I was recently listening to an interview between podcast host Joe Rogan and his guest Mikhaila Peterson, follower of the controversial “carnivore diet” as an answer to lifelong autoimmune disease, in which Mr. Rogan made a number of negative comments regarding naturopaths following the mention of various dietary recommendations Mikhaila had been offered by her own naturopath. As a subscriber to and avid listener of Mr. Rogan’s content, due in large part to his generally being very open-minded, especially with regard to unconventional ways of thinking about health, I was initially surprised and honestly quite turned off by his comments. I didn’t expect him to have such an uninformed view of naturopathic medicine. But then I realized that that was exactly what it was – uninformed. Most people have no idea what type of training naturopathic doctors (NDs) receive, the approach to care that they provide, or they mistakenly conflate naturopathic doctors with traditional naturopaths, who have far less rigorous training, and, in some states, have no regulated way of actually distinguishing themselves from NDs.
I have been on a mission since beginning naturopathic medical school to inform others about how a naturopathic approach to medicine can resolve a lot of the issues our current medical system faces. This took me to Washington D.C. multiple times over those four years to advocate for the inclusion of naturopathic medical care into the current healthcare paradigm, speaking to the aids of congressmen and senators about how a preventative, patient-centered approach can actually result in a huge cost savings to the system long-term. I understand very well the lack of information all the way to misinformation being spread about how naturopathic doctors treat their patients.
The Association of Accredited Naturopathic Medical Colleges (AANMC) has put together a couple of very detailed articles outlining and comparing the education of naturopathic doctors to medical doctors (MDs) and NDs to traditional naturopaths. To briefly summarize this information, ND students go through a 4-year curriculum at an accredited naturopathic medical school, very similar to MD students for the first two years, which is when the basic sciences like anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology are taught. For the final two years, ND students focus on their clinical rotations, similar to their MD counterparts, though ND rotations focus on treating patients with dietary, lifestyle, botanical, homeopathic and sometimes pharmaceutical interventions, as opposed to the primarily pharmaceutical treatments emphasized in MD rotations. This is to say, we have a solid understanding of conventional treatment options for a variety of conditions seen in primary care medicine, and we additionally learn how to treat these conditions using less harmful interventions by getting to the root cause of the illness.
This is where the fundamental difference in philosophy comes in. Conventional medicine is very algorithm-based, meaning there is a clear path for treatment options #1,2 and 3 when you go to see a conventional doctor with a specific complaint or diagnosis. A naturopathic approach, on the other hand, does not take your symptoms at face value. Instead, more time is taken to investigate the underlying cause and treat that. This is what I mean when I say that, long-term, a naturopathic approach saves the healthcare system money. It prevents patients from having to see a physician over and over again for the same complaint that was just being palliated by whatever medication they were given. Further, by getting to the root cause of illness, naturopathic doctors effectively prevent the development of more serious, chronic diseases that will require more expensive interventions down the road. NDs do this using simple, yet effective, individualized interventions involving changes in diet and lifestyle, herbal medicines, vitamin and mineral supplementation, and medications only when absolutely necessary.
I hope that naturopathic medicine will be a household term by the end of my career. I hope that we can manage to integrate naturopathic physicians into a healthcare paradigm where our expertise in natural medicine is recognized and used alongside the expert knowledge of MDs, DOs, DCs, PTs, RNs, LMTs, and all other healthcare practitioners. I chose this field of medicine because I know that it is effective, and even more, I know it is the approach that many patients would choose if given the choice.
