Michelle Woodworth

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It should come as no surprise in a world where a homeowner can be sued because a careless driver plows into a brick mailbox but even in a profession as altruistic as nutritional consulting knowing the legal boundaries and pitfalls can save your practice and your good nature.

It’s almost as if there’s a competition among acronyms over who gets to do what and the name they use for their technique. That being said, licensed doctors own a monopoly on the terms diagnose, cure, prescribe, and treat. These words have legal meaning in the health care field and if anyone other than a licensed doctor uses them, they are considered to be practicing a regulated profession without a license. One way to avoid stepping on the toes of the licensed medical profession and stay within legal boundaries is to avoid using any terminology that establishes you as a licensed professional.

• Cure, by definition, means to remedy or restore to health. And while we cannot legally use the word cure, we can use remedy, restore, improve, help, or correct. Reverse may even be appropriate in some situations.
• To diagnose is to determine the identity of a disease or illness by medical examination. As nutritional consultants we are not performing any medical examinations or identifying any diseases. What we do is to check, evaluate, or determine.
• Licensed practitioners prescribe courses of action to their patients. Unlicensed practitioners make suggestions or recommendations and advise or offer options to their clients.
• If you are dealing with someone in order to relieve or cure, you are treating them. Since nutritional consultants don’t cure we don’t use the word treat. Instead, we relieve, balance, correct, and remedy.

Though not on the black list like the previous terms, disease is another word best left out of the nutritional consultant vocabulary. Condition or imbalance would be more appropriate. It is also prudent to refrain from naming a specific disease. One might describe the symptoms rather than verbalizing the medical label. Though this may just seem like semantics (and really that’s exactly what it is), in our world today this is a necessary precaution to avoid legal consequences.

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Using the right words,
Michelle Woodworth

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