#3048: Roanne Houck

Several states currently have naturopathic licensing laws, something naturopaths and naturopathic organizations (and other pseudoscience organizations) for years have been trying to achieve across the US because it gives their practices a sheen of legitimacy that their quackery, being pseudoscientific nonsense, cannot obtain from facts, science or actual results. Colorado does, despite efforts from naturopathic organization, not – they require registration to hold the title “Naturopathic Doctor” (ND) and give them limited prescriptive authority but has no licensing system – but many Colorado naturopaths nevertheless like to cosplay as real doctors to fool people who actually need health-related help into paying for their services. 

 

Such services include ervices like the services provided by Roanne Houck, who, through Gunnison Main Street Clinic, offers unsuspecting or low-information (or delusional) victims stuff like homeopathy, “detoxification”, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and something called Ortho-Bionomy®, a form of osteopathic manipulation. The reason we took note of Houck in particular is that she is also the former president of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Doctors (its current president is one James Gilchrist, ND, Lac), a position from which she repeatedly and grudgingly had to tell Colorado naturopaths that they couldn’t call themselves “physicians”, all the while fighting hard to expand naturopaths’ scope of practice in the state against the advice of real medical groups – something that, as demonstrated by Houck’s own practices, would have been lunacy.

 

Diagnosis: More of the same. It’s endless, and we might be losing. At least we’ll continue to expose them.