I recently had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Brian
Goldman of CBC’s White Coat Black Art to explore the
growing presence of naturopathy in Canada. In an effort to provide balance to
the criticism surrounding the oft uncritical, nonsensical, and expensive health
advice naturopaths provide to patients, Dr. Goldman was fair to interview Canadian
naturopath Dugald Seely—the director of the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre
and also the executive director of research at the Canadian College of
Naturopathic Medicine (CCNM).

After I listened to the episode, I was disappointed that Seely
did not use this podium to raise awareness of real problems within the
naturopathic profession. As a prominent and self-proclaimed evidence-based
naturopath, Seely had the perfect opportunity to say, at the very least, that homeopathy
is ineffective and the profession should jettison it.

Seely says to Dr. Goldman that he practices naturopathy
using therapies that are based in evidence. During the interview his responses
hovered around the theme that he shuns the non-evidence-based practices.

But when Dr. Goldman asked him whether he uses homeopathy, Seely
squirmed. When pushed, Seely eventually returned with, “I don’t practice
homeopathy. I find that there are a lot of other tools that I have, that I
learned, that I feel comfortable using.”

If Seely is going to take a public stance and say
naturopathy can be evidence-based, why didn’t he cut down the low-hanging fruit
and denounce homeopathy for the quackery that it is? Instead, Seely skirted Dr.
Goldman’s questions with weasel words.

Seely could be hesitant to trash homeopathy because he is
employed at CCNM, an “accredited” naturopathic institution, where students take
almost three times as many credits in homeopathy than in pharmacology (13 hours
in homeopathy vs. 5 in pharmacology).

CCNM even funded a clinical trial that
Sealy ran at his private practice (OICC) investigating the use of homeopathy in
a cancer patient with fatigue. Yes, just one patient. At least, the trial was registered
and named appropriately: “An N-of-1
Study of Homeopathic Treatment of Fatigue in Patients Receiving Chemotherapy.”

It “assessed” the effectiveness of homeopathy in preventing
chemotherapy-induced fatigue in one patient by randomly selecting either
homeopathic treatment, which included lengthy counseling or a sugar pill during
courses of chemotherapy. Since homeopathic
substances are placebos and no
different than sugar pills, in essence, the trial is testing the
effectiveness of talk therapy against placebo with a research design that is
even more fatally flawed: a lack of control group, no blinding (because there
cannot be), and glaring conflicts of interest.

Yet, in a poster
presentation for the study by Seely and David Brulé, that was published in the Journal of Homeopathy in 2014, they
conclude that homeopathy “may be an effective treatment for fatigue with
minimal potential to interact with chemotherapy and affect anti-cancer activity
and potential for cure.”

For someone who is the executive director of research at one
of the leading naturopathic programs in North America, it is illuminating of
the naturopathic profession that Seely does not reflect upon the overwhelmingly
vast body of scientific literature that indicates homeopathy is nothing more
than a placebo sold for profit—health
fraud. In other words, it can only empty patients’ wallets.

When asked by Dr. Goldman to respond to a remark from the
outspoken naturopathy critic Timothy
Caulfield that naturopathy is a pseudoscience, Seely responds, “I can only
speak to what we are doing at the OICC and [we] certainly have a focus on a
more evidence-based practice.”

No, Mr. Seely. I think you are fooling yourself.

Image by André Koehn, some rights reserved.