Naturopaths, NDs, have a very successful marketing/lobbying campaign going on across N. America aimed at making them the legal equivalents of medical doctors, MDs, by having states and provinces grant those who have graduated from “accredited 4-year naturopathic medical schools” the same privileges that MDs have, such as prescribing and using prescription drugs. One of the marketing mantras they use is that “naturopathic medical schools” provide the same education that MDs get in “their medical schools”. NDs present lists of the courses they take, many of which use the same titles as the courses given in real medical schools, such as “pharmacology”, "gastroenterology", "oncology".
http://www.ncnm.edu/academics/Program_Layouts_2010-11.htm, click on “5 yr ND track)
In reality, naturopaths do not believe in or understand science or the medical sciences like pharmacology or toxicology. Theirs is a dangerous belief-based system of medicine.
I don’t have the resources to investigate to see if my suspicions are correct, but I’ve long believed that those who are attracted to “naturopathic medical schools” are for the most part the most gullible among us. Who else would pay huge sums of money to get degrees that only qualify them to work as clerks in health fraud stores? Who else would believe that the folk medicine that didn’t work for and often killed our ancestors and which is now taught in naturopathic schools is scientific or evidence based?
Today I was sent the link to a blog that I think gives a lot of weight to my suspicion that naturopaths have been scammed into believing that the educations they get in their schools are the same as those that MDs get in theirs.
http://open.salon.com/blog/ipab/2012/06/07/why_congress_wants_you_to_default_on_your_student_loans_1
While the author’s expertise is chiropractic schools, I suspect that his allegations apply equally to “naturopathic medical schools” and wish that I had the resources to throughly investigate and report the matter.
Except for a few obvious conmen, the majority of NDs I’ve dealt with strike me as being caring human beings who really want to heal people and solve all of life’s problems. However, they also strike me as being the most gullible among us, the most easily conned since they believe everything that pleases them without ever trying to verify any of it independently. They also strike me as running away from everything unpleasant. So it makes perfect sense to me to think that when they get their “med school” diplomas and can’t use them to earn a decent living that they believe the people who convinced them to enroll in those schools when they tell them that the problem isn’t the education they paid all that money for, but rather The Establishment, the medical doctors who believe in and practice evidence-based or scientific medicine who fear that NDs will put them out of business. It also makes perfect sense to me to see the most aggressive of this passive lot chant the marketing/lobbying mantras that savvy professionals teach them. What I don’t understand is why so many politicians support and enable them, especially since they don’t seem to have much public support evidenced by the fact that so few people use their services and so many don’t even know what a naturopath is, even in Vermont, a hotbed of alternative medicine.
accredited naturopathic schools, naturopaths, alternative medicine, vermont, dangerous doctors, unscientific medicine, scams, useless degrees, useless diplomas, useless degrees
There is another article on this topic here, http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com/2013/09/accredited-naturopathic-schools-article.html.
ReplyDelete