne Swetlikoff, N.D. (not M.D.).

The article is a load of crap (the claims can be easily dismissed as nonsense), but what do you expect from a “doctor” of naturopathy? What surprises and disgusts me is that the CBC, a supposedly reputable news source, thought it was a good idea to publish this story, and by doing so, endorse this type of “medical” advice.

I think I just used up my quota of scare quotes for the month. Damn.

However, there was one positive outcome to this article. The comments left by the readers seemed (for the most part) skeptical of the article’s claims. To me, this was a refreshing change of pace, and a nice reminder that there are other rational people out there.

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• CBC.ca: Water: Still your best health bet
• The Rogues Gallery: A Naturopath On Water

In my recent article about Consumer Reports, I mentioned that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that organically grown foods are any safer, tastier, or more nutritious than are their non-organically grown counterparts. Accepting this premise, you might say that it is still a legitimate choice to purchase organic food to support a more “natural” method of farming. Aside from the fact that this is quite fallacious, it is also very wrong.

The fact is that here in Canada — and in other countries that have modern farming practices — we have the most plentiful, healthful and safe food supply in all of recorded history (though you would not know it by talking to a naturopath). So much, in fact, that one of our biggest problems right now stems from an overabundance of food and the resulting over-consumption of certain types of foods. Short of obesity-related health problems, we live in a time and place where people are living longer than ever before.

Enter the organic food crowd, who believe that we are being slowly poisoned by the pesticides and antibiotics in our foods. The truth is even if evidence surfaced that eating non-organic food is harmful (none exists, to date), any negative health effects due to pesticide or antibiotic consumption would be vastly overshadowed by the health benefits accrued by modern farming techniques. In a way, organic food proponents bear some resemblance to anti-vaccine proponents. People who have never had to deal with nation-wide pandemics of measles or polio fail to see the importance of vaccinating their children and maintaining herd immunity against the diseases. Similarly, people who have grown up in a country with an abundant supply of safe and healthful food fail to appreciate all of the harms and waste that we have been able to eliminate through modern farming techniques.

The other problem with organic food is that even if we wanted to, we simply could not feed all of the people in Canada using organic farming techniques, let alone the world while maintaining affordable food prices (if you think increased food prices due to rising oil costs are bad…). Short of a mass extinction, there appears to be no way to reconcile this huge problem. Organic farming would only ever work as long as a small percentage of the population consumed organically grown foods — but proponents of organic foods believe that all food should be grown organically.

So why is organically grown food bad?

Read the rest of this entry »

I am a big fan of Consumer Reports magazine. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a consumer information and advocacy magazine. In each issue, it selects groups of products (e.g. computers, televisions, lawn mowers, refrigerators), and makes recommendations based on a battery of tests, surveys, and investigation of the product. It tests all of the products that it recommends, and usually has a very scientifically-minded approach to studying consumer goods.

However, the magazine is not limited to the analysis and recommendation of products, but also contains other supplementary material. Some of these things, like recall and safety notices, are often valuable in supplementing the content of the magazine. However, they can sometimes get into trouble in their supplementary sections, leading to problems like those in their latest issue. I took exception to two articles in particular: When to Buy Organic and How Did You Sleep Last Night?.

Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC posted an article a while back, announcing, “Trust drug may cure social phobia.” Arguably, this article may be jumping the gun a little in terms of efficacy of the product, but the BBC does tend to be pretty good with this type of stuff, and the headline does include the important word may. However, I’m not interested in discussing the efficacy or plausibility of this product; rather, I want to talk about the underlying message behind products such as these.

The thing I love about science is the same thing many people hate about it. Not only do we try to find the solutions to problems, but we also solve things that we didn’t know used to be problems. Up until now, many people would become shy and nervous in social settings and that would be dismissed as just the way things were. Now, along comes a group of scientists who they tell us that we can change the way we interact with each other by taking a drug. I find this brilliant, and while it may not be as amazing a discovery as a cure for a disease, or a more efficient way of producing crops to feed the world population, these types of discovery – ones that change the perceived status quo – are still pretty amazing in their own right.

Read the rest of this entry »

In relation to Mitchell’s previous post, I often find it hard to discuss the case for or against “natural” substances, since the distinction between what is “natural” and what is “artificial” is an entirely imaginary construct.

While we as humans have advanced a great deal in our understanding of science and technology we’re nevertheless very, very far from deities and are thus still bound by the laws of conservation of mass and energy.  Simply put, it is virtually impossible to create matter or energy out of nothing.  We can, of course, synthesize materials and substances, though this process by its very definition involves the changing of one existing substance into another.  One might make the case, therefore, that synthesized materials are thus “artificial” as they would not exist without human intervention. Read the rest of this entry »

Meet the castor bean:

It is grown around the world to produce castor oil. Not only is it 100% natural, but it contains one of the most toxic substances known to man-kind: ricin. While eating a castor bean might make you very sick, exposure to virtually any amount of concentrated ricin will cause death¹.

So the next time somebody tells you that there couldn’t possibly get hurt taking that natural herb or supplement, remember the castor bean, and just say no!

Update: It has been brought to my attention that I perhaps missed one of the most interesting facts about Ricin while writing this article. This comes from the same source referenced above:

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is sold as an alternative to conventional (i.e. science/evidence based) medicine. The rallying cry of CAM supporters is usually that of choice. They feel that the supporters of conventional medicine have backed them into a corner, and conspire alongside “Big Pharma” to ensure that their choices for treatment are limited. They demand to be able to choose how they treat their own bodies. Naturally, in a place like Canada where we have a universal public health care system, we fund these “treatments”, because we don’t want to deprive people of their ability to choose. Even if we take into account the fact that these “treatments” don’t work, they still make people feel better and get rid of symptoms, so why shouldn’t we fund them? Granted, some forms of CAM can be dangerous, but as long as people are properly informed as to the safety and proven efficacy of CAM techniques, why shouldn’t they be able to take that risk? Some forms of CAM, like homeopathy, are truly harmless — especially if taken in conjunction with conventional medicines.

Taken together, this sounds like a compelling case for public support and funding of CAM, and this is often seen as a compelling reason by legislators. If the people want it, and it makes them happy, then why shouldn’t we support it? Aside from the fact that this lends credence to ineffective methods of treatment (which arguably is also a rather large problem), the main reason for why this is a bad idea lies in the intended purpose of universal public health care.

Read the rest of this entry »