Our History and Mission

The North American Academy of Neural Therapy is a non-profit educational organization whose mission is “to advance the understanding and practice of Neural Therapy in North America”.  Its target is medical professionals, in particular those licensed to inject procaine, the principle therapy of neural therapy.

Neural therapy’s history has been entwined with that of procaine and similar local anaesthetics since the early 1900s. In 1904 procaine was discovered to have therapeutic properties beyond that of simple local anaesthesia. However, it was only in the 1940s when the Huneke brothers discovered the “interference field” that neural therapy began as a systematic discipline.

From its roots in Germany, neural therapy gradually spread to other countries in Europe, and especially to the Spanish-speaking world, where in Spain and Latin America it is widely practised. Neural therapy was first introduced to North America (in a sustained way) by Dietrich Klinghardt in the 1980s.  He created a private educational academy and trained many hundreds of physicians and dentists over the ensuing decades by offering two or three-day workshops on neural therapy and related subjects.

Some of his students (Kidd RF, Harris G, and Harris J) also taught short neural therapy workshops in the following decades, but only when contacts were made with other neural therapists in South America and Europe did momentum build to create something larger.  In 2017 a small group of Canadian and American physicians organized the first international neural therapy conference in Ottawa, Canada.  It was from the success of this meeting that the idea of creating a North American neural therapy organization was born.

The North American Academy of Neural Therapy welcomes physicians (MD and DO) and clinicians of all types, dentists, naturopaths, acupuncturists, veterinarians, and others wanting to support neural therapy in North America.  (Although primarily a medical discipline, neural therapy involves dentistry because interference fields are often found in the teeth or cranial structures.)

Generally, neural therapy involves injection, so practitioners with a scope of practice that includes the ability to inject is ideal. But anyone who works with the body or mind will find neural therapy assessment valuable for deeper insights into their patient’s conditions or unexplained pain. And they can work with a neural therapist for the procaine injections to resolve the identified interference fields/lesions.

A full globally recognized training program is in the early stages of development.  A physicians’ directory is publicly available and includes NAANT members. Various opportunities for education, hands-on workshops, and networking are available on this site and for members. And we put on a semi-annual conference that is now being planned for Nov 4-8, 2027 – more details here »