Colleen Huber and Naturopathic "Oncology": She Built the Movement's Institutions — and Nearly Half of Its Practitioners Now Treat Children
Colleen Huber, NMD, runs a Tempe, Arizona cancer clinic that discourages chemotherapy in favor of baking soda and intravenous vitamin C, has sued multiple critics for defamation, and as of late 2025 advertises a medical license issued not by any U.S. state board but by a tribal authority. She is also president of the Naturopathic Cancer Society and co-founder of the institute that credentials "naturopathic oncologists" — the same specialty a 2019 practice survey found nearly half of cancer-treating naturopaths now extend to children.
Who is Colleen Huber?
Huber founded Nature Works Best Cancer Clinic in Tempe, Arizona in 2006. The clinic's own marketing has claimed remission rates as high as 90% for patients who "complete" its treatment — built around intravenous sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), high-dose intravenous vitamin C, and a strict sugar-free diet — explicitly instead of chemotherapy or radiation. Huber has gone further than simply offering an alternative: her clinic's own materials have told patients their "best opportunity" is to begin natural treatment before chemotherapy or radiation "sicken and weaken" them, on the theory that conventional treatment strengthens cancer rather than fighting it.
⚠️ The research behind the claims doesn't hold up
Every study Huber's clinic has pointed to as evidence for its remission claims was authored or co-authored by Huber herself, published without registration on ClinicalTrials.gov, and reviewed by a naturopathic institutional review board Huber co-founded — meaning she has effectively graded her own work. An independent reanalysis of her data by researcher Thomas Mohr found that once low-quality and incomplete records were excluded, outcomes favored standard-of-care cancer therapy by roughly 10 to 1. Huber's clinic has also advertised that conventional chemotherapy has only a "2.1% survival rate," a statistic debunked by multiple independent reviewers (including McGill University's Office for Science and Society) as a misuse of a 2004 paper that never made that claim — the original authors excluded leukemias, ignored hormone therapy, and measured five-year survival rather than remission.
A pattern of suing her critics
When former naturopath-turned-whistleblower Britt Hermes published criticism of Huber's research and business practices on her blog Naturopathic Diaries, Huber filed a defamation lawsuit against her in Germany in September 2017 — a jurisdiction where defamation is a criminal rather than civil matter, making it a notably aggressive venue in which to sue an American critic. The Kiel District Court ruled against Huber in May 2019, rejecting the suit. Huber has pursued legal action against multiple other critics over the years for calling her treatments quackery.
A striking 2025–2026 development: whose medical board?
A license from a tribal authority, not a state board
As of Huber's own clinic website in late 2025, she describes her medical license as granted not by the Arizona naturopathic board or any other U.S. state licensing authority, but by what she calls the "First Nation Medical Board under authority of the Crow Tribe of Indians" — describing it as superior to state boards for protecting "physicians' freedom of expression and best practices." Separately, the Better Business Bureau's current listing for Nature Works Best notes that the clinic's owner "does not keep a current license" and "no longer practices medicine" directly, with other licensed providers now seeing patients at the clinic. Tribal sovereign-authority credentialing schemes of this kind have become a recognized pattern among practitioners who have lost, let lapse, or wish to operate outside the reach of conventional state medical licensing — precisely the jurisdiction that exists to protect patients.
The institutions Huber built
Beyond her own clinic, Huber has spent years constructing the professional infrastructure of "naturopathic oncology" as a specialty: she is President of the Naturopathic Cancer Society, and Co-Founder and Secretary of the American Naturopathic Research Institute / Naturopathic Oncology Research Institute (ANRI/NORI), one of the credentialing bodies behind naturopaths who call themselves oncology specialists. She has also written for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Children's Health Defense outlet, The Defender — the same anti-establishment health-media ecosystem already documented on this site in connection with Scientology-adjacent anti-psychiatry advocacy.
Where children enter the picture
Huber's own clinic markets primarily to adult cancer patients. But the specialty she helped institutionalize has a pediatric footprint that is already measured, not merely feared. A 2019 practice survey published in Integrative Cancer Therapies (Psihogios, Ennis & Seely) surveyed naturopaths who treat cancer patients and found that of 99 such practices, 47.5% also treat pediatric cancer cases. Among naturopaths who don't currently treat children with cancer, the single most common reason given was not an ethical or safety objection — it was simply an absence of demand from patients and families.
| Category | What surveyed naturopaths reported using on child cancer patients |
|---|---|
| Supplements | Vitamin D, fish oil, probiotics, vitamin C, melatonin, turmeric, glutamine, homeopathic Arnica, and other natural health products, each selected by more than half of respondents |
| Diet | Anti-inflammatory, dairy-restricted, Mediterranean, gluten-restricted, ketogenic, and low-glycemic diets imposed on children already undergoing cancer treatment |
| Physical interventions | Acupuncture, acupressure, and craniosacral therapy, alongside exercise, yoga, and massage |
| Mental-emotional | Reiki, alongside meditation, art therapy, and other supportive interventions |
Pediatric oncologists who reviewed the survey's findings noted that restrictive diets like the ketogenic diet carry particular risk for children mid-treatment, who already need to meet strict growth and developmental milestones on top of surviving their cancer — and that homeopathy, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy have no plausible mechanism for treating cancer in a child any more than in an adult.
Why this belongs on QuackeryWatch
Huber's case matches the pattern of Kerri Rivera's chlorine dioxide protocol, homeoprophylaxis, the Weston A. Price Foundation's homemade infant formula, the fenbendazole/Joe Tippens cancer protocol, and the GAPS diet: a practitioner offering an alternative to well-established, evidence-based standard of care, built on self-graded research and marketed with statistics that don't survive scrutiny, reaching for legal threats against critics rather than engaging their evidence. What sets naturopathic oncology apart is scale and institutional depth — it has its own board certification, its own research institutes, and, per its own practitioners' survey responses, its own already-documented reach into pediatric cancer care.