The Naturocrit Podcast - Episode 015b1 [s02e05b1] Script and Annotations [Part 2 of 5]

this is the script and annotations for the multi-part Naturocrit Podcast Episode 015, aka s02e05, titled “The JACM 2019 Special Issue on Naturopathy”. 

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in this first third of Episode 015 Part 2, I will take a break from the SIN proper and share my 2021 Master's degree capstone product, which asks and answers this question:

"Is care founded upon epistemically unwarranted medical claims and methods an appropriate publicly-funded remedy for America's underserved and vulnerable populations' rampant healthcare inaccessibility and inequality issues? The case of Bastyr University’s Center for Natural Health and BU’s satellite community clinics":

001. Episode 015b1 Script and Annotations [Part 2 of 5]:

 

Table 3.

Bastyr University Clinic San Diego, California (bastyrclinic.org).

Language from bastyrclinic.org CITATIONS: (BUC, 2021a; BUC, 2021c; BUC, 2021b; BUC, 2021d)
Assurances	EU	Transgressions
teaching clinic, comprehensive, aims to help, wellness support, prevent illness, feel heard, respected, understood, resolve chronic health problems,  support healthy lifestyles, identifying and treating the causes of disease, primary care, science-based foundation, medical school, many other degrees at the University, world’s leading academic center in natural health, transformative, licensed, improve your quality of life, disease prevention, become a full partner, gain control, thoughtful and informed decisions, provides all aspects of natural health, preventative health  care, fully address your health, thorough diagnosis, comprehensive treatment, suited to your individual needs,  doctoral-level study, accredited, NPLEX licensure exam, professional state associations, evidence-based	physical medicine (which is the naturopathic analog of chiropractic manipulation), homeopathy, hydrotherapy, supplements, visceral manipulation, craniosacral therapy, vitalism	coded vitalism, science claimed upon the supernatural, science-claim/delineation upon ancient and traditional or blended knowledge

Dyer and Hall’s EU examples will be extended, in the process of this project, toward naturopathy in Washington State and California as there is no specific mention of naturopathy in their study.

But, all the basic components of naturopathy or that which is analogous are there in that study.

Each is granularly named, such as homeopathy, chiropractic particularly subluxation ‘theory’ CITATION: (Homola, 2006),  therapeutic touch, crystal healing, astrology, acupuncture, anti-vaccination, and animism.

Below is a mapping of those areas from the study, there termed health pseudoscience CITATION: (Dyer & Hall, 2019, p.309).

This is not an attempt to be exhaustive in terms of the rather boundless contents of naturopathy:

Table 4.

EU Item in Dyer and Hall	BU, BCNH, or BUC parallel or analog
homeopathy	homeopathy, classical homeopathy, drainage therapy CITATION: (BU, 2021d)
chiropractic	physical medicine (spinal adjustment, hydrotherapy)
therapeutic touch, crystal healing	craniosacral therapy
astrology	Vedic astrology CITATION: (BU, 2021c); astrological medicine CITATION: (BU, 2013)
acupuncture	acupuncture / traditional Chinese medicine
anti-vaccination	ubiquitous toxins CITATIONS: (BU, 2021d; BU, 2011a; BU, 2020); supplements
animism	vitalism, supernaturalism, esotericism

00.51.56

SIDEBAR

So, many of the health pseudoscience items at BU are in one-to-one correlation with what’s listed in Dyer and Hall.

That is quite useful.

Chiropractic has become so blended with physical therapy that the aspects I’m really looking at in terms of chiropractic -- and Dyer and Hall are looking at in terms of chiropractic -- are the weird essential ideas from the 1800s like subluxation theory.

And naturopathy does a lot of amalgamated essential weird stuff within their physical medicine.

I should know since I took that class within naturopathy school, where you crack peoples’ backs and spines.

And when I was in school, it was embedded within Goodheart’s applied kinesiology theory which is triple the crazy in terms of science.

For the antivaccination analogy, when antivaxxers deny science and the benefits of vaccination, they speak often of being made toxic with something in the vaccine.

Naturopaths are, of course, historically famous for claiming toxins everywhere:

not just the reasonable scientific ideas such as those in environmental medicine, real environmental medicine, real environmental medicine, but the make-a-fast-buck toxins-are-the-source-of-all-ills unreasonable kind / unreasonable pseudoscientific ideas.

Also included, as relates to their income from The Toxin Boogeyman scheme, is the claim of detoxification with antitoxin supplements, which of course they solely dispense.

For the animism, I correlate naturopathy’s metaphysicalisms.

They’re not this physical world, they’re not psychology, they are not of the things that let’s say are evident and measurable and processable by science.

And often they are the things that are refuted by evidence and quite nonparsimonious in terms of what we know about this world and how it works.

END SIDEBAR.

A knowledge model can be derived from these contents.

The quite synthetic and syncretic knowledge modeling of natural health science CITATION: (BU, 2021e), as Model 2, as compared to mainstream health care systems and their mainstream science fix to singular CITATIONS: (Walton & Zhang, 2013, p.3), as Model 1, can be summated with these two diagrams:

 

Model 1. [author created]

 

 

 Model 2.[author created]

 

00.55.09

SIDEBAR:

I’m very happy with the creation of these knowledge models in the sense that, in doing the capstone, even after a couple of decades of studying naturopathy, it really helped me clarify certain aspects of naturopathy in terms of, basically, epistemology.

If the very tip of the pyramid is sort of the result, then it makes sense that modern healthcare, with all its stringencies and requirements -- of self-testing and self-correcting and evidence and science, and collective participation -- ends with the epistemically warranted as an outcome.

And it also makes sense that for Model 2, which is where naturopathy falls, the result is the epistemically unwarranted as the final outcome because there is so little integrity within the process.

CLOSE SIDEBAR.

Procedural method or lack thereof forms the base of the models.

The middle layer is the resulting knowledge in terms of stringency and veracity, and the top triangle is the overall knowledge categorization.

In Model 2, the natural health science model, an often-hidden body of commitments and preferences coupled with an overall project of amassing or combining, results in blended knowledge, falsely labeled knowledge, and the epistemically unwarranted.

In Model 1, the health care professions’ obligation to rigorous science standards is shown.

In the process, a rather opposite orientation to knowledge acquisition occurs as compared to Model 2, categorized as the epistemically warranted [EW].

Table 5.

This is a single table for a side-by-side comparison of these Models’ polarities.

 

epistemic behaviors	Model 1. mainstream modern science-based health care	Model 2. natural health science (naturopathy and kind)
approach to acquiring knowledge	methodological naturalism	disoriented esotericism
anchoring aspect	delineation of epistemic kinds, analysis	occult sectarian preconceptions, aggregation
results	epistemic rigor, categorical veracity	epistemic conflation, categorical falsehood
summative label	epistemically warranted (reasonable, evidence-driven)	epistemically unwarranted (irrational, without evidence)

One last thing to note is that naturopaths claim to get to the root cause of a patient’s issue, instead of just treating symptoms.

Ironically, this knowledge modeling is such an activity but turned toward naturopathy.

The deep behaviors of Model 2 specifically manifest themselves across naturopathy in various manners (e.g., claims, therapies, style of communication, transgressions).

[Continues in next post].