Profile of a Profession: Naturopathic Practice - Center for the Health ...

Profile of a Profession: Naturopathic Practice
Section E Proactive Practice Model and Viability of Profession
of Naturopathic Medicine
What efforts has the profession made to develop practice guidelines, treatment protocols
and interprofessional collaboration on clinical care? How are rates of patient satisfaction?
How is the profession developing new modalities? How accessible are members of the
profession to the public? What groups and associations are working to promote the profession? 8
Guidelines and protocols
Naturopathic medicine is in the process of developing clinical care practice guidelines and protocols. This is
a new undertaking throughout health care, but many naturopathic physicians, like other health care profes-
sionals, are committed to developing a consistent method for advancing such a science. While detailed clin-
ical care guidelines are still in the development stages, naturopathic physicians can rely on less specific prac-
tice guidelines developed by the professional associations to guide daily practice (see appendices A and B).
Although naturopathic physicians are trained to work collaboratively with other health care profes-
sionals and to refer patients to other providers as appropriate, we did not identify any formal documents
regarding interprofessional guidelines or protocols for clinical care.
Patient satisfaction
Limited research has been done to date on patient satisfaction, including cultural competence, of natur-
opathic medical care. However, pilot data was gathered regarding cost savings of naturopathic medical
care from 135 patients at five separate participating naturopathic physician practices (Weeks, 1996b).
A two-page survey was completed by each patient at the time of their visit to a naturopathic physician.
The majority of patients felt that the care received by naturopathic physicians was cost effective for
them. These points are summarized below:
• 49% experienced lowered or discontinued use of conventional prescription medications
• 16% were able to eliminate surgery or other invasive procedure
8 For a complete list of questions, see Dower et al., Profiling the Professions: A Model for Evaluating Emerging Health
Professions. UCSF Center for the Health Professions, 2001.
Chapter One: Naturopathic Medicine 47