How to choose a naturopath (and what the letters after their name mean)

The thing this article won’t do: tell you whether naturopathy works, or what it is for. That is not a directory’s call to make, and the honest version of that conversation happens with a practitioner and with your GP. What we can be useful about is the paperwork — because in naturopathy the paperwork is where most of the difference lives, and almost nobody explains it.

Start with the fact that surprises people, especially people who have already read our piece on how acupuncture is registered in Perth. Acupuncturists are government-registered under AHPRA, with a protected title and a public register you can search in a minute. Naturopaths are not. The two professions sit side by side in half the clinics in this directory — and only one of them is regulated by the state.

Nobody owns the word “naturopath”

There is no legal barrier to using it. Naturopathy sits outside the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme — which means no government licence, no national exam, and no register anyone is obliged to appear on. A person with four years of full-time study and a person with a weekend certificate can print the same word on the same business card, and neither is breaking a law by doing it.

That isn’t an accusation against the profession — most Perth naturopaths trained for years, belong to associations with real entry requirements, and will tell you the gap frustrates them considerably more than it frustrates you. But it does shift the work onto you, and it’s why the letters after a name matter more here than in almost any other corner of health.

The letters answer two different questions

Most naturopath bios carry a small alphabet after the name, and the strings tend to run together as though they all mean the same kind of thing. They don’t. Split them into two piles — what someone studied, and who currently vouches for them — and the whole line becomes much easier to read.

• Qualifications — what they studied. BHSc (Naturopathy) is a Bachelor of Health Science and runs three to four years full-time, while Adv Dip (Nat) is an Advanced Diploma, which was the standard pathway into the profession for most of the previous two decades. ND stands for Naturopathic Doctor, a North American title that does not correspond to Australian registration and is worth asking about rather than assuming.
• Memberships — who vouches for them now. ANTA, ATMS, NHAA and CMA are professional associations. ARONAH is a voluntary register that deliberately mirrors how AHPRA boards operate, for a profession AHPRA does not cover.

The letters	What category they belong to
BHSc	Qualification — a bachelor degree; the course and major matter more than the abbreviation
Adv Dip / Dip	Qualification — the standard pathway before the sector’s benchmark changed
ND	A title, not an Australian registration — worth asking about rather than assuming
ANTA · ATMS · NHAA · CMA	Professional associations — current membership is what they tell you
ARONAH	A voluntary register, run to mirror how AHPRA boards operate
Health-fund provider status	Recognition by an insurer — a filter, not a qualification

A qualification is a thing that happened once. A membership is a thing being maintained.

Associations require continuing education and current professional indemnity insurance, they audit it, and they can and do remove people who let either lapse. Seeing both is the point. A degree with no current membership beside it tells you a good deal about 2011 and nothing whatsoever about where somebody stands this year.

Degrees, diplomas, and the line drawn in 2019

You will see both a bachelor degree and an advanced diploma among practitioners in the naturopathy listings, and the instinct is to read the diploma as the lesser thing. That instinct is usually wrong, and the reason turns out to be a date rather than a ranking of one qualification against the other.

The sector lifted its education benchmark to a bachelor degree for anyone qualifying from 1 January 2019, which means practitioners who finished before then hold an Advanced Diploma or Diploma — the standard qualification of its day, still recognised by health funds, and not a lesser thing. So a diploma frequently signals a longer career rather than a shorter education, for the straightforward reason that somebody practising since 2006 was never going to hold a qualification that did not exist yet.

1. Before 2019Advanced Diploma was the standard pathwayThe qualification of its day — still recognised by health funds
2. 1 January 2019The sector lifted its education benchmark to a bachelor degreeFor anyone qualifying from that date
3. TodayBoth qualifications are in honest circulationThe date somebody finished explains which one you should expect to see

What is worth checking is where somebody studied. Endeavour College of Natural Health, Torrens University and the Southern School of Natural Therapies are the recognised providers, and a qualification from an institution nobody has heard of is a perfectly fair thing to ask about — politely, and before you book rather than after. Three questions cover it:

• Where did you study, and what was the course?
• When did you complete it?
• Is it recognised by your current professional association?

The check that takes about a minute

Everything above condenses into one free, public routine. Oria Haven helps you discover; the professional body is what helps you verify.

1. 1 — Find the claimNote the association named on the practitioner’s site or listing
2. 2 — Go to the sourceOpen that association’s own practitioner searchANTA · ATMS · NHAA · CMA · ARONAH
3. 3 — Search the nameCheck the practitioner appears, and that the details match
4. 4 — Ask if anything is unclearA good practitioner is pleased to be asked

What is regulated, even though the practitioner isn’t

Two things, and both are more useful than they sound.

Many of the products are regulated: supplements and herbal preparations that are therapeutic goods fall under the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s framework — look for an AUST L or AUST R number on the label — and the rules depend on the product and how it is supplied or advertised. What no product in that framework can legally be advertised for is a serious condition. The advertising is regulated under the same law, which is why a practitioner’s website usually reads more carefully than the same practitioner does in conversation. It also means a clinic promising to treat a named disease is not being bold. It is being non-compliant.

None of this may stay the position for very much longer, either. In March 2026 the Australian Naturopathic Council, with ARONAH, ANTA, CMA, NHAA and three education providers, formally asked every state, territory and federal health minister to bring naturopathy and Western herbal medicine into the national registration scheme — the same one that covers your physiotherapist. ATMS, one of the largest associations of the lot, opposes the move. A profession arguing in public about whether it wants to be regulated at all is an unusual thing to watch, and it is worth knowing that the argument is live while you are choosing somebody.

The health fund test

There is a shortcut here, and it does a surprising amount of the work for you.

Rebates for naturopathy were stripped out of private health insurance in 2019, along with fifteen other natural therapies, after a federal review of the evidence. Then they came back — on 1 July 2025. The government re-included naturopathy among seven therapies eligible for extras cover, following a second review led by the Chief Medical Officer with the NHMRC. Eligible does not mean covered, though: each insurer decides whether its policies include naturopathy, at what level, and which practitioners it recognises. Many funds now recognise naturopaths accredited with the main associations — a considerably better position than eighteen months ago, but one you confirm with your own fund, not assume.

Here is why that matters even if you hold no extras cover at all. Funds check qualifications, insurance and current association membership before they’ll pay a cent — not out of concern for you, but because they’re protecting themselves, which happens to produce exactly the audit you’d want done. A practitioner who is provider-registered with the funds has therefore already been through somebody else’s paperwork audit, at somebody else’s expense. That is not a verdict on their skill and it is not an endorsement of anything at all. It is a filter, and it costs you nothing to apply.

Before assuming you’re covered, ask your insurer

• Is naturopathy included in my extras, and from when?
• Is this particular practitioner recognised by my fund?
• What is the benefit per consultation, and my annual limit?
• Is there a waiting period?

What you’ll actually pay

A first naturopathy consultation in Perth commonly runs sixty to ninety minutes, with follow-ups shorter and cheaper. The consultation is also rarely the whole bill — supplements, herbal preparations, testing and treatment plans are usually charged separately, and they can add up faster than the consultation does. Asking about the second bill before the first bottle appears is not rude; it is the question the good practitioners answer without a flicker.

Six questions, none of them rude

• Which association are you a member of, and is it current? Every association runs a public “find a practitioner” search on its own website, and the whole check takes under a minute. Use it.
• Where did you study, and when did you finish? The date they finished usually explains the qualification they hold.
• Are you registered with health funds? Even if you are paying out of pocket.
• Do you work alongside GPs? Practitioners who write to your doctor, and who say plainly when something is outside their scope, are the ones to keep.
• What does a first consultation cost, how long is it, and what’s extra? The pricing section above has the Perth picture; the point of asking is hearing whether the answer is direct.
• What happens if what I’m asking about is outside your scope? The practitioners worth keeping have a ready answer, and it usually involves your GP.

A good practitioner will answer all five of those without a flicker, and most will be pleased to be asked, because the ones who trained for four years are rather tired of sharing a job title with people who did a short course online. Someone who bristles at the second question has told you something useful.

And notice the shape of the answers, not just their content. You aren’t looking for someone who agrees with everything you believe — you’re looking for someone who can plainly explain their training, their current membership, what they can and can’t help with, when they’d refer you elsewhere, and what it all costs.

The quality of the answer tells you almost as much as the letters after the name.

What this directory does and does not check

Here is the part that costs us something to say. Oria Haven does not verify qualifications. We check that a practice exists, that it’s trading and that its details are right. But where a listing shows a degree or a membership, that is the practice’s own claim being repeated by us — and we’d rather say so plainly than display a green tick you have no way of auditing.

We check	We don’t claim to verify
The practice exists and is trading	Qualifications, independently
Published listing details	Clinical competence
Publicly available information	Treatment effectiveness or outcomes
	Whether anyone is “the best”

So use the associations’ own registers instead of taking anybody’s word for it, including ours. They are free, they are public, and they are the only thing described in this entire article that actually constitutes proof.

Ready to compare practices?

Once you know what you’re checking, browsing gets much easier. A few places to start — the ratings are each practice’s own Google rating, reproduced, and nothing here is a ranking:

Or start from where you live:

Your naturopath checklist

• I know their qualification, and when they completed it
• I’ve checked their current membership in the association’s own search
• I’ve asked whether my health fund recognises them
• I know the consultation price, and what’s charged separately
• I know who to speak to if my concern needs conventional medical care

Choosing a naturopath FAQs

When you are ready to look, the naturopaths in the directory are listed with their suburbs and what they offer. The neighbouring pages are worth a glance too. Herbal medicine, nutrition, kinesiology and homeopathy overlap with naturopathy more often than not, and several practitioners hold qualifications across two or three of them. The full holistic and natural therapies category sits above all of them, and you can narrow it by suburb — Fremantle and Perth carry the most.

Enquiries go straight to the practice, and we never take a cut of a booking. If you run a naturopathic clinic and your listing has the wrong letters after your name, claim it and fix it — that is free too, and it takes about ten minutes.

Oria Haven is a directory, not a health service. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing in it says what naturopathy does or does not do. Regulatory positions change — the registration submission described above was live and undecided at the time of writing. Last reviewed August 2026, against Australian Government private-health-insurance guidance and the professional associations’ own published information. If you have a health concern, speak with your GP or a registered practitioner.