About Naturopathic Medicine

The history of naturopathic medicine is not a single story or a straight line. The modern profession developed from many different ideas and healing traditions that existed long before naturopathic medicine became an organized profession.

In North America, naturopathy emerged as a distinct professional movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early practitioners brought together approaches from European nature cure and hydrotherapy, nutrition, botanical medicine, homeopathy, physical medicine and other systems of health and healing. Benedict Lust was an influential figure in organizing and promoting this emerging profession and established the American School of Naturopathy in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The broader history of many therapies incorporated into naturopathic and other Western health practices is also connected to Indigenous, Asian and other traditional systems of knowledge. These traditions have their own histories, cultures and systems of practice and should not be represented as having originated within naturopathic medicine.

Their incorporation into Western health care also occurred within histories of colonialism and unequal cultural exchange. Indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants, for example, was frequently adopted into Western botanical practice without appropriate recognition of the communities from which that knowledge came. Similarly, Asian medical traditions have at times been simplified or reinterpreted as they were adopted in Western settings. A contemporary understanding of naturopathic medicine requires acknowledging these histories rather than presenting the profession’s development solely through a European or North American lens.