Results for: "naturopathic licensing"
Missouri tackles primary care shortage with “assistant physicians”
A new law in Missouri will allow medical school graduates who have not completed a residency to practice in underserved areas. They will be able to call themselves “doctor” but will be licensed as “assistant physicians” with significant limitations on their practice. (The first link is to Senate Bill 716, the bill that was passed and signed by the governor. It covers...
Legislative Alchemy 2014 (so far)
Legislative Alchemy is the process by which credulous state legislators turn practitioners of pseudoscience into state-licensed health care professionals. In addition to unleashing quackery such as homeopathy, colonic irrigation, moxibustion, reiki, cranial sacral therapy and the detection and correction of subluxations on the public, these practice acts typically give chiropractors, naturopaths and acupuncturists the freedom of being governed by their own regulatory...
Twenty days in primary care practice, or “naturopathic residency”
The metastasis of alternative medicine throughout the health care system comes, in no small part, at the hands of the federal and state governments, mostly the latter and most particularly the state legislatures. Under their jurisdiction rests the decision of who can, and cannot, become a licensed health care practitioner, and what they can, and cannot, do. This is the gateway through...
2013 Legislative Review: placenta take out
It’s official in Oregon now. You can take your placenta, along with your new baby, home from the hospital. This was already a practice among the CAM set but apparently new mothers were running afoul of laws designed to protect us from bio-hazards. New legislation exempts “the removal from a health care facility . . . of a placenta by a postpartum...
Licensing Naturopaths: the triumph of politics over science
Naturopaths shouldn’t get too excited about having a special week in their honor. The U.S. House of Representatives gave watermelons a whole month. As between naturopathy and watermelons for my good health, I’ll go with the watermelons any day. You’ll soon understand why. Today is not my usual blogging day. But when David Gorksi announced SBM’s celebration of Naturopathic Medicine Week, I...
Six reasons CAM practitioners should not be licensed
States license “complementary and alternative” (CAM) practitioners (chiropractors, naturopaths, acupuncturists/TCM practitioners and homeopaths) via the magic of “legislative alchemy.” Ironically, licensing statutes are enacted based on the states’ constitutional power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. Yet these CAM practice acts actually increase public vulnerability to unsafe and ineffective health care practices. It is, in short, a bad...
Naturopathic organ repositioning coming soon to Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania legislators need to know only one thing about House Bill 612 (licensure of naturopathic “doctors”) to vote against it: As a means of “naturopathic musculoskeletal therapy” the bill would allow naturopaths to “reposition body tissues and organs.” This is impossible. You cannot “reposition” tissues and organs of the human body by external manipulation. Why does this tell us everything we need...
Fighting Back
As I hope I demonstrated in Legislative Alchemy: Naturopathy 2013, below, licensing “naturopathic doctors,” especially as primary care physicians, is a bad idea. Unfortunately, the only people usually interested in opposing their licensing efforts are medical doctors and their organizations. Of course, this allows naturopaths to pretend they are the victims of the evil, Big Pharma-controlled medical-industrial complex which kills and maims vast...
Legislative Alchemy: Naturopathy 2013
A fresh season of state legislative sessions is upon us and with it comes the ubiquitous attempts by purveyors of so called “complementary and alternative medicine” (or “CAM”) to join the health care provider fraternity. Via the magic of legislative alchemy, state legislatures transform pseudoscientific diagnoses (e.g., “chronic yeast overgrowth”) and treatments (e.g., homeopathy) into faux, but legal, health care. Once the...
Here we go again: A bill licensing naturopaths rears its ugly head in Michigan
The goal of organized naturopathy is to achieve licensure for naturopaths in all 50 states. Unfortunately, that means they have to come through Michigan, which is my state. This means the naturopaths, having failed to pass a licensure bill last year, are back to try again. They're a lot like the Terminator that way. They never, ever give up.