Several years ago I used to see a bumper sticker on a car around town that read, Denial is not a river in Egypt. Not knowing what it meant, I asked the driver who explained that while in therapy trying to gain insight into how to deal effectively with her emotional problems she had learned that her habitual way of relating to the world, denying that everything bad or unpleasant existed, was counterproductive and the cause of her unhappiness and coping difficulties. Others who realized that they too were guilty of living with their heads buried deep in the sand understood that her sticker meant: denial exists; it isn’t a myth; when taken to an extreme, it debilitates those it infects who, in order to, in New Age lingo become “whole” and “balanced”, or in traditional terms, become emotionally stable, happy, well adjusted adults, have to change their pattern of behavior.
Can anyone tell me where to get a bumper sticker that reads, “Denial is a naturopath in Vermont”?
I get furious with people like Ken Adachi http://educate-yourself.org/lte/bluesenatorA03oct02.shtml who publish erroneous statements about me. Ken, who has claimed that I am paid to say what I do about silver, something blatantly untrue, wrote that I am a poor woman from KY or WV who took silver for 35 years before turning gray when in fact I had never set foot in either of those states and only took silver for three years before developing argyria. By the time I was 35, I had been gray for 20 years!
Because of the way I feel about people making false statements about me as well as in the interest of fairness and because getting the facts right is very important to me, on August 13, 2010 I sent the following message to the New Hampshire Association of Naturopathic “Doctors”, NHAND, http://www.nhand.org/:
I've posted several blogs dealing with NDs. http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com
Please add comments correcting any errors you see and adding your views.
An automated response arrived immediately:
Thanks, Rosemary Jacobs!
We appreciate your taking the time to visit the NHAND website, and for contacting us.
Your message has just been sent; we'll do our best to get back to you at the email address you provided — rosemary@rosemaryjacobs.com — in a reasonable amount of time!
Sincerely,
NHAND
Also on August 13, 2010 I sent the following email to five of the 32 NDs listed on the Vermont Association of Naturopathic “Physicians” website, http://www.vanp.org/member_directory.php, choosing the five simply because their email addresses were easy to locate.
Subject: Dangers of Naturopathy
I cannot begin to tell you how utterly horrified I was to discover that silver is included in the Vermont ND formulary. Neither can I put into words the disgust I felt when the complaint I sent to the licensing board was forwarded to the naturopathic advisor and brushed off.
Doctors who practice scientific medicine learned the uselessness and danger of ingesting silver and putting "colloidal silver" in the eyes well over 50 years ago. Silver causes argyria, gray skin. I have had a general case since I was about 15. I am now 68.
After alerting the licensing board to my concerns and being brushed off, I started reviewing ND websites and have posted several blogs reporting what I found and my opinions about it. You will find them here:http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com
If you find factual errors, I would appreciate it if you point them out in the comments section along with any views you have opposing mine and I certainly hope that you REMOVE SILVER from your formulary NOW and have both a toxicologist and pharmacologist review the other substances you include to make sure they will at the very least not harm anyone.
Please forward this to any of your colleagues whom you believe may be interested in it.
Rosemary
http://www.webanstrich.de/rosemary/
(There was another ND listed on the Vermont association’s site who I had linked to who I very much wanted to send the same message to but gave up when I couldn’t locate her email address, not even on her own website.)
On August 15th, I sent the following to a California ND site that I had linked to:
I recently discovered that NDs in my state, Vermont, include silver in their formulary. Having had argyria for over 50 years and a webpage warning people about the uselessness and danger of ingesting silver for over 10, I was absolutely horrified, but even more horrified when my concerns were brushed off. I started looking at material on the Internet posted by and about NDs and have started a blog on which I have posted several articles on the topic. One includes a link to your site.
I would appreciate it if you looked at my material and in the comment section note any factual errors as well as opinions disagreeing with mine.
http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com
Also on the 15th, I sent this to an Oregon ND quoted in a newspaper article that I linked to:
I recently discovered that NDs in my state, Vermont, include silver in their formulary. Having had argyria for over 50 years and a webpage warning people about the uselessness and danger of ingesting silver for over 10, I was absolutely horrified, but even more horrified when my concerns were brushed off. I started looking at material on the Internet posted by and about NDs and have started a blog on which I have posted several articles on the topic. One includes a link to an article in the Oregonian that quotes you.
I would appreciate it if you looked at my material and in the comment section note any factual errors as well as opinions disagreeing with mine.
http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com
To date I have received two auto-replies telling me that the “doctor” was out of the office. One from a Vermonter sent August 17th read:
Dr. Pretty Plant (not her real name) will be away from the office from August 5 thru August 16. She will return on Tuesday, August 17. Our office assistant, Moldy, (pseudonym) will be available Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings to schedule appointments, fill supplement orders, and answer any general questions you may have.
Fill supplement orders? Does that mean Pretty Plant sells supplements to the patients she sees, a common alt med practice which I think should be illegal? I mean it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the conflict of interest there, to figure out that a greedy practitioner, and there are greedy practitioners in every profession, will be very tempted to tell patients they need products which he very well knows they don’t just to increase his own bottom line. But since Pretty Plant has not responded to my message I have to assume that she has no intention of talking to me so that there is no way to ask her what she pitches and sells to her patients. Neither is there a way to discover if she feels that she has to choose between being an alternative pharmacist (really a herbalist) and an alternative “physician” or if she believes that she is trained and at liberty to practice both alt pharmacy and alt med simultaneously in Vermont.
Of all the emails I sent, one real person, a Vermont ND, did respond. She wrote:
Please remove me from your email list. Thank you.
She signed her one liner with the honorific “Doctor” in front of her name.
I responded:
I don't have an email list. You can bury your head in the sand but the real world won't go away. I have no intention of contacting you again, but will be more than happy to speak with you if you ever contact me.
Since I haven’t heard back, I assume that her head is still covered with a pile of sand or some other natural product.
While there may be a law permitting this ND to use the title “doctor” in Vermont, there is no law saying that anyone else has to address her that way, and I most certainly won’t. As far as I can tell, the only titles that she deserves are “Natural Denialist” and “Naturally Deluded”.
How can anyone practice as a doctor who cannot deal with the harsh realities of life? How many things are worse than serious disease, especially the terminal kind? How can anyone go into medicine if he can’t face people like me, people upset and frightened by the drugs and therapies he uses and who fear that he lacks the knowledge, training and skill to safely treat patients?
Years ago I met a lady who was so terrified of breast cancer that she ignored a lump in her breast till it ate through her skin creating a repulsive looking open sore. She is not the only person who has denied and refused to deal with such an frightening reality who this has happened to. The German artist Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert’s fear of breast cancer drove her directly into the hands of a quack who convinced her not to undergo evidence-based treatments for her disease. As a result she died a very painful death at the age of 41. There is a photo of her cancer disfigured breast here:
http://www.ariplex.com/nmwiki/index.php?title=Victims_of_new_medicine
As I told Natural Denialist, "You can put your head in the sand but the real world won't go away."
If a woman with a small breast lump that is invisible to the eye and only detectable by touch, as my malignant tumor was when I discovered it, visits Natural Denialist, is she going to call the growth a harmless, little natural lump and suggest that the patient take some botanicals, exercise, eat lots of fruit and vegetables, hopefully organic, and maybe throw in a relaxing massage, or is she going to have the lump biopsied immediately to see if it is malignant? For the patient’s sake, I certainly hope it is the latter, but I have to wonder if someone emotionally unable to talk to me, an angry upset stranger, about the dangers of the belief-based medical system she practices, is emotionally able to have an honest discussion with a patient about breast cancer and the possibility that she may have it. While I’m sure that there are some MDs like people everywhere who do their best to avoid all of life’s unpleasantries, I suspect that they are few and far between simply because not many could survive the hospital residency programs which are an integral part of an MD’s medical training but not a part of an ND’s. In a hospital residency an MD is forced to face the unpleasant reality of serious illness and death on a daily basis and is trained to deal rationally with it. Burying his head in the sand isn’t an option, and there are lots of malpractice lawyers breathing down his back ready to pounce if he does slip up and ignore or miss something that he should see and deal with realistically.
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