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by Cpoll
2214 days ago
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> Another example is naturopathy, which seeks to improve patients' health mostly through the adoption of an optimal diet and nutrition program. Not much is more biologically plausible than this, but, hey, Wikipedia knows best. That description sounds a bit biased itself. You're describing a dietician, but the Naturopathy umbrella (and practicioners) also covers unproven herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture, belief in 'vital energy,' etc. |
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The wording of the Wikipedia article is that anything considered “alternative medicine” is by-definition “biologically implausible”.
But plenty of what is central to what naturopaths do - i.e., nutrition - is plainly biologically plausible. That naturopaths approach nutrition differently to mainstream dieticians doesn’t make the approach by-definition “implausible”. And the “unproven” herbal remedies they may use are not “implausible” (herbs are made up of molecules and thus can quite obviously influence physiology).
“Unproven” and “implausible” are not the same thing; that’s my central point.
If some naturopaths also practice homeopathy, that doesn’t change the biological plausibility of the nutritional aspect, which in my experience, is the vast majority of the practice (at least here in Australia).
For what it’s worth, your assertion that naturopathy is an umbrella term for those other modalities isn’t correct. Sure, some of them are also homeopaths, but not the majority in my experience. And of course acupuncture is from Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is a separate system again.
Speaking of which, in just the past few years we’ve seen Nobel Prize awarded to a Chinese researcher for “discovering” artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin in the herb sweet wormwood, which had long been used as a malaria remedy. She found this by scouring 1600-year-old Chinese medical texts.
So by Wikipedia’s definition, this remedy was “biologically implausible” right up until the moment someone completed Nobel Prize-winning research to suddenly make it plausible.
Fabulous logic. How lucky the researcher hadn’t read Wikipedia beforehand and learned her proposed research was implausible.