Oppose Holistic Practitioner Licensing Bills

Two bills,  HD3807/SD2151, an Act regulating alternative healing therapies and HD3152, an act relative to protecting the lineages of Asian bodywork therapies, were introduced to Massachusetts legislature to control and license holistic practitioners — including all energy practitioners and teachers of Reiki, Qigong, Jin Shin Jyutsu, Tai Chi, Meditation and scores more. These bills would burden these safe, traditional healing art forms with unnecessary and restrictive standards and would limit consumer choice without justification.

Holistic practitioners would be required to be certified, and receive additional, standardized, fee-based education to become eligible for licensure (and the privilege of paying endless years of renewal fees.) This would force many healing practitioners who have been safely practicing for decades to close their doors, and for those remaining to raise their rates.

Who is clamoring for protection or making claims against these practitioners? No one! But bureaucrats are clamoring for licensing.

Licensing requires standardizing education, which trains people only in dominant styles and professions, thereby picking winners and losers, and destroying the truly amazing delicate ecosystem that holistic healthcare has become. Both bills are lose-lose propositions for consumers as well as practitioners of alternative and complementary healthcare in Massachusetts.