Denial Is A Naturopath In Vermont

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://rosemaryjacobs.com

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.

Naturopathic Doctors, NDs or Naturally Deluded?

Whenever I encounter an ND who calls or considers himself a doctor, physician, general practitioner or scientist rather than a faith or natural healer, I think of him as naturally deluded. How else can one explain how, despite all the objective, scientific evidence to the contrary, Vermont NDs include silver in their formulary? http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html How else can one explain why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they believe that the doctorate degrees their institutions award them accurately portray who they are and qualify them to practice scientific medicine?

Having been permanently disfigured by an ignorant, though not deluded, MD over fifty years ago, it scares the hell out of me to see that NDs, most of whom probably weren’t even alive then, are still wallowing in the same ignorance that he did. For me it’s very personal. http://www.webanstrich.de/rosemary/

But naturopaths’ use and promotion of silver isn’t the only reason that I think that NDs are deluded in their belief that they are qualified to work as doctors, physicians and general practitioners or that they understand scientific or evidence-based medicine as many claim in the reams of promotional material they publish. At least two MDs who have investigated the matter agree wholeheartedly.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Naturopathy/atwood.html

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Naturopathy/relman3.html

Another MD who looked at their VT formulary told me that he had no idea where they got it from because it isn’t grounded in pharmacology or toxicology as they are currently understood. I know at least one layperson who shares these views and fears, a lady who corresponded with me a few years ago who calls them naturopathetics.

Yes. I know name-calling isn’t nice, but on a moral scale it is a whole lot better than believing that you practice scientific medicine when you are so ignorant of the subject that you include in your formulary a heavy metal toxin like silver which, if taken internally or in your eyes, offers no benefits whatsoever but can permanently disfigure you.

Although NDs are required to study scientific disciplines like biochemistry and pharmacology in their four year naturopathic colleges, either: they are taught alternative biochemistry and alternative pharmacology, as in the alternative to or opposite of scientific biochemistry and pharmacology; they don’t understand what they are taught; or, they simply don’t believe in science and objective evidence other than when it supports their natural healing belief-based philosophy. Their religion. Otherwise how could they include in their studies and practice the archaic belief-based medical system of Classical Homeopathy, http://www.aanmc.org/naturopathic-medicine/naturopathic-physicians-are-rigorously-trained.php, that maintains that well shaken water and sugar pills have miraculous healing properties? Scientifically speaking that is sheer and utter nonsense that doesn’t have a shred of objective evidence to substantiate it unless you think that testimonials about famous people using it, like the lady with the funny hats, count as scientific evidence.

My guess is that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, uses homeopathic “remedies” because she simply hates to abandon her ancient family traditions like silly hats, a throne, a crown, a luxurious lifestyle and the little black box of homeo “remedies” said to accompany her on her travels, which probably contains the exact same “remedies” that her ancestors took with them before the advent of scientific medicine as they traveled about by horse-drawn coaches. And again, my assessment of the scientific merits of homeopathy is shared by the vast majority of scientists and medical doctors.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7910948/Homeopathy-will-not-be-banned-by-NHS-despite-critical-report.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/5956106/Homeopath-to-the-Queen-risking-patient-health-by-selling-swine-flu-remedy.html

(Please don’t make the erroneous assumption that all homeo “remedies” are benign, harmless or devoid of active ingredients because they are not. Like all unscientific systems of medicine, homeopathy and its “remedies” aren’t well regulated or standardized and the philosophies of belief-based medical systems can mutate quickly. People have been injured by products labeled “homeopathic” such as the “cold remedy” which really did contain zinc that caused anosmia, loss of smell. See p. 26:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/DrugSafetyNewsletter/UCM192395.pdf

Also homeopathy is highly individualized and not every homeopath follows the principles of Classical Homeopathy.)

NDs also study “botanical medicine” which for many certainly seems to mean herbalism, http://www.brattleboronaturopathic.com/mary.page.html, a healing system built on the belief that many plants have medicinal properties which our ancestors discovered over the centuries by trial and error. Herbalists, unlike scientists, believe that those properties are contained in the entire plant or an entire part of a plant like the leaf or flower and make their remedies, often tinctures, using them as the raw ingredients. They think that all the ingredients in the plant work together in “synergy”, and unlike scientists, they believe that there is no need to challenge their beliefs regarding safety and efficacy by conducting controlled scientific studies to determine if the objective evidence supports their opinions.

While many plants do have medicinal properties as well as toxic properties, plants are kind of like soup, full of many different ingredients or chemicals which can vary widely depending on many things.

http://rosemaryjacobs.com/rose7.html

http://rosemaryjacobs.com/rose8.html

http://rosemaryjacobs.com/rose9.html

That is why pharmacognosists, who are scientists specializing in pharmacy, work to identify and isolate active ingredients found in natural products, not just plants. When they succeed, they extract those chemicals and use them as drugs or synthesize them in labs, producing medicines that are standardized for purity and potency, things very important to scientists and MDs who are fanatical about making sure that the medicines they use consistently provide the correct dose and who are also fanatically about only using drugs that have been adequately and objectively studied before they use them on patients to make sure that they offer benefits, the amount that offers those benefits, the amount that is toxic to the average person, the side effects they produce, and the interactions they have with other drugs, food and now supplements.

Since “dietary supplements”, many of which are herbs, have become so popular, scientists have started to study some of them too, but as yet they haven’t come up with any scientific evidence that would make me take a “medicinal herb” or “botanical remedy”.

http://hcd2.bupa.co.uk/fact_sheets/html/herbal_medicine.html

NDs also study and use Chinese medicine, another medical system not based on science that uses "remedies" that are often harmful. http://rosemaryjacobs.com/rose19.html

If it wasn’t all so very dangerous, it would be funny - grownups dressing up and playing doctor like children do and a former president of a naturopathic college alleged to be “one of the world's leading authorities on science-based natural/integrative medicine” http://www.webmd.com/joe-pizzorno-jr-nd claiming that the cure for the common cold has been found.

Joseph Pizzorno, who was the president of Bastyr naturopathic school at the time, was quoted as saying on p. 114 of the 1998 April issue of Good Housekeeping magazine that, “There really is a cure for the common cold, and it’s echinacea. I take it when I feel a cold coming on, and I virtually never get sick.” Yea. Sure Joe. Scientific studies didn’t support your claim then and they don’t support it now, twelve years later. Look at what NCCAM, National Center for Complementary & Alternative Medicine says under the heading “What the Science Says". "Study results are mixed on whether echinacea can prevent or effectively treat upper respiratory tract infections such as the common cold.” http://nccam.nih.gov/health/echinacea/ataglance.htm Scientifically speaking that means the evidence isn’t in yet, Joe. Not that we’ve found The Cure even if you take it when you feel a cold coming on and don't get sick.

But wait that isn’t all. NCCAM also states, “Side Effects and Cautions: When taken by mouth, echinacea usually does not cause side effects. However, some people experience allergic reactions, including rashes, increased asthma, and anaphylaxis (a life-threatening allergic reaction). In clinical trials, gastrointestinal side effects were most common.”

Anaphylaxis! Wow. That kills you very quickly unless you have some epinephrine on hand to inject immediately. If you have ever heard of someone allergic to bees or peanuts who died suddenly after being exposed to them, they died of anaphylactic shock. That’s a hefty price to pay to cure a cold or worse yet hoping to cure a cold. Of course, it is my guess that there are very few people who would have such a serious allergic reaction to echinacea, but how many would want to risk dying over a cold? My guess is that most of those practicing scientific medicine would think that the hoped for benefit does not outweigh the risk just the way that they think that the lack of benefits derived from ingesting silver do not outweigh the risk of being permanently discolored by it and that it is a waste of money to use any product as a drug, even one known to be safe, unless there are many solid, objective, studies, the results of which have been consistently reproduced, showing that it offers benefits outweighing the risks its use entails. But that line of thought is alien to those practicing belief-based systems of medicine. But then they do not choose their drugs on the basis of objective, scientific evidence showing benefits and risks. They choose them based on their philosophies of healing.