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Naturopathic Doctors?

Blog Forums Alternative Health/Medicine Naturopathic Doctors?

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  • #10089
    ThomasSeay
    Moderator

    What do you think about Naturopathic doctors? Did these mofos really pursue Natural Medicine or are these just people who didn’t have the grades to get into a real medical school? What do you think about them? Have any of them helped you? Have you ever been to one that doesn’t wear Birkenstocks?

    #10098
    BradKW
    Participant

    Maybe you just haven’t sniffed enough herbs today, Thomas.

    #10101
    ThomasSeay
    Moderator

    Likely. I will change that when I get home from work this evening.

    #10105
    mighty m
    Participant

    Brilliant, TS!

    Short version: I recently had experience with a naturopath, who was smart and helpful, but unfortunately a little too wrapped up in the current anti-grain/clean eating way of thinking. Helped me stay away from prescription meds — that alone is HUGE and I’m really grateful. Despite the blind spots, still better care than your standard 7-minute visits with a “regular” doc. Eventually, though, I plateaued eating with restrictions … thus, 180-eating.

    Long version: I went to a naturopath because I had very suddenly developed every-freaking-meal heartburn for the first time in my life last year. In retrospect, I believe it was a metabolism slowdown due to overtraining/undereating in exhausting summer heat, with major life stresses as a backdrop … but I didn’t know that then, I was just freaked out! The “regular” doctor gave me free samples of Nexium that made the symptoms twice as bad. So, I gave the naturopath a try. First experience in the alterna realm! To me, it at first felt equivalent to going to a fortune teller, but I had a deep intuition that taking the meds was the exact wrong thing to do.

    Dr Nature is pretty well respected in the small city where I was living at the time, and had originally trained as a chiropractor before doing the ND thing. His office worked hard to get as much covered by insurance as possible. I will also say that he was a relative minimalist and didn’t push excessive supplements or an expensive appointment schedule. And he is a very bright, interesting person to talk to, in general, which is saying something because I’m picky.

    He set me up with enzymes, HCl, multivitamin, plus lots of lab work, including a poop test. I got pretty good test results, only showed a Vitamin D deficiency (even by conventional standards, not just alterna-standards) as well as slightly elevated Reverse-T3, as opposed to parasites and sibo and so forth, thank goodness. He also told me to drop grains, sugar and dairy. (This was probably good thing to *try* because these are common sensitivies … but when it made no difference to me, I think I should’ve been encouraged to re-introduce those foods. And I should’ve had the courage to do it myself, without seeking approval.) Also to his credit, he encouraged me to take my temperature a lot … but certainly wouldn’t have suggested sugar to raise it! lol.

    Eating super-“clean” plus the digestive sups helped at first. At least they got me *eating* again, my symptoms had been so bad I was down to maybe 800 calories! I got up to maybe 1800 cals and, eating quasi-paleo, didn’t have time/energy/money to cook or chew any more. Eating so “healthy,” I eventually plateaued with the symptoms this crowd knows like the rosary — fatigue, hair loss, dried up sex parts, trouble sleeping, unintentional weight loss (which, because it moved me from the “overweight” to “normal” bmi category, was quite triggering to body neurosis I’d thought I’d left behind years ago), yada yada yada. And my low body temperature never went up eating clean. Thanks to 180, slowly going back to no-restrictions eating allowed me to completely forego the enzymes and HCl. Still working on getting to 100% energy-wise, and getting over anxiety from gaining back weight I hadn’t really set out to lose in the first place.

    And that’s the long version! Probably boring, but maybe it’s relevant to someone out there.

    #10112
    BradKW
    Participant

    Thanks for the story, mighty.

    Reading articles off the WAPF website has pretty much made it so that I associate all naturopaths, homeopaths, and holistic-whoevers with condescending, my-method-is-better-than-yours douchebaggery.

    *sigh* Although, I’m probably wrong because I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there studying this field with good intentions.

    #10119
    StephanieMichelle
    Participant

    My mom sees a naturopath. She developed a type of autoimmune colitis in 2011 and her gastroenterologist put her on steroids. They worked, but she didn’t want to live on them. I was really into paleo at that time and encouraged her to see the naturopath. He started her on some sort of amino acid injections. Each injection is $300, and insurance doesn’t cover the cost. At first she needed the injections every week, but now its been 8 weeks since her last one. Her doctor is trying to wean her off of them, which I think is good. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if she is experiencing a placebo effect, but autoimmune diseases are poorly understood so I’m not sure. I don’t think her doctor is as much of a money-sucker as other naturopaths since he is trying to wean her off of the expensive injection.

    The problem I do have is that she now trusts his opinion over an MD. I’m probably much less into the “natural” approach and woo like others on this forum, because I work in the medical field and I see what works. Modern medicine definitely has its drawbacks, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals and the eat less, move more belief, but it saves a lot of lives as well. Of course this is partly my fault because I really believed the naturopathic stuff for awhile and encouraged it. My mom calls him when something is wrong, so I’ve been telling her to call her MD as well so she can have two opinions (I don’t have much faith in natural remedies after trying to “naturally” cure a UTI and a yeast infection). Basically, this naturopath seems to have helped her, but I think placebo effect played into this. I also know people that his treatments didn’t work for. I wouldn’t see one unless I was very desperate and nothing else had worked for me. And I had a ton of money to spare.

    #10120
    StephanieMichelle
    Participant

    Wow, sorry that response is so jumbled up. Not enough sleep will do that!

    #10127
    ThomasSeay
    Moderator

    mighty m, that wasn’t too long. It was interesting. However, you left out answers to a couple of my questions. Did your naturopath wear Birkenstocks (over socks)? Also did your naturopath offer you a free cup of Chamomile or some other vile-tasting tea during your visit? If you don’t mind, do you live in the US or some other country?

    #10132
    mighty m
    Participant

    Thanks Thomas! Ha ha … no Birks, thank goodness. I think just regular shoes? They did have one of those glug-glug water coolers with the cone-shaped paper cups, though. I love those cups.

    I live here in the US … I live in the East Bay now, but last year when this happened, I was in the Midwest. I would be more cautious, or at least selective, about seeing a Bay Area naturopath, perhaps ironically … the market for that sort of thing around here strikes me as inexhaustible and thus large enough to accommodate mediocre practioners and expensive stuff, whereas in the Midwest I don’t think you could get away for very long with things that didn’t help people at least somewhat.

    #10232
    ThomasSeay
    Moderator

    East Bay, you say! Man, we need to organize a party for the Bay Area folks.

    Going to a naturopathic doctor around here requires you to take a vow of poverty. Definitely will wipe out your bank account. And there’s lots of them. One more exotic than the other.

    #10888
    Esqueleto
    Participant

    I find most of them to be the mirror image of regular doctors; a little too open to natural remedies they don’t really have the background to fully comprehend, as opposed to pharmaceuticals.

    After wasting a lot of money on the UK equivalents, now I try instead to find scientists who have moved into researching health topics.

    #11074
    OldMate
    Participant

    I went to a naturopath here in Australia. At the time I was eating extremely low carb paleo. My complaints were dizziness, low body temp, fatigue, poor digestion, low libido, all the usual low carb stuff.

    From memory she put me on high dose omega3 supplementation, Q10, gave me some kind of tonic she made up. I payed a shite load for it all, I took them for about 3 weeks before I decided it was making me worse and threw them all away.

    I think there could be some great naturopaths out there, its just a matter of finding the right one. Just like anything I guess

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