How Nurses Can Affect Policy Making

6/5/2006

Liscense to practice Naturopathic Medicine
The CFI-FL is the Center for Inquiry in Florida. This site was not easily stumbled upon during my search. My search started at the state level and was going to be about the elderly and how they are being taken advantage of through the courts that appoint them a legal guardian that the elder doesn't even know. Basically they scam all the elders' money and the elder just sits in a nursing home dying. When I didn't have any luck with finding any bills on that subject, I ran across CFI-FL and started to look around. I found something of great interest to me and reviewed the available information on it and decided to write about Naturopathic Practitioners and the bill that was started to stop them from being licensed in the state of Florida.

Currently since March of 2006, Florida's State's Legislature has been considering passing a bill to license a Naturopathic Practitioner. Now doing some research on Naturopathy, its not what it is cracked up to be. Naturopathy is based on a higher being, perhaps God and the healing is all in the faith and belief of the person performing and receiving the healing.

My Views on Passing this Bill

My position on this bill is complete against it and actively. Basically they steer someone away from health care and possible solutions to their illness, and divert them and waste their medical dollars on some made up bogus therapies. These are more or less just a scam to make money and let someone believe they are being healed, when they are not. Naturopathy is based on using natural remedies, like sunlight, message, water and just diet. The person being healed has to believe they are self healing and don't need any medical attention. People who practice naturopaths are supposed to be holistic and believe that the body and supernatural soul are joined. They don't run any test to determine what is wrong with the person; they just start trying to treat an illness they know nothing about. There are enough scammers out there and now they want to give them a license to scam. This would have a huge impact on me personally because I feel very strong about health care and our healing process. Being someone who has two parents in their 60's, I worry about how this could affect them. If someone scammed them and they were ill and needed medical attention, but believed in something that could not help them. How would I be able to protect them from these scammers and make sure they sought medical attention in the correct form? Personally it will affect in a bad way because I can't stand when someone scams an innocent person and much less an elderly person who really doesn't know what to believe and wants to believe there is a great good to save them.

If this bill passes and they begin to license Naturopathic, it is going to have a great impact on the stakeholders of true health care practice. Giving them a license is going to make more and more people believe they can heal and that they should seek healing before going to the doctors. The stakeholders are going to see a huge impact on the elder and the very young, teen to age 24, because these are the most influenced of all populations and you can convince them very quickly to believe what you are doing is good. These populations are the ones who get scammed on the internet by those stupid chain letters and pass it on emails. The emails that say someone is sick and needs money donations and they actually send money. It is just basically setting up the public for more scams and there has been no scientific approach to justify what they are doing is real.

Taking Action

One action I would take on this bill is lobby and make sure that people are made aware of the facts and not just that now they have a license this must mean it is true. Lobby to the populations that I feel would be greatly affected by the scammers and make them aware. Bring up facts on how they just believe in one thing and don't even truly know what the body is doing and how it is reacting to anything. Setting up sites to visit with debates on the topic to get a lot of opinions and let everyone make their own decisions. Lobbying would make me feel like even if you did choose this route of healing, you had information that fair warned you and you have the means of obtaining true facts. Just making people aware would make me feel better about them being out there if this bill should pass.

References

Gwyther, L.P., George, L.K (1986). Caregiver Well-Being: A Multidimensional Examination of Family.

Donelan, K., et al. (2002). Challenged To Care: Informal Caregivers in a Changing Health System. Health Affairs

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