Letter from the Director

On behalf of the Alternative Medicine College of Canada, I welcome you. We know our students have both the desire to learn and the desire to help others.

These two activities, learning and helping, go hand-in-hand. Through my acupuncture and homeopathy practices, I learned that the desire to heal and intuition were not enough. I needed knowledge as well. With knowledge, we as practitioners are able to create realistic goals, discover what works, and realise when a more specialised field of practice is required. When we understand our scope of practice, we don’t hesitate to refer patients to traditional doctors when their problem is about injury, not function.

After so many years of collaboration with traditional medicine and alternative medicine, the time seems to have come to issue a WARNING:

Concerning the fundamental subjects in anatomy physiology and pure sciences

In Western Canada the pharmaceutical lobbies, quite aggressively, succeeded in obtaining legal protection for the title of naturopath, ND. by training naturopathic doctors with a training time (4 years) devoted mainly to the fundamental subjects of medicine, pharmacy and even minor surgery. The title “naturopathic doctor” (ND) essentially implies that of doctor of medicine (MD), and also includes conventional (allopathic) medicine. It can be argued that “naturopathic doctors” violate naturopathic philosophy by engaging in conventional schools in order to obtain official approval. Moreover, we can guess their intention to block access to the profession while controlling teaching and practice. We very much regret the submission of several naturopathic schools in Quebec to this dictatorship who, under the pretext of wanting to obtain recognition, have completely reduced the richness of traditional naturopathy while artificially inflating the hours of training!
At the CMDQ. We do not want to train naturopathic doctors. We believe that a training of approximately 1200 to 1500 hours is enough to form a good naturopath and these are the standards required by the professional associations of Quebec; at the same time, training in anatomy-physiology remains a prerequisite which should not exceed 250 hours.

Regarding the care methods taught

In addition to the previous paragraph, a naturopath must have access to the teaching of a variety of techniques of care which, in addition to the courses of hygiene and health education, have proven their worth, such as: The Bodily Approaches , Ortho-Molecular Approaches, Phyto-energetics, Gemmotherapy, Aromatherapy, Nutritherapy, Energy Therapies, Electromagnetic Waves, Biotherapies, Homeopathy, Oligotherapy, Counseling.
The variety of these methods of care learned allows the naturopath to respond effectively to the specific profile of his clients.
Some schools have insufficient course content in care methods. Programs based solely on French or European education are generally incomplete at this level. In France, for example, most therapeutic care is forbidden to non-doctors and is therefore not taught. There remain mainly courses based on fundamental subjects, vital hygiene, nutrition and an iridology course as useless as it is ineffective in practice. The excess hours in anatomy physiology are used to artificially inflate training hours, all to the detriment of treatment techniques.

About the doctorate

Several schools offer a doctoral program to attract clients; the doctorate is reserved for university studies, bearing this title would be illegal and unworthy in the eyes of the public, do not fall into this trap.

Regarding clinical internships

Beware of promises of 500 hours of clinical training! Schools have no or very few patients in consultation wishing to be treated by students. Since there are a hundred or more students a year in demand, these interns spend their time waiting and end up sharing a patient between six practitioners. These hours paid and lost on hold represent a large part of the 500 hours promised but are still counted as clinical internships with the blind or benevolent complicity of certain professional associations.

In conclusion, I invite you to keep an open mind to new ideas, but always act with common sense to find what is best for you and your community.

David Bentata