Practitioners Should Have The Right To...
As an alternative health practitioner you are a healer. It is who you are. You do not simply practice a profession in a distant office from nine to five. Your healing art is a life philosophy, part of your spiritual base. You help people to heal to find their spiritual center. Health to you is not simply removing symptoms.
As an alternative health practitioner you have devoted years to learning your art. You may have taken formal course work, or studied under a master. You have invested much of your time and resources. You constantly read and seek to improve yourself and your art.
As an alternative practitioner people seek you. They need you as a guide so that they can find better health and a more centered and fulfilling life. You want to make a difference in people's life. Many of the people who come to you are sick. They are diseased and have not fared well under regular medicine. You clients are educated and they know what they want.
Many see your social role as sacred. Others see you as a quack and want to shut you down. In Connecticut you can be charged with practicing medicine without a license. Your healing art is safe and effective and your clients are happy, yet legal action can be taken against you. You are not practicing medicine as it is practiced by regular physicians, you do not prescribe drugs, you do not perform any surgeries, you do not interpret charts or tests, and you do not diagnose disease. Why would you? That is what your clients are trying to get away from or they are looking for a modality to ease and compliment some procedure they are going through with a regular physician. Yet as the law is written you face criminal charges and risk lose of property, personal liberty and your art and livelihood. You can be financial crippled trying to pay legal fees for your defense. Your clients can loose you.
What is needed in Connecticut is a change in the law so that alternative practitioners will have a safe harbor. Doctors who use alternative medicine will not be held to vague and unwritten "standard of care" dogma without due process. The broad sweeping language in the law that defines what you do as medicine needs to become more specific.
You may have been practicing without any problems. There is no guarantee that you will continue in the shadows. Try to imagine if the state department of health serves you legal documents to 'cease and desist" or worse arrests you? Where will you be then? What will your clients do without you?
What can you do? You can join Connecticut Health Freedom Coalition and help establish laws that protects your right to practice and your clients right to choose.
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