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Welcome to the website of the General Naturopathic Council

Whether you are looking for a well qualified practitioner to help you with health concerns, or you are investigating training courses to help you with that all important career decision, or you just want to find out more about naturopathy, we can provide you with all the information you need.
Visiting a Naturopath
More and more people choose natural healthcare practitioners alongside conventional medical treatments. The public and medical professions are becoming increasingly interested in the safe practice and efficacy of natural therapies. Members of the public who plan to visit a naturopath offering complementary and natural medicine should look for the GNC registration as a mark of quality, professionalism and conduct.

The General Naturopathic Council has a long-standing reputation as a resource for people seeking highly qualified practitioners. Use our ‘Find a Practitioner’ register to locate one of our Registered Naturopaths or Associate Naturopaths.
To enable the public to have confidence in our naturopathic practitioners, in conjunction with the government agency Skills for Health, the GNC has developed National Occupational Standards for Naturopathic Practitioners. In order to be registered with the GNC, a practitioner must work in accordance with these high standards.

Training as a Naturopath

The GNC understands how stressful it can be trying to find a course that is right for you as an individual. You will want a course that will fit in with your family and/or working life. You will see many courses on offer, each one claiming to be the best on the market. In additional to providing a thorough grounding in course content, here are a few things you should look for:
These days most providers of professional insurance require an element of attendance, rather than courses completed entirely via distance learning. Our accredited courses meet the specified attendance criteria.

Does the course include clinical training? This is important to enable the training provider to assess that you are sufficiently knowledgeable, safe and competent to work with clients.

From the student’s perspective, clinical training with ‘real’ volunteer clients is invaluable as a confidence and experience-building tool.

Our …https://gncouncil.co.uk/accredited-courses/ page provides details of courses that have been accredited by the GNC. The first thing you are likely to notice is that the list is quite short and that’s because of the depth and scope of our accreditation procedure. We check not only that the course teaches all aspects of the GNC’s Core Curriculum but also how the training providers deliver their courses and support students throughout their learning. We talk to students about their learning experience, and we check the financial viability of the training provider. We only accredit courses that meet our criteria in full; the end result of our accreditation process produces courses the GNC is proud to promote.
If you are embarking on training for Naturopathy, seek out training from a GNC accredited provider to ensure you are meeting the UK national standard.

Working as a Naturopath

The GNC is the regulator for Naturopathy in the UK. Accepted onto our register are practitioners who are either fully qualified naturopaths or naturopathic practitioners. What’s the difference between the two?

The training for our Registered Naturopaths will normally involve a minimum of three years of part-time study. During this time the student will be fully trained in at least one major therapeutic discipline, for example herbal medicine, nutritional medicine, acupuncture, osteopathy and Traditional Chinese Medicine. In addition, students will learn a range of therapeutic skills and techniques that can be applied in practice, including hydrotherapy, and the psychosocial skills that are so important for so many of our clients in our world today.

Another key therapeutic approach is to understand the structure of the body and how misalignments may have a detrimental effect on health; so many people these days recognise the aches and pains that develop as a result of poor posture.
These, and other, therapeutic approaches will be taught from the naturopathic perspective that is explained below. Once qualified, the practitioner is able to register with the GNC as a Registered Naturopath; you will find these naturopaths by using our ‘Find a Practitioner’ search.

Naturopathic practitioners are listed as Associate Naturopaths when you search our ‘Find a Practitioner’ register. They are trained and fully qualified in at least one therapeutic discipline that is taught from a naturopathic perspective, such as naturopathic nutrition, colon hydrotherapy, Hijama, osteopathy, homeopathy, herbalism and naturopathic herbal medicine.

Understanding Naturopathy

It’s important to understand that naturopathy itself isn’t a therapy, rather it is a set of traditional principles that determine the approach the therapist applies in practice alongside therapeutic techniques. You can find more about this set of principles on our https://gncouncil.co.uk/naturopathy/…… page.

Our Registered Naturopaths and Naturopathic Practitioners understand the impact on the body of various imbalances and stress factors, not just the mental impact but also physical and biochemical. This can be explained using as an example a ‘three-legged stool’: one leg represents the body’s biochemical element and how it influences our health; another leg represents the emotional influence; and the third leg represents the structural influence. If one of these elements is not working efficiently there will be a greater strain on the other two elements. A naturopathic assessment will help to identify these and other imbalances, enabling recommendations for appropriate therapeutic intervention.

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