CSF Application #010 Appendage - On Educational Grades and Naturopathy's Errors!

here, a continuation of the CSF Application #010 - education, education, education.  Quite ironic for naturopathy since they claim "doctor as teacher":

001. again within the same Perplexity thread as the previous post:

001.a. tasking: "What kinds of errors in thinking are being manifest by the practice that has been focused upon, in light of: a) medicine as an applied science b) etiology and manifestation c) the correlational versus the causal d) theater versus reality?  At what level of general K-12 and higher education are such errors supposed to be dealt with in terms of educational outcomes?"

001.b. answer:

"This question cuts to the educational foundations of everything documented in this thread. The errors being committed are not exotic or advanced — they are categorically foundational, and most are addressed in formal education before college. That is precisely what makes them so damaging when they are institutionalized at the doctoral level.

A) Medicine as an Applied Science

Medicine is an applied science in a specific and rigorous sense:

• it applies knowledge generated by the basic sciences — biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology — through systematic clinical investigation governed by evidence standards, and its interventions must be accountable to measurable outcomes in human biology.

The errors manifest throughout this thread's subject matter include a fundamental category confusion:

• naturopathy is presented and licensed as an applied science while its foundational principles operate outside the scientific framework that defines applied science.

The NUNM Principles claim "objective observation" and "scientific analysis" as the basis for vitalism and spiritual disease causation — but objective observation is a scientific method, not a legitimizing label that can be affixed to any assertion.

[Note: Oh snap!]

Applied science requires that:

• Claims be operationalizable and testable
• Interventions be evaluated against outcomes in controlled conditions
• Mechanisms be traceable to validated basic science

Every element of the Godby/SNMC diagnostic and therapeutic portfolio that the CSF Report flagged fails at least one of these requirements [e.g.]:

• "Energetic resonance signals" from hair are not operationalizable.
• "Life force" has no traceable mechanism.
• "Adrenal fatigue" has no validated physiological substrate.

These are not minor gaps; they are constitutive failures of what it means to be an applied science.

The error is specifically category error — treating a belief system as if it were a science-derived practice and then claiming the accountability standards of the latter.

[Note: Even if the error doesn't, yet, have a fancy name for what is being entailed: category error, scientism, epistemic trespass.]

B) Etiology and Manifestation

Etiology — the rigorous study of disease causation — is one of medicine's most disciplined domains. It distinguishes between:

• Necessary causes (without which the disease cannot occur)
• Sufficient causes (which alone produce the disease)
• Contributing factors (which modulate risk but are neither necessary nor sufficient)
• Correlation (co-occurrence without established causal pathway)

The errors throughout the subject matter of this thread include several distinct etiological fallacies:

Pluralistic causal overreach. The NUNM tolle causam principle asserts that causes operate simultaneously at "physical, mental-emotional, and spiritual" levels, and that the physician must address all of them. This is not an etiological framework — it is an assertion that everything is always causally relevant to everything, which destroys etiological precision rather than enhancing it.

Root cause mystification. SNMC marketing frames IgG food sensitivity as a root cause of anxiety, depression, obesity, and brain fog; OptimalDX "optimal ranges" as revealing hidden root causes of chronic disease; neurotransmitter urine testing as identifying root causes of psychiatric illness. In each case a correlate — often a contested one — is elevated to the status of necessary or sufficient cause without evidence of causal mechanism or therapeutic outcome data. This is not etiological reasoning; it is etiological theater.

Symptom suppression as causation. NUNM's primum non nocere reformulation asserts that suppressing symptoms without addressing causes is itself harmful. This embeds a specific etiological claim — that untreated root causes invariably worsen disease — that is not supported across the broad disease landscape and is actively contradicted in many domains (e.g., pain management, hypertension, type 1 diabetes). The error is treating an etiological preference as an etiological law.

C) The Correlational vs. Causal 

This is perhaps the most pervasive and identifiable error class in the entire body of practice analyzed in this thread. The correlation/causation fallacy — formally post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this") — is the single most common reasoning error in alternative medicine. Its forms here include:

Correlational Claim Made	Causal Inference Drawn	Why It's Unwarranted
IgG antibodies to foods detected	Those foods cause anxiety, depression, obesity	IgG indicates antigen exposure, not pathological response; no RCT evidence for claimed outcomes
"Optimal range" deviation detected	Deviation causes chronic disease	"Optimal ranges" are not validated against clinical outcomes
Symptom improvement after naturopathic treatment	Naturopathic treatment caused improvement	Natural disease course, placebo effect, regression to the mean, concurrent conventional care all uncontrolled
Thyroid reflex measurement (ThyroFlex) deviates	Thyroid cellular dysfunction present	Device measures neuromotor reflex; no validated correlation to intracellular thyroid status
Hair scanning detects "energetic resonance"	Parasites, EMR exposure, or toxins present	No validated physical mechanism for the measurement; no outcome data

The correlational/causal confusion also operates at the institutional level. The CBNM Sunset Review characterizes skepticism about ND efficacy as an "under-recognition of safety and efficacy" — implying that the existence of a large patient population using naturopathic care is evidence of its efficacy.

Patient volume is a measure of utilization, not of outcome. This is the same error, scaled up.

D) Theater vs. Reality

This is the dimension the Naturocrit introduction captures with "naturopathillogical" — the clinical theater operates independently of whether any actual mechanism is at work. The errors here are:

• Diagnostic theater. Hair scanning, applied kinesiology, urine neurotransmitter panels, and ThyroFlex all produce outputs — numbers, graphs, "imbalances," "sensitivities" — that have the formal appearance of diagnostic results without validated connection to physiological reality. The theater is precise: white coats, laboratory aesthetics, numerical readouts, technical vocabulary. The reality is that the outputs do not reliably correspond to any measurable biological state.
• Therapeutic theater. HBOT chambers, IV nutrient drips, ozone autohemotherapy — these are procedurally elaborate, physically immersive, clinically formatted interventions. The elaborateness of the theater is not incidental; it is therapeutic in a specific and limited sense — placebo response is real and partially modulated by ritual complexity. But therapeutic theater that is sold as validated mechanism-based intervention, and priced accordingly, conflates the two.
• Credential theater. The NUNM Principles, the CBNM license, the DCA branding, the "Medical Center" naming, the title "physician" used eleven times across the six principles — these are all elements of a professional theater whose staging is identical to regulated medicine while the backstage mechanisms diverge fundamentally. The patient sees the same stage set and cannot detect the difference.
• Etiological theater. The act of attributing a patient's symptoms to "spiritual root causes," "life force disruption," or "optimal range deviations" is a performance of etiological reasoning without its substance. It produces the feeling of diagnosis — a named cause, a treatment plan, a clinical narrative — without the validity that etiological reasoning requires.

The Educational Level at Which These Errors Are Supposed to Be Resolved

This is where the institutional scandal becomes sharpest. Every error catalogued above is addressed in formal education well before graduate school:

Error Type	Educational Level Where Addressed	Standard/Framework
Correlation ≠ causation	Middle school / grades 6–8	NGSS Crosscutting Concept: "Cause and Effect"; specifically taught as a distinct reasoning skill by grade 8
Category error (belief ≠ science)	Elementary through middle school	NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: distinguishing questions answerable by science from those that are not; introduced at K–2 and formalized by grade 5
Falsifiability / testability as scientific criterion	Middle to high school / grades 6–12	NGSS Practices; also addressed in Common Core ELA standards for evaluating evidence and argument
Post hoc fallacy / anecdotal evidence	High school / grades 9–12	Common Core ELA Standards for informational text: evaluating validity of reasoning, assessing evidence quality
Operationalization of claims	Introductory undergraduate / college	Research methods, statistics 101, philosophy of science
Applied science vs. belief system distinction	High school biology / introductory undergraduate	NOS (Nature of Science) framework embedded in NGSS from grade 3 onward
Placebo / theater vs. mechanism distinction	High school / introductory college biology or health science	Evidence hierarchies: case report → RCT → systematic review

The correlation/causation distinction — the most pervasive single error in this thread's subject matter — is a 6th grade educational outcome in the NGSS framework.

The category distinction between scientific and non-scientific questions is introduced at the kindergarten to 2nd grade level in the NGSS.

What this means, stated plainly:

• the reasoning errors that are foundational to naturopathic practice as documented in this thread — and that NUNM embeds in its foundational professional principles — are errors that the American public K–12 educational system is specifically designed to eliminate before students reach high school graduation.
• A doctoral-level program that builds its foundational principles on those errors, and then asserts those principles survive scientific analysis, is not only failing its students educationally — it is institutionally inverting the K–12 educational project while claiming to extend it at its highest level.

References

Achieve, Inc. (2013). Matrix for K–12 progression of crosscutting concepts in NGSS (Appendix G). Next Generation Science Standards Lead States. https://static.nsta.org/ngss/resources/MatrixForK-12ProgressionOfCrosscuttingConceptsInNGSS.8.8.14.pdf

California Board of Naturopathic Medicine. (2026). 2026 sunset review report: Presented to the Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development and the Assembly Committee on Business and Professions. California Department of Consumer Affairs.

Cullen, R. (2026, March 18). The Cullen-Snyder framework for evaluative analysis of naturopathy with regard to freedom (v.1.1). [Unpublished framework document].

Cullen, R. (2026). The Naturocrit Podcast [Standard introduction text]. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-naturocrit-podcast/id665188081[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]

Ernst, E., & Hung, S. K. (2011). Great expectations: What do patients using complementary and alternative medicine hope for? Patient, 4(2), 89–101.

Godby, D., Le, N., Ho, E., Nguyen, T., & Mendoza, S. (n.d.). Sacramento Naturopathic Medical Center [Website content analysis]. sac-nd.com.

Insight Assessment. (2025, April 14). What the critical thinking data tell us: K–12 education. https://insightassessment.com/iaresource/what-the-critical-thinking-data-tell-us-k-12-education/

Logically Fallacious. (2021, October 20). Fallacy of causation in alternative medicine? https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/cgi-bin/uy/qa.cgi?ns_questions+sM6SdSDc

National Academy of Sciences. (2013). A framework for K–12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. National Academies Press. https://www.pdesas.org/davbauman/2021/12/6/779378/file.aspx

National University of Natural Medicine. (2026). Naturopathic principles of healing. https://nunm.edu/academics/college-of-naturopathic-medicine/naturopathic-principles-of-healing/[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]

Nissen, N., & Weidenhammer, W. (2020). Unifying principles of naturopathic medicine: Origins and definitions. Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal, 19(3). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7219457/

Sampson, W. (2001). Alternative medicine and common errors of reasoning. Academic Medicine, 76(3), 230–237. https://academic.oup.com/academicmedicine/article/76/3/230/8356483

Singh, S., & Ernst, E. (2013). Thirteen follies and fallacies about alternative medicine. The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 43(4). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3981077/

Snyder, T. (2024). On freedom. Crown.

Swarup, N., & Ghosh, R. (2024, July 10). Science and faith as applied to medicine. PMC Open Access. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11410286/."