Re: I want medicine, not supplements

Hi Eric,

For the most part it’s nice to hear what you have to say from a practitioner perspective.

I just wanted to clarify a point that is a real pet peeve of mine, and that is this mentality that it’s mostly deemed as being the client/patients fault if they don’t see any improvement with a particular prescribed plan from a naturopath. It’s as if the practitioner always needs to prevent themselves from losing face by maintaining that the patient is doing things wrong rather than entertaining the possibility that part of a ‘plan’ is not right for that particular individuals body chemistry, or heaven forbid, the practitioner simply got it wrong. You hinted at this when you mentioned 40% get better, the rest fail due to compliance issues – lack of self control, poor self discipline etc. Maybe it wasn’t compliance, maybe it was some very difficult to detect factor which prevents healing – an unusual reaction to a supplement, an unknown environmental trigger, the wrong target (liver, gut, adrenals) or simply being beyond repair. Many practitioners are unwilling to admit this, perhaps due to wanting the business and keeping their ego/reputation in check.

The most frustrating example of this I heard recently was a fairly well respected nutritional balancing practitioner who suggested that people who don’t commit fully to the program, including daily sauna’s and coffee enema’s are the ones that don’t recover. We all have variable levels of ‘detox’ that we can cope with but daily sauna’s and coffee enema’s would put me in ER. And of course that’s deemed to be my fault as a patient….

Most patients are genuine, honest people and this shouldn’t be ignored just because we are unwell.

The most refreshing attitude I’d like to hear from a naturopathic doctor, which I seldom hear is one of positively, realism and sincerity. I would be much happier with a naturopathic doctor telling me after 30 minutes of hearing my case that he can’t help me than have his ‘tried and tested’ plan shoved down my throat hidden within a veil of false positivity, i.e. ‘I’ve seen this work for others, give it x months and it will work for you, you’ll need to purchase all these expensive tests and supplements etc etc……’

One thing that I would also lump with the supplements is the expensive functional tests that are often ordered, under the guise that this will give you medical proof for your condition, and will further reinforce the naturopaths view that X and Y should be used. I think a lot of these tests are bunk, especially food allergy IgG tests, which often show your ‘intolerances’ simply to those foods you have been eating most recently. There are well known examples of patients sending the same sample taken at the same time and sending to 2 different laboratories, and getting 2 completely different results back. The same with stools tests, one shows a parasite, the other shows yeast and no parasite. Same with saliva tests, different labs, different results. One thing you can’t dispute for the most part with orthodox medicine is that testing is much more accurate. It may not be very sensitive, but it is accurate and standardised across the country/world. It may be useless for thyroid issues, non Addison adrenal issues, toxicity issues and the majority of gut issues (no profit?) but that’s a sensitivity issue rather than an accuracy issue. It’s frustrating when these functional tests are offered as cutting edge medical confirmation of your illness when in reality they are poorly understood, still often inaccurate and expensive.

Interested to hear your thoughts on both issues.
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