Domain Guide

Practice Models and Care Delivery
Innovative and distinctive systems of assessment, analysis and therapeutic strategy created by clinicians to engage the needs of their patients that are gradually systematized as they are shared with colleagues, refined through time, and evolve into consistent methodologies; individuals and groups who established key practice models and institutions; organizations established to provide clinical models and articulate effective therapies for patients; influential predecessors and elders who shaped concepts, models and treatment pathways that may never have been published.

Experience, Heritage and Knowledge
Oral and written knowledge (including concepts and skills) that underlies and informs the evolution of a profession’s current knowledge base and its eventual codification efforts; includes knowledge transmission through many ways of knowing, being and practice. The “terrain of knowledge” both within the professional milieu and in the scientific and intellectual environment in which the seeds of codification are planted, resulting in the “fruit” of theories, definitions, positions, publications, and practice models; includes written scholarship and implicit or tacit knowledge through perception, customs, worldviews, spoken and somatic transmissions, intuition, art, experimental methods and experience; seen as cumulative, with diverse contributors from many different fields throughout history; can be greatly influenced by worldview, as well as by the sociocultural context during which it is formed. Worldviews and practices of contrasting historical currents that are illuminated include healing and medicine, religious and secular, folk and learnéd, Empirical and Rationalist, manual therapies and prescribers, bone-setters and physick, Vitalists and Mechanists, Homeopathy and Allopathy, Mixers and Straights, Nature Curists and Drugless Physicians, natural and pharmaceutical, traditional and integrative.

Definitions, Principles, Theories and Ethics
Professional definitions, ethics statements, and principles; seminal or foundational “grand theory” or meta-theory (e.g., Hippocratic, Galenic, Paracelsus, Hahnemann, Kuhne, Lust, Lindlahr, Cordingley, Spitler, Wendel, Jacka and other articulators of early theories of natural medicine, as well as contemporary naturopathic theory authors); key author(s) of a historic school of thought or paradigmatic influence in naturopathic medicine’s underlying principles or theory; collaborative efforts, events and institutions focusing on developing and adopting philosophy, theory, ethics, or principles, including ANA, ISNP, AANP, CAND, BNA, WNF, NMSA, ANR, ANPA, ARONAH, Legacy Project, FNMI, and NMI.

Coherence and Codification
Events, people and publications that represent pioneering, formative, and catalytic works within a discipline, profession, or system of thought, specifically works that import specialized knowledge from diverse sources into the framework and lexicon of a particular profession. Codified works include seminal, synthetic, and collaborative scholarship that significantly contributes to the profession. A profession’s framework is defined by a) its epistemology, i.e., its philosophy, principles, and theory of practice; and b) its scope of practice, diagnostic, and assessment structure and its therapeutic modalities. These frameworks demarcate the profession’s identity and function as “boundaries” of knowledge (i.e., “This is who we are, what we do – how and why we do it.”). The body of codified works and perspectives evolves through experience and review in a predominantly cumulative manner but sometimes through displacement and supercession by subsequent ideas, discoveries and innovative practices.

Professional Associations
State, provincial, regional, national, international and global organizations, including professional, graduate and student organizations and their activities; primarily membership organizations.

Governmental Policy and Legislation
State, provincial, national and international legislative, public policy, regulations, and other governmental actions; public health commissions, boards of health, county councils; military; any organized action that expresses jurisdictional, legislative or policy authority; and expressions of socioeconomic and cultural context, including trends in public awareness and opinion.

Licensure and Regulation
State, provincial, and national licensing acts and/or regulations; regulatory boards and licensing exams, and the organizations that administer them, including changes to those acts and/or legal challenges; includes international ‘training to competence to scope’ standards and benchmarks.

Schools and Educational Councils
Founding, key events, and closure of naturopathic or predecessor academic institutions (universities, colleges, schools, programs), associations, and councils; any significant events involving academic institutions and organizations of groups of emerging naturopathic physician-level academic programs, institutions, or organizations. Examples of significant academic events include strengthening basic sciences and other standards in core naturopathic curriculum by William Schulze, W.A. (Alfred) Budden and Robert Broadwell.

Academic Accreditation
Academic accreditation, accrediting agencies, and key events in North America (as recognized by the US Department of Education and Canadian academic regulatory bodies); similar public recognition and accreditation of international academic institutions as recognized by existing or emerging regulatory frameworks or peer-reviewed academic standards including Germany, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, South America, Africa, Asia, and other countries.

Research Institutes, Grants and Publications
Research institutes, research grants, and key scientific and research journals, publications, and papers involving naturopathic medicine and naturopathic physicians as researchers and scientists.

Gaian Health Emergence
Naturopathic educational, clinical and institutional emergence beyond North American and European origins through “importation,” combination and innovative synthesis with indigenous and local medical traditions, models and organizations. Inclusion and participation of naturopathic medicine, naturopathy, and NDs in global public and community health delivery, public policy development, regulatory issues, education, and practice models that address global health; includes work by international relief organizations, delivery of community services, research, community organizing, and advancement of naturopathic medicine within WHO and other international organizations.

Mainstream Context, Collaboration and Integration
Emergence of naturopathic medicine into “mainstream” medical care delivery, institutions, and health practices, apart from legislation and public policy, in a manner that restores, broadens, and evolves the historic traditions of medical pluralism; includes within and among all health professions and within the broader socio-cultural and politico-economic systems; characteristically cooperative (e.g., collaborative events, clinical environments, publications, and efforts) between the naturopathic community, conventional medical providers, “integrative” medical practitioners, government and regulatory agencies, and/or national professional organizations (e.g., multidisciplinary alliances of the 1910s to 1930s, recent interdisciplinary or integrative clinics and collaborative initiatives involving clinical and/or “CAM” and naturopathic medicine participants).

Adapted and evolved from Mitchell Bebel Stargrove, Pamela Snider, Amy Neal, Craig Mehrmann, et al. Naturopathic Medicine: History and Professional Formation Timeline, 2018 (Unpublished Draft)

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Background:
The Nature’s Medicine Through Time website provides you with an embedded system of topical characterization and thematic historical analysis. The current iteration of the domain categories and definitions represents a phase in the development of a syntax for framing and sorting the particulars of history. Some of this content was shared and further developed in collaboration with Pamela Snider, Amy Neal, Craig Mehrmann and others under the auspices of my role as History Editor within the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Project during the period of 2007-2018. In that context an emphasis was placed on the development of naturopathic medicine, its institutions and activities as analyzed and categorized through the descriptive model of “professional formation”. The conceptual framework present in this Nature’s Medicine Through Time website continues to evolve in its interpretive model, expand in scope, and deepen in structure since its application in exhibit prototypes of the unpublished Naturopathic Medicine: History and Professional Formation Timeline.

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