[troutman]

Bunk. Don't waste your time.

http://www.naturowatch.org/

http://www.quackwatch.org/01Quackery...turopathy.html

Naturopathy, sometimes referred to as "natural medicine," is a largely pseudoscientific approach said to "assist nature" [1], "support the body's own innate capacity to achieve optimal health" [2], and "facilitate the body's inherent healing mechanisms." [3] Naturopaths assert that diseases are the body's effort to purify itself, and that cures result from increasing the patient's "vital force." They claim to stimulate the body's natural healing processes by ridding it of waste products and "toxins." At first glance, this approach may appear sensible. However, a close look will show that naturopathy's philosophy is simplistic and that its practices are riddled with quackery.

The Bottom Line

In 1968, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) recommended against Medicare coverage of naturopathy. HEW's report concluded:

Naturopathic theory and practice are not based upon the body of basic knowledge related to health, disease, and health care which has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Moreover, irrespective of its theory, the scope and quality of naturopathic education do not prepare the practitioner to make an adequate diagnosis and provide appropriate treatment. [29]

Although some aspects of naturopathic education have improved in recent years, I believe this conclusion is still valid. I believe that the average naturopath is a muddlehead who combines commonsense health and nutrition measures and rational use of a few herbs with a huge variety of unscientific practices and anti-medical double-talk.

http://www.naturowatch.org/general/beyerstein.html

Naturopathy is the most eclectic of "alternative" practices. It has changed its methods in response to popular fads and beliefs. It practices no pool of consistent diagnostic or therapeutic methods. The most notable things that unite its practitioners are a penchant for magical thinking, a weak grasp of basic science, and a rejection of scientific biomedicine, which they refer to as "allopathy." Because naturopathy lacks a coherent rationale, patients can encounter anything from commonsense lifestyle advice -- eating a healthy diet, rest, exercise, and stress reduction -- to an array of scientifically implausible nostrums and gadgets [1].

Conclusion

Our inquiry provided naturopaths and their professional associations ample opportunity to refute the conclusions of several major commissions of inquiry that deemed their therapeutic rationale lacking in scientific credibility. None of our informants was able to convince us that the field had taken these earlier critiques to heart; in fact, few seemed to recognize that a problem still exists. Throughout, we found underestimation of the power of the placebo. At the same time, our own bibliographic searches failed to discover any properly controlled clinical trials that supported claims of naturopathy, except in a few limited areas where naturopaths' advice concurs with that of orthodox medical science. Where naturopathy and biomedicine disagree, the evidence is uniformly to the detriment of the former. We therefore conclude that clients drawn to naturopaths are either unaware of the scientific deficiencies of naturopathic practice or choose to disregard them on ideological grounds. Naturopathy seems to appeal to magical thinking in people with nostalgia for a bygone "Golden Age" of simplicity when things moved at a more leisurely pace -- a halcyon world that probably never existed [28]. Despite the scientific shortcomings of the occupation, there continues to be considerable satisfaction among clients. In addition to benefiting from the placebo effect, many find their sociopolitical outlook nurtured by naturopaths' antiestablishment, antitechnology stance, and others find reinforcement for their faith in a benevolent, human-centered universe. Naturopaths also attract people who, for one reason or another, have been dissatisfied with their contacts with biomedicine. They appeal to people with illnesses with a strong psychosomatic component and those who have chronic conditions for which biomedicine, at present, can offer little. Naturopaths' elaborate history-taking and prolonged "hands-on" interactions provide the human contact and social support that, perhaps unknowingly, many of the so-called worried well are really seeking. They also cater to those with exaggerated fears of side effects of standard medical treatments.

To their credit, naturopaths emphasize the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, the value of prevention, and the desirability of using the least intrusive intervention that will do the job. However, their means of achieving these ideals leave much to be desired while fostering scientific illiteracy in the process. Like most pseudoscientific systems, naturopathy offers comfort to its adherents. But comfort afforded is not truth implied.

http://www.skepticssa.org.au/pdf/naturopathy.pdf