Last spring I wrote an article about a Dr. Al Plechner, who claims to have discovered a glandular imbalance, which he has named Plechner Syndrome and which he claims is responsible for a wide range of health problems. Dr. Plechner’s web site includes many of the classic warning signs of medical nonsense, including: grand claims that a lone individual has discovered, through trial and error rather than formal scientific research, a major breakthrough that the rest of the medical profession has missed; that there is one entity responsible for an enormous number of seemingly unrelated diseases; that one simple  therapy can cure or improve many seemingly unrelated diseases; that mysterious “toxins” in the environment can be blamed for health problems without specific evidence for such a connection; that anecdotes and personal experience is sufficient to demonstrate these claims; and that scientists and veterinarians who disagree with Dr. Plechner are motivated by ignorance, greed, or other malign motives rather than a genuine interest in the truth and the welfare of patients.

Following my earlier criticism of Dr. Andrew Jones (here and here), his followers leaped to his defense through a combination of anecdotes and personal attacks on me. The same has now happened with Dr. Plechner’s followers, and this time it appears he has actively solicited people to come forward in his defense. Starting a couple of days ago, I began receiving a number of comments on my original post, most offering anecdotes suggesting Dr. Plechner had helped their pets, often after conventional veterinarians have failed or given up. I have, according to my usual policy, approved these comments and tried to offer reasonable and polite responses. I am always open to constructive debate and discussion focused on ideas and facts.

A fair number of the comments have also included personal attacks or abusive language. I do not generally approve such comments since they are both uncivil and not productive. In the past, I have collected anonymous examples of the sort of abusive or hysterical hate mail I get just so people can understand the kind of tone and thought processes so often marshaled in support of unconventional medical practices.  In this instance, a supporter of Dr. Plechner has forwarded to me an email in which Dr. Plechner asks his supporters to set me straight. I think this provides some additional insight into Dr. Plechner’s approach and why pet owners should be highly skeptical of his claims.

His original request to his followers is as follows:

When you have time to waste, Google drplechner.com and go to Plechner’s Syndrome and the Art of Making Things Up

Now I know why my son said, “Pop do not look at the comments against you on the internet”!

WOW!

I think the time has come to have you comment on the statements that have been made about my faulty research!

What a shame that a person that is so “academically impaired”, has so little to do accept to show their “ignorance with an attitude”, by trying to discredit new research studies that have not been included in their education in schools of medical learning just yet.

Treating the cause of disease is just as important as treating the effects, if not even more important!

The fact that my profession does not know the cause of a disease at this time, does not mean that a cause does not still exist.

On line notifications like this only hurts the patients based upon this contributors ignorance!

I know how busy all of you are, but the time has come when venomous misconceptions like what this person is preaching, must end.

If you have time, I would really appreciate you sending your comments and experiences using Plechner’s Syndrome to the website information at the end of the article.

My only feeling is that this kind of article is only hurting people and animals with health problems and keeping them from getting proper treatment.

The time is coming, when my research findings will be accepted by the medical professions and make a huge difference for their patients.

Thank you for understanding and believing in me.

Sincerely,

AL

This message contains a number of clear examples of Dr. Plechner’s belief that he is a misunderstood visionary and that the reason the rest of the veterinary profession rejects his claims is because we are all ignorant. It is a remarkable display of arrogance to assume you are right and the vast majority of other medical professionals are wrong, so this somewhat contradicts the more sympathetic descriptions of Dr. Plechner by his supporters.

He also refers to “new research studies that have not been included in their education,” yet neither he nor any of his supporters ever produce any published research on his claims for us to evaluate.

And while I understand that no one likes to be criticized, it hardly supports Dr. Plechner’s case that he responds to this criticism not with evidence or substantive arguments but simply repeated assertions that he is right and the rest of us are wrong and with personal attacks on a critic he knows nothing about. Phrases like “academically impaired” and “ignorance with an attitude” are just vacuous, petty attempts to insult, not an argument against anything I have written. And “venomous misconceptions” is not only a silly attempt to imply some sinister motive for my lack of acceptance of his claim, but also a bit hypocritical given his personal attacks in this message to his supporters.

In a follow-up message thanking one of his supporters for defending him, Dr. Plechner goes further, revealing his conspiracy theory driven agenda and his underlying rejection of the scientific and medical profession generally.

One crucial pt to always keep in mind: “Follow the money trail”

“HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER, CALLS THE TUNE”

Much of so called ‘science’ operates on this basis.

And most of the medical/ big pharma colluded industry has a cozy little relationship with

government, msm and the educational institutes to boot.

We should class them as ‘Disease Care’ providers, and not Health Care!

Once again the pharma shill gambit and the blithe dismissal of all doctors who don’t agree with Dr. Plechner as greedy and more concerned about money than about the welfare of their patients. This sort of insulting nonsense deserves no respect or response other than to show it for what it is and let the public judge whether it is fair and reasonable or extreme and self-serving.

While some of Dr. Plechner’s supporters have, as I pointed out earlier, have been civil and even thoughtful in their defense of him, others have been even less reasonable and less substantive in their attacks on his critics than he has. Here are some samples from comments and messages posted to this site or sent directly to me. Such hysterical ranting and abuse belongs in the realm of debates about religious cults, not about the causes and treatments of disease in our animal companions.

“That Skep Vet is a jerk”

“Some scientist YOU are!!! With NO evidence or EXPERIENCE of using Dr. Plechner’s Protocol, you have MADE UP a MOST INCREDIBLE diatribe which amounts to character assassination. This article is outright libelous you should be sued for for an attempt to destroy the reputation of someone who has worked hard for fifty years and has saved countless lives. You have NO actual scientific experience with this protocol, yet you have judged it in the extreme. HOW can you do this and call yourself a scientist??? Talk about a personality disorder, this is cognitive dissonance.

The truth is geniuses are ahead of their times and the little minds always do what you are doing.”

“Well, the above diatribe from one self-proclaimed know-it-all,”skeptvet,” just goes to prove that any pompous ass with a computer and keyboard can make denouncements of Biblical proportions denigrating the findings of others, about which they neither have any direct knowledge or proof to the contrary.

Yes, Mr. or Mrs. Skeptvet, we who have first hand experience with Dr. Plechner and what’s possible when the mind is not a steel trap, encourage you to waste more of your time, attempting to deny and negate the life work of one man who has actually been in the thick of it for 5 decades. A man who has demonstrated his enormous heart and compassion and humanity countless times, while you’ve been at your keyboard, “working” hard at slicing and dicing someone’s reputation.

We absolutely encourage you to waste more of your value-less time, along with all the other flat-earthers. Opinions cannot sway those with FIRST-HAND knowledge of what works! I bet we could give a damn whether science agrees or not.

Personally, I’d rather have a live cat and pass (or piss) on the studies.”

It seems pretty clear from the information cited in my original post, and from the responses of Dr. Plechner and his supporters to that critique, that Dr. Plechner believes himself to be a visionary possessed on an insight not appreciated by the rest of the veterinary profession, and that his followers are willing to accept his claims based on anecdotes alone, without concern for whether there is any real scientific evidence to support them. That is, of course, their right. However, history is littered with the work of such iconoclastic visionaries who were wrong, and justly forgotten. And, unfortunately, history is also littered with people hurt and killed by mistaken beliefs about health and ineffective or dangerous medical therapies, and a greater understanding of the value of scientific assessment of these therapies could have saved many of them

As I’ve discussed before, the kind and brilliant pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, guided much of the childcare practices in the English-speaking world for decades with his incredibly popular book Baby and Child Care. Among his many insights, unfortunately, was a tragic mistake. Based on his own experience and reasoning, he decided the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) could be lowered by putting babies to sleep on their bellies, so they wouldn’t choke if they vomited. Most parents from the 50s to the 90s followed this advice. But from the 1970s, there was good scientific evidence Dr. Spock was wrong. A systematic reviews of the subject has concluded that:

Advice to put infants to sleep on the front for nearly a half century was contrary to evidence available from 1970 that this was likely to be harmful. Systematic review of preventable risk factors for SIDS from 1970 would have led to earlier recognition of the risks of sleeping on the front and might have prevented over 10 000 infant deaths in the UK and at least 50 000 in Europe, the USA, and Australasia.

When a campaign was instituted in the U.K. to reverse the practice Dr. Spock had recommended, the number of SIDS cases dropped dramatically. That is the danger or following the intuition or experience of one person, however smart or well-intentioned, and ignoring the need for real scientific evidence. I bear no personal ill will to Dr. Plechner, but I stand by my assessment that his claims are implausible, not supported by meaningful scientific evidence, and a dangerous assertion of the intuition of the individual over objective research as the measure of medical hypotheses.

Naturopathy is a pleasant-sounding term for an approach to health and disease that is quite different from that of science-based medicine. It is an example of an alternative philosophy that has great appeal for from a certain perspective but which, when examined closely, has little real substance.

What Is It?
According to the American Council of Animal Naturopathy (ACAN), naturopathy is an ancient practice, “naturopathy has been around since the fall of Adam and Eve.” According to more neutral and skeptical sources, it took shape in Europe in the late 19^th century. ACAN defines naturopathy as:

a philosophy and system of prevention of disease first and then treatment of disease that avoids drugs and surgery and emphasizes the use of nature or natural agents such as exercise, water, herbs, etc. to assist the body in bringing its self back into balance and health.

As is often the case with alternative therapies, this is contrasted with a rather caricatured description of conventional veterinary medicine:

Today’s veterinarians are in the business of disease care, they hold doctorate titles from colleges that teach them anatomy, biology, chemistry and surgery. They are taught how to use modern, high tech equipment to diagnose while the pharmaceutical companies teach them which drug to prescribe or use to treat or suppress the symptoms of the dis-ease or illness the animal is presenting with.

The Six Principles of Naturopathy, identical to those espoused by human naturopathic organizations such as the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP),  describe the philosophy in more detail. Some key points are:

The body has the inherent ability to heal itself. This healing process is intelligent and ordered.

Every illness has a cause. Causes may occur on the physical, mental or emotional level. Symptoms are expressions of the body’s attempt to heal, but are not the cause of illness.

Animal Naturopaths use nature’s methods that minimize the risk of harmful side effects. Methods designed to suppress symptoms but not remove the underlying cause are usually harmful, their use is always avoided. [by which they mean most scientific medical therapies]

All aspects of that animal (physical, mental and emotional) are taken into account.

Illness is due to improper diet, habits, exposure to toxins and general lifestyle. 

Does It Make Sense?
The assumptions upon which naturopathy is based are questionable. The distinction between “natural” and “unnatural,” and the suggestion that the former is equivalent to “healthy” and the latter to “unhealthy,” is an appealing but ultimately vacuous idea. There is no clear line dividing natural from unnatural. Are cooking, farming, tool-making, wearing clothes, or other human behaviors that alter the world we live in inherently unnatural and unhealthy? Is it a matter of degree? Is it ok to cook plants as part of preventative or therapeutic medicine, but not ok to extract medicinal compounds from plants? It quickly becomes clear that the distinction between natural and unnatural is capricious and arbitrary, and it is not a sound basis for deciding what is healthy and what is unhealthy for us or our pets.

The idea that natural things, even if we could agree on what these are, must be healthier than unnatural things is pretty obviously false. Uranium, arsenic, botulism, rattlesnake venom, and many other “natural” things are harmful or even deadly. And clearly artificial things, like the growing of food crops, sanitation and water treatment, and medical interventions such as vaccines and antibiotics have improved the length and quality of human life far more dramatically in the last few centuries than all the efforts of the tens of thousands of years before we developed a scientific approach to understanding and manipulating our world. The fact that some of the things we create are harmful doesn’t validate the belief that anything human made is unhealthy and anything unchanged from its natural state must be healthy.

Naturopathy is, itself, a complex and purely artificial set of beliefs and practices that no other animal employs and that humans invented along with all of our other unique beliefs and behaviors. Calling it natural, and labeling scientific medicine unnatural is simply s statement of belief, not a factual or verifiable claim.

Because the philosophical basis for naturopathy is so vague and ill-defined, the actual practice of naturopaths encompasses almost any form of alternative therapy. Among the practitioners listed on the ACAN website as Certified Animal Naturopaths, you find practitioners of homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, iridology, and other therapies that are questionable or completely lacking in any validity. Whatever a particular practitioner chooses to define as “natural” is apparently acceptable within a naturopathic approach apart from vaccines, pharmaceutical medicine, and many other conventional therapies.

It is important to point out that this “board certification” in naturopathy is not recognized by the American Board of Veterinary Specialties which regulates veterinary medical specialties. It is equivalent to similar certifications for homeopaths, psychics, and astrologers in that it is invented by naturopaths to legitimize themselves and is not recognized by mainstream veterinary medicine. In fact, there is no requirement that those who take the various certification courses the ACAN offers be veterinarians or trained healthcare professionals. The ACAN web site states,

as long as you are 18 years of age or older, these courses are designed to educate no matter what level of current knowledge you may have. They prepare you to be certified in animal health coaching, nutrition consulting or animal naturopathy consulting or to inform and educate you just for your own knowledge to help your own pets if that is what you are looking for.

It seems implausible that a powerful approach to healthcare superior to modern medicine is also so simple that it can be learned and practiced by anyone without any scientific or medical knowledge. Surely such a method would have replaced all other medical practices before now?

Historically, naturopathy has been a vitalist philosophy, identifying disease as a state of imbalance in not only the physical body but the mind, spirit, or vital essence of a creature. This philosophy rejects predominantly physical causes of illness and instead considers the root of disease to be in non-physical, spiritual factors. As one proponent has put it, “vitalists analyze bodily illness mainly in terms of the spiritual factors that might be contributing to it…Disease, according to vitalists, is simply a more advanced stage of the stress that we exhibit when we persistently fail in the pursuit of physical and spiritual goals.”

Because this essentially dismisses all the progress made by science in understanding the causes and treatment of disease, and because it identifies naturopath as a purely faith-based practice, naturopaths often de-emphasize this element of their philosophy and talk more vaguely about the “inherent healing power” of the body rather than the “vital force” or spirit. It is true that the body has a remarkable capacity to heal itself and many ailments resolve without treatment, or in spite of treatment, which is one of the reasons ineffective therapies can appear to work even when they do nothing. However, naturopaths claim this inherent healing power is “intelligent and ordered,” which is a faith-based claim that cannot be examined or tested in any objective way. They also claim that this healing power can be supported by their recommendations and impeded by scientific medical therapies, which is contrary to a great deal of actual evidence.

One major problem with vitalism as a foundation for medical therapies is that its principles have to be accepted or rejected entirely on faith, which makes any claim one chooses to make immune from any objective evaluation. Given the unprecedented success of science-based medicine compared to all the methods that went before it, it seems unwise to go backwards away from the practice of objectively and critically evaluate medical claims by established scientific means.

Does It Work?
Of course the first step in answering this question is to define what “it” is, which as we’ve seen is difficult because there is no consistency to the specific interventions naturopaths employ. I have written before about homeopathy, TCM, herbal medicine, and many of the specific treatments naturopaths recommend. Many of these are unproven or clearly ineffective. Others, like herbal remedies, probiotics, and some dietary supplements may have some benefit. Categorizing them all as “natural” tells us nothing about which are helpful and which aren’t.

However, many of the recommendations naturopaths give, especially for humans, are identical to those given by conventional doctors. No one disagrees with the idea that clean, healthy food is essential for life, though what exactly this means may not be open to dispute. Similarly, clean fresh air and water, appropriate exercise, and a positive attitude are undoubtedly good for everyone, though they may not be the key to perfect health or immortality. The fact is that much of what naturopaths recommend may be perfectly reasonable, or even supported by good scientific evidence despite the fact that they are recommending it regardless of the evidence and based on a philosophy incompatible with science.

Like many alternative medicine proponents, naturopaths are happy to cite scientific research when it supports their beliefs and claims, but they are likely to dismiss any which does not. Because naturopathy is a vague philosophy encompassing many different practices, it is difficult to study in a controlled manner, and there is relatively little research on the general approach. A recent attempt at a systematic review of naturopathy found 12 studies that met the inclusion criteria, and while they appeared to show some benefits, they all had significant weaknesses and limitations that made it impossible to draw and reliable conclusions. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the American Cancer Society, and other government and private organizations have stated that there is currently no real evidence to support the claims of naturopaths. There also appears to be absolutely no controlled clinical research on naturopathy in veterinary species.

That leaves only the inevitable testimonials. For reasons I’ve discussed many times before, individual anecdotes provide no real evidence to support or reject medical therapies. At best they can suggest potential benefits or risks to be examined more closely, but despite the fact that they are highly persuasive, they are not a trustworthy source of information about naturopathy or any other medical practice.

Is It Safe?
Again, it is difficult to comment on the safety of naturopathy as a general approach because it is so ill-defined and specific therapies are not consistent between practitioners. The risks of particular practices, such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, TCM, and all the particular alternative therapies employed by naturopaths can be considered separately. The biggest risk of the philosophy itself is that it often involves counseling people against seeking and using conventional medical diagnostics and treatments. Naturopaths are frequently opposed to vaccination, for example, which is a position that clearly places people and animals at unnecessary risk of illness and death from preventable diseases. Naturopathy, like any other pre-scientific and unproven medical practice, is not a safe or reliable substitute for scientific medical care, and eschewing conventional care in favor of naturopathy risks losing the opportunity to receive effective therapy in a timely way.

Naturopaths often present themselves as appropriate substitutes for primary care doctors, for humans and animals, despite the fact that many of them lack of any real scientific or medical training. Even in those instances when the therapy they recommend is reasonable (such as diet and exercise advice) or harmless in itself (such as homeopathy), these individuals are not qualified to detect and respond to serious health problems.

Bottom Line
Naturopathy is a vague vitalist philosophy that identifies the causes of disease as imbalances in the vital life force or spirit and in supposed dietary deficiencies or undefined environmental toxins. The basic principles of the approach are unproven and, in the case of the claim that the roots of disease are spiritual, untestable.

Naturopaths use a hodgepodge of different alternative therapies according to their personal training and inclinations. Some of these are clearly ineffective nonsense (e.g. homeopathy, iridology), others are merely unproven but at least plausible (e.g. herbal remedies, dietary supplements), and some are consistent with conventional medical recommendations (e.g. exercise, some dietary advice). It is difficult to study the overall risks and benefits of naturopathy due to the varied and inconsistent treatment offered by individual practitioners. There is little research evidence in humans and none in veterinary species to support naturopathy as an effective approach.

The risks of individual therapies offered by naturopaths are also varied. Some, such as homeopathy, have no direct effect at all, for good or ill. Others, such as herbal remedies, can cause harm directly. The greatest risk, however, from naturopathic treatment is that naturopaths often recommend avoiding conventional medical care, include vaccines, surgery, and pharmaceutical medicine. Substituting unproven, untested, or ineffective therapies for scientific medicine is not an appropriate way to seek health or treat disease.