here, perhaps irony / gallows humor sprinkled with a little ribbing on my part, though I'm not directly equating any part of the scientific skeptical movement with a starship crew that basically is seventy and older IRL years and rather mothballed [wink-wink]. I will end on a positive note, because hope is something I suffer from:
001. at Science-Based Medicine, Jann Bellamy writes in "Legislative Alchemy: 'Naturopathic Doctor' Licensing is Bad Medicine for Florida" (2026-03-03) [my comments are in bold]:
"Hello, again. Good to be here. As some of you may recall, I was a regular SBM contributor from 2010 to 2022. As an attorney, I was particularly disturbed by the incorporation of rank pseudoscience into the law, a phenomenon I dubbed 'Legislative Alchemy', the subject of many of my posts [...the subtitle to the post was] bad medicine, bad laws, bad choice";
hear, hear. Here's a Perplexity AI-LLM summary of the entire post: "The overall attitude is strongly critical and oppositional, with a tone that is urgent, alarmed, and openly disdainful toward naturopathic licensing and the legislators supporting it."
I can get behind that! After all, I stated to my own Connecticut Public Health Committee that their strange / special / peculiar treatment of naturopathy in terms of statute is, minimally, "oversight incompetence" and "sanctioned deception" [Podcast Episode 017a starting at about 00.10.36]. Episode summary: "So, this episode isn’t just about what naturopathy claims to be. It’s about what happens when a state’s statutes, regulators, and institutions decide to pretend those claims are true – and how that decision quietly corrodes scientific integrity, consumer protection, and the basic conditions for real freedom including of belief and of choice."
002. my comment to that SBM post:
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"[Through the cobwebs…] Naturopathy, you say? 'Round up the usual skeptics and get the Enterprise D first shift back a-venturin'…' Creaky noises... Actually, I've recently been a-venturin' in the little-noticed naturopathy swamp-of-not-Florida but Connecticut. There be monsters here: very legislatively protected, matured, devouring. Florida right now appears to be building the estuaries where naturopathy's little ones can grow to adulthood with this bill push. Perhaps the new episode foreshadows Florida's future after they get that toehold. To quote myself [I'm on a budget]:
'A Cullen–Snyder Applied Case Study: Epistemic Conflation and Freedom Implications in Connecticut Naturopathic Practice
Abstract
This case study applies the Cullen–Snyder Framework for Evaluative Analysis of Naturopathy with Regard to Freedom (v1.0) to a set of Connecticut naturopathic clinical materials. Using a dual analytic structure—(1) Cullen’s epistemic audit and (2) Snyder’s freedom impact matrix—the study evaluates diagnostic expansion, therapeutic boundary stretching, and institutional legitimacy effects. Findings indicate a high Science Camouflage Index, moderate-to-high Institutional Legitimacy Score amplification of weakly supported modalities, and measurable impacts on Snyder’s factuality, sovereignty, and solidarity freedoms. The analysis demonstrates how epistemic conflation within licensed healthcare environments may function as a structural erosion vector affecting both scientific integrity and civic freedom.'
Cheers."
there may even have been a cameo in the commentary section by a certain BMH? Now, the "new episode" I refer to is 017 which focuses on Connecticut ND law and all the legal hooks it creates for those willing to wield a righteous legal sword in the name of positive freedom. The formal rendering in the comment above is available in its entirety by way of the Episode 017c script. So much tyranny for a sleepy place where the rich park their money by way of real estate, and the state acts as a concierge for that class while redlining the poor in decrepit-dysfunctional urban areas.
003. a hopeful note / insistence:
it turns out that "legislative alchemy" ended up in the third application of the CSF, which was UB, in Episode 016a. Therein I write: "Legislative Alchemy [Go Jann!]: The process by which these permissions are secured has been termed 'legislative alchemy' - where lobbying convinces lawmakers to treat alternative therapies as legitimate healthcare despite overwhelming scientific criticism." Now, what gets so twisted in Connecticut is that the law itself for naturopathy labels naturopathy as science. It is so Corrupticut. There is no review process that is objective and 'of science', and therein: what is within the decreed science of naturopathy by law in the state of Connecticut is exempt from any scrutiny because it declares itself science, though the very essence of science is such scrutiny.
a query to ChatGPT in terms of what such mechanisms are using as their prioritized / vetted sources in terms of this task "Which public facing web sites are the best in terms of scientific and ethical evaluation of naturopathy?", to get an idea of WHY the SBM blog was prioritized in terms of authoritative reference, yielded:
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"If your criterion is public-facing, methodologically rigorous, and ethically explicit evaluation of naturopathy, the field is actually quite narrow. Most high-quality evaluation comes from a small set of science-based medicine platforms, academic/public-health sources, and a few critical-but-constructive specialty sites. Below is a structured, discipline-oriented shortlist with commentary on epistemic standards, bias controls, and ethical framing.
1) Dedicated science-based critique platforms (highest signal):
Science-Based Medicine. URL: sciencebasedmedicine.org
- Methodology: Explicitly rooted in scientific realism, plausibility analysis, and evidence hierarchies
- Strengths: systematic dismantling of naturopathic claims at the level of mechanism + clinical evidence, strong focus on standard of care, regulatory ethics, and patient risk, uses clinical literature, not just opinion.
- Limitations: Tone is adversarial; critics argue it is not 'neutral' (though it is methodologically explicit).
- Example finding: Naturopathy often operates without a coherent evidence-based standard of care and may accept modalities 'despite the scientific evidence'."
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now [and acts 'through the cobwebs and creakiness', I will add], deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
speaking of standing, basically of civic duty even in rough seas, incidentally, a long time ago, my first blog rendering was through the address "standtoyourduty.blogspot.com" and particularly the entry "The Epistemic Conflation Of A School of Thought Claiming To Be Scientific"
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[I'd framed a mark-up way back in the day, which still hangs on the wall]
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which will be revisited as Episode 018 hopefully by the end of the year, because it is its twentieth anniversary. It is seminal, truly, because even the current Cullen-Snyder Framework version is centered around the term 'epistemic conflation'."
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