A theologian and philosopher instead of a doctor?

The Presidium of the Supreme Medical Council positively evaluates the introduction of a new specialization - addiction psychotherapy. The NRL praises the possibility of people providing medical services to improve their professional qualifications.

However, as the Presidium points out, the completion of specialization in this area should apply to people who have a professional title related to the performance of a medical or related profession.

The above-mentioned serious doubts are raised by the possibility of practicing this specialization by people with a professional background: theologian and philosopher, while the draft regulation did not include a dentist. Failure to include the profession of dentist in the catalog of professions, upon completion of which you can start specialized training in the field of addiction psychotherapy, is unjustified and indicates unequal treatment of doctors and dentists.

The Presidium of the NRL therefore requests that Annex 2, entitled Fields of study, after the completion of which you can start specialization training in individual areas of health care, in such a way that in the added number 18 to the above-mentioned of the annex also includes the completion of studies in the field of medicine and dentistry.

Regarding the issue of enabling a theologian and philosopher to specialize in addiction psychotherapy, it should be noted that these are professions, in no way related to health care. However, the provision of a service such as addiction psychotherapy is, in the opinion of the Presidium of the NRL, a strictly medical (therapeutic) impact and should be reserved only to those entities that guarantee professional secrecy and an appropriate level of knowledge about therapeutic aspects in conducting a given therapy. Moreover, addiction therapy, as a healing process, should be free from ideological issues. It should also be pointed out that addiction psychotherapy may also apply to behavioral addictions, and not only addiction to harmful substances. Therefore, the guarantee of professional secrecy (to which medical professionals are obliged) is particularly important in this aspect.

At the same time, the Presidium of the NRL does not negate the usefulness of representatives of various professions, including theologians and philosophers, in the broadly understood process of therapeutic influence. However, due to the medical aspects of the addiction treatment process, people working in the above professions should not be entitled to self-medicate addiction treatment as specialists.

In addition, as is clear from the justification to the draft regulation, the project initiator wants to standardize the path of education for addiction psychotherapy specialists, indicating that by the end of December 2021 there were two entities under which training in the field of addiction took place (the State Agency for Solving Alcohol Problems and National Bureau for Drug Prevention). When creating a uniform path of education, the project initiator omits people who obtained a certificate of addiction psychotherapy before 4 years (see Regulatory Impact Assessment, part 4: Entities affected by the project). The above, in the opinion of the Presidium, means that people who have been creating an addiction treatment system for several decades will lose out, because they are expected to take the exam they have already passed and undergo the certification process (school, supervision, internship), which they also already have myself. We would like to mention that the above-mentioned the trial ended with a state examination and was financed (usually) from own resources.

As follows from the justification to the draft regulation, an addiction psychotherapy specialist will have to "submit an application for recognition of the achievements as equivalent to the implementation of a specialization training program". On the basis of a positively considered application (after verifying the "professional achievements"), an addiction psychotherapy specialist will be able to take the exam, but this does not apply, as it results from the RIA, to addiction psychotherapy specialists who defended their title earlier than 4 years ago (i.e. approx. 4000 people in Poland, according to the information included in the tables in part 4 of RIA).

Source: NIL