What is the difference between a Naturopathic Doctor and a Medical Doctor?

There is not as much difference as some might assume or want you to beleive. Both types of doctors are highly educated and practice modern, science and evidence based western medicine. Philosophically Naturopathic Doctors (NDs) bring a holistic approach to medicine. They look at your health problems in the complete context of you. What you are experiencing, how you live, what you believe, and what you are willing to do to produce your maximum available health are also very important considerations — in addition to physical examination, laboratory tests, and diagnostic imaging. NDs seek to identify the root causes of health problems and resolve them whenever possible. This takes time for a doctor to perform competently, one patient at a time. Naturopathic Doctors sacrifice their maximum earning potential in order to provide quality health care. Seeking the best possible results for their patients while managing their own personal well being.

The naturopathic approach to medicine is available for all health care providers to practice. The conventional primary care economic model is unfortunately based on rapid turnover of patient visits. The typical family practice MD needs to see 22 individual patients a day in order to make the billing numbers that support their handsome personal incomes. “Churning visits” comes at a high cost to the quality of care that can be delivered, and to the job satisfaction, quality of life, and sustainability of the healthcare professional. All too often burnout, apathy, and lack of empathy fill the hours until enough money is made to escape the healthcare profession all together… Indeed, only 22% of new graduate MDs are pursuing careers in primary care. The other 78% are going into high priced specialties that pay extremely well with a more sensible patient workload.

USA healthcare is the most expensive in the world with almost no one satisfied with the process or the outcomes.

Naturopathic Doctors are not servants of the pharmaceutical industry. The dogma of evidence based medicine has been erected high beyond reason to form an economic barrier to entry for any treatment that cannot be patented, command a high price, and afford to become a patron of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval process. The planet Earth has provided us humans with many potential medicines. Most do not fit the criteria to enrich the pharmaceutical companies, their executives, and stockholders.

Without FDA approval, responsibility for harm falls to the healthcare provider making the prescription. In Oregon, NDs have been licensed since 1927 enjoying a patient safety record that is not just above reproach — it sets a standard unachievable by the current conventional model and its rapid fire prescription pad. The risk is incredibly low from lifestyle interventions, biochemical interventions with targeted nutrients, herbal medicines, and prescription drugs given on and off label by an attentive practitioner that knows you, follows up with you, and is ready to adjust treatments whenever they are evidenced to be causing harm or to not be helping.

“First do no harm” is part of every health care provider’s Hippocratic oath. The evidence for harm and lack of harm are both well accounted in the gathered statistics of hospital admittances, licensing board complaints, death records, malpractice torts, pharmaceutical lawsuits, legal and regulatory actions. Is there any other point of evidence more important than this? Yes. Patient outcomes are inherently anecdotal and yet the most important piece of evidence in patient care. Every treatment falls into statistical distributions where they harm or don’t harm, provide benefit or not. It is the attentive doctor that makes the most good from these ranges and uncertainties — one patient at a time. People get better, feel better, and get on with living a good life. Then they tell their friends who it was that helped them most.

There is only choice preventing other healthcare practitioners from providing the same kind of attentive care as NDs. Some MDs who have focused on patient outcomes over their own enrichment have assumed the mantle of “Functional Medicine” doctors. Good for them! Like NDs, they all too often suffer the scorn of the dominate conventional medicine model that is locked into “churning” pharmaceutical laden visits for profit and universal misery.

Advances in modern medicine are often amazing in the ability to rescue people from death. But should that be where we spend all of our health care dollars? Is that where we, each and every one us as a patient, want to focus all our attention towards health — on simply not dying? No. We all want to live full, happy, productive long lives with as little ill health as possible. That is why we need NDs to be in our lives and integrated with the rest of the healthcare system. Naturopathic medical school trains NDs to provide primary care and to know the limits of their education and scope of practice. NDs refer to advanced care when a health problem is out of their scope or comfort level. There is a time and place for every high risk life saving intervention, and thankfully experts that know how to perform them.

Our shared goal for everyone should be to avoid needing life saving interventions as much as possible, and to recover as much health as possible after they have been needed.