As a PA, you are NOT an independent provider. You practice at the leisure of how your supervising physician would have you practice. If you don’t feel comfortable with that arrangement, then being a PA will not suit you well. They own you in all 50 states, and every health system.
The big question you should be asking yourself is why you would want to venture far from the kind of practice that would be in line with what a physician would want to see from his or her PA? You are suggesting that you would like to have latitude to do things that would invite scrutiny, so that is why I ask.
Medicine is about more than just not being sued, it’s about helping your patients. Exercise and eating right are great. We encourage it. But science tells us that when someone hasnt been walking or eating right, or even if they have genetic predispositions underlying their illness, then there are protocols associated with treatment that generally involve more than just continuing to encourage exercise and diet. They don’t come to you to tell them to walk and eat right, so if you send them out the door after ignoring their condition when you could have helped fix it, then you are in the wrong place professionally. Someone who frequently departs from established protocol isn’t actually practicing medicine that is in their patients best interest, even if it makes the provider feel that they are operating in a more holistic sense.
There is a saying that I love which asks the question “what do you call alternative medicine that actually works?.... you call it medicine.” That is to say that when an herb or supplement is proven by scientific study to be efficacious, then the medical community typically brings it into the fold as a treatment that we use. But that scientific verification tends to be the bus stop where “natural and integrative” approaches are famous for getting off. As providers, we would be the first to suggest most treatments that are domonstrated to work better than a placebo. Psyche providers are booked out months in advance, and I lose nothing if my patients have another weapon to throw at their mental health problems. But they deserve to not have their time and money (or the insurance company or government’s money) wasted while I act as an apothecary to mix up potions that have only hearsay to reccomend it. It’s hard enough to make potions that work when your ingedients have strong empirical evidence to support their use.
A lot of the world is beset with false ideas that we pay heed to, organic being one of many. It doesn’t matter if the tomato you eat is organic or not, just eat a tomato... there is no difference from a science standpoint. It sounds like you are stuck on an idea of “natural” approaches being superior simply because it seems like nature is a simple and clean place, free from imbalance. There might be merit to many aspects of that, but consider that arsenic and hemlock are natural substances, yet deadly to us. The natural state of man seems to be diseased, vulnerable, and having low life expectancy. The closer we are to our natural state of living, it seems that we tend to die younger. We should look around and marvel at where we are now because humanity started the process long ago of clawing ourselves away from folk medicine.
My point isn’t to mock those who aren’t embraced by the medical community, but to highlight how we pick and choose the things we are going to believe. That is not as problematic when it takes place on the individual level, because we have to make our own decisions, even if we use our freedom to make poor ones. When we become providers, there is a higher standard for what we present to our patients. My guess is that if you were to pursue becoming a PA, you would have your eyes open to best practice approaches that would cause you to abandon many of your preconceptions and biases regarding traditional medicine.
