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Alternative health practitioners in Wisconsin now offer their services in a precarious situation, relying on the goodwill of local authorities rather than enjoying fully legal status. By offering any type of healing services, these healers run the risk of prosecution for practicing medicine without a license. In some areas of the state, consumers cannot find alternative health practitioners because the hostile stance of local law enforcement forces these healers to operate under the radar.

The proposed Consumer Choice and Wellness Act will create a framework for the peaceful co-existence of modern medicine and natural alternative modalities. Practitioners such as herbalists, nutritional counselors, body workers, homeopaths, native healers and those who offer other wellness solutions will be able to operate in the open without fear that lack of awareness on the part of local law enforcement will put them on trial. While protecting consumer freedom to choose alternative health care, the new bill still provides for some limits. It defines "prohibited acts" which require a license such as prescribing pharmaceuticals.

The bill also mandates disclosures on the part of healers in order to protect against unsafe practices. The bill was drafted by Diane Miller, a Minnesota attorney, the Legal and Public Policy Director of the National Health Freedom Coalition (NHFC) and its sister organization, the National Health Freedom Action (NHFA). The bill has been introduced in the Senate Health Committee, sponsored by Senators Molton, Lasee, Gallaway and Grothman, with co-sponsorship from Representatives Ripp, Williams, Van Roy and Rivard. The Wisconsin Consumer Choice and Wellness Act is modeled after similar legislation which has successfully passed in other states such as Minnesota, California, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Louisiana.

Other countries, including Canada, already have in place laws which, like the proposed WI bill, limit some specific actions only to physicians and nurses, yet still permit for the practice of alternative healing. Part of the urgency for the Wisconsin bill stems from the fact that efforts have been made to limit the freedom of health care practitioners in that state. Another proposed piece of legislation, the Dieticians Licensing Bill, seeks to outlaw alternative therapies, limiting nutritional counseling only to Licensed Registered Dietitians. The American Dietetic Association seeks to establish sole claim to the field of nutrition, ignoring the expertise of those who have studied nutrition outside of an allied health profession university program.

The American Dietetic Association has corporate sponsors such as the Coca Cola Company, Pepsi and Mars Candy -- giving it a larger war chest to fight alternative health care, but also making its definition of nutrition somewhat questionable. The CNN article quotes Marc Lion, CEO of Lion & Company CPAs, LLC, which advises independent doctor practices about their finances, as saying "A lot of independent practices are starting to see serious financial issues." Physicians apparently blame factors such as rising business and drug costs, as well as decreasing Medicare reimbursements as contributing to the demise of many small private practices. Business experts on the other hand point to a lack of business management skills on the part of many physicians. The trend encompasses not only general practitioners but specialists including oncologists and cardiologists.

Physicians whose private practices are barely staying afloat in the current economy look forward with dread to the changes in the federal budget which could cut Medicare physicians pay by 27.4%. Even top-rated doctors, some of whom have sacrificed a personal salary in order to pay their staff members and keep their practices open, are contemplating personal bankruptcy and/or leaving medicine. Observing that a wave of physician bankruptcies could leave many communities "without a vital health resource," the CNN article also briefly touches on at least one of the factors which have contributed to this state of affairs. "In oncology, doctors were allowed to profit from drug sales.

So doctors would buy expensive cancer drugs at bulk prices from drug makers and then sell them at much higher prices to their patients." One physician quoted in the article stated: "I grew up in that system. I was spending $1.5 million a month on buying treatment drugs." Revised Medicare guidelines mean that physicians are now reimbursed for less than half the cost of those cancer drugs. What the CNN article does not state is that the entire mainstream health care system has been built on an unsustainable model of inflated drug prices, expensive diagnostic equipment and the con game run by most health insurance companies.

Whereas those companies formerly ran their shell game primarily on health consumers, sharing the profits with doctors, now physicians too are finding no pea beneath the shuffled shells. Perhaps if physicians received less training in prescribing drugs and more training in preventing disease, there would be a larger number of successful small practices. Currently, people enter the field of medicine expecting to go through a lengthy and expensive education process and then pay off any debts for that schooling by allying themselves with insurance companies, Big Pharma and medical device-makers.

On the other hand, people in modalities of healing referred to as "alternative" only sometimes receive insurance reimbursements. They are more likely to prescribe herbal remedies than pharmaceutical drugs. They learn to detect patient health problems through observation and patient contact rather than through diagnostic equipment which is expensive to purchase, as well as, invasive and toxic to the patient. They must rely on word-of-mouth from satisfied patients who have actually experienced some measure of healing in order to build their practices in acupuncture, herbs, chiropractic and other forms of natural healing.

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