One of my good friends is a naturopath.... She also works in a research lab, but she doesn't seem to apply her science to being a naturopath.
Alot of it does seem to be common sense and alot of the herbs used historically have helped people... And in general it seems harmless to try. And some of it just makes me hold my head in my hands... When she was looking for highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to add to her bath to aerate her skin because some doctor in some class told them to do that...
She does often try to help me, and I guess the reality is that nothing she tells me makes enough sense that I bother to try it... My wrist issues will go away if I stop eating corn. Or stopping to eat wheat will do such and such... And the reality is that I don't eat much of either of those products anyways, I grew up with an asian mother, so my diet has a lot of fruits & vegetables, rice, and not much wheat or corn to begin with.
If you've got a chronic inflammation problem - I could see cutting back to a simple diet and slowly adding things back would quite possibly help you, because a lot of people seem to have wheat or whatever intolerances lately that just cause low level issues.
There are some foods with anti-inflammatory properties - olive oil has something that's related to ibuprofen in it, so adding more of those to your diet may help you.
The other thing that may help you is seeing if you can find an intestinal parasite or two - give your immune system something to make a productive immune response against and it may reprogram it from the non-productive one that you're making. It's periodically in the news that giving worms to IBD sufferers makes them better, as does giving hook worms to asthma sufferers...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...54C0A96E9C8B63