As I celebrate 21 years of practice I look back and see how things have changed since Oct 1^st 1985. I was one of 3 women practicing in the province back then along with a total of about 40 ND’s altogether. At my first association meeting I was the only woman in attendance that year! Since then the College of Naturopathic Physicians of BC has grown to 200 and half of them are women. The acceptance of Naturopathic Medicine is steadily growing and over 150,000 British Columbians rely on ND’s for their primary health care. The medical and pharmaceutical community on the other hand have not embraced the profession. They used to tell their patients “ don’t waste your money by seeing an ND” and now they say “don’t take this or that herb because it will kill you”. The hypocrisy around that is that the use of natural therapies results in very few deaths per year compared to the 45- 90,000 deaths in hospitals in the US due to medications and drug-drug interactions and this does not account for deaths from the same cause that occur outside of the hospital. (Similar statistics exist for Canada as well).

The unfortunate truth is that the 200 ND’s in BC do not have the funding to get on the TV or radio every time the media publishes some very questionable research, the latest regarding vitamin E. (You can see my retorts on my website). We educate our patient: one on one and with the articles we write and the lectures we give. It is a numbers game. There are over 6000 GP’s in BC not including specialists and that compares with 1000 ND’s all across Canada. So the onus is on the patient to do their own research and make their own decisions with what information they are able to gather. These are the types of people I am seeing. Very well educated people who do not want to subject their body to drugs and surgery unless all other avenues have been exhausted first. (ND’s are well trained to know their limits and refer patients back to their MD’s for more aggressive therapies if warranted).

Politically we are not that much further ahead. We have been fighting with the political party of the day to get a Pharmacopoeia ,from which we base our practice, accepted by the government since the 1930’s, to no avail. Every time we seem to get close, there is an election and the process is stalled due to a change of government or a change in the Health Minister. Each Health Minister then needs to be brought up to speed regarding our education and scope of practice and around and around it goes. Presently we have a good lobbyist group that is very intent on getting ahead of the election roller coaster so that the present Health Minister Honourable George Abbot, can get some good work done for us in the next three years (the government spends most of their fourth year in power on pressing re-election issues.)

The patients I am seeing are much harder to treat than the ones that I encountered early in my practice. This may due in part to my skill set however I am also convinced it is a sign of the times: our environment is swamped with more chemicals and substances that the human body is not used to detoxifying; there are more resistant bacteria and viruses evolving to trick the immune system and our immune systems are not getting wiser in learning how to handle these onslaughts; and the quality of our food sources is declining every year (unless you choose organic foods).