here, musings by way of some AI-LLM muscle within my own Naturocrit'in on these Naturocritters. I’ve been thinking about CNME, NACIQI, and ED in light of ‘all that I know.’ And in gaming-out the either thumbs up or thumbs down that ED will do, I realized that such is just a surface distraction / the bushwa [a nice Americanism?] from the larger issues at hand. Therein, some thoughts before I even know about what ED will decide...
[my notations are below in blue and right-aligned]
001. two taskings were assigned to Perplexity:
001.a. “In terms of the findings of the attached 2026 CT ND Final Report PDF and the soon-to-be-determined fate of CNME by way of NACIQI and ED, expound upon the attached DOCX commentary.”
[Note: The commentary was this quick ‘back of a napkin’ scribble:
“Whether ED determines a thumbs up or at [oops, 'a'] thumbs down for CNME, I feel that what I’m watching is superficial. What’s dire is not being addressed, in terms of both knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce, and the integrity of freedom — in so many ways. So, it’s like watching the leaves change on a tree — the thumbs up or thumbs down — on a tree that eats people. All that’s being talked about are the leaves, not the trunk and root issues which are more dire. E.g., the homicidal tree metaphor. All eyes are averted in terms of the dire; it is so decreed, structured, and in terms of processes...baked in. Special treatment...tree-tment. [I’m in my old man punning mood...].”]
001.b. “In terms of the entire system -- federal administrative, state legislative, academic accreditation, broad investigative and evidentiary malaise -- create an explanation of the national, state, and intellectual / lack-of-intellectual virtues and values / vices and transgressions as relates to knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce and positive freedom in the Snyderian sense.”
002. answers [all puns aside]:
002.a. for 001.a.:
“Your DOCX comment is directionally strong, and the attached PDF gives you a fuller vocabulary for explaining why a NACIQI/ED decision on CNME can be superficial even if it feels consequential in the moment. The core idea is that the accreditation outcome is only one visible branch of a larger structure; the PDF argues that Connecticut’s statutory and regulatory framework already embeds deeper problems of epistemic legitimacy, scope, consent, and institutional platforming that are not solved merely by a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on CNME.
Core Meaning
The DOCX says the public process is focused on “leaves” rather than “trunk and root issues,” and the PDF gives substance to that metaphor by identifying those root issues as knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce, and freedom harms built into Chapter 373 and PA 14-231.
In the report’s terms, the deeper problem is not just whether CNME survives federal recognition, but that Connecticut law already treats naturopathy as “science,” grants broad diagnostic and treatment authority, and ties licensure legitimacy to CNME-defined education despite the report’s claim that the curriculum includes non-evidence-based content.
That means your commentary can be expanded into this sharper thesis:
- even a negative CNME outcome at NACIQI/ED would not automatically unwind Connecticut’s state-conferred legitimacy structure, while a positive outcome would merely preserve a system the report characterizes as already corrupted at the level of premises.
- Putting it differently, the accreditation fight matters but the report frames it as secondary to the prior state choice to authorize and platform naturopathy through licensure, title protection, scope language, and regulatory deference.
Why “Superficial” Fits
The PDF’s Cullen-Snyder framing helps explain why you call the proceedings superficial. It argues that the most serious harms are structural: “science camouflage,” inflated institutional legitimacy, impaired informed consent, variable non-evidence-based treatment pathways, diversion from guideline-based care, and erosion of public-health solidarity.
So the NACIQI/ED question can appear procedurally important while still missing the deeper issue:
- whether a federally recognized accreditor is being judged mainly on process, compliance, and recognition criteria, while the underlying educational and practice model remains insufficiently interrogated on epistemic grounds. That is very close to what your DOCX is getting at when it says “what’s dire is not being addressed” and that this avoidance is “baked in.”
Trunk and Roots
If you want to “expound” the commentary, the strongest move is to name the trunk and roots explicitly:
The trunk is state-bestowed legitimacy: Connecticut defines naturopathy as “the science, art and practice of healing by natural methods,” allows NDs to diagnose, prevent, and treat disease, and ties practice authority to CNME-recognized education.
The roots are institutional choices beneath that trunk: outsourcing epistemic standards to the profession’s own accreditor, protecting broad “natural methods” language from external scientific scrutiny, allowing title inflation without robust disclaimers, and integrating NDs into provider directories, insurance structures, and other legitimacy-granting systems.
Under that framing, CNME’s federal fate is not the whole tree. It is one nutrient line feeding a larger organism. [OMG: I believe we just got holistic / wholistic. Go biology!] The report’s point is that:
- even before one asks whether CNME deserves recognition, one must ask why Connecticut law lets professional recognition substitute for independent evidence review in the first place.
Ethics, Commerce, Freedom
Your DOCX mentions knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce, and freedom.
The PDF maps each of those concerns into a more formal critique.
Theme | How the PDF supports your comment |
Knowledge integrity | The report says licensure blurs the boundary between validated medicine and pseudoscience through “science camouflage” and statutory use of the word “science.” |
Ethics | It argues informed consent is degraded when patients infer MD/DO-like competence from “doctor” and “physician” framing without equivalent training or disclosures. |
Commerce | It emphasizes revenue-generating testing, supplement sales, and marketplace expansion facilitated by licensure and payer/platform legitimacy. |
Freedom | Using Snyder’s framework, it argues harms extend to factuality, sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, and solidarity. |
That last point is especially useful for strengthening your commentary.
Instead of saying only that the process misses “dire” issues, you can say it misses harms to freedom itself:
- people cannot exercise real autonomy when the information environment is distorted, when licensed status creates false parity, and when entry into naturopathic care can constrain later access to effective care.
Stronger Formulation
A tighter, expanded version of your DOCX commentary could read like this:
- The NACIQI/ED disposition of CNME may matter administratively, but the attached Connecticut report suggests it does not reach the deepest problem. The public drama centers on whether the leaves stay green or fall, while the trunk and root system remain largely untouched: a state legal framework that declares naturopathy “science,” delegates epistemic authority to CNME-linked standards, grants broad licensure legitimacy, and thereby normalizes pseudoscientific care as healthcare.
Under that view:
- a favorable ED outcome [that CNME persists in some form] would not vindicate knowledge integrity; it would only preserve an already-questionable legitimacy pipeline;
- an unfavorable outcome [bye-bye CNME] would expose one weakness in that pipeline, but it still would not by itself dismantle the broader Connecticut structure of permissions, promotions, protections, and platforming that the report identifies as the real source of harm.
The “tree that eats people” metaphor works because the report does not describe isolated bad actors; it describes a system that can convert licensure into false reassurance, commerce into care theater, and formal choice into impaired freedom.
That is why the accreditation spectacle can feel superficial:
- it is a dispute over canopy management while the root architecture of state-sanctioned epistemic conflation remains in place.”
[Note: Hear, hear. Suggestions taken under advisement! I’m mean, who the ‘f’ else am I going to talk to about this stuff on this level! Machines these days are more virtuous, at times, than, dare I say, 'the people that made them.']
002.b. for 001.b.:
“The whole system you describe can be understood as a layered failure of factuality, accountability, and positive freedom:
- the federal level can preserve scientific integrity in principle, states can dilute it through licensure and permissive scope, accreditors can certify without fully policing epistemic quality, and the surrounding investigative ecosystem can normalize ambiguity until commerce masquerades as care.
In Snyder’s terms, the question is not just whether people are formally “free,” but whether institutions actually support sovereignty, factuality, mobility, unpredictability, and solidarity [that is, positive freedom].
Federal Level
At the federal administrative level, the ideal value is scientific integrity:
- evidence-based decisions should be protected from political distortion, because weak scientific integrity erodes the effectiveness of public programs that depend on objective data. That value tracks directly to Snyder’s factuality and sovereignty, since people cannot make real choices if the state’s own knowledge pipeline is compromised.
The vice, when it appears, is not usually overt censorship; it is procedural weakness, inconsistency, or deference that allows legitimacy to flow without rigorous epistemic review.
In a positive-freedom frame, that means the federal system can fail by not building the conditions for truth, rather than by simply restricting speech.
State Level
At the state legislative level, the deepest value should be consumer protection through evidence-aligned scope, honest titles, and meaningful oversight.
Yet state systems often fragment oversight, and many legislatures lack independent ethics capacity or robust enforcement structures, which makes it easier for professions or insiders to regulate themselves.
In the Connecticut naturopathy context, that pattern becomes especially visible:
- the state can convert a contested practice into a licensed profession, then allow the credential to serve as a proxy for competence and evidence;
- the vice is institutional credentialism — bestowing legitimacy by statute and platform rather than by independent validation [which is a form of rule-by-law authoritarianism, IMHO] —while the transgression is that the public is encouraged to infer scientific parity that the underlying epistemic base does not earn.
Academic Accreditation
Academic accreditation should embody intellectual virtues:
- honesty, open-mindedness, teachability, intellectual humility, and willingness to revise claims under evidence.
[Note: Hear, hear!!! Ah, teachability. By the way, as a person who has 'education' in the title of his B.A. major, a Health Sciences M.S. with a sub-specialization in health professions education, a current AMT credential as an Allied Health Instructor {all minor things, I understand}, it is not a reach for me to also remind that in terms of what educators do, as in teach the teachable, according to the National Education Association's Code of Ethics titled "Code of Ethics for Educators" which applies to teachers and administrators {a representative preponderance}, it is fundamentally WRONG to misteach the unteachable so to speak. Regarding that Code and misteaching the unteachable, Perplexity gives a nice summary:
"Read straightforwardly, the NEA Code of Ethics is clearly incompatible with the basic idea of “misteaching” in the sense of knowingly giving students distorted or misleading instruction [...] while the NEA Code never uses the term “unteachable,” the combination of (1) the evidentiary status of core naturopathic doctrines, and (2) the Code’s insistence on truth‑seeking and non‑distortion, gives you a defensible argument that presenting those doctrines as scientifically supported is ethically incompatible with proper teaching, and thus sits in the zone you are calling unteachability."]
On that view, accreditation is not merely bureaucratic recognition; it is a public promise that the educational pipeline cultivates reliable knowledge practices.
The vice is intellectual complacency or closed-mindedness when an accreditor treats doctrinal continuity as a substitute for evidence quality.
If an academic system contains homeopathy, vitalism, or similar modalities without forceful epistemic differentiation, then it is not just teaching content; it is training students in blurred boundaries between science and non-science.
[Note: And I'd like to remind: WITH forceful epistemic misrepresentation -- e.g. the label of academic "health science" and academic "science-based," and, as in CT law broadly, "science"; plus, after all, 'naturopathy combines' and 'naturopathy blends' is their sectarian transgressive MO].
Investigative Malaise
The broader investigative and evidentiary malaise is the social habit of treating documentation, titles, process, and “being regulated” as if they were proof of truth. That malaise is not ignorance alone; it is a moral and epistemic failure of diligence, courage, and honesty, because it permits ambiguity to do work that evidence should be doing [An amazing two sentences / statement! And truth here, of course, is within the organized, systematized, self-testing, self-correcting science context].
In your terms, this is where “commerce” enters as a vice:
- the marketplace rewards ambiguity, credentialed legitimacy, and professional branding, while the cost of false confidence is shifted onto patients and the public. This corrodes positive freedom because people are not merely free from restraint; they are deprived of the informational and institutional conditions needed to choose well.
[Note: I was interested in this aspect because I was thinking about the law-writing process that I’d covered in Podcast Episode 017 and the later DPH criticism of naturopathy when they asked for scope expansion towards prescribing by the CT healthcare establishment. So we get a law that falsely categorizes naturopathy fundamentally as science then a report that says 'not committed to science, antithetical to science.' What bushwa!!! The special report document that was created by the CT DPH stated “finding evidence-based literature on naturopathy is difficult as naturopathy is based more on philosophy compared to conventional medicine, which is based on science and research.” CT’s DPH and ct.gov overall did not do something more vital and simple in terms of evidence and the house that they claim to keep in order: look at the NDs’ practice pages, for starters, within their very own state; look at the UB ND program curriculum the state has approved as health science. I did look at practices with the 2026 Final Report of CT NDs. Sure it cost me time, but not much money itself in terms of computational expenses. Such malaise, such preference!!!
I tasked ChatGPT separate from this post's Perplexity thread, to look into the document which is here
https://portal.ct.gov/dph/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/dph/practitioner_licensing_and_investigations/scope_of_practice_2017/02172017naturopathreportfinalrevisedpdf.pdf
and was told as an answer to my interrogations:
“'[Yes] the report contains no evidence that DPH systematically examined the actual public-facing practice websites of Connecticut naturopaths’ [so] that would be a fair characterization of the document [lets hear it for citizen science...] the 2017 DPH report relied heavily on stakeholder testimony, organizational submissions, and selected literature rather than conducting an independent investigation of Connecticut naturopaths' actual practice websites or marketing claims. While DPH made some evaluative observations of its own, many of the report's substantive criticisms of naturopathy were presented through the views of physician and nursing organizations participating in the committee process [...] the 2026 report's most significant addition is that it moves from stakeholder assertions about naturopathy to claims about observed Connecticut naturopathic practice patterns and marketing content, something the 2017 DPH report largely did not do.”]
Snyderian Mapping
Snyder’s five freedoms give a useful structure for the whole system:
- factuality is damaged when institutions blur evidence and belief;
- sovereignty is damaged when people consent under false premises;
- mobility is damaged when licensing funnels people into constrained care pathways;
- unpredictability is damaged when outcomes depend on provider ideology rather than evidence;
- and solidarity is damaged when public institutions normalize practices that weaken collective welfare.
That is the central diagnosis: the system’s vices are not only bad outcomes, but bad conditions of possibility for freedom.
The institutional virtue you are looking for would be disciplined truth-telling, external review, honest scope limits, and refusal to let professional or commercial convenience stand in for epistemic warrant.
Values and Vices
Level | Virtues | Vices | Freedom harmed |
Federal administration | Scientific integrity, evidence-based policymaking, transparent records | Political distortion, procedural drift, weak evidence discipline | Factuality, sovereignty |
State legislation | Consumer protection, evidence-aligned scope, independent oversight [ | Credentialism, regulatory capture, permissive title/scope rules | Mobility, sovereignty, solidarity |
Accreditation | Intellectual humility, teachability, epistemic honesty | Closed-mindedness, doctrinal insulation, false equivalence | Factuality, unpredictability |
Investigative culture | Diligence, adversarial testing, evidentiary rigor | Ambiguity tolerance, commerce-first validation, superficial process-worship | All five, especially factuality |
The shortest way to state the whole matter [again, being holistic / wholistic!!!] is this:
- the national problem is not merely that some institutions make bad decisions, but that different layers of authority can each launder uncertainty into legitimacy. That is exactly the kind of environment in which positive freedom atrophies, because the citizen is left with form without truth, choice without adequacy, and regulation without accountability.”
[Note: Even today in the naturopathy news that google.com aggregates, we're informed by a proponent and "future naturopathic doctor" of Ohio's "Senate Bill 385." The bill's primary sponsor is Terry Johnson. The current introduced version comports with the CT ND Final Report of 2026 in this way, briefly, via Perplexity:
- "Epistemic outsourcing: By hard‑coding CNME and NABNE into licensure eligibility and using the State Medical Board only as an administrative shell, Ohio delegates science‑content decisions to naturopathic professional bodies whose curricula include modalities lacking credible evidence (homeopathy, vitalism, detox protocols).
- Statutory anti‑guardrail clause: The directive that the Board “shall not limit” naturopathic devices, substances, and therapies effectively pre‑commits the state to licensing pseudoscientific modalities now and in the future, even as independent evidence evolves.
- Title‑based science camouflage: Protected use of “naturopathic physician/doctor” without mandatory training and scope disclosure invites reasonable but false inferences of parity with MD/DO education and evidentiary standards, corrupting informed consent and substantive autonomy.
- Institutional platforming via the Medical Board: Listing NDs in the same public directory and applying the same probation framework as physicians amplifies science camouflage by presenting naturopathy as simply another medical specialty, not as an epistemically heterogeneous practice that includes non‑evidence‑based modalities.
- Behavioral discipline in place of epistemic scrutiny: The disciplinary provisions focus on fraud, gross deviations, and personal impairment but never ask whether core naturopathic modalities themselves meet minimal evidentiary thresholds, reproducing CT’s pattern of blaming individual “bad actors” while the licensure statute structurally enables harm."
Same as it ever was.]
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