Erin (who asked that I use only her first name) has struggled with psoriasis for her entire adult life. Now in her forties, she’s softspoken and has a youthful energy. She lives in northern Alberta, Canada, about five hours from the nearest major city, so she wasn’t able to find many options for treating psoriasis other than going the pharmaceutical route. Her doctor recommended a topical steroid, which she didn’t think seemed like a good long‑term solution, both because she has melanoma in the family and is at higher risk for skin cancer (for which long‑term use of topical steroids may raise the risk, though a 2018 systematic review found no evidence to establish whether or not this is true), and because eventually steroid treatments stopped working well to control her condition. She also felt uneasy about taking biologics—systemic medications that suppress the part of the immune system that’s overactive in psoriasis—and none of her doctors took the time to talk her through these options. “I’ve had so many poor experiences with medical doctors who sort of shame or just don’t have the time for you, or certainly haven’t met me in my hesitation,” she says. “I always seem to get the doctor who’s like, ‘just trust me,’” but that never sat well with her.
So it was no surprise that she was attracted to alternative medicine. “It really appealed to me to be like, okay, I’m in control here,” she says. In addition to the psoriasis, she was also suffering from migraines and severe chronic stomach pain, as well as struggling with anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. She’d never gotten good support for those things, so when she heard about the naturopathic approach, it immediately resonated. It felt like finally she was going to have someone listen to her, take her symptoms seriously, and figure out what was going on. And when she started working with a naturopathic doctor, she got a diagnosis that supposedly explained the cause of all these disparate problems: “leaky gut syndrome.”
That diagnosis, unfortunately, is a dubious one.
