My 2018 TNP Episode 14b on NUHS Naturopathic 'Duh': Devil's Advocacy, 'Duh' Snark, 2018 as a Warning Shot for 2026 CNME Issues, and Persistent Hooks

here -- with NUHS on my mind and initially likely because I read the NUHS faculty testimony from the March NACIQI meetings and because for some reason I see a decent amount of persistent listens or reads to the 2018 Naturocrit Podcast Episode 14b which deals with ND Smith's naturopathy textbook of 2008, its CNME compliance, and his academic home at National University of Health Sciences; and, because, admittedly, I forget about the middle of the country in terms of Naturopathyland, per Flyover Effect, and this includes the Illinois school so lets give that area some love -- I'll flesh out some musings through Perplexity AI-LLM interrogations across 2018 to the present 2026:

001. Episode 014b, titled "ND Smith and Spoliation [spo lee a tion] of Higher Education Science Integrity and Medical Ethics", is here as mp3 [Podbean; Archive.org]; and its script is here [Blogger];

002. regarding my use of spoliation [drawn from a query at the end of the Perplexity thread used:

"'Spoliation' in the episode title ends up working as a pretty sharp metaphor for what the script documents at NUHS in 2018 and what becomes visible about CNME by 2026: not literal destruction of evidence, but a progressive damaging of the integrity of 'higher education science' in and around naturopathic programs that CNME accredits.

In law, spoliation is the destruction, alteration, or concealment of evidence by a party who has a duty to preserve it. The script’s title—'ND Smith and Spoliation of Higher Education Science Integrity and Medical Ethics'—borrows that concept and redirects it: instead of shredding documents, institutions are said to be shredding or contaminating the category of science as applied to health‑professional education [...by] eroding the boundary conditions that protect scientific categories and medical ethics from sectarian belief and pseudoscience."

[I'll also add that as mentioned in the previous post, NUHS does not apparently share their presumably dismal NPLEX licensure exam scores publicly...a kind of evidence concealment]. 

003. Perplexity tasking:

003.a. [as a Devil's Advocacy] "For the attached podcast episode script: a) Does the author's argument withstand scrutiny?; b) Does the author seem intolerant?; c) Does it seem the author respects the differentiation of belief and scientific processes?; d) What situations resemble the context that is being describe from, say, the past 100 years?";

NUHS and Naturopathy 2026 in a 4 Stage Model: An Institutional Pathology Analysis / An Organizational Character Diagnosis

here, NUHS and some deep-thinking academic cause / etiology and effect / manifestation ['sauce for the goose' root-causers!]:

001. my background thoughts / musings that sets this up:

I thought it interesting to read the NUHS testimony at the recent March 2026 NACIQI regarding their status with CNME and not to hear anything said about how NUHS ND students perform on the NPLEX exam and to find that NUHS doesn’t publicly reveal anywhere on its site [as far as I can tell] their NPLEX numbers.

Now, as I’ve often pointed out, it’s ‘doctoral academics subset healthcare subset science subset health science subset naturopathy and all its science-exterior stuff (if we’re talking about the essentially naturopathic)' at NUHS like all AANMC-CNME-AANP-CAND schools. 

NACIQI talked about issues of CNME integrity in terms of how it treats / administrates standards upon its member schools such as NUHS and how it regards its ND students. That seemed very symptomatic / of the branches / low-hanging fruit because its a moral issue.  

So, lets move up the branches, to the trunk, and into the roots of naturopathy particularly as evidenced through NUHS to get to the epistemic issue being that they are as a knowledge institution labeled "science" foremost.

NUHS naturopathy is very found these days of:

• employing a “root cause” model (see the ‘NUHS student’ page nuhs.edu/treating-the-root-cause/);
• and from their 2026 Career Guide (see https://www.nuhs.edu/wp-content/uploads/Career-Guide-ND-2025.pdf):
• claiming “our academic superiority”;
• labeling its naturopathy as “science based” including therein their homeopathy and kind;
• coding vitalism while we’re told naturopathy is “distinguished by the principles that underlie and determine its practice”;

[Note: That's the front-end because the PDF is a marketing device; vitalism is itself alive and well at the back end within the school's curriculum and as a graduated product: a) transparently in course descriptions and stated treatment goals; b) opaquely in stated treatment goals; c) and as is necessary to belong to state guild organizations that represent licensees wherein those .orgs state that the "science based" includes naturopathy's "vital force or life force" and naturopathy's "homeopathy". Ah, but the heart of science is data, measurement, transparency, veracity, epistemic humility, responsibility, self-correction and kind.

Also, in the result below, vitalism and homeopathy will be used as tangible items that will represent the larger 'essentially naturopathic science-ejected' (ENSE) as a matter of manageability.  There's a lot more within the ENSE but there's only so much room!] 

002. so, I ran a Perplexity interrogation / tasking at the end of the thread that helped produce the Naturocrit Blog post I'd put up just before this one:

002.a. “Therein, expound on the relationship of 'Epistemic Failure Enables Moral Failure' in the sense of 'etiology and manifestation'";

CNME-AANMC-AANP-CNPA Naturopathy and "The Second Dimension": "0.68%"-ish, "No", "Strongly Negative", and "Compounding"

here, likely due to the Federal scrutiny that I'm seeing regarding CNME and its accreditor, and the 2026 CT ND Final Report and kind -- particularly the report on how if granted greater scope in CT for pharmacy that the NDs here would simply ignore standard of care and engage in "diagnostic expansion and therapeutic stretching" [euphemism alert!!!] -- I'm 'crunching some numbers' by way of the A.I.-LLMs regarding naturopathy's academic footprint:

001. first to Perplexity:

001.a. this task was assigned:

"In terms of the proportion of the entire US doctoral-level healthcare education population: a) how much of a percentage does AANMC-CNME naturopathy comprise as an institutional footprint and also as a student population?; b) are there any other healthcare areas at the doctoral level claiming "health science" "biomedical science foundation" which get the kind of privileges naturopathy gets overall in terms of their 'representation of homeopathy as science and kind' falsehood?"

001.b. the answer:

"[for a)]:

AANMC-CNME Naturopathy's Proportion of US Doctoral Healthcare Education

Institutional Footprint

• 7-8 CNME-accredited schools out of approximately 1,200+ total doctoral healthcare institutions in the U.S.
• Institutional percentage: ~0.6-0.7% of doctoral healthcare education institutions

Student Population

• Estimated 2,000 naturopathic students out of approximately 295,858 total doctoral healthcare students
• Student population percentage: 0.68% of all doctoral healthcare students

The Systemic Failure of ‘Academic-Governmental Institutional Deception Postured as Science’ Through the CSF v1.1: An Active Erosion Vector Converting Inalienable Rights into Negotiable Commodities

here, I muse by way of a premise statement and then an application of the Cullen-Snyder Framework v1.1 to that [this is part of the evolution of the CSF to v1.2]:

001. premise statement which reflects the U.S. higher education arrangement:

“By focusing strictly on consumer frameworks (which assume a voluntary contract between a school and an individual), the previous analysis bypassed the upstream civic and natural rights that are inalienable—meaning they are inherent to human dignity, exist prior to any institutional policy, and cannot be bartered away.

When an accredited system uses public infrastructure to fund, validate, and broadcast epistemologically empty or deceptive claims under the guise of ‘academic freedom,’ the issue ceases to be a mere consumer contract.

It becomes a structural violation of civic and natural rights that extend across all of society.

The three foundational, inalienable rights directly violated when a state-sanctioned higher education system facilitates fraud include:

[Note: The below section of "three foundational inalienable rights" is "a normative constitutional-civic framework centered on three inalienable rights principles: cognitive liberty (or the right to epistemic self-determination), bodily integrity, and equal protection and civic equality. I regard these principles as foundational preconditions for legitimate public education, informed consent, and democratic governance, whether or not every dimension of those principles has been fully articulated in existing constitutional jurisprudence.”]

1. The Right to Truth (Cognitive Liberty)

The absolute first premise of civic society is that the government—and the institutions it explicitly deputizes through federal recognition—cannot systematically subsidize or formalize institutional deception.

The Violation:

• Inalienable rights are grounded in the capacity for reason and self-determination. If the state builds a closed loop of circular deference (where the U.S. Department of Education, institutional accreditors, and programmatic boards all validate an epistemological vacuum), it compromises the citizen's ability to act as a rational agent.

The Civic Impact:

• This is a form of cognitive entrapment. It weaponizes the prestige of the state to distort the baseline information environment of society, compromising a person's fundamental right to evaluate reality without institutional engineering.