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 accepts as full members physicians (MD and DO), dentists, naturopaths (with licences to inject in their jurisdiction) and veterinarians. Although primarily a medical discipline, neural therapy involves dentistry because interference fields are often found in the teeth or cranial structures. Naturopaths are also accepted into full membership where their local licensing regulations permit injections.
A training program and a conference are in the early stages of development. A physicians’ directory is being created, and various opportunities for education and networking are being planned. Physicians and dentists who would like to know more about neural therapy can read more here. Application for membership can be made here.
