The Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors (CAND) is the official representative of its 2,500 member practitioners across Canada, and in its official journal, CANDJ, purports to offer “best practices of the naturopathic profession to members, health care practitioners, interested parties, collaborators, government and the public.”
However, a March 2026 article in CANDJ made a mockery of the journal’s promise to feature “best practices of the naturopathic profession” to readers and instead provided a hack eyed anti-Israel rant that cherry-picked data, misrepresented facts, censored inconvenient details, and offered no discernable connection to naturopathic medicine whatsoever.
The article, “Naturopathic Doctors Must Speak Out Against Human Rights Atrocities in Palestine,” was authored by Leslie Solomanian, Cyndi Gilbert, Samantha Clouthier, Vivian Liang, Kyla Wright and Kim Abog.
Leslie Solomanian is an associate professor at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, Cyndi Gilbert is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor whose website apologizes for her profession’s “colonization and oppression,” Samantha (Sam) Clouthier is based in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Vivian Liang is a Burlington-based naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist, Kyla Wright is a naturopathic doctor in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, while Kim Abog is a naturopathic doctor and doula in Toronto.
Conspicuously absent from those biographies is any relevant expertise in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but that did not stop the authors from opining anyway.
They made the absurd claim that “people living in the Gaza Strip were dropping dead in the street from a manmade famine,” linking to a BBC News article which quotes Hamas – hardly a reputable source – as claiming that some 270 people have died of malnutrition in Gaza.
Even if such a number were verified – which it is not – that is not famine by any stretch in a population of 2.3 million people. Even according to Hamas’ own claims, the rate of death from malnutrition is similar to that of the United States, where no famine exists.
The authors claimed that there was “plenty of aid,” but that it was being “withheld by the state of Israel.”
This, too, is nonsense, with Israel repeatedly and publicly sharing the immense food aid that it had approved for Gaza, only for so-called “humanitarian” organizations failing to deliver it. Meanwhile, in Gaza, scenes showed bustling markets and restaurants, hardly what one sees during times of “famine.”
Predictably, the authors repeated the tired claim of “genocide” in Gaza, but rather than actually defend their allegation, they pivoted to an appeal to authority, writing that “nearly all the major human rights” groups have labeled it as such, “including the United Nations.”
Among the supposed experts linked in the article include a now-debunked claim by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), to which anyone with a credit card can join, and Amnesty International, which had to redefine genocide in order to level that allegation at Israel.
As for the United Nations, it never found that Israel was guilty of genocide. Instead, it was a three-person committee run by a group of longtime anti-Israel activists who did so. It’s remarkable that this brazen falsehood was allowed to pass muster in CANDJ.
While the authors concocted an absurdist picture of Gaza, they cynically hid from readers any mention of why the war there began at all. They cryptically mentioned “a situation… since October 2023,” while avoiding any mention of the horrific massacres of October 7, 2023, carried out by thousands of Palestinian terrorists alongside other Palestinian “civilians”.
The authors are entitled to their views, as ill-informed as they are. But it is a black mark on The Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors (CAND) and its official journal, CANDJ, for publishing a rambling anti-Israel tirade that shamelessly misrepresented facts and censored out inconvenient details from public view, all in the name of medicine.