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Disclaimer: I have been teaching, researching, and promoting health and wellness at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University for over 10 years. I have a PhD from an accredited institution. I support the need to promote health and wellness both at AU and in the Athabasca community. I feel morally and professionally obligated to write this blog post.

To the point: I listened to the glycemic index talk on Friday by a Naturopathic ‘Doctor’, Susan Crites. Of course, there is no accredited University that offer’s such a degree in Canada and this ‘credential’ is certainly dubious.  Nevertheless, much of the information presented was accurate with some missteps and contradictions (“diets don’t work” but ‘give me money to try my diet’ ) that may just have been the nature of a live presentation.  I was interested to hear about Ms. Crites 5-week challenge that she heavily promoted, evidently with the support of the Wellness Committee and the wellness fair on the weekend.

Anyway, I looked at her 5-week challenge on her website and was somewhat horrified that someone would try this. To be clear, this ‘challenge’  is overpriced (hundreds of dollars) and potentially dangerous (‘lose 4-5 lbs. in 5 days’). That is, this diet program has the hallmarks of a sketchy weight loss program (e.g., http://www.dietitians.ca/Nutrition-Resources-A-Z/Fact-Sheet-Pages%28HTML%29/Weight-Loss-and-Control/Guidelines-for-Choosing-a-Weight-Loss-Program.aspx. That Ms. Crites is allowed to promote her dangerous and sketchy practices with AUs tacit support (and in some cases enthusiastic support) is disturbing and possibly inappropriate. To be clear, practices listed on her website are fraudulent and potentially dangerous (e.g., Auricular Medicine, losing 4-5 lbs in 5 days).

However, if someone outside of the context of an AU talk or Wellness Committee sponsored event wants to waste their money on psychic readings, magnet bracelets, or Ms Crites fraudulent practices, that is his or her prerogative. My question to the AU community is whether it is appropriate for AU to support a speaker who opens her talk by promoting her business and ends her talk by promoting her business and her dangerous, pricey diet plan? Perhaps I can use a similar forum to sell you my Amway or Mary Kay products? Another question I have is whether or not it is appropriate for the AU Wellness Committee to support a speaker who tries to sell dangerous products and services to AU employees?

Increasing the health risks of AU employees does not seem like a mandate of the AU Wellness Committee. I am concerned that an AU employee could suffer negative physical, mental, and financial consequences from exposure to fraudulent health practices that he or she would not otherwise have been exposed to if it were not for AU supporting and endorsing these products and services (tacitly, if not enthusiastically) and therefore giving legitimacy to these kinds of practices and practitioners.  

By the way, the response from the Wellness Committee about these questions with respect to this weekend’s events (medium readings, psychics, Ayurvedic ‘medicine, etc.) was to blow off my concerns and to reaffirm their position that ‘anything goes’ in terms of wellness.  

In case anyone doubts the risk, here is a real example the Wellness Committee has not responded to. Many people believe that vaccinations in children cause or are somehow linked to autism, and indeed various health and wellness practitioners might support this patently false claim. The information which spawned the autism and vaccination link was based on fraudulent data. Decades of research from around the world clearly shows that there is absolutely no link between vaccinations and autism. The harm that is caused by not having your child vaccinated is very real with countless cases of increases in rubella and mumps popping up around the globe, for example.

Suppose that a practitioner came to wellness day, invited by AU, and decided to discuss the harm of vaccinations as they link to autism. Now suppose that a parent, thinking they were making an 'informed' choice, decided not to vaccinate their child. If that child should become sick, or get another person sick, what is AU's responsibility? We promoted, endorsed and supported this speaker at a health and wellness fair. This is a very real potential danger of having just 'anyone' come to speak at a health and wellness fair, or a talk at AU. And this is one danger in thinking that 'anything goes' in terms of wellness.

For further reading, http://quackwatch.org/ ; http://www.ncahf.org/ ; http://www.dietitians.ca/ ; http://www.acsm.org/ ; http://hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/index-eng.php