A 'Now Open' 2016 Letter To Elsevier Regarding Science Degradation

here, a recent query to publisher Elsevier:

001. in an email I'll term "A Letter To Elsevier Regarding Science Degradation", I recently wrote:

"2016-07-20

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to request comment regarding a long-standing categorical claim that has appeared in a published article of the Medical Clinics of North America which I think is false.

Let me provide some background.

Naturopathy is a subject I've been researching for almost twenty years, including my four years of attendance at an in-residence North American naturopathic 'medical' school in Connecticut.

As part of my research, I publish a podcast about naturopathy and its relationship or lack of relationship to medicine and science, in terms of both epistemology and ethics.

Currently, I am in the midst of writing, recording and publishing Episode 012, which is titled "Preponderant and Universal Medical Ethical Codes and North American Naturopathy's Transgressions"

.

.

[see archive.org: http://archive.org/search.php?query=%28naturocrit%29&sort=-date ].

Your MCNA article from 2002, that I feature prominently in this Episode, is titled appropriately
"Naturopathy" and here is the citation

[see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11795088 ]:

.

.

Here is the problem, as I see it, and I'll briefly formulate it based upon what I'll call
'preponderant sources':a) Notice the language from your article "with all other branches of medical science", which is a categorical claim that naturopathy is a subset of science. I've checked the language of this abstract with the bound / paper-based article, which I own, and it is the same language the naturopath-authors use in their summary within the article. This "branches" claim, by the way, is quite typical for naturopathy. Here is one of the ND granting schools stating it currently 

[see http://www.scnm.edu/about-scnm/naturopathicmedicine/ ].

b) What isn't disclosed in your article, and by naturopathy also, is this illogical situation:

b1) Science is claimed categorically upon 'the naturopathic';b2) In their own words, globally, naturopathy is based upon a "vital force (vis vitalis)" which has been for-decades science-ejected. Just this June 2016, the World Naturopathy Federation, which includes the AANMC which is a consortia of North American naturopathy schools including SCNM that I've included a link to above, published their "Naturopathic Root's Report" and that language
specifically that I have just quoted

[see either http://worldnaturopathicfederation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Naturopathic-Roots_final- 1.pdf
or the curated https://web.archive.org/web/20160713040310/http://worldnaturopathicfederation.org/wpcontent/
uploads/2015/12/Naturopathic-Roots_final-1.pdf]

The authors of your naturopathy article are graduates of an AANMC school;

c) The Next Generation Science Standards actually chose vital force / vitalism / vis
vitalis as an EPITOME of the science-ejected. You can easily find this at The National
Academies Press, in the publication "A Framework for K- 12 Science Education:
Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (2012)"

[see http://www.nap.edu/read/13165/chapter/7#42 ]

which was authored by the Committee on a Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards, the Board on Science Education, the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the National Research Council. I would like comment regarding this situation, and that could include your current editorial staff, the original editor of the issue, and the ND authors of the article.

How can what is based upon the science-ejected essentially categorically be termed "science", and specifically "medical science"?

How do we get this nonsense to make sense?

One of the biggest problems I see is pollution of the MEDLINE database by a false categorization, and an unnecessary degradation of scientific integrity.

I thank you for your time, and your consideration of this issue.

Sincerely,

Rob Cullen, RMA AHI CPC-A CPI
Bridgeport, CT"