Volume 38 Issue 3

Beyond the binary
(A final word as President)

For years now, whenever our profession talks about its future, we’ve defaulted to the same tired multiple choice question: registration, yes or no. Pro or anti. Pick a side. It’s a question that fits neatly on a placard and terribly onto a profession as complex as ours, and I think it’s time we admitted that.

A practitioner said something to me recently that’s stuck. She told me she never gets political in her clinical practice, she just wants to help patients. But watching regulatory changes threaten how she could work, she said, “I can really see how much politics can impact my work.” I think most of us are like her. We didn’t get into this profession to fight regulatory battles. We got into it to help people get well. But whether we like it or not, the political landscape shapes what we’re allowed to do in that clinic room, and pretending otherwise is a luxury none of us actually have.

I’ve been a volunteer director at the NHAA for eight years now, and president since 2022, and in that time  I’ve watched this same argument go round and round without ever quite landing anywhere new. Someone described our profession to me a while back as a bunch of anarchists, and I think this is both one of our best qualities and one of our most problematic. I haven’t been able to shake the idea, because it’s true. We are wildly, stubbornly passionate. I see it every time I talk to practitioners, academics, researchers and students, this deep and genuine care for the health outcomes of Australians, backed by knowledge that is vast and properly complex. And yet put a group of us together and you’ll get as many visions for the future as there  are people in the room.

Here’s what I think we’re missing. A profession doesn’t get built on a yes or no answer, it gets built on foundations, and ours are already incredibly sturdy. Naturopaths and Herbalists have been part of the fabric of Australian health for a long time. Plant medicine for even longer. Sure, we have always had a bit of a PR problem, but I consider this to be due to the profession not knowing how to define ourselves, which then creates confusion for the public being able to understand what we can do. Despite this, the growth of Integrative, Traditional and Complementary Medicine in this country goes from strength to strength, and we should be considered the leaders of this movement. We have a growing evidence base, with genuinely excellent research underway across Australia into naturopathic and herbal medicine as whole practice, not just isolated ingredients.

We have the beginnings of a robust, shared answer to the question of who a naturopath or Western herbal medicine practitioner actually is, as we begin to create shared education standards, competency frameworks and codes of conduct, work that is unglamorous and essential in equal measure. And we’re starting to see that definition reflected back at us in legislation. WorkCover recognition in some states. Private health insurance rebates, reinstated and with more on the way. None of this is the registration argument; and all of it matters more than the registration argument.

I’m a ridiculously optimistic person, and I’ve seen real cohesion built during my time on the board, not despite our differences but often because we worked them out in the room rather than around them. There is clear proof of this happening across the profession. Four associations, historically considered more as competition rather than collaborators, sitting down together to build something resembling a shared vision for the profession. Add to that some of the best naturopathic and Western herbal medicine education providers in the world, and we have a foundation worth being proud of. It should be our strength, the thing that holds us together. Instead, in a climate thick with misinformation, we keep risking it by dragging the whole conversation back to a reductionist for-or-against argument that was never big enough to hold what we actually are.

I think most of us only really clock how political our work has become once the politics arrives at our own front door, and by then the conversation is already happening without us. I’d rather we got there first.

While writing this I went looking for a quote from Pericles, something about how disinterest in politics doesn’t mean politics loses interest in you. Turns out he never said it. It’s a myth, invented and then repeated  until it felt true. Fitting, really, because our profession has plenty of its own myths, and I suspect we’d all benefit from working out which ones actually hold up.

So this is the challenge I leave you with. Stay engaged. Build better arguments than the ones we’ve been  recycling for years. Have the harder, more nuanced disagreements, because we’re capable of them.

Stepping out from behind my own clinic room eight  years ago to see the full, colourful, occasionally chaotic world the NHAA has protected and fought for over more than a hundred years has been one of the genuine privileges of my life. Thank you for letting me help steer the ship, even when it insisted on being unruly. I couldn’t be prouder of where we’re headed, and the wonderful people who continue to lead the way.

Author(s)

Hannah Boyd Director and President NHAA
PO Box 696, Ashfield, NSW 1800, Australia
Email president@nhaa.org.au