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[[File:Cayleff.jpg|thumbnail|275px|left|Nature's Path]]
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Before 1870, medicine in the United States was completely unregulated. The lack of regulation and the limited effectiveness of 19th century regular medicine encouraged the development of multiple competing medical sects during the century. The three largest medical sects were regulars(traditional physicians), homeopaths, and eclectics. Even though these three sects were the most prominent, numerous other medical systems were created and survived on the margins. Eclecticism, osteopathy, chiropractic medicine, and hydrotherapy are just a few of the medical sects born during this era of United States history. At the very end of the 19th Century, a new medical system called naturopathy was created by Benedict and Louisa Stroebel Lust. Unlike many of the 19th Century medical sects created, naturopathy has persevered to this day. Naturopathic healing was founded and based on number of influences including botanics, hydrotherapy, eclecticism, temperance and vegetarianism.
This involved constant entrapments authorized by AMA leaders with paid spies who visited practitioners with fake ailments and were “prescribed” salves, teas, massage or hygienic regimens. If this sounds like cloak-and- dagger high drama, it was. One such informant, Frances Benzacry, worked for the New York County Medical Society. She was so infamous that she sold her story to the Ladies Home Journal in 1915. In it she chronicled the various “cases” against naturopaths and other sectarians she brought to court and admitted, with surprising candor, that none of the therapies she witnessed had brought harm to patients. Benedict Lust himself was arrested sixteen times on state and federal charges, despite his M.D., D.O. and, N.D. degrees, and degrees in homeopathy and eclecticism. Always at the ready was Louisa’s commitment to bailing out the accused. Some refused bail as a publicity ploy to rally attention to the unfair persecutions.
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So yes, naturopaths, to avoid accusations of using the label doctor, physician, etc., first chose the word “naturopath” to distinguish themselves. But this was insufficient to stop the hounding by the politico-medical establishment.
Many current licensed naturopaths are far more willing to embrace some of the benefits of biomedical medicine. This statement is complicated, perhaps overstated, but signifies an important shift nonetheless. Diminished are the carte blanche rejections of all pharmaceuticals (synthetic versus plant-based treatments) and vaccinations, replaced with a more tempered “weigh the evidence and outcomes” advice. Antibiotics are seen by some as having value, although a single-minded “fighting germs” approach still echoes as an inadequate theory of disease causality.
And professionalization itself can shift the focus from the political to the personal--again, antithetical to early philosophical leanings. Making a profitable living can be in conflict with an ethos of community betterment, which was so much the core of the original creatorsthinking.
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<i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1421419033/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1421419033&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=cca3095a2c9ae902342f3af1f4cf34c9 Nature’s Path ]</i> can enhance curriculum in American history, Women’s Studies classes, health and healing and social change classes. The chapters and their detailed subheadings lend themselves to topical and chronological insertion into course syllabi. This is a terrific text for faculty wanting to introduce not only new content knowledge, but for those who want to generate analytic discussion about power relations, gender equity, institutional monopolies, the courage to defy the norm and radical thinkers and practitioners who dare chart their own vision.:
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