From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,misc.kids.breastfeeding,misc.kids.health,
	alt.health,sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Dairy & Allegies
Date: 15 Jun 2005 12:01:46 -0700
Message-ID: <1118862106.690096.202610@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

>> I disgree.  Cow's milk allergy [or humans having health problems with
dairy / cow's milk] is quite common.  N.D.s will tell people that the
ROOT cause of many cases of ear infections and strep throats is the
patient drinking cow's milk. <<

COMMENT:

George, I don't give a lizzard turd what ND's may or may not tell you.
You never know if your ND has a degree from Bastyr or got it by
mailorder study. And (as in the case of MDs) even the well-educated NDs
aren't infallible.

What matters is what the scientific studies show. The better-educated
NDs use them as the basis of their practice, just like anybody else who
competently practices in the healthcare field. Find me the the study
which shows ANY evidence of a connection between strep throat and milk
drinking. Otherwise, stuff a sock in it, okay?

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,misc.kids.breastfeeding,misc.kids.health,
	alt.health,sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Dairy & Allegies
Date: 17 Jun 2005 14:36:39 -0700
Message-ID: <1119044199.723458.238910@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>

 >>I live in Canada where ND's a regulated and many were medical
doctors with degrees. They are regulated and tested before being
allowed to practice the same as a chem/cut freak.<<

COMMENT:

Do not generalize-- you don't know enough.  Actually, that is true of 4
provinces only in Canada. In the rest of Canada you cannot practice as
a naturopath only, unless you restrict yourself to things that wouldn't
count as "practice of medicine" under your provincal law.. Anywhere
else in Canada other than the 4 provinces (and also in 30-odd US states
that don't allow naturopathic practice per se) a naturopathic
practitioner would have to legally practice under some other kind of
license, in order to practice at all. Some who do that may use the ND
initials, which (again) you can get by mail order if you're not going
to use that as your primary practice license. It's rather hard to tell
if a chiropractor (or an MD for that matter) who also uses "N.D",
actually has naturopathic certification that would be recognized by the
CNME, or got the ND by mail. It's all far more complicated than you
imagine.

Here in California we regulate and test our hairdressers. You never
know what damage an unregulated cosmetologist might do. The mind
boggles at the danger to the public.

>>I find your comments insulting, demeaning and very ignorant from a person
from a narrowminded profession. <<

COMMENT:

All this while providing wrong information for Canada?  If you're going
to acuse somebody of being "ignorant" and "narrowminded" you'd better
have your facts straight. Otherwise it looks pretty foolish.


>>How many seconds of nutritional education did you study in medical school? <<

COMMENT:

Oh, somewhere around 72,000 seconds as I recall. But I learned most of
what I know in a fellowship at the post-doc level, where I carried out
and published a number of nutritional studies on rodents and humans,
and published four of them, incluiding one on nutrition in Biosphere II
that ran in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And you,
Pizzagirl?

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,misc.kids.breastfeeding,misc.kids.health,
	alt.health,sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Dairy & Allegies
Date: 17 Jun 2005 14:56:28 -0700
Message-ID: <1119045388.799613.171550@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

<<Most ND's have more education than MD's and also open minds.<<

So open that their brains are in danger of falling out, if they get
into homeopathy.

But I digress. Most naturopaths (unlike the Alternative Medicine
Practitioners which actually also exist as a licensed profession in
some places) do NOT much get into homeopathy.  I have quite a lot of
respect for the well-trained naturopath who respects science and the
scientific method, and I regard the CNME accredited naturopath who
keeps a mechanistic biochemical outlook as being next after MDs, DOs,
nutritionists, etc in science-based health care practice. If
naturopaths suffer from more difficulty in providing scientific
justification, some of the blame is not to be found in their philsophy,
but in the poverty of relevent non-drug related research, which is not
the fault of the naturopath, but rather of the politician and the
public (since we do live in democracies in the West).  I've
lifted/stolen/borrowed a lot of interesting stuff from naturopathic
training texts, of which I own several, for use in my own practice.
Imitation is the sincerest flattery.

Not alternative health care is of the same quality! After accredited
naturopaths, you start getting into people who stick needles in people
and crack their spines, and it all starts to get murky. And as soon as
your practitioner starts to talk about chakras, prana, qi, energy
healing and homeopathy, they've totally lost it and are now into
religion and frank quakery.

As for whether or not the average naturopath is better educated than
the average physician, that's subject to quantitative argument. I
challenge you to defend it.

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,misc.kids.breastfeeding,misc.kids.health,
	alt.health,sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Dairy & Allegies
Date: 20 Jun 2005 17:56:21 -0700
Message-ID: <1119315381.086572.137050@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

>>I have read more than 20 hours of nutritional documents. I rest that
case. I see the medical education community there has improved from 20
seconds to 20 hours. I doubt that has happenned here yet. <<

COMMENT:

Excuse me? That was formal "classroom instruction by experts" time. If
you're going to go by reading time of nutrition papers and texts you
need to have done thousands of hours. Most of my own reading time has
been scientific papers and abstracts. I see I have accumulated >100
texts and popular books on nutrition and alternative medicine, but it's
a minor part of my medical library and a minor part of my nutrional
education. Half of it is crap, but I have to read this stuff to see
what the public is reading. As I said, the biggest problem of
alternative types is what they THINK they know. Some nut who thinks
vitamin E is the answer to heart disease (Canadian). Some other nut who
thinks you can cure most diseases by drinking enough water. People who
think you can slow aging by taking enough vitamins. A pair of doofuses
named Diamond who believe in "food combining."  Eating for your blood
type. Homeopathy. Chinese food cures and TCM. The Atkins books, the
Ornish book. the Walford books, the Zone diet crap. The Balch texts as
intro to naturopathy. etc, etc., etc.  Makes me tired just to look at
it.


>>In Ontario, anyway, you cannot be an ND and an MD. Some have tried
practicing ND skills while being an MD and been chastised for it losing
their MD licence for "Unconventional methods" despite their technique
success for many patients. <<

COMMENT:

According to CNME, Ontario is one of 4 provinces that license NDs to
practice as naturopaths. I see no reason a medical student studying for
an MD could not practise under a valid ND license, as recognized in
Ontario. Whoever you're talking about must have had a mailorder ND
degree, or in some other way failed to satisfy Ontario law.

If you care to cite a specific case in the news I can be proven wrong.
Otherwise I'm just going to assume that you're your usual fountain of
misinformation.


SBH