A U.S. Department of Education staff team has recommended that the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education no longer be recognized as the accrediting body for such programs. If the recommendation is adopted, accreditation by the council would no longer make schools eligible for federal student aid.
The report will go next week to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. That 14-member panel will make its recommendation to U.S. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley.
The staff report concludes that the medical council has been inconsistent in the way it applies its standards, and lax in enforcing them. Part of the problem may be in the tiny number of programs it accredits: three in the United States and one in Canada. The schools are Bastyr University in Kenmore, Wash., Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Tempe, Ariz., National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Ore., and the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in Toronto.
The council, which has accredited naturopathy programs for the past 13 years, angrily accused another naturopathy group, the Coalition for Natural Health, of undermining its authority. The coalition has fought efforts to license practitioners of naturopathy because such requirements would exclude the vast majority of practitioners, who didn’t graduate from accredited schools.
Council officials said they had no proof that the coalition had tried to influence the Education Department. They said, however, that they suspected that the coalition’s criticism of the council over the past year may have been timed to influence decision-makers in Washington. But in the battle over accreditation, both sides came out swinging last week. Officials with the council believe their opponents are trying to cash in on the public interest in natural medicine by passing themselves off as doctors.
“We believe many of the members of this organization (the Coalition for Natural Health) are people who have obtained Doctor of Naturopathy degrees from correspondence schools not regulated by state education agencies,” said Robert B. Lofft, executive director of the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education.
“We have to wonder why our enemies are spending so much money to discredit a tiny little accrediting agency,” he added. The coalition has waged an aggressive state-by-state lobbying effort to defeat attempts to license naturopathy -- a requirement the council strongly favors.
The coalition’s president, Jeff Goin, countered that the accrediting council was trying to monopolize the practice of naturopathy by insisting that only people with four-year degrees from accredited schools should be allowed to practice.
Many of his members have no interest in prescribing medicine or performing surgery, and don’t pass themselves off as physicians, he said.
The coalition’s 2,500 members use a variety of techniques to encourage the body to heal itself, using such tools as diet, exercise, massage and sunlight. “Some learned from correspondence courses, some are tribal healers who learned their skills on reservations, and some have learned as apprentices with other practitioners,” he said.
The colleges that the council accredits are comprehensive educational institutions that offer four years of postgraduate training, including two years of clinical work in disease diagnosis and patient care.
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