Offit says it infuriates him to see not only ordinary citizens buy into the claims of homeopaths, naturopaths and the vitamin industry, but doctors and hospitals. He calls out Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Deepak Chopra and others, saying they have abandoned science for the thrill of celebrity that goes with evangelizing alternative medicine.
“They have this almost guru-like stature that you should listen to them,” Offit says. “It is the surety of their statements that draw you to them. They make you think they are someone who just knows. But it should be the strength of data, the strength of science, rather than personality, that decide what it is true.”
Weil, for instance, has promoted the plant kava as a non-addictive relaxant. “Seven years later, when kava was shown to cause severe liver damage, the FDA issued a warning against its use,” Offit writes. But few consumers are aware. Weil sells his own line of supplements.
Chopra sells a line of supplements, oils, books and even jewelry. “Chopra has helped wealthy businessmen, celebrities and politicians like Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Milken and Hillary Clinton find their inner space without feeling bad about being rich,” Offit writes.
“Definition of an optimist: a person with a depressed friend.”
"I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything."
"It has been said that Ken Wilber is a cult leader. Some say a destructive cult leader. He counts Bill and Hillary Clinton as followers. Bill Clinton has quoted him. Hillary responded enthusiastically, when asked if she was trying to find Wilber's Theory of Everything, 'That’s right, that’s exactly right!'”
Licensed naturopathic physicians should play an integral part in patient access to alternative medicine within the Federal Healthcare Law (Obamacare) as they serve as primary care physicians within the complementary health care field.
With Americans spending over $34 billion dollars spent annually on alternative medicine, the inclusion of licensed Naturopathic physicians would offer patients the option of seeking alternative medicine care covered by insurance AND provide access for those currently unable to afford care.
Licensed Naturopathic physicians are able to diagnose and treat both acute and chronic disease and are experts in nutrition, herbs, and other holistic therapies.
"Blasphemy laws are very strange because they can be both very silly and also very sinister. They are very silly because you are talking about crying statues and moving statues or Virgin Marys appearing in tree stumps in Co Limerick. But on the other hand these type of laws are used in Islamic countries to jail people or sentence them to death. Or in Sanal's case facing a jail sentence for his work exposing bogus miracles.
The Irish government should pay attention to Sanal's case and realise they must get rid of this absurd and dangerous law. Because we shouldn't be so smug in Ireland. After all, we have had the hysteria about moving statues and a man bringing people to a shrine in Co Mayo so they can look at the sun and see the Virgin Mary."-- Mick Nugent, Atheist Ireland, on how East and West come together "spiritually" to crush people
Oh, take my word for it, Mr. - that's all we're giving you:A New Plymouth doctor says a medical researcher's claim that homeopathy is crazy is a "national scandal".Oh, get off it - you're a friggin' water salesman posing as a physician! "Properly trained" my ass. Listen to me, you delusional fool:
Dr Joe Rozencwajg, of Natura Medica Ltd, has been practising natural medicine in New Plymouth for 10 years and said homeopathy can be successful.
"We (homeopaths) know what we are doing, we are properly trained and we should be given the minimum respect we deserve."
Swing Girls - some great Jazz from Japan at the link. Music is a way out, people - but only the good stuff. Don't listen to those who don't know, or don't advocate for, the difference.
Why Naturopaths Should Not Be Licensed by Kimball C. Atwood IV, M.D.:"Irrational, unscientific beliefs and practices abound in naturopathy, likening it more to a cult than to a valid form of health care. These beliefs and practices are not merely at the fringes but are the standards of the field. They are advocated by the leaders themselves.”Irrational + beliefs + a cult + leaders. Take your time, those of you not familiar with the NewAge.
I thought Scientology made you perfect?:Are Kirstie Alley and Maksim Chmerkovskiy cursed on the dance floor? A week after her partner tumbled to the ground after pulling a muscle, Alley’s shoe came undone during her performance on Monday’s Dancing with the Stars.A member of "the world's most dangerous cult" is on American television and this is all anyone cares about. The murders, kidnappings, brainwashing? They get nothing. Kirstie Alley loses a shoe and it's everywhere.
“I’m not doing a sitcom. I’m actually doing a dancing show!” the actress told reporters afterwards. “I’m tired of having to recover. I would just like to do something right. I don’t feel like I’m jinxed, but I feel like I need to get my sh– together. When people are accident prone, there is something going on with them. There is something going on. Our rehearsals were swell. We’re bitchin’ in rehearsals. If you could just sort of tune into the rehearsals…”
“Look, I’m supposed to be Swan Lake out there, la la la la la,” she continued. “Instead I’m like, la la la la and he’s supposed to come out to me but he comes up and I’m like, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe is off, what do I do? I don’t know what you do in these situations! I’m going to write a book about this. I just feel like I want to be the people who dance well. First week, we were the people who danced really well. And somehow along we’ve become the freak show. The freak show is good but we need to take the dancing up a notch.”
Why do so few of us see this before it happens?It might seem strange to link global warming and the futility of wind farms with the ongoing collapse of the euro. But in several directions at the moment we can see the unfolding of one of the hidden patterns shaping human affairs, which years ago I called “the fantasy cycle”. It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling.We're falling apart, people. And - if you're an American who, say, recycles - you've been dreaming,...
When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.
California in the balance:We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.What's going to happen when California falls? Even I don't know that.
We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.
I've said this more times than I can count - always leading to an argument:It may be a key Christian principle but forgiving too easily can be dangerous, the Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested.Sorry everybody, but what you're doing ain't cutting it,...
Rowan Williams has warned that easy forgiveness can make suffering appear not to matter.
In BBC1’s What is the Point in Forgiveness?, to be broadcast on Good Friday, the Archbishop also concedes that it is not fair to expect victims of abuse, rape or torture to turn the other cheek with ease.
Some of the reasons it's hard to follow up on killer quacks is their trials take so long, many of them operate in places where english isn't always spoken, and the press drops stories as soon as the shine wears off. That said, one story I've finally caught up with - 3 years later - is that of Mitra Javanmardi, a "homeopath" and "naturopath" who killed a guy in Canada. The consult is $225. Nearly triple what other Naturopaths charge. She is very personnable, very sweet and then sells you hundreds of dollars worth of her products. I actually got worse. Became completely constipated with all her powders and ended up with hemorrhoids on top of my original problem (slightly enlarged prostate).If more courts were willing and able to dig further into these subjects, and see them for what they are, I'm sure, they'd try to stop this nonsense and these light sentences wouldn't be handed down as often as they are. And they are, all too often. Way, waaay too often.
Jann Bellamy is asking a question I wish all these high-faluting law professors would answer:During my continuing education about so-called “complementary and alternative” medicine one question presents itself in my mind over and over: Isn’t that fraud? Well, is it?Then she gives us the law and examples of how various CAM practices - Acupuncture, Naturopathy/Homeopathy, Chiropractic, and Reiki - meet the requirement of fraud.
It's always nice to see, in this nation of liars, we're not all the suckers they take us as:Marijuana is legal in Arizona, smoke up.Hey - homeopaths have to do something in this country - and cultural/political subversion is about all NewAgers are good for! Leave 'em alone! That's our job!
Nit pickers might argue that it’s only legal for people with certain medical conditions who have a note from their doctor, but that was sham legal mumbo jumbo used to dupe Arizonans into voting for legalizing marijuana.
The proof that this has nothing to do with medicine is written into the law – you don’t need a prescription from a doctor to get it, you just need a “recommendation” and you don’t even need a doctor, you can go to a naturopath or a homeopath to get one.
Homeopathy and naturopathy are simply government-regulated quackery. Not even uber liberal California allows these so-called physicians to prescribe marijuana.
The NewAge naturopathic bullshit works every time:"A Kiwi woman has told of her bizarre experience with a UK cult 'guru' jailed this week for rape, detailing how he danced around her bed and 'enlightened' her during an alleged sexual assault.Don't get me wrong:
Michael Lyons*, also known as Mohan Singh, was jailed for 10 years after raping and sexually assaulting two female 'recruits' between 1998 and 2008.
The 52-year-old London man was acquitted of three further charges of rape, one involving the 23-year-old New Zealand woman on her OE in 2005.
She has written of her experience on a website for the Rick Ross Institute, an organisation which tracks and studies cults.
A second New Zealand woman also complained to police about Lyons. He was not charged in relation to the complaint but the woman gave evidence at his trial.
UK police said Lyons operated as a 'spiritual group leader' purporting to be a naturopath, skilled in osteopathy, acupuncture and nutrition."
"A herbalist who sold pills that gave a woman cancer and kidney damage walked free from court yesterday as a judge called for tougher regulation of traditional Chinese medicines.-- The Daily Mail
Ying 'Susan' Wu, 48, sold little brown pills called Xie Gan Wan to Patricia Booth from her traditional medicine shop over five years. She said the 'natural' treatment for a skin condition was so safe that in China children drank it 'like Coca-Cola'.
But Mrs Booth, 58, a senior civil servant, contracted bladder cancer, suffered failure of both kidneys and had a heart attack."
"Popular Westmount naturopath Mitra Javanmardi was in court Tuesday for the opening of her preliminary inquiry following the death of one of her patients.-- CTV Canada
Javanmardi has been charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence in the death of 84-year-old Roger Matern in 2008, after Matern sought the naturopath's help to treat heart problems.
After a series of treatments involving magnesium injections, the patient was found dead in his sleep shortly after he returned home."
"It’s absurd – and dangerous too – that every person reading this article could set themselves up tomorrow as a practitioner of herbal medicine. They could gain access to powerful herbs such as belladonna and ephedra, and give those to patients without any training or quality control at all.
