Chris Kresser: Yeah, good question. This is a question I get a lot, so I wanted to speak to it a little bit. Sometimes when I’m talking at conferences, I’ll get people who come up and say, “I want to do what you’re doing, but I don’t want to go to medical school. I want to figure out what the best way to do it is.” The answer really kind of depends on a number of different factors. It depends mostly on personal circumstances, and I get the sense that where you’re at, Ashley, you don’t want to go back to school for 10 years and be training for another 10 years before you get back out in the world to do what you want to do.
If that’s the case and it is the case that you do want to have a license, then one of the best ways of doing that, I think, is either a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant program. There are some really accelerated programs where you can get licensed in a couple of years and then do your internship, I think, in another year. I have a friend who was an acupuncturist actually, or still is, but he also decided to combine that with a physician assistant program. It was pretty intense because he chose an accelerated program, but within two years he was already doing his internship, and now he’s out there practicing as a licensed physician assistant. That means he has prescribing privileges under the supervision of a doctor, but that supervision can be fairly loose, from what I understand, and PAs can operate with a lot of autonomy. They can certainly practice functional medicine, they can order all the tests, and they can make diagnoses, so the PA/NP route is a really good option, and it’s probably faster than a naturopath ND program and even an acupuncture program. In California, the requirements for acupuncturists are greater than in any other state, as far as I know, because we’re licensed as primary care providers in the workers’ comp system, so we have to know a lot of Western medicine. It’s a four-year master’s program. I don’t know of any other four-year master’s programs. And the ND program, I think, is four years or more, so PA or NP, I think, is a pretty good choice. RD is a good choice, too, but they can’t necessarily order all of the lab work, as Kelsey and Laura and other RDs in the program might tell you.
I hope that helps. There’s no perfect answer, but I think NP/PA is kind of a best-of-both-worlds type of situation for many people.
Marcie just sent in a comment. She say she’s currently going to UT Tyler’s nurse practitioner school. You can do a one-and-a-half-year accelerated program but would have to get a BSN first, and Marcie said that would probably make her cringe, which it did for her. So there are prerequisites there that would have to be done before that one-and-a-half-year accelerated program. That’s a good point that I forgot to mention. Of course, the nurse practitioner and physician assistant programs are going to have extensive prereqs, so I’m not sure where you’re at with that, Ashley, but if you’re lucky, maybe you did some of those in school that would count towards that degree and they haven’t expired yet.