Dr Georgiou again
Dr Georgiou has been giving advice to someone who is tired and has “lost their sexual desire”. Apparently, before becoming a holistic medicine practitioner Dr Georgiou was a clinical sexologist and has now developed a method for treating sexual dysfunction – “naturopathic sexology”. The only google results for this search term lead to: Dr G’s own website; detoxmetals dot com; universitynaturalmedicine dot org; and the americanboardofsexology dot com. This being the case, I think it’s fair to assume that this method has never been properly tested. Just in case, I checked the five hits on google for “naturopathic sexology” – and found nothing relating to the testing of this method.
Dr G makes all the usual nutritionism claims – apparently dehydration and lack of nutrients are likely to affect ones sex drive. He then refers to “Optimum Nutrition” and my bullshit detector goes off again – Optimum Nutrition is a Patrick Holford motto/logo. Arginine is recommended at 2 grams per day, extra B vitamins are recommended for testosterone production and Dr G then claims that because low testosterone is often linked to a low sex drive, high potency multivitamin supplements containing antioxidants and omega 3, 6 & 9 supplements may help. He finishes by recommending Ginseng, Maca, Muira Puama and Damiana.
Having checked on Pubmed, there appears to be no evidence to suggest that Damiana is useful for increasing either testosterone or libido. Ditto for Muira Puama and Maca. Ginseng and Arginine are mentioned in a paper in Alt Med Review, which states that “These substances are far from providing a ‘magic bullet’ or cure for ED. Practitioners and consumers should not be fooled by unsubstantiated claims made by the manufacturers of natural agents to treat ED.” (although this common-sense statement is followed by some waffle about how “these natural agents should not be omitted from the erectogenic armamentarium” because they may provide benefit and “if effective, these agents have the added benefit of allowing patients to respond spontaneously to their partners”. pdf.
Which leaves us with B Vitamins, Antioxidants and Omega 3, 6 & 9 fatty acids. Firstly, why would anyone take an Omega 3-6-9 supplement? These are fats we get in our diets in gram amounts – whereas the supplements recommended by alternative practitioners contain milligram amounts. They aren’t going to make much difference to anything - if for no other reason than the fact that the amounts being sold are a ‘drop-in-the-ocean’ in terms of our daily intake. There’s absolutely no reason I can think of why antioxidants would improve/cure sexual dysfunction and a google search under either term yields zero results. A Pubmed search for Antioxidants +”raise testosterone” bring up this message: ’Error in query. Quoted phrase not found’. I checked on Pubmed for “B Vitamins” +testosterone and found two studies – neither of which said anything about supplementation of B Vitamins raising testosterone. Although I did get to find out that Seminal plasma cobalamin significantly correlates with sperm concentration in men undergoing IVF or ICSI procedures. You learn something new every day.
Naturopathic Nonsense « Stuff And Nonsense said,
November 5, 2011 at 2:24 pm
[...] outrageous nonsense I’ve seen from naturopathic practitioners, though. Far from it. I think Dr Georgiou the naturopathic sexologist, inventor of Heavy Metal Detox™, is difficult to beat on that score. [...]