Naturopathic Doctors in Colorado get legal ok to treat infants and toddlers

I am fully trained and qualified to treat children under 2 years old.  However, I was limited legally from treating them until the passage of a recent bill in the state legislature.  So Hip Hip Hooray!!  Please bring your babies to me.  I offer a non-judgmental environment.  I explain both conventional and alternative options for treating your child.  Then you can make your own decisions about their health care.  I spend a great deal of my time educating people on what Naturopathic Medicine is and what it has to offer them.  The lack of information the public has on my degree has been a huge problem in getting Naturopathic Medical care to the people of Colorado.  The bill the Governor just signed to allow ND's to treat children under 2 took a huge amount of work to pass.  We had to get enough legislators educated on who we are and what we are qualified to do.  Thanks to a big effort to meet with them and explain our profession, they understand that we are very well equipped to help infants and toddlers.  ND's, like Medical Doctors are regulated on the state level.  This means every single state has to pass laws to allow ND's to practice legally in their state.  Unfortunately, because so many people do not understand the training an ND has, and because many others feel the practice of Naturopathic Medicine threatens their bottom line, legislation to legalize the practice all over the country faces incredible opposition.  Thanks to 20 years of hard work from Colorado citizens and ND's a bill was finally passed last year to regulate the profession in Colorado.  This gave legal recognition and oversight to ND's in Colorado offering more protection to its citizens.  Now anyone who uses the initials N.D. after their name or calls themselves a Naturopathic Doctor in Colorado must have completed at least 8 years of college including 4 at an accredited Naturopathic Medical school.  They must successfully pass naturopathic board exams, and keep their education current by completing continuing education requirements.  Before this law, anyone could call themselves an ND and the public was not assured of their qualifications.  As part of the political compromise process (read-what we had to do to appease enough lobbyists to get the bill to pass) the original registration bill forbade Naturopathic Doctors from treating children under 2.  This had nothing to do with our qualifications.  ND's are trained and highly qualified to treat infants and toddlers.  It had everything to do with other healthcare providers in Colorado fearing the loss of "customers" to us, and ignorance of our qualifications.  I am so happy that we have been given the state's blessing to do more of what we are trained to do, cradle to grave primary care.  The next step... prescription authority.  One of the things I really appreciate about Naturopathic Medicine is that we are trained to be integrative physicians; we learn pharmaceutical drugs as well as herbs, homeopathy, chiropractic and other "alternative" modalities.  This is wonderful as it means we are able to offer our patients more options.  Although many naturopathic doctors prescribe few pharmaceutical drugs, and many of our patients come to us because they do not want to take drugs, many other patients use some pharmaceuticals along with herbs and other alternative medicines and would like to be able to get everything from one Doctor.  I feel it is my role to explain options to my patients, then they make the choices between drug therapies and alternative therapies.   When they want to combine conventional and alternative I am there to guide them and them make sure they avoid interactions.   Here is a link to the Law Week Colorado article on the latest Bill