Study Naturopathic Medicine

Professor Jon Wardle
Foundation Director and Maurice Blackmore Chair of Naturopathic Medicine, Professor of Public Health

What matters to us is that we change the conversation on health. Rather than having people ask why naturopaths should be involved in the health sector we have people asking why it's taken so long. One of the wonderful things about being a practicing naturopath is seeing the tremendous power that naturopathy can have in patients’ lives.

At the Centre we're teaching Australia's naturopaths to be the future leaders of Australia's healthcare professions. We're teaching conventional practitioners about the benefits of integrating traditional and complementary approaches to really provide the best of both worlds. We want to open up opportunities for allied health practitioners and community health organisations who probably haven't thought about naturopathy as an option to expand their clinical skills and offer better care for their patients. We're really committed to helping the patient be an active part of their treatment journey.

At the National Centre we have leading researchers, key opinion leaders, key global leaders in evidence-based medicine, as well as key leaders in traditional practices. Education, advocacy, and research are all interlinked - we don't see these as separate. Research needs to inform training and practice, practice needs to inform research. Students at the Centre are actively involved in research they're actively involved in patient care, they're getting experience not just in theoretical training but in practical real-world skills as well.

When most people think of naturopathy they think of naturopaths in a one-on-one clinical setting, we're going to go beyond that and we're actually going to take naturopaths into the community. We're working with hospitals local health districts community organizations to actually help naturopaths do the most they can for their community. The centre offers a whole suite of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, these include basic clinical training, specialty clinical training but we also have a number of courses on expanding the health impacts of areas such as food production, lifestyle medicine and a whole range of other disciplines

One of the unique parts of the centre is we're not just an education institute delivering training courses, We're actively involved in practice, we're actively involved in research, we're actively involved in advocacy. All these elements combined to give students the optimal experience of real-world settings for naturopathic practice.
We want to teach students not to be scared of complexity but to embrace it. We want to teach students to be detectives in the health setting.

We want to teach students to understand the underlying causes, understand the patients, learn about the patients and actually understand how different systems work together. This is how naturopathy works in practice and this is how we can help make people better.

Hi I’m Sophia, I’m a student at Southern Cross University and I’m also a naturopath and I’m pursuing a PhD with the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine.

Naturopaths provide patient-centred health care by delving into the underlying causes of ill health so naturopaths use a range of different therapies including nutritional, herbal and lifestyle medicines to support the person and support body systems, understanding the interconnectivity between body systems with what we eat and the way we live our lives.

So it's very much patient empowerment focused and assisting people to take control of their own health.

I wanted to become a naturopath because I could see that there was a missing link in conventional medicine and that missing link is the holism, it's the patient empowerment and patient education and treating the person rather than treating the disease so I think that's a really important component of healthcare that naturopaths provide.

I think research is really important for the advancement of any profession and that includes naturopaths and also in my clinical practice as a naturopath a number of questions have started arising about why certain treatments work the way they do and the best way I can think of to answer those questions is by doing research so I’m really excited to be able to contribute to my profession in that way by and contribute to research.

I really love being on campus at Southern Cross University here at Lismore, it's a beautiful campus, it's in a lush tropical environment surrounded by nature and for me that's an ideal place to spend my days so I really love being here each day and I also really enjoy being surrounded by a lot of other wonderful people who are doing all sorts of work in very interesting and exciting new areas.

Now I’ll tell you about courses offered through the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine, our facilities and how you can apply. Southern Cross University offers a Graduate Certificate of Advanced Naturopathic Medicine which can be completed in eight months part-time. There are three intakes a year and for 2022 those are in March, July and October.

The Graduate Certificate and Master's Degrees in Advanced Naturopathic Medicine are the only postgraduate qualifications in Naturopathic Medicine to be offered in Australia.

This course is designed for students with a bachelor's degree or equivalent in naturopathy to allow you to develop specialized knowledge in a particular field such as gastrointestinal health, mental health or reproductive health.

The Graduate Certificate also provides a pathway for graduates wanting to undertake further postgraduate or higher degree studies. The degree is available 100% online to allow busy professionals the flexibility to fit their studies in with their careers and to be able to study from anywhere in the world.

If you would like to study in more depth National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine also offers a Master of Advanced Naturopathic Medicine, the Master's Degree also has three intakes per year and is delivered 100% online, it can be completed in 1.3 years part-time with the same course content as the graduate certificate.

The Master's Degree allows you to delve deeper into an area of specialized study and also further extend your research skills through a dedicated research component.

The Master of Lifestyle Medicine is Australia’s first master's degree offered in this discipline, it is comprised of eight units which align with competencies in of the international board of lifestyle medicine and the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.

The contemporary curriculum addresses clinical reasoning, metabolic health, self-care, health behaviour, shared models of care and research in the context of lifestyle medicine.

NCNM is also well equipped to supervise students completing higher degrees by research. Students are able to pursue a master of science or a PhD, these degrees allow you to develop the knowledge and research skills essential for a career in research or academia.

You'll be involved in making meaningful contributions to health research and to improving health outcomes through your work opportunities and experiences that you can be a part of at Southern Cross University are established professional networks, courses are designed and delivered by experts in their fields, HDR supervisors are engaged and committed to helping students excel in their research and of course state-of-the-art labs across our campus locations.

I’m here at our Lismore campus in a biomedical lab and we've got science and health labs across campus locations.