For over ten years now I’ve made my living in alternative medicine. It doesn’t really matter what kind of experience you collect, what kind of working relationship you build with your patients, what kind of hit-or-miss scenario you encounter along your particular journey, nor does it matter who “teaches” you anything, no one wants to tell you about or discuss one constant in our work: every couple of years, like clockwork, we alt-med practitioners find ourselves scrambling to mobilize against some well organized, well funded threat to our livelihood–a threat that can be local or national, and is now often international in scope. And every time it happens, people in our professional communities think that somehow “things will work out for the best” if we just go along with what’s happening, consider the attack to be some kind of “constructive criticism” we could use to our advantage (and then try to change what we’re doing because we think we can become “more acceptable”). Sometimes, we take the government and conventional medicine at their word for what they’re trying to do with us, if the “attack” ends up leading (coincidentally!) to some time consuming, money sucking “process” initiative.
That’s the best case scenario, one that, in my experience, has yet to end well. The worst case, the most evident reaction, includes an automatic factioning process. Various alternative medical system “regulating bodies” (societies, associations, colleges, and boards) all claim to be working “right alongside the government in a “process”–the only valid process–that will make us all “legal” (or acceptable, or legitimate…whatever it is we’re told we’re not, by everyone except our patients). “Everyone else” not in the “chosen” and involved body is just “doing the wrong thing”. Somehow, we always fail to see how it is we’re all lured off to take part in these ongoing projects that lead nowhere but effectively tear us apart. I wonder how we keep missing this, every time it happens.
It’s difficult to think we’re ever going to be united on anything any time soon when so much paper and ink are wasted in international and local one-upmanship endeavors, which quite literally show us up to be politically retarded. Easy to manipulate, we still think it’s all about what we’re supposedly doing wrong, and who we have to blame and ostracize in our communities for creating the “bad name” with which we’re all labeled. It’s like we assume the position of the powerless, every time. We are quite literally the unwitting instigators of our ongoing demise. This is never more evident than when we’re confronted with the kind of challenges we never seem prepared to face, whether they come at us from a local source, or from some huge force far outside of the confines of our own state laws.
This year’s big challenge in Canada is Bill C51–it’s full of massive restrictions regarding access to all natural substances–herbs, vitamins, medicines, and just good old real food–to which we’ve idiotically allowed Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Medicine to control access. It will also dictate choice and behaviour, with severe repercussions to individual citizens who opt to use alternative medicines, and to practitioners alike. It opens us all up not just to these transgressive laws, but also laws made in other countries which previously did not affect our own behaviour–such as the Codex Alimentarius, which many natural health physicians believed would never apply here in Canada. Under C51, they’ll become law in Canada and we’ll be subject to those laws, without their having to undergo the parliamentary process in to become law in this country. There won’t be any recourse then, in terms of protest–elected officials will have no say in the matter, and they’re our one tiny link to power in this country.
It will mean the end of alternative medicine as we know it here–that is, it won’t be available to the public through well trained, educated, and skilled practitioners, only through conventional medical doctors (who are not required to undergo this education process in order to prescribe). To add insult, the bill is intended to be the “thin edge of the wedge”. It will be one of the first which will override any legislative sovereignty we have as a country. And that will open the door to plenty of other such bills, not necessarily ones which affect alternative medicine alone. It’s meant to be a real Trojan horse of a law, the potential for abuse is staggering.
And yes, the repercussions include seizure of property–homes, practices, files, medicines. They include incarceration, asset seizure (so it will be impossible to defend yourself, should the law be used against you), and the imposition of very heavy fines (these will be applied to manufacturers of natural products primarily–the idea is to shut them down, eliminate their access to plants, seeds, genetic materials for the manufacture of natural products; but the fines will also be levied against individual practitioners, consumers, people like parents who choose to treat their children with real food or herbs, too).
Two years ago, when Homeopaths were being suckered into yet another “self-regulation” scheme that we were never allowed to devise ourselves, I remember having one hell of an ongoing argument about the process with my own doctor, a Naturopath who trained me quite well in my own studies in classical Hahnemannian Homeopathy. But he’s an exception as a Naturopath–for his accreditation, the DHANP, he was required to study Homeopathy in school to the same basic extent that I was: five years of conventional medical sciences following a completed university degree, combined with a full three year Homeopathic medical science training course, and two years of supervised clinic work in classical homeopathic medicine. This is an American accreditation, one we don’t have in Canada at the moment–mostly because NDs here have succumbed to demands made by conventional medicine that they prove themselves to be “science based” practitioners. As a result, the “ND” designation here allows you to claim that you are a Homeopath even though you’ve never studied homeopathic medicine. When the NDs got that little plum, they were also given quite a political pedestal, which raised them far above the Homeopaths and other alternative medical practitioners below. Suddenly NDs were the authority, their patients could seek out help and receive repayment for their expenses from private insurers…while the NDs ensured that Homeopaths, Traditional Chinese Medical doctors, and others would no longer be covered under those policies. Divide and conquer, effectively implemented, part one.
Divide and conquer part two came along when the “self-regulation” process became an opportunity to destroy both NDs and HDs (homeopathic doctors) by attempting to create a regulatory “college” board which included them both. The first clue that this was to be a destructive idea was the fact that the NDs were under fewer practice restrictions, would not fulfill education and ethical standards set by Homeopathic medical societies, and finally, held a great deal more political clout in the conventional medical community than their Homeopathic counterparts, and nothing was being done to fix that inequality on this proposed college. That should have been a glaring clue we could not overlook: and yet, I remember my own doctor thought this college would be a great idea. When I protested that he wasn’t thinking about the poor training most NDs have in Homeopathy, and how so much of our future as homeopaths will be compromised because of the lack of priority that has been placed on the need for full training of homeopathic medicine as opposed to it’s opposite paradigm, conventional medicine…he pooh pooh’d my concerns as if I couldn’t understand what was going on. I insisted: I pointed out to him that the very school in which he used to teach student Naturopaths classical homeopathy, the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, no longer employed a classical homeopath on its teaching staff. He no longer taught there himself, and the full extent of the school’s courses on homeopathy were now being written and taught by a pharmaceutical company selling polypharmacy patent medicines mislabeled as “homeopathic” to untrained physicians, all looking to practice lucrative homeopathy as if it were the same as conventional medicine. He agreed there was a problem there, but couldn’t seem to understand that this would put us all at a disadvantage. He couldn’t see that this pharmaceutical company, now the sole Canadian-based lab making the Homeopathic remedies Hahnemannian homeopaths use, was poised to reach into a promising new market of untrained MDs, who’d be far more inclined to use their rote prescription patent medicines under the guise of treating patients with Homeopathic medicine. After all, alternative medicine is a huge growth market right now, our patients have all tried conventional methods and those methods have failed. Over 70% of the population now uses some form of alternative medical care–that’s a big chunk of the marketplace that’s up for grabs to Pharmaceutical companies looking for even bigger profits. And that fact puts all the bona fide alternative medical physicians in a disadvantaged position.
He meant well, he was idealistic and completely bamboozled by the lure of “scientific legitimacy”, the kind conventional medicine approves of, the kind that keeps pharmaceutical companies humming. He protested that not enough Homeopaths were familiar with the basic medical sciences, even though he knows full well that those courses are handy in terms of reference, and of knowing about the conventional medical paradigm and how it differs significantly to Homeopathic medical science, which requires a completely different perspective in which to practice effectively. I argued then, and still argue, that a Homeopath had better understand Homeopathic medical perspective and method thoroughly–or stay away from the medicines and the practice of homeopathy all together–choose a modality that’s a lot easier, closer to conventional methods, instead. It would be more useful for us to know what diagnostic tests are available here, so that when our patients bring their results to us we can interpret them effectively, and act accordingly (send them out for even more tests, or use the information in our own differential diagnoses for finding the similimum). But that information’s only taught to MDs–and they’re not willing to share that knowledge. Another fact that should alert everyone concerned that the last priority in this “protective measure” is our patients’ care, that public health and consumer protection are definitely not on the agenda for these regulations.
This conflict was the greatest disappointment I’ve ever felt in my teacher, and in my doctor: to me it was mystifying that he would be willing to argue a point even if it meant we would both be compromised in the end. When I told him this, he told me not to worry, and said, “The government can never take away your right to make a living.”
I couldn’t believe such a capable and learned person could be so politically naive, so gullible. And so thoroughly unaware of our shared history as physicians in North America. They damn well can take away our right to make a living as practitioners away. They could, and they have in the past. Using very similar tactics. Successfully.
Recent Comments