National Health Freedom ACTION

Currently regular citizens of Michigan can be charged with a felony for giving nutritional advice or nutritional counseling without a Dietitian or Nutrition license. But hopefully that’s about to change! Michigan’s Office of Regulatory Reinvention (ORR) is now recommending that the occupation of Dietetics and Nutrition be deregulated, and the Dietetics and Nutrition Licensing Board be eliminated! The ORR released its recommendations last week, in a report entitled “Recommendations Regarding Occupational Licensing” (Feb. 2012). The ORR’s stated rationale for its recommendation is that, “ The regulation of dieticians and nutritionists does not provide a clear public health and safety benefit. ” The recommendations will now go to the legislature.

The recommendations of the Michigan Office of Regulatory Reinvention, that the occupation of Dietetics and Nutrition be deregulated and the Dietetics and Nutrition Licensing Board be eliminated , could result in a win for Health Freedom and for the health of Michigan’s citizenry and economy. The ORR report contains recommendations for changes to Michigan’s occupational licensing regulations. The recommendations encourage job creation and will increase competition in the affected occupations, thereby lowering costs for consumers and they are the result of a regulatory review process that began when the Occupational Licensing Advisory Rules Committee met for the first time on August 18, 2011.

Government officials explain that “The [committee members] carefully considered the public health and safety benefits of 87 different occupations [and] found that there were at least 18 occupations that did not require regulation.” Deregulation of information sharing about how to improve health through nutrition was recommended, in part, because the ORR found that “A closer examination of the practices of dieticians and nutritionists calls into question whether true public harm is prevented by licensing the occupations…it does not appear that licensing dieticians and nutritionists is necessary to protect the public.”

The recommendations consist of the final recommendations from the Occupational Licensing Advisory Rules Committee (ARC), and additional recommendations by ORR, developed in conjunction with the MI Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA). Click here to read the ORR Report.

NOTE: The ORR Report is not a legislative bill or part of the rulemaking process. The implementation of any ORR recommended changes would be through the legislative process for changes to statute and the rulemaking process for administrative rule changes.

The history of MI regulation of dietetics and nutrition is explained in the ORR Report as follows: “When dieticians were added as licensed professionals to the Public Health Code in 2006, the law also included the practice and the use of the title “nutritionists” as those professionals who would now have to become licensed. Since the effective date of the act and the creation of the Michigan Board of Dietetics and Nutrition, there has been an ongoing discussion about how to establish acceptable credentialing and education requirements by nutritionists in order to become licensed.”

Review criteria for use by regulators can be found in the document, Guidelines & Criteria for Evaluation of Proposed Regulatory Initiatives in Michigan, and includes the following:

• Risk for substantial harm to the consumer from the unregulated practice of the occupation;
• Practice of the occupation or profession requires highly specialized education and/or training, related to the occupation or profession;
• Economic costs of regulating the occupational group do not impose significant additional costs on the public or unnecessarily restrict access to health care services

Read the Full Article Here: http://www.nationalhealthfreedom.org/nhfa/Alerts/MichiganRecommendsDeregulation_050112.htm