3-2 Understanding Informed Consent and Scope of Practice

An energy healing practice is a legal entity. Your “scope of practice” and ways of informing your client about it have legal consequences. Client privacy is another issue that is in part governed by law and needs to be addressed through informed consent. This guide provides an overview of these requirements.

3-3 Framing Your Practice So You 1) Can Use Physical Touch and 2) Are Not Practicing Medicine Without a License

Along with informed consent and scope of practice, state laws and local regulations also impact whether a practitioner can use physical touch in a healing setting and what constitutes practicing medicine without a license. This guide is designed to help you think through these tricky issues.

3-4 Ethics Resources

Ethical guidelines are a field’s way of imparting the wisdom of all those who have gone before you so you can be at your best in your healing work. This guide links to the “Energy Healing Practitioner’s Ethics Code,” to documents about how ethics complaints are handled, and to the order page for the Ehtics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners, which is a natural companion to this Toolkit.

3-5 When to Refer a Client

Whether you are operating your practice under a formal license in one of the health care disciplines, working as a Life Coach, volunteering at a hospital, or working in a different context, you need to know when a client’s condition is outside of your scope of practice and a referral is required. This guide will help you identify these instances.

3-6 Representing Yourself as an Energy Psychology Practitioner

Many energy healing practitioners have studied EFT or other forms of Energy Psychology. What credentials are required before you can represent yourself as an Energy Psychology practitioner? What conditions can you and can’t you work with? What types of language can you use or must you avoid using? While the exact answers vary from one state to the next, this guide attunes you to the issues and the questions you need to answer for your local setting.

3-7 The Legal Structure of an Energy Healing Practice

The very structure of your practice—whether a sole proprietorship or a corporation—is another decision that must be made with an understanding of the legal context. The guide briefly summarizes the considerations and refers you to web resources that can help you make the right decision for your practice.

3-8 Risk Management and Professional Liability Insurance

Risk management is far more than taking a defensive posture against all the things that might go wrong. It is an attitude of providing high quality services in a caring manner with adequate safety nets.

3-9 How Not to Get Overwhelmed by the Paperwork

As health care practices evolve, so do the requirements for keeping records. This guide gives you suggestions for becoming the master rather than the victim of the forms you use in your practice. It briefly recaps the kinds of information you will need to keep, suggests strategies for streamlining them, and explains how well-designed forms are shortcuts so you don’t have to invent new ways of documenting every emerging situation. It also gives you an overview of HIPAA, the government’s “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.”.