Unbiased Clinical Intel:

The Case for Independent Funding

Naturopathic Doctors are trained early in their schooling to ask questions about the status quo of healthcare and to be cautious about doing things the way they have always been done. 

Given the state of health and healthcare, these skills are necessary to invoke change and look for new possibilities to inspire patients and policymakers alike. Being critical of study funding, conflicts of interest and bias are important skills in critical appraisal and can help keep a clinician’s perspective balanced. 

While our profession values critical evaluation of funding and bias in research, we recognize there’s an opportunity to apply these same principles more consistently to our own professional development. Conventions and conferences are made possible through funding from supplement companies and lab companies. Continuing education credits are kept “affordable” through sponsorship and third-party payments. 

This observation led us to see an opportunity to demonstrate how we might align our educational standards with the same critical thinking we apply to evaluating research.

Since our inception in 2019, The Confident Clinician has been clinician-funded. We’ve never accepted a dollar of industry funding, sponsorship or third-party funding. Our entire framework is supported by clinician memberships, bringing a level of unbiased content that we believe fills an important gap in the industry. This agnostic approach to research has enabled us to provide our members with content based solely on evidence and clinical applicability, rather than reverse-engineering conclusions based on who pays the bills. 

We saw an opportunity to demonstrate that clinician-funded education could provide a valuable complement to existing educational resources. Our goal is to create the standard of care in the industry first, to drive innovation second. In Naturopathic Medicine, as in many other areas of health, innovation by companies often precedes evidence to support its use in clinical care. By publishing standards based on current evidence from an unbiased perspective, we are supporting not only our members in their day-to-day clinical decision-making but also creating a standard that fosters innovation. 

Throughout our years of work, we’ve not yet had to rely on industry funding, and we never will. It’s our promise to our members and their patients that we’ll only bring unbiased work to our platform. We’re grateful for the many ways companies support our profession’s growth and development. Our approach simply offers an additional resource – one specifically designed to serve as an unbiased reference point for clinical standards.