Dear Patients and Friends of Naturopathic Medicine
As naturopathic doctors, it is our pleasure to serve the people of Alaska, providing preventive and natural medicine to families for the past 30 years. We now need your help as we work to maintain our current ways of practicing naturopathic medicine and serving Alaskan families.
Naturopathic doctors were first licensed in Alaska in 1986. At that time there were four doctors in the state who had licenses in other states as Alaska did not offer licensing. Legal action against one of our providers led to an overwhelming response from consumers like yourself and our current law was formed. While not perfect, our licensing has allowed our profession to establish itself in several communities in Alaska.
Restrictions on our practice include the fact that we can not “give, prescribe, or recommend in the practice:
1. a prescription drug or
2. a controlled substance.” Controlled substances are prescription drugs such as opiates that are likely to be abused.
The Division of Occupational Licensing, who oversees our profession in Alaska, adopted regulations in 1994 that “prescription drugs” does not include medicine that is derived from or is a concentrate of a plant, tree, root, moss, fungus or other natural substance. This regulation was enacted because many of the therapies that have been a staple of naturopathic medicine are restricted by the prescription (Rx) legend. They are not available to the general public. This includes several herbs that are in tincture form and nutritional injections like B12 shots.
In 2011, many of our suppliers stopped providing these much needed products to our offices because they had been told by the State of Alaska that we can not use anything that is a prescription. These restrictions are not in line with the regulation above, and are a contradiction to how most of us have practiced over the past 18 years.
House Bill (HB)266 would clear up this confusion by taking one statement from our regulations and putting that into our licensing law. The law would state that naturopathic doctors in Alaska could not use prescription drugs “except a medicine that is derived from, or is a concentrate of or is an extract of a plant, tree, root, moss, fungus, or other natural substance if the medicine is not a controlled substance.” This would not be an expansion of our scope of practice but, as one legislator put it, “enshrining the status quo.”
We are grateful to our sponsors in the House, Cathy Muñoz and in the Senate, Lesil McGuire. We need legislators to hear from you that naturopathic medicine is your choice of health care. In these precarious times, tying the hands of your primary care providers creates an unnecessary barrier to appropriate care.
We have 90 days to accomplish our goal. Please contact your legislators, as well as our sponsors and any other legislators needed to get HB266 passed. Please forward any of your correspondence to either your naturopathic doctor or to Amy E Chadwick, ND, AKANP Secretary at amycnd@gci.net
Thank-you in advance for your continuing support of naturopathic medicine.
Yours in health,
Your naturopathic doctor!