My State Bans PTs from Providing Nutrition. What Do I Do?

 By Dr. Sean M. Wells, DPT, PT, OCS, ATC/L, CSCS, CNPT® , NSCA-CPT, Cert-DN

So you’ve looked into several online courses for nutrition in the hopes of helping your patient get better, faster. As you are scouring these online classes you stumble across the fact that you, as a physical therapist (PT), cannot provide nutrition in your state. Seriously? Is this true? Maybe. So, should you simply drop the idea of enrolling into a certification course on nutrition -- absolutely not!

 It should be made very clear that any healthcare provider can offer nutritional information for general health. Whether you call yourself a nutritionist, CNPT® , or health coach, offering generalized health and wellness nutrition information is permitted for almost every state. Such a rationale makes perfect sense: we need people in our country eating better food for better health. The legal issue really comes when you begin to offer disease-specifi...