Hi, I’m Michael H. Cohen. I’m founding attorney at Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We provide legal strategies and solutions to businesses that accelerate health and wellness.

And today’s topic is going to be legal strategies for complementary and alternative medicine providers like acupuncturists, chiropractors, healers, hypnotherapist, you name it. And this is an area that I love because, as you probably know, I’ve done a fair amount of study of energy healing, so I’m into this.

So first of all, you want to make sure that practitioners are appropriately licensed, or if not licensed, that there’s a law like SB 577 in California that protects the practitioner.

So, you also have to be careful about scope of practice. So can an acupuncturist incorporate massage? different scopes of practice for different professions. Secondly, you need to communicate the treatment parameters and the limitations. The more the patients have realistic expectations, the less likely they are to sue.

And finally, it’s important to stay up on regulations governing complementary therapies, and that can involve, for example, requirements that Practices have to have protocols in place, and if they don’t, they could get fined. So, you want to look at a healthcare attorney who’s experienced, can help you put things in place, they’re going to be proactive and protective.

Sometimes they’re required by law, sometimes they’re just best practice. A little bit of work at the beginning, up front, can save you, or in the middle, can save you a lot of problems later. No one wants to get sued, no one wants to get hauled in front of a regulator, so get the best advice that you can, get it as early as you can.

If you’d like to dive deeper into any of the topics we’ve talked about today, reach out to us. Click below. We’d love to talk to you, and we look forward to it.