On October 5 I talked about the utterly crackpotish Milk/Blood Type Moron Connection.
Then a day or two later, the moon-worshipers at East-West magazine found another dingbat, Dr. Ellen Cutler, D.C. to quote on the subject of lactose intolerance. Cutler:
thinks people’s reactions to milk are not solely based upon their inability to digest lactose, but that it could be sensitivity to the proteins in milk or even sensitivity to the enzyme lactase itself.
That's right. Cutler says that reaction to milk could be a sensitivity to the enzyme lactase itself. Lactase is not found in milk, of course, but is naturally made in human intestines. This would be as astounding case of auto-immune allergy if there were anything to this nonsense, but fortunately there isn't.
How should people cure this non-existent sensitivity?
In some cases, Cutler says, people could even be sensitive to other sugars such as maltose in grains, sucrose or dextrose in fruits. As such, rather than give up dairy she suggests taking a digestive enzyme. Depending on the specific sensitivity the person has, Cutler says, there are sugar-specific or wide-range enzymes that can help with digestion.
Or you can help your digestion by using lactase. Lactase is the one enzyme that can be of any effect, because there is only one sugar in dairy, and that is the milk sugar lactose. No other enzyme will have any effect on lactose. Of course, taking lactase would be worse than the disease because people are sensitive to lactase, but don't let logic get in the way. Culter doesn't.
Note: I have to interrupt here and say that there is not one documented case in all of the medical literature of anyone being sensitive to lactase.
A doctor should know the medical literature. But Cutler is not a medical doctor or a physiologist or a nutritionist or anyone who could be expected to read normal medical studies. Ellen Cutler is a D.C., which stands for Doctor of Chiropractic. [I know: that looks wrong. Isn't Chiropractic an adjective? But that's what is awarded.]
But still, she's a doctor, isn't she?
No. Not any more than a lawyer with a J.D. (juris doctor) degree is a doctor. A D.C. is not a medical doctor, nor is someone who is even able to prescribe medicine.
But Cutler really, really wants you to take enzymes. Not the lactase enzyme, to be sure, because that's cheap and readily available and works just fine. But other special blends of enzymes. You see, she's a quack with her own brand of crackpot cure-alls to sell you.
If that doesn’t work, she says her own technique, BioSET, does.
BioSET (BioEnergetic Sensitivity and Enzyme Therapy) is a cleaning process designed to help clear food sensitivities. It works on principles similar to acupressure and helps rid the system of intolerance through a process resembling biofeedback.
Yeah. And it clears your wallet through a process resembling scamming.
From her website:
The BioSET™ line of professional therapeutically effective blends of high potency enzymes, standardized herbal extracts and natural-source vitamins and minerals
100% vegetarian capsule and contents
No fillers - only active ingredients
Patient-friendly product names
Specifically formulated to be an integral part of the BioSET™ diagnostic and treatment system developed by Dr. Ellen Cutler.
I have a patient-unfriendly name to call you if you fall for such quackery: gullible fool.
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ReplyDeleteI found this post when searcing for "chiropractic an adjective". I looked it up, and the dictionary does clearly indicate it is a noun. But I don't really get why, other than that is how it is used (so a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, dictionary would merely catalog the poor usage). the -ic suffix usually denotes adjectives, though it can sometimes denote a noun (medic).
ReplyDeleteBut we already have a different noun form to denote the practioner: chiropractor. It doesn't seem sensible or consistent to me for "chiropractic" to denote the branch of "medicine" that involves chiropractic practice. "Oncologic", "osteopathic" and "pediatric" are all adjectives that describe a branch of medicine. (In some cases, there is a different, more traditionally "noun-ish" form to describe the branch in one word, such as oncology; and sometimes there isn't--language is not always fully symmetrical that way.)