Florida’s 2026 “HB223: Naturopathic Medicine” Text Through the Lens of a Forthcoming Research Context

here, the output of a task to Perplexity as run within a certain research context yet-to-be-published:

001. I recently was alerted to this bill's text publication at flsenate.gov;

002. and through the contexts of naturopathy in Connecticut, this task was performed:

“How does the attached proposed Florida Bill PDF compare and contrast in relation to the above present-day issues resulting from Connecticut’s platforming of naturopathy?”

003. the output:

“The Florida bill largely replicates the Connecticut model of platforming naturopathy as a quasi‑medical profession, and so imports many of the same structural problems documented in Connecticut, while adding a somewhat more elaborate disciplinary and financial‑responsibility wrapper.

Structural similarities to Connecticut

• Protected title and monopoly: Florida’s HB 223 creates a “Board of Naturopathic Medicine” and makes it a crime to practice or call oneself an ND/NMD without licensure, mirroring Connecticut’s Chapter 373 protected “naturopathic physician” status.
• Education and exam pipeline: The bill ties licensure to CNME‑accredited ND programs and NPLEX exams, exactly the educational and testing infrastructure that in Connecticut produces graduates who practice homeopathy, vitalism, detox, nonvalidated testing, and energy therapies under a scientific veneer.
• Full naturopathic scope imported: By licensing “naturopathic doctors” rather than carving out a narrow wellness or counseling scope, Florida would be importing the same whole‑system naturopathic profile that the Connecticut CSF reports show is structurally pseudoscience‑heavy once in practice.

In Cullen–Snyder terms, Florida’s bill recreates the same Science Camouflage Index and Institutional Legitimacy Score problems: formal state recognition of naturopathy as if it were a coherent, evidence‑based branch of medicine, when the Connecticut record shows extensive epistemic conflation and freedom harms downstream of that recognition.

Differences and added features

• More detailed disciplinary and malpractice framework: HB 223 is lengthy on board procedures, probable‑cause panels, closed‑claims reporting, and financial‑responsibility requirements (malpractice coverage or notice to patients). Connecticut’s statute is leaner on those operational details.
• Background checks and investigative licensing delays: Florida explicitly builds in fingerprinting, criminal background checks, and the option for a 90‑day licensure delay if concerns arise, plus the ability to license with restrictions or probation. Connecticut’s framework is less explicit about such investigative tools.

Those features may modestly improve individual‑practitioner discipline, but they do not address the core epistemic issues: what is being licensed and presented to the public as medicine. They manage bad actors inside a system whose knowledge base, as seen in Connecticut, is already deeply misaligned with evidence.

How Florida would recreate Connecticut’s harms

Given what the Connecticut reports document about ND practice built on CNME/NPLEX training:

• Factuality degraded: Florida would be telling the public that CNME‑accredited naturopathic education and NPLEX exams produce “doctors” of a distinct medical discipline, just as Connecticut does. The Connecticut case studies then show those graduates routinely using homeopathy, detox and adrenal fatigue narratives, nonvalidated testing (IgG, broad micronutrient/genomic panels, SIBO tests, bioenergetic devices), and energy medicine under the label “science‑based care.”
• Sovereignty hollowed out: As in Connecticut, patients and legislators in Florida would rationally infer that licensed NDs’ claims are anchored in the same kind of evidence as MD-DO care, when the Connecticut ND‑practice analyses show that is not so. Consent to “preventive” or “root‑cause” care would be given under systematically distorted assumptions.
• Mobility and unpredictability: Florida patients would gain a parallel entry point into the system that looks like primary or integrative care but follows its own, weaker evidentiary logic—exactly the pattern Connecticut’s CSF harms tables describe: delayed diagnoses, fragmented care, and variable, idiosyncratic treatment based on unvalidated tests and narratives.
• Solidarity and public health: Once naturopathy is a formally licensed profession in Florida, the same dynamics seen in Connecticut—vaccine‑hesitant counseling, chronic‑Lyme and detox paradigms, oncology‑adjacent marketing—are likely to emerge and complicate public‑health messaging and resource allocation.

In other words, HB 223 borrows the form of a modern regulatory regime (board, CE, malpractice coverage, discipline) but leaves untouched the substance of what is licensed, in the same way Connecticut’s statute did. The Connecticut evidence suggests that this form‑without‑substance model is exactly what generates the CSF‑identified harms.

Key contrast in lessons

Connecticut’s experience (as synthesized in your reports) shows that:

• Licensure tied to CNME/NPLEX, with a broad diagnostic/treatment scope and a “doctor” title, has not produced a reliably evidence‑based, prevention‑focused profession; it has produced a high‑camouflage pseudoscientific medical subculture with significant individual and systemic harms.
• Florida’s bill largely copies that architecture, adding more procedural safeguards around who may enter and how they may be disciplined, but not changing the underlying epistemic contract: naturopathy as a whole system is treated as if it were a valid, science‑based medical discipline.

Through the Cullen–Snyder lens, Florida is poised to replay Connecticut’s experiment, with similar degradations of factuality and freedom, unless the bill is substantially revised to decouple licensure from pseudoscientific core modalities and to constrain what can be marketed and practiced under the state‑sanctioned naturopathic title.”

And what are the chances a future revisions of the bill's text un-naturopathy's naturopathy?