Kevin, I've always been a fan of your writing, but you're dead wrong about natur

opathic medicine. This is a real blind spot for you, and you definitely need to
inform yourself about it. It's clear you haven't done much research on this subj
ect. I have. I've spent my entire adult life studying it. I went to naturopathic
medical school for two years before dropping out due to needing to take care of
my family.
I can assure you the education I got there was on the same level as the educatio
n students get in allopathic medical school, and in many areas far superior.
How do I know this? Two of my best friends recently graduated medical school, an
d they know absolutely nothing about nutrition, the immune system, the microbiom
e, and much more. We literally become what we eat, so if a doctor knows nothing
about nutrition, then he's really nothing more than a glorified pharmacist passi
ng out drugs which don't work. After all, it was Hippocrates who said, "let food
be thy medicine and medicine be thy food".
We were taught all the hard sciences at my med school such as biochemistry, anat
omy, and pharmacology. You may not know this, but in 15 states naturopathic doct
ors are allowed to write prescriptions for drugs just like MDs can.
Naturopathic medicine is evidence based, and it works. Don't take my word for it
, just do a quick google search of some natural therapies and treatments. Many o
f them have double blind clinical trials to back them up.
http://www.bastyr.edu/news/general-news-home-page/2013/08/naturopathic-doctors-a
dopt-evidence-based-medicine-study-finds
http://www.atms.com.au/a-lot-of-evidence-for-natural-medicine/
Therefore you have it exactly upside down, it's the conventional medical system
that's been an utter failure, and the results have been disastrous. By claiming
that naturopathic medicine is quackery you're automatically making the case that
the conventional health system in this country is legit and has been a success,
and nothing could be further from the truth.
The rates of drug usage for all diseases in America has skyrocketed over the pas
t 30 years, so if the drugs were working we'd expect the rates of all those dise
ases to decrease, right? Instead, they've skyrocketed along the exact same time
frame as the increase in the rate of drug use. This should tell you that not onl
y are the drugs not working, but in most cases the side effects they cause are s
o bad they make the patient's disease worse, or create new diseases.
I'm not making this up, there are tons of studies linking various drugs to a who
le host of diseases and health problems. But doctors keep prescribing them witho
ut even asking if they work. Why? Several reasons: 1)They're making millions for
big pharma, who's in charge of the med school curriculum and who pays doctors t
o push these drugs, as John Oliver recently exposed on his show . . .http://www.
mediaite.com/tv/john-oliver-destroyminatestirpates-big-pharma-in-season-2-premie
re/ 2)They're a big source of income for doctors too, not only for the drugs the
mselves, but because the drugs don't work, their patients need to keep coming ba
ck for return visits to try new drugs or other treatments. 3)Most doctors are t
oo arrogant to admit they're wrong and that what they learned in med school has
long been outdated and completely inadequate to treat the diseases of the 21st c
entury.
Unfortunately alternative medicine has always been dominated by liberals, so thi
s makes it easy for conservatives to attack it, but in this case the liberals ar
e right. You can always focus on a few areas of alternative medicine that don't
have any science to back them up like Reiki, but that's really just a straw man

because the vast majority of NDs don't practice that, I would know because all m
y professors were NDs, and none of them mentioned Reiki.
As far as acupuncture goes, I'm afraid you're wrong about that too. Just because
you can't prove that qi exists, doesn't mean that acupuncture isn't legit. Ther
e are studies showing that it does indeed have several measurable and beneficial
effects on the body, and basically no side effects . . .http://www.wsj.com/arti
cles/SB10001424052748704841304575137872667749264 As the article mentions, a good
acupuncturist does a lot more than stick needles in you, they're trained to stu
dy the whole body and treat the root causes of disease, something MDs aren't tra
ined to do in med schools here.
Other countries like germany, canada, and australia give NDs the same rights MDs
have, and their rates of all diseases are much lower than ours. Their medical s
ystems are much more advanced as well because they incorporate holistic medicine
into their treatment plans instead of relying solely on drugs like we have.http
://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2013/521879/
There's a mountain of evidence that our approach has been a spectacular failure.
Since I know you're a highly intelligent and well-read man, this tells me you s
imply made up your mind about this subject based on your biases and didn't bothe
r to research it before you found a few articles on quackwatch to try to back up
your points.
Btw, quackwatch is full of its own quackery. For years it's been claiming that D
r. Burzynski is a quack. As it turns out, he's a doctor and scientist who found
a cure for cancer that got FDA approval for clinical trials, and those trials pr
oved that his treatment of antineoplastons was able to cure the most difficult c
ases of brain cancer known to man. I urge your readers to watch the movie if the
y don't believe me . . https://vimeo.com/69209285
The bottom line is this: what people who haven't studied this field at all don't
realize is that medicine isn't all science, although that's what we've been bra
inwashed to believe in this country. Rather, it's part science, part art. Many o
f the most successful treatments for a wide range of diseases that now have clin
ical trials to back them up were being practiced by naturopaths long before the
science proved they were right, such as natural hormone replacement therapy, adu
lt stem cell therapy, trans-cranial brain stimulation http://www.fisherwallace.c
om/pages/published-research, and more.
As with politics, a lot of medicine relies on and involves common sense. If you
start trying a certain treatment on patients and eventually find that it's succe
ssfully cured a certain disease in 900 out of 1000 patients, does it really matt
er if it has FDA approval or if there are clinical trials to prove its effective
ness? Of course not.
Yet this is exactly what probably 90% of MDs in America believe, because they've
bought the lies they were taught in med school.
Those 900 patients weren't lying, and if something has a 90% success rate, that'
s not a placebo either. This is in fact what's been happening with NDs all aroun
d the world, as well as in America. They've been successfully treating patients
with holistic and natural medicine for decades. Unfortunately it's been under th
e radar because the conventional medical system, big pharma, and the FDA have co
lluded to work together to convince us they're all quacks, despite their healthy
patients proving otherwise.
Mind you, these are the same people who've been telling us for decades that fat
and butter was bad for us and that wheat and carbs were really healthy, when the
exact opposite was true. The alternative medicine practitioners who claimed oth

erwise were labeled "quacks" who didn't have the science on their side, when it
turned out the "science" was a few flawed studies that were subsequently debunke
d. The NDs were right all along, and just now, after having been proven wrong, t
he conventional system and even our gov't is admitting they were wrong . . .http
://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Science-The-soft-science-of-dietary
-fat-21.pdf
http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/time-magazine-we-were-wrong-about-saturated-fat
s/
The part of medicine that is art is the part that requires a doctor to truly obs
erve and listen to each patient to make an accurate diagnosis that takes into ac
count all of their health problems- physical, emotional, and spiritual, because
all of these areas are connected. You can't treat one without treating the other
s.
Good medicine also involves being intellectually curious and open-minded, and fi
nding out which treatments work and which don't, regardless of what's popular or
"mainstream" at the time.
A healthcare system shouldn't resemble high school, where decisions are made bas
ed on peer pressure and what all the cool kids are doing, yet that's exactly wha
t the American healthcare system resembles, and it's sad.
All medicine should involve some experimentation and willingness to try new thin
gs, of course making sure they're safe first. The great thing about naturopathic
medicine is that 99% of the time we don't have to worry about this because the
treatments we use are natural and only aid the body's innate healing mechanisms
to do what they've been trying to do all along, heal us.
It's time we take a new approach to medicine and start treating the whole person
and the root cause of their diseases rather than a set of symptoms with a set o
f drugs, as our current approach does. It's time we start truly healing people
instead of making them sicker, and naturopathic medicine is the means to do it.
It's been doing it for hundreds of years already, long before drugs were invent
ed, and it will continue to do it long after drugs fall out of favor with the pu
blic, which they will soon enough as soon as people wake up and start getting ti
red of being sick and tired.
Instead of writing a hit piece on alternative medicine, I suggest you do some re
search on it and not just go to sites that have been set up by the pharmaceutica
l industry to attack it. Maybe even talk to a naturopathic doctor, you might le
arn something, and they happen to be the kindest, most open-minded, and most bri
lliant people you'll ever meet. Then, we can talk about who the real quacks are
and which form of medicine works best.