Protecting Traditional Medical Systems & Practices In New Mexico.
In the late fall of 2005, I was asked to help develop language for a bill to be introduced to the New Mexico Legislature in its early session for 2006. In the spirit of "two heads is better than one", I located Charlie Jordan from Dragon River Herbals, who also participated, and discovered key language which helped with specific terms applied to various traditional practitoners from the Southwestern United States region.
The head of the New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department, Boards and Commissions Division, Kathleen O'dea, then revised the language and drafted a document in legal language, found a willing New Mexican Senator to carry the proposal to the New Mexican Legislative session, in January, 2006. Though the bill arrived just after the opening of the Legislative session, we were able to place it on the agenda. The bill was heard late in the session, and easily passed, since it merely called for a study to discover if these traditional practices were jeopardized (along with other alternative healing modalities), and then formulate a way to protect them from unnecessary interference.
In the following year,(2005) various meetings were supposed to have been taking place within the state, involving several state agencies, and groups of interested citizens around the state. These meetings, to my knowledge would have been aimed at discovering whether present laws provide enough protection for alternative practitioners and their methods of practice, and what if any further protections are needed to protect and preserve these traditional practices.... but I am unaware of ANY of these types of meetings having been conducted.
We missed a huge opportunity in the January 2007 session, by failing to work in an organized way within the NMCAAMP group, and which subsequently failed to agree on several key points, within the language. The disheveled bill never made it past the state medical board, and didn't even make it to the floor. :-(
This was a VERY disappointing outcome for those of us who've been working on this issue for a couple of years already.
Now, some members of the NMCAAMP group have "splintered" from the main group, and are calling ourselves "Citizens for the Protection of Alternative Health Care"... the acronym for which is
The active members of the NMCAAMP group took up my suggestion, of beginning the process using one or two of the existing state laws which currently protect herbalists, and have been on the law books for up to 6 years,... and then modifying the language within those so that what we end up with truly represents the specific wishes of most New Mexicans involved in this field...(complete with the names of those traditional practitioners.)
I am expecting to see the new document any day now, and then the C-PAHC group, together with the NMCAAMP group, will spend some time and energy conducting public presentations in as many towns within New Mexico as is possible, in order to educate the public about the specifics of what we are doing, and to ask for suggestions and for your support. Vist the C-PAHC site now ...and book mark it for later reference. Keep checking back to see the public meeting schedule. You can volunteer or communicate with us via the Contact Us page on the website.
We will have a signature petition of public support at these meetings, for you to sign if you support it after hearing about it. Besides the petition, we will have a form letter which you can use as a guide, or just photocopy it and send it to your local New Mexico Congressmen and Congresswomen... and to your New Mexico State Senators, so they know what you want them to do and why.
Any of you who are interested in becoming directly involved in this process within New Mexico, please DO join us. We really need your help. We are particularly in need of grant writers for non-profit groups, and we need people to act as local contact people in as many towns throughout the state as possible. We could use help in reserving public meeting facilities in each town. As these meetings are secheuled, they can be posted well ahead of time, on the website. Contact people who choose to could also help us by posting flyers in key locations in their community, and by contacting local radio stations to ask if they would air some short public service announcements (which we would provide) for awhile before the meeting. It would be nice to have you on our state-wide team, participating as a local person who wants to help protect alternative medicine in your community and your state.
If you'd like to use the new language we have drafted, as a template for your own group's efforts to create protective legislation in your own state, for the traditional and alternative medical systems in your area, and the practitoners of them, you welcome to download the PDF document from the link on the C-PAHC website:
C-PAHC
New Mexico Complimentary and Alternative Medicine Project (http://www.nmcaamp.org)
Providing these practitioners protection under the law, will preserve the old healing traditions which serve their communities, and are so much a part of the historical landscape, and which contribute to the atmosphere of diversity, here in our great state. I encourage you to become involved in this process by attending public meetings which are being scheduled throughout the state.
Please go to the C-PAHC address above to become involved in the listserve,(e-mailing everyone in the group, and having any other communications from others in the group, sent to you). This is the best way to start, if you care to become an organizer for the healers, herbalists, curanderas, tribal members, or others of your area.
This is a site which deals with the issue of whether or not herbalists in general should adopt the Traditional Medicines Congress (TMC) draft document, which is a regulatory scheme, cooked up by trade organizations, such as the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA), which wants more information allowed on labels, about how herbal products are to be used, but seems to want to exclude the soul of herbal medicine... the traditional practices, and make it nearly impossible for small herbal practitioners to survive. (This is my view point about the TMC anyway.) They in effect, want to do with herbal products, what the pharmaceutical industry insisted upon doing with drugs... which is to substitute a visit to the doctor with words on a label. The problems with this are many, including the effect of taking away the ability of herbalists to use herbs which relate to many indigenous medicine practices, (since they have no written historical documentation, and under the TMC, any herbs included in the recognized "pharmacopea" would be required to have written historical documentation. One of the largeest dangers of the TMC proposal is that it would set the stage for standardization and licensure of herbalists in the U.S.
We must realize that herbal medicine is ultimately, an ORALLY-TRANSMITTED tradition, which is the ORIGINAL form of medicine for humanity, and which has thousands of generations of knowledge behind it. Today, the herbalists alive on Earth, around our globe, representing all diverse herbal traditions, are indeed the keepers of this important human knowledge. Please go to this site for a better understanding of the many threats which emanate from international trade treaties, and are destroying traditional herbalism and with it, the cultural heritage of the peoples of the world. This site will give you lots of information about what you can do to
STOP the TMC.
With kind regards, and green thoughts,
Richard McDonald, C.H.
THIS IS IMPORTANT
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