JREF-SBM's Naturopathy Guide: Excellent, Damning, Available!

here, I promote the just-released James Randi Educational Foundation and sciencebasedmedicine.org Kindle / Apple / Nook title "Science-Based Medicine Reviews: Naturopathy".  Oh my, oh my, oh my:

001. some specifics from in "Science-Based Medicine Reviews: Naturopathy.  A Critical Guide for the Health Practitioner and Consumer" (2013, ASIN B00B9JKFWE):

001.a. people:

the editors:

MDs Novella and Gorski;

the contributors include:

MD Novella, MD PhD Gorski, MD Crislip, 

MD Atwood, MD Hall, MD Lipson, 

MD Albietz, RPh Gavura, PhD Kroll, 

VMD McKenzie, DVM Ramey, MD Snyder, 

JD Bellamy, MD Sampson;

 

001.b. in the introduction where we're told:

"the mission of Science-Based Medicine [...] is to be a source of reliable information and analysis to help navigate the wild west of health information on the internet and elsewhere [..]";

hear, hear.  Now, I MUST add, naturopathy itself claims the label "science-based" as well.  So, here we are, apparently, at loggerheads already: a science-based criticism of a claimed science-based area!  Sign me up, I love collisions of claims.  But, naturopathy's claim to being scientific is quite fake: to this day, for instance, here is an ND consortia claim of science upon homeopathy and that is known hugely to be bunk.  It's that simple; there is no 'at loggerheads' issue.  Where Science-Based Medicine has their work cut out for them is not in revealing such naturopathic nonsense because that's easy.  I often label that nonsense "the naturoPATHillogical."  The larger task, which is not the main mission of SBM,  is the political implementation of SBM particularly in terms of current and future naturopathy licensure (IMHO).  They likely will win on that front, because they are unopposed and, as I've just shown, quite 'radar-sneaky'.

"the philosophy of SBM [...is] it is in everyone's best interest for health care to be systematically evaluated by the best science available [...] a systematic and careful use of evidence and logic to evaluate factual claims [...yet] there are numerous and powerful influences in society that strongly appose the scientific basis of medicine [...and speaks of] adjusting the threshold of evidence required to establish a new claim based upon the prior scientific plausibility of the new claim [...aka] cumulative scientific knowledge [...]";

true, true, true. Extraordinary claims demand...

002.c. sections of the book include:

basic science / theory;
law and politics;
clinical trials and uses;
quackademics;
what's the harm?

Note: by way of disclosure, I must point out that at the original sciencebasedmedicine.org posts that the book references, I have made many, many comments over the years under the user name "daijiyobu".

what's always so interesting is the often complete silence of the naturopathy crowd to scientific criticism.  The light is shone onto them, and they slither away into their dark crevice because in terms of their science-basis, there's no there there.

yet, this book should be the first thing someone reads regarding naturopathy be they: a legislator, a potential or current naturopathy patient, and potential or current student of naturopathy [I went to ND school for four years and left in disgust].