RedScrubs
The Resource for Medical Professionals

“The latest event sponsored by “integrative medicine” proponents on my medical school campus featured the naturopath Peter Bongiorno, a 2003 graduate and valedictorian from Bastyr University. Advertisements all over campus billed the lecture as “Stress, nutrition, and the GI tract,” which seemed innocuous enough. However, the lecture title as written on Bongiorno’s slide show was “Naturopathic apologetics for treating the gut.” He explained “treating the gut” to mean that for a wide variety of symptoms the naturopath’s diagnosis inevitably focuses on the intestine and interventions nearly always involve dietary changes or supplements.”

This rather lengthy discussion on naturopathy brings head-on some of the controversies between conventional medicine and clinical nutrition with complementary alternative medicine (CAM) approaches used in naturopathy. Part of the problem is lack of an evidence based approach that CAM is struggling with. Also brought to light by this blogger was the efficacy of allowing naturopaths to prescribe in certain states with the point being made that they (the naturopaths) do not have the training to practice medicine, but in many cases your local physician wouldn’t mind chatting about CAM therapies such as de-stressing techniques.