New Mexico moves closer to health freedom open-practice for holistic and alternative practitioners

by Ken Winston Caine

New Mexico is on track to enact the second simplest and shortest health-freedom, right-to-practice act for non-licensed providers in the United States.

Oklahoma has the shortest. It is contained in two sentences in that state’s medical practices act:

1. “It is the intent that this act shall apply only to allopathic and surgical practices and to exclude any other healing practices.” and

2. “Nothing in the Oklahoma Allopathic Medical and Surgical Licensure and Supervision Act shall prohibit services rendered by any person not licensed by the Board and practicing any nonallopathic healing practice.”

New Mexico’s proposed act is being shepherded by a small group calling themselves the New Mexico Complementary and Alternative Medicine Project and has been bankrolled primarily by The Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque.

Its bill proposing an amendment to the state’s Uniform Licensing Code cleared its last committee hurdle in the New Mexico Senate last night, being passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 5-2 vote to the full Senate for debate.

The language moving forward says simply:

“C. Nothing in the Uniform Licensing Act is to be construed as
requiring licensure of a person engaged in traditional, cultural,
complementary or alternative health care as long as that person
does not claim to be engaged in the practice of medicine or in
any other profession or occupation regulated by a board.

“D. Nothing in the Uniform Licensing Act is to be construed to
limit the public’s right to access traditional, cultural,
complementary or alternative health care practitioners, nor to
limit the right of a non licensed traditional, cultural,
complementary or alternative health care practitioner to
practice.”

It wasn’t always like that.

Until June, the proposed bill’s language contained requirements that practitioners provide clients with long, detailed disclosure statements, contained clear limitations on how one could practice, and required that practitioners obtain and maintain signed informed consent statements from all clients.

All that was modeled on health freedom acts that have passed legislatures in Minnesota and California and a few other states.

Then in June, NMCAAMP insiders met with revered law wizards at the University of New Mexico School of Law, and the strategy changed. All the detailed disclosures and “shall nots” were stripped from the bill.

Whether the current, very simple and elegant language will make it through the full house is an unknown at this point. But with 20 days left in the legislative session, the push is on.

The state Medical Board is fiercely fighting the bill.

State Senator William Payne at the Judiciary Committee hearing urged the medical board to chill a bit. He pointed out that the bill does not allow anything that is not currently allowed and does not strip the medical board of any of its authority over people in New Mexico who practice medicine.

He noted that the bill clarifies that the Uniform Licensing Code does not require people to be licensed who are practicing methodologies that are not governed by any existing licensing board.

“If someone wants to wear a triangle on their head and believe that it makes them feel better,” what business is that of the medical board or any other state licensing board, he asked.

If the medical board could document that a particular herb or therapy was dangerous, then they should propose an amendment to the bill to prohibit that specific thing, he said.