Online Alternative Medicine Course Scam

My friend recently completed a full time one year post graduate Doctor of Naturopathy course from a recognized college. I was pleased for her and while I was not too sure just what the certification involved I was quite happy to call her Doctor Puja! Since it peaked my interest I went online to check out other similar courses in my home town. I did feel the ring of Doctor before my name would have a nice sound.

That is when I was hit by a barrage of online alternative medicine courses. There were some institutes that offered full time courses which were from recognized universities and those were not the ones that caught my eye. What I found interesting that there were a number of sites from Kolkata and in West Bengal which offered you all kinds of Alternative Medicine courses as a distance education option.

A preliminary study of more than five sites showed that all of them offered everything from a certificate course to a Doctor of Alternative Medicine (A.M. MD). All of them claimed to be registered companies and gave some Government Act and Law numbers to sound authentic. The fees that they offered went from as low as nine thousand rupees to as high as forty thousand depending on the website.

It sounded too good to be true and so I dug deeper. I had the advantage of being a Reiki Medium and a Tarot Card reader and so I knew these were not skills that you could pick up in a correspondence course. My father also happens to be an advocate of Homeopathy and I knew that the course for these doctors was a regular degree course and again not something that could be taught via a correspondence course alone.

The catch was very simple when I looked into methodology that the sites gave. They sent you books to study and then they sent you question papers to your home to answer. The course did not involve you taking up any exams in a center. All they did was send you a question paper and you were to answer it in your home and then you would get a doctorate. That is not possible as even in a distance education program you must pass an examination that is conducted in proper centers.

Take any course from IGNOU for instance and you will have to pass an exam. Essentially what these online alternative medicine courses were doing was giving you illegal certifications. If you decided to work based on these qualifications there would be a good possibility of your being charged for fraud and ending up in Jail! So please be very careful before you take up any online correspondence course.