OPPOSE SB 412

April 13, 2011

 The Bill – Nevada Senate Bill 412 (SB 412) provides for the regulation of the practice of complementary integrative medicine by creating a government-sanctioned Board of Complementary and Integrative Medicines to control all natural health care, backed by the power of the State to imprison and fine all offenders.  Just imagine when, as with other such medical boards, the power seekers and control freaks who naturally gravitate to positions of power in government come to have the say over what type of natural medicine may be practiced and what type may not.  Will your favorite form of natural medicine survive?  Or will it be branded a heresy and persecuted?  It does not take a rocket scientist to see that this Bill is the road to ruin for all of those creative natural health practitioners who refuse to conform.  This Board is just a not-so-clever attempt to create and enforce a monopoly that will end up strangling CAM practice.

     SB 412 must be defeated or amended to protect natural health and its practitioners.

     This legislation would put alternative practitioners of Nevada in serious jeopardy of felony fines and imprisonment for practicing complementary and integrative medicine that does not fit within the proposed Board’s licensing requirements and “accepted” practices.  It is intended to define all natural healers and have them tested and/or approved by conventional doctors.  There will be no grandfathering, no CEU (continuing education unit) for practicing licensees (under the Drugless Practitioner status), and it will make practicing any form of complementary health care a felony if the practitioner is not licensed.

     Alarmingly, to become a “licensed” Complementary Integrative Physician under this proposed law, an applicant would have had to attend medical school or have “received an equivalent education satisfactory to the Board.”  He or she must also be “of good moral character”; and we all know how other medical boards have used that requirement to persecute innocent practitioners.  In short, the bill gives the Board great powers to set the bar at whatever level it wants to screen out unwanted alternative practitioners.

    This is the Medical Monopoly at its finest, acting to stifle their competition and those they disagree with, the natural-health practitioners, all in the interest of course of “protecting” the public.  This Bill would criminalize victimless conduct.  After all, there should be no penalty at all – even a misdemeanor penalty – unless someone has been actually harmed and such harm has been proven in a court of law.  This Bill is typical government overkill and completely unnecessary.  Besides, the cost to the State of Nevada, once they create the Board and then try to license all these practitioners, will be far greater and more troublesome than they anticipate.  In the end, as attractive as it might seem now to have a “stamp of approval by the State,” the Board will become just another costly, rigid, and loathed government agency, out of touch with reality.

Where This Bill Stands Now

   The Bill is in the Senate Committee (Commerce, Labor & Energy) and is to be heard on Friday, April 15^th, just two days from now.

Please forward this News Release to everyone on your e-mail list right now.

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Click here for the permanent link to this news release, use this link to inform others.

National Health Federation: Established in 1955, the National Health Federation is a consumer-education, health-freedom organization working to protect individuals' rights to choose to consume healthy food, take supplements and use alternative therapies without unnecessary government restrictions. The NHF is the only such organization with recognized observer-delegate status at Codex meetings. www.thenhf.com