001. Tom Chivers writes at The Spectator in "How does naturopathy work? A bit like a flying vacuum-cleaner to Mars" (2014-11-10):
"every so often you read a piece about alternative medicine that asks: how does it work? How does homeopathy work, how does acupuncture work, etc. There was a piece in the Telegraph recently that asked: how does naturopathy work? [...]";
not if, but an assumed working 'how'ness.
"the problem with this piece – and with an awful lot of other pieces on similar topics – is that there’s no point answering the question ‘how does X work?’ until you have first answered the underlying question: ‘does X work?’ [..]";
hear, hear.
"does naturopathy work? Short answer: of course not, don’t be ridiculous. The long answer is a bit more involved: naturopathy isn’t something nice and straightforward like homeopathy, which you can simply point at and say ‘obviously diluting something until there is literally none of it left doesn’t make it work better as a medicine, and even if you think it does, we’ve got all these studies to show that it doesn’t’. Naturopathy is a broad tent of silliness [...] as far as I can work out, ‘naturopathy’ is pretty much just any old
alt-med quackery, all available under one roof; a one-stop nonsense shop [...]";
and there you go. An excellent thumbnail label.
