Natural medicine is a tiny but necessary (and growing) piece of a massive healthcare market.A handful of colleges and universities in America continue to add modestly each year to the number of natural medicine providers.Top 10 Market Realities Naturopathic Institutions Face Let’s have a look at the top 10 characteristics of this robust network of institutions whose members have held the place for preventive, lifelong wellness medicine for decades. Their general assumption is that mainstream biomedicine is gravitating toward more holistic approaches in response to market demand, rather than the shift emanating from a more philosophical center, notwithstanding the epistemology and track record of its disease-centered paradigm. The latecomers (eg, mainstream integrative medicine programs) have not usually benefited from knowing the history of natural medicine that has persisted for at least a century in America. That small group of fewer than 10 programs has faced detractors and political opposition the whole way. Many mainstream allopathic health-education institutions, we must remember, have pushed into this market in recent years, borrowing the lingo and terminology but not the philosophy or the coordinated practice of a spry network of universities and colleges around America that has been dedicated to natural medicine for decades. Schleich, PhD Education What’s It Really Like Out There?Īs every naturopathic physician knows, natural medicine is also known these days as “holistic” or “integrative” or “functional.” Some estimates put the aggregate population of active licensed/registered/certified (by civil authority) traditional naturopathic providers at 5000 nationwide.

Naturopathic medical conferences 2016