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A Method for Describing and Evaluating Naturopathic Whole Practice

Study area
General Wellness

Principal investigator

Herman PM, Sherman KJ, Erro JH, Cherkin DC, Milliman B, Adams LA
Project period


Even though complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is generally practiced as distinct systems of medicine, almost all CAM research has focused on single therapies. In order to more adequately evaluate the effectiveness of these medical systems, studies that evaluate the outcome of intact whole systems are needed. One challenge lies in defining the whole medical system (and any medical system it is compared to) in a way that ensures treatment fidelity.


This paper presents a proposed method to measure treatment fidelity (treatment criteria) in studies of the naturopathic medical system.


Illustrative example of the theory-based development and post-hoc "testing" of treatment criteria against an existing database of actual treatments prescribed by a random sample of naturopathic physicians.

Main Outcome Measures:

Treatment criteria for 3 conditions--menopausal symptoms, bowel dysfunction, and fatigue/fibromyalgia--and their comparison to actual treatments prescribed.


A set of meaningful, measurable treatment criteria based on the naturopathic practice principles were defined that could have generated the majority (82%-93%) of treatment prescriptions given at visits for these conditions. Several of the treatment criteria components are common across the 3 conditions studied, and might be appropriate for all visits to doctors of naturopathy (NDs). Others are specific to each condition. In addition to ensuring model validity, these criteria help identify critical components of care, enable study replication, provide a measure of quality of care, and are one step toward allowing CAM to be studied as it is generally practiced-as distinct systems of medicine.


Work was performed at Bastyr University and the University of Arizona.