Your Doctor can get in trouble

for using natural health treatments

Whether for reasons of conviction or crony capitalism, the government is heavily biased in favor of conventional medicine and against integrative or natural medicine. So laws often trample doctors’ natural right and their patients’ right to choose the healthcare options they prefer. Recent legislation introduced by Sen. Durbin and the FDA’s disastrous NDI draft guidance offer even more evidence of that—as if we didn’t already have enough!

Federal law clearly states that licensed physicians may “manufacture, prepare, propagate, compound, or process drugs solely for use in the course of their professional practice” [21 USC 360(g)]. Furthermore, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C) cannot regulate the therapeutic practices themselves.

Despite this, the FDA has approached individual doctors and threatened them with legal action if they continue to prescribe or use anything other than an FDA-approved drug or a drug being investigated under FDA procedures.

For example, doctors legally using bioidentical hormones made by a local compounding pharmacy in their practice have been been intimidated by FDA officials who send a letter or demand a visit. FDA employees may also demand to see the doctor’s books or patient records, none of which is proper. The doctor may also worry that the FDA is in contact with medical insurance companies or the state medical board.How Medicare and Medicaid Have Criminalized Natural Medicine

The federal government has also gained more and more control over individual doctors by paying their bills through Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, etc. Federal law makes fraudulent billing a felony that can land a doctor in jail. This sounds fair, until one realizes that the federal government may interpret a natural health treatment as a fraud simply because it is not conventional. In this way, medical care has become criminalized and any doctor who accepts a government payment may be facing a jail sentence.

This is further complicated by the fact that a doctor who contacts Medicare and asks if a treatment is acceptable under notoriously uncertain and unclear government rules may be given completely different answers by different Medicare employees. But whatever the answer given, that answer does not represent an acceptable legal defense. A doctor may therefore check with Medicare, proceed in good faith, and still be threatened with jail