‘Essentially witchcraft’: A former naturopath takes on her colleagues
By MEGAN THIELKING
OCTOBER 20, 2016
Britt Hermes once considered herself a doctor. Now, she’s an apostate.
Hermes spent three years practicing naturopathy, a broad-reaching form of alternative medicine that focuses on “natural” care, including herbal remedies, acupuncture, and the discredited practice of homeopathy. But unease about a colleague’s ethics led her to look more closely at her profession — and what she found alarmed her.
So for the past two years, Hermes has been waging a scathing fight against naturopathy on social media, in science blogs, and on her own website, Naturopathic Diaries, which just won a “best blog of the year” award from a scientific skepticism magazine in the United Kingdom. She has not pulled punches.
Hermes has said naturopaths use a “cornucopia of pseudoscientific methods.” She posts articles with the blunt headlines like “Naturopathic pediatrics is not safe,” “Naturopaths need to back off autism,” and “Naturopathic medicine has too much quackery.” And she’s circulating an online petition to stop states from recognizing naturopaths as primary care physicians. Her message: “Naturopaths are not doctors.”
“I’m trying to contextualize and call out the false and exaggerated claims,” she said. “They want to be able to do everything an MD wants to do — but they also want to practice essentially witchcraft.”
Hermes’s activism comes at a time when the roughly 4,400 licensed naturopaths in the US are organizing and pushing for more legitimacy.
In May, more than 100 aspiring and practicing naturopaths descended on Capitol Hill to rally support for a federal pilot program that would allow them to be reimbursed by Medicare for some patients. They’re also lobbying for expanded authority to diagnose and treat patients in a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Michigan.
Those lobbying efforts are funded in part by vitamin companies that want to see the profession grow. Many naturopaths tout dietary supplements, herbal remedies, and vitamin infusions for healing.
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The American Association of Naturopathic Physicians declined to comment. But some of Hermes’s former colleagues have attacked her for what they see as a misleading attack on the profession.
Mainstream doctors say Hermes is a powerful voice in taking on alternative medicine for one clear reason — she knows it from the inside out.
“Naturopaths dislike me, but they loathe Britt because she’s a traitor,” said Dr. David Gorski, the managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, who has also spoken out against the naturopathic industry.
“They really, really, really hate her.”
From itchy skin to a $200,000 degree in naturopathy
Hermes, who’s now 32, spent her high school days plagued by terrible psoriasis, a skin condition marked by itchy, red patches. She started taking cod liver oil and changed her diet to see if either would help, which she thought they did.
“I became sort of obsessed with the idea of being able to treat it without prescription medicines,” she said.
That sparked a deep desire in Hermes: She wanted to hit an ideal state of health without needing to rely on conventional medicine. She went on to enroll at Bastyr University, an alternative medicine school based in Washington state. It’s one of a half-dozen naturopathic and alternative medicine universities in the United States.
At Bastyr, Hermes took classes with names that would seem familiar to conventional medical students, like human anatomy and physiology. But she also studied botanical medicine, hydrotherapy, and homeopathy, a practice founded on the theory that extremely diluted concentrations of certain compounds can treat disease. Homeopathy has been widely debunked as pseudoscience.
