What are the legal issues the natural health practitioner needs to know about?
In some states, legislatures have enacted laws that restrict practitioners from using certain professional titles, certain modalities, or both. The former are commonly called “title laws,” and the latter are called “scope of practice laws.” Until recently, most of these licensing laws were limited to highly specialized, narrowly-defined fields of natural health such as chiropractic and acupuncture. However, within the last few years a number of special-interest groups have sought to pass licensing laws to limit the practice of a number of more generalized natural health practices that have been in the public domain since the beginning of time. Such misguided initiatives have included attempts to license naturopathy, naturopathic medicine, and homeopathy. These licensing attempts are usually initiated by special interest groups within the natural health field who want to drive out competitors and establish a monopoly. This serves to restrict consumer choice, prevent healers from offerin
