From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is David Hoffmann. David is author of seventeen herbal books on herbs and natural healing, including Holistic Herbal, a safe medical herbalist for traditional medicinals. He's on the core faculty of the California School of Herbal Studies. He's on the advisory board of the American Botanical Council and a founding member and past president of the American Herbalist Guild. And David is also active in the environmental and peace movements.
And, you even, ran on the Green Party ticket for parliament that I read.
And Yeah. In in eighty three before anyone had heard of the Green Party.
That's very progressive. So you could you could read a lot of articles by David and lots of them at, at healthy dot net.
Welcome, David.
Well, what thank you for inviting me, and thank you for the good work you're all doing.
Oh, thanks so much. And and is is are do you have, another website? Or I just found the articles on healthy dot net.
No. I I have I mean, for years, I've been teaching classes on how to use the Internet for Herbalists, how to do research, and I just made this decision in my life. I I don't want to be out there as a as a face and a name too much. So, my stuff is all over the herbal components of the web, but, I don't have a web page. Good point.
It's a lot easier. Yeah. Right.
I think it's up to people like you.
Oh, great. Well, I'm happy to oblige.
So I was, telling you earlier, before we started the call that, your your book, New Holistic Herbal, was the very first book that I purchased. So, it was, you know, it's quite an honor here to be, to be to be talking with you. It's such a such a great book.
And, Well, thank you.
Is is that now you didn't it seems like you came out with holistic herbal after the new holistic herbal. Is that true?
No. The other way around. Oh, okay. Remember, they they came out in in England first.
So by the time they got over here, it all got really confused because it was just that the middle 80s was the beginning of publishing companies buying other publishing companies. So that book went through three different publishers, Not because the book made the publishers go bankrupt, but because they kept buying each other out. So they they kept relaunching it with slightly different names, which really pissed me off. But I'm just the author.
I have no say in these things. So the new Holistic Herbal is the slightly updated version of the holistic herbal.
So that's the one to get if you're out there and looking for Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
But if, I've I've written a textbook for practitioners which and and students, which is, one of the core textbooks at the naturopathic schools now. It's called Medical Herbalism which really is a practitioner level book whereas the holistic herbal is for real herbalists. Now I've got to be very careful how I say this.
There is a difference between being a herb lover and using herbs in your life as a core issue, which makes you a real herbalist, and then being a practitioner, which doesn't necessarily mean you're a herbalist.
You could be a phytotherapist.
And this might be something we'd want to talk about.
Okay.
But there there is a difference between the two. So, I I really don't think that having lots of degrees and and knowing the chemistry of plants makes you a better herbalist, might make you a better practitioner.
That's good. Thank you for that, Claire. Because that's really on on HerbManser, you know, what it's about. I mean, I think the majority of us are people with families who, might have a little herb garden or go out and and pick some things and and and turn them into home remedies for the common ailments.
Which is, one of the major contributions that the herb world is making to our culture and more importantly in the next few years when the oil runs out and when the breakdown really starts hitting hard, It's going to be the local community herbalist who's going to be the heart and soul of healthcare because there aren't going to be any pharmaceuticals.
Most of those come from petrochemical and we can't afford those in the near future. So the basic herbal skills, which were lost in the 50s and 60s, it sort of went out of the collective memory.
They're back and they're back because of what I call the real hurdles.
The person in the family who knows how to make a poultice or knows which herbs are really useful in colds and flu. That information is going to be maybe not life saving, but life affirming in the next few years. And we need to spread our skills as widely as possible because of that.
What the practitioners are doing in bringing traditional herbal medicine into the context of twenty first century medicine is really important and I personally am very committed to that. But it's almost moving away from herbalism. It's moving away from the green heart of the plant and our relationship with that green heart into almost commodifying the herbs into standardized predictably affected substances that pharmacists and doctors feel comfortable with. And even though we can do that, and I do that a lot, I wonder sometimes whether we might be selling out a bit doing that.
Is that is that sounding coherent?
Yes. Totally. Totally.
And, is that how you got when you started, working with herbs, is this something that you did when you were a a much, you you know, like a from a from a childhood or Oh, no.
No. No. No. No. You know, my father was a photographer. I he was the Beatles photographer of all things.
Really?
I I grew up in a very different world. You know, I was on tour with the Beatles and all all that weirdness from the sixty.
Well, I think this interview needs to take a dip.
We're gonna talk about the Oh, no.
No. No. No. No. I'm just kidding. I won't go there. Okay. Just kidding.
You know, there there was nothing green in my upbringing. My, I lived in London. Right.
I I was, you know, doing science at school, not botany. I was just on this path. I actually was thinking I was going to be a plastics chemist of all things.
And then flower power hit in nineteen sixty seven, totally changed my life.
And by the time I finished university in sort of 'seventy three, I a whole bunch of things changed in my head, and I realized the revolution had to happen one way or another. It didn't take the form I thought it was going to, but I realized that we had to get back to nature. We had to allow that embrace back into Western civilization, otherwise we were dead.
It's still a big issue. We need to do that. We need to do it very, very definitely. But in the process of that filtering through into my head through the craziness of the late 60s and early 70s.
I found that my scientist in the back of my head was suddenly a herbalist in the back of my head. Oh. Virtually surreal. I had no expectation or no aim to go in that direction.
And my heart connection I just discovered with plants, married with my training in chemistry and that sort of scientific analytical thinking. So I know about how to be embraced by a plant and think about its alkaloid tannin interactions at the same time, which usually people are either one or the other of those extremes.
I can luckily do both. But I actually feel transformed and blessed by Herbst getting me in the seventies. It was, you know, if I can become a herbalist with my background, anybody can.
It it it wasn't from my parents. It wasn't from my culture. It wasn't from my education. It was from the herbs getting me. There's a wonderful word that Hildegard of Bingham came up with.
You're familiar with Hildegard? Yes. Yeah. Alright. Good.
The word was birrigidas, and I better spell it because of my accent. It's b I r I d I t a s. And it she totally made the word up, but it means the healing power of the divine in green things.
And that's what got me.
I was touched by that, the ritatas.
It didn't mean that therefore I had to become a herbal practitioner just because of my scientific orientation, that's what happened. But to me, herbalism and the gift of herbalism is the experience of the embrace of nature.
What we then do with that is a reflection of our personality.
But that embrace is real, it can be felt. It can be very traumatic, but it's also very transforming.
You know, telling my parents in the middle seventies that, oh, wow, I'm gonna become a hard list.
They thought I'd lost it completely.
It's not a normal career path.
But when I'm sure a lot of the people listening to this will have had equivalent experiences.
When you get that connection with the plants, it never leaves and it will give you a really hard time if you don't listen to it.
So I dropped out, became a herbalist, made all sorts of really bad career choices, leading to the fact that I don't feel I've ever had a career. I've had a vocation or avocation, whatever the word would be, and thank God for the Davis. And now I find in situations where I'm talking to people with the right letters after their names who consider themselves to be either herbal practitioners, psychotherapists or scientific governmental experts on herbs.
It's sad. They just don't get it. They just see the herbs as organic drug delivery systems.
And if you do that, it's like just spitting in the face of nature.
So as beginning beginner herbalists these days, it is really easy to slip into seeing herbs for diseases or herbs as sources of the important constituent.
And yes, you can do that, but it really cripples the perception of the herb that you then have. The chemistry is important. The disease treatments are totally important, but that isn't herbalism.
That's just a very small part of it.
So, when you talk about holistic herbalism, how then can people because, okay, so you're saying that it's easy for people to slip into, looking at herbs through that, you know, through the way of, like, the symptoms and the and the chemistry, then for a person who is starting out, you know, what kind of foundation should one develop, and how did they do that to become a holistic herbalist?
Symptom hub thing or the disease hub thing.
It's really important to the symptom herb thing or the disease herb thing. It's really important information.
It's just partial.
And, if you have that partial information, you can do a lot, but you're not a herbalist.
And herbalists who get the big picture and can hear and feel the data. If they don't know the details, then even though they're really good herbalists, they're not going to be good practitioners.
So if a herbalist wants to become a practitioner, you have to pay your dues.
If a practitioner wants to broaden what they're doing so that they get the vision of herbalism, that's a different process. There you just have to throw all the information away and go and hug trees for a year, if you see what I mean. But getting back to your question here, I think the first thing is to find some model of holistic perceiving that feels right for you.
So if you're drawn to medicine and you want to be holistic, treating the whole of the person, seeing more than just the symptoms, there are a bunch of, no, sorry, not bunch, there are a range of choices of explanatory models which really help basically reprogram the brain so that we start thinking and perceiving holistically.
There's Chinese medicine, there's Ayurvedic medicine, but neither of those are parts that I took.
There is Western in herbalism, eclectic medicine, and physiomedical medicine. There are solid, wonderful systems which came out of the Western world view, which enable us to perceive the human being as a whole thing, not just a bag of symptoms.
But in deceiving the whole person, there are ways in which you can interpret that in terms of what herbs may help them.
And it's initially not simple. It's initially quite complex stuff. But there are a number of features of Western herbalism in this country, which are really what's the word I'm they're blazing the way into twenty first century Western holistic medicine.
There is no twentieth century Western holistic medicine.
We need to create a model and the model is I can feel it in the air, but no one's written the book yet. Mhmm.
And it may be one of the people listening to this who writes the book.
But, when students get frustrated with Western anatomy and physiology and Western herbalism not being holistic enough from when they listen to their TCM friends. TCM is traditional Chinese medicine. Everything sounds incredibly holistic in what they do.
That's partially because of the language they use and Western medicine doesn't use that language.
I don't think Chinese medicine is more holistic than Western medicine. It's the practitioners are trained to perceive more holistically.
And what we need to do in training herbalists and training, especially training naturopaths, we need to be more holistic in the way we perceive the world, not simply in the way we interpret symptoms.
So, you know, the whole thing about physician heal thyself, you can't be holistic with a patient unless your personal world view in life has gone through the changes so that you can be holistic and transform your conditioning and your education and your lifestyle.
And it's asking a lot, but I think we have to ask it. We have to expect that from practitioners. At the moment, one of the things that's really pressing my buttons, I'm in California and I'm hearing a lot of green marketing, changing consumption patterns to green consumption patterns. It really pisses me off because you can't save the planet by buying something.
Even if it's green, if you're buying it, you're part of the commercial system, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
We need to question everything we're doing and reframe our questions, our answers, our opinions, our treatment protocols, our lifestyle choices in terms of an ecologically viable stance in the world. And I can't give you easy one liners on that.
It's challenging stuff.
In purely herbal terms, if you look at the writings of, for example, Michael Moore, this one example of someone who's doing what I consider to be holistic herbalism, you can't really turn to Michael's writings and say, all right, irritable bowel syndrome, what herb am I going to use? It's much more in-depth and holistic, sometimes very irritating, but why, why not?
All of the good Western writers demand more of their readers than just doing what the writer says. The reader has to think and has to re perceive what's going on. Mhmm.
So I could just run like this for hours, but I'm not going to.
Right. Right. So, then on that, let's say, since you were just talking about that, where you're saying about, say, if someone has irritable bowel syndrome and they're Yeah. Looking for people to go, you know, beyond that. Let's talk about an example here because there were various people who did members on Herb Mentor who wrote in questions. For example, wondering if you've seen cases where IBA, IBS, Rose ACA, allergies, or head related symptoms, and what possible protocols all the way to, someone who about Meniere's disease to, looking for another one here, suffered from chronic pain from herniated cervical discs and and has depression issues.
Or is it You know, so so the idea.
Okay. What about I'm just getting, like, are you talking about, like, you know, that approach? These people have a similar type of story where it's like, I've got this chronic thing, and I know that I wanna treat naturally, but I don't know know how. Or a lot of times it's like I've tried this herbal tincture and it didn't work, and it's like, so what's the approach? You know, what is this?
Yes. That raises all sorts of questions. So, let's use IVF as the condition to compare and contrast different approaches. But before that, you just said you quoted this person, I tried all sorts of natural approaches. Now immediately, what do we mean by natural?
Because as far as I'm concerned, if something appears in the body of the planet, it's natural.
The only thing that isn't natural as far as I'm concerned is plutonium and other isotopes the planet can't deal with. Because if we say that technology makes something unnatural, then you can't have a tincture, You can't have a bottle. You can't have a cup of tea. How does the heat arrive? Do you see what I'm getting at? Yes.
So it's not so much simplistic things about natural versus prescription drug because actually sixty percent of current prescription drugs still derive one way or another from plants.
Even if they're now made from petroleum, the insight came from a plant.
What is important to me is not which particular marketplace it comes from, either the natural or the pharmacy. It's more is the protocol being used one that is going to be affirming to life or one that is specifically symptom specific. So there are some situations where I think I got a backup.
In the Hippocratic Oath, which I said the equivalent of when I graduated, the first or second line is first do no harm, right?
I think that sometimes the alleviation of symptomatic discomfort is something we essentially have to do because the pain, the symptom, whatever it is, might be doing harm. So I wouldn't personally ever go to a practitioner who told me they did not treat symptoms.
Mhmm.
Now that's my personal choice, because, you know, why should people suffer? I want to alleviate suffering. Right. My my personal commitment is not to herbalism as a practitioner, but to the alleviation of suffering as a practitioner.
Right.
So but on the whole, the prescription approach to alleviating symptoms can often be more problematic than the disease causing the symptom.
So I want to avoid that. So if we use irritable bowel syndrome, which is what's called a functional problem as opposed to an organic problem. The herniated disc is an organic problem.
It is physically there, you can see it, there's a rip or herniation or something.
In irritable bowel syndrome, you might find inflammation if you look carefully, but nothing's broken, nothing's missing, nothing's organically physically wrong. There's no indication for surgery, none of that stuff. And that makes it very appropriate to be treated and alleviated with herbal approaches. Now, herbal approaches are going to include nutrition, has to. I personally don't see a difference between a medicinal plant and a culinary edible plant. The only difference usually is one of taste.
So, IBS you can do purely nutritionally, though it's hard work. Nutrition plus herbs, it's very simple, very straightforward, usually.
Oh, one last thing about that. When I say nutritional, I mean food. I don't mean supplement.
I'm really not a supplement person. So let's think about the IBS. If you looked in some of the phytotherapy books, the books that are using hubs in the context of mainstream medicine, to search on IBS you'll find peppermint oil and maybe one or two other things.
That's the epitome to me of what we shouldn't be doing. That is looking for a specific herb, in this case a herbal product, the peppermint oil in an enteric coated capsule, which is one that doesn't dissolve till it gets passed the stomach.
So that you've got bioavailable peppermint oil where you need it and you get good symptomatic control.
Much safer than the drugs that you use for the same thing within the system, but that's not really holistic herbalism.
That's green organic drug delivery systems.
What I would do, well, there are a number of ways. You need to put the person's disease name in a context.
That context needs to take into account the person's body type, the person's lifestyle, the person's diet, and that will often give you a good grasp of how to approach this. The IBS has not come out of nowhere. It's a manifestation of using old language, dis ease. Something isn't happy somewhere. Now that can be psychological, it can be nutritional and everything in between.
So by looking at the person sorry, let me rephrase that, looking at the person first and ignore the IBS, you get major insights from what the psychology is like, what their lifestyle is like. Some people are living lives that it's amazing they've only got IBS.
Our culture expects us to live in such an insane way. Right, so that's first step.
Then there needs to be some coherent interpretation of the symptom picture. You don't ignore the symptom picture. The symptom picture is the, the clothing of the disease, which is asking us to interpret it.
So in sort of eclectic physio medical terms, you do a detailed analysis of what's going on, what squeeze they have between the different extremes. Are they cramping? Are they having very loose stalls? What are the issues in between? What triggers the swings?
Etcetera, etcetera. And then the insights that come from that sort of analysis, you combine those with ready access to the eclectic materia medicus and some of the more modern writings from people like Michael, people like myself, Paul Bergner, for example, is doing wonderful stuff on this.
Though I'm not sure he's got a book out on this, but his website is just amazing for this stuff.
It's possible to find herbs that fit the pictures, that fit the patterns that you've been recognizing.
And, they may not be IBS herbs. That's not the point. You're not treating the IBS. You're treating the person. Mhmm.
Now that that should have been a two week intensive class to explain it. But the other way of doing it, you could do pulse diagnosis and work through a Chinese model of the interpretation of the signs and symptoms or you could use an Ayurvedic model. The point is there are lots of models.
And the first stage for us Western herbalists I think is to let go of needing to be acceptable to the local MD, having to have everything fit that sort of worldview because hub for a symptom or a hub for IBS. There are herbal approaches to the disease so we can move it back to ease so the functional problem goes away.
K.
And and, so somebody is there so someone is, I I I think if someone has some experience working with herbs, then they can navigate their way, through using some books like yours and others to to come to that or or or or based on their experience and because they have feelings and relationship with their A lot better to have a teaching.
It really is because this is even in TCM, you really need teachers. Because what sounds like, I mean, in the book, I've done my best to articulate that model quite coherently, but people don't fit models and herbs don't fit models.
The model the algorithm of how you go about it is a guide, but you need experience to guide you through the guide. So, people really need to make the most of teachers.
And so okay.
Yeah. Well, in twenty, thirty years ago, there weren't there were hardly any. There were three or four left from the old days. And I've been here twenty four years now and I'm just so impressed with how North American herbalism has not just been reborn, but created anew, not the old stuff come back.
The old stuff came back and then flowered into something new. Mhmm. So we have Susan Weed type traditional herbalism. We have cutting edge medical herbalism as is going on in the Tice of Sofia School.
Do do you know the place I mean? Yeah.
Tice of Sofia and Maryland. They do five element acupuncture, which is actually what I am. I'm a five element acupuncturist.
Yeah. But they they also do the sort of herbalism I'm talking about.
Right. Exactly.
There's There's But that's not the only place you need to go to do it.
So there's Rosemary Glen Star folk herbalism, which I think all Western herbalists need to be at home in that stuff before they get clever.
Because clever herbalism is always weaker than traditional herbalism.
I just pissed off most of my friends by saying that. But unless we have that kitchen sink knowing about herbs in us, anything we try and get clever with, we miss the point. We end up blowing it the way the researchers keep blowing it when they're looking at herbs.
Because the because the kitchen sink herbalism has, because it has nourishment and home at the core?
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Which then the next step on that, towards med the medical herbalism is there is a complete understanding, even though you can't define it, of the concept of a tronic.
Mhmm. And you go into Western medicine, there is no concept of the tonic.
Other they use the word, but there it's used to talk about muscle tone, and it means something very different.
And the heart and soul of all the competent systems that I've looked at from different places of the world. They all have at their heart the understanding of certain herbs of nurturing tonic specifics for certain organs or certain body systems or even certain tissue types. And you build your prescription with the herbs for the disease if you're gonna use them around a heart of the nurturing herbs for the place in the body that needs the support, which is going to be the site of the pathology if there is one, but also the site of impact to the pathology. And then insights which come from the body type and medical history of the person and their family. So tronics and timing is our core strength and that's the one part of what we're now offering to mainstream medicine that they're totally rejecting because in their paradigm that doesn't exist.
So you can't do double blinds because they can't conceive of what a tonic is.
I see.
The control is, The actual experimental procedures of controlling variables and all the statistics and stuff is dependent on large numbers of people being seen as being the same and averageable.
And I don't think you can do that. You need to find the food that's right for that person. So you can't do statistically valid experimentation on tonics because you're never going to find two hundred people who are going to respond the way we want to the same tonic.
It's gonna be different.
Mhmm. And does that have to do with the fact that people have different relationships with different herbs?
Is there Oh, I don't know.
I think that's part of it, but I think also it's a genetic issue.
Because we even though I'm talking I've been talking about Viriditas and all of that, we're based on DNA. They're based on the plants are based on DNA. And I totally embrace evolution as a reality. One of the reasons, if I can get that logical here, one of the reasons plants work as therapeutic substances is that we've all evolved together within the context of an ecological priority that moves environments towards stability, which in human terms means health.
So it makes total sense to me that herbs and food and human bodies fit and do it the right way and we're going to be as healthy as we can be. That doesn't mean disease less, but as healthy as we can normally be most of the time.
So there are genetic issues, there are biochemical issues and there are consciousness issues and there are heart connection issues.
Something I think all herbalists have found is that eventually they find who their herbal allies are, who their friends are as heard.
I remember talking to Rosemarie Glaubstor about this a while ago. I use Skullcap a lot for all sorts of different things in different ways. She uses mother word in a very equivalent way. Now I use Motherwort and she uses Skullcap, but what it really comes down to is that Motherwort is one of her allies and SCULCAP is one of mine, which might mean that my patients get a better outcome from SCALCAP because I trust it.
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Yes. And this is not supposed to happen. You can't do double blinds on that sort of variability.
But I think all herbalists have experienced this.
Does it come down to what sort of mood the herb is in?
Does the herb actually like the person you're giving it to? This is really weird stuff we're moving into.
And I feel these days comfortable about moving into those sorts of areas of strangeness because I feel at home with the science.
I'm not rejecting the science to move into herbal ally stuff. I think science is an amazing tool for herbalists. You you just Just by the belief system.
So someone actually just asked this question was that she's passionate about science, but some of her scientific friends are very hostile to her.
Like, it's some kind of So it's got nothing to do with science.
That's the belief system. Any of the listeners here who've gone through science education, and I went through it for a very long time, if you really carefully analyze what you went through, yes, there's all the factual stuff and then there's the context within which it's taught and we were all conditioned into a Cartesian worldview that is not necessary for science. It's just one of the philosophical belief systems.
Newton was an alchemist. He wrote more books on alchemy than he did on gravity.
So it's only today that we're really beaten up at school and at university into assuming that science and that scientific wonderful perspective on the world means you've got to be rigidly materialistic.
And no, that's not a given. It's just you just don't get government grants if you're not rigidly materialistic.
You can still be a scientist. Mhmm. So I I really support and affirm any herbalist who really wants to know about the pharmacodynamics of flavonoids in the central nervous system. It's wonderful stuff.
As a part of the picture, the problem with the science world view, they assume that there aren't any other parts of the picture and there are. So Skullcap contains flavonoids which interact with the GABA receptors, which opens up the whole world of pharmacodynamics and what you can do and what you can't do and where it works and where it doesn't. But none of that explains why Skullcap and I really like each other. It's got nothing to do with GABA receptors. It's a heart connection.
And I think all practitioners after a while, and they take quite a few years, but eventually they get, usually the person's healing inner the patient's healing heart is intuitively letting the practitioner's intuition know what herbs are needed. And for me to get that point, I had to get my mind thinking about how to come up with an algorithm for protocol development, which I've done. But the real function of that was to get my mind to shut up so I could intuit.
Mhmm.
Not then throwing the science away, but then after I got something intuitively, then assess it scientifically or technically to make sure I I heard right. Because if if you just purely trust whatever your intuition says, if you have an inner voice, make sure you know the difference between Bayberry, Barberi, and Burberry.
Right.
I said those fast on purpose, you know, because you won't always hear it right. Sure. But I think we need to trust this. And don't expect affirmation from your science friends or from your medical friends or from your parents for that matter.
But on the other hand, if you're into science, don't expect affirmation from your herbal friends who might think that you're selling out. Mhmm. It's a really weird situation.
Oh, yeah. I think that it, goes it it can fit in beautifully.
There's, a series we've been doing on, on Honorbenter called the Village Herbalist with, have you ever met, Heather Neon Fleche D'aire from, missus Thompson's in, Eugene, Oregon?
And she does just a beautiful job of kitchen herbal and herbalism while teaching, you know, while just rattling off all of the science, Yeah. And and constituents behind it.
And it's, it's it's it's poetry, really, when she's That's the way it needs to be done.
On the other hand, I just need to a word of warning.
Herbalists who don't know the science, who rejected it all the way through school and they just don't have that world view, it's best not to dabble because it's really easy to mess up. Let me just give you a little story.
We often do opening circle meditations at her school. And one of our teachers in a while ago, she didn't teach scientific herbalism, but was leading us really good meditation and we were touching into the cycling of the air and oxygen comes from the plants.
And then she said, and visualize you breathing out carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide.
And most people didn't get it, but the few people in the circle who knew that, immediately we just lost it.
Our attention went. So if you don't know the science, you don't need it. I mean, don't bring it in until you know it.
Otherwise, you make mistakes. And that's the best way to lose your science friends.
Overwhelm them with your herbal knowledge, but don't try and get it into their language if you don't know their language. Good point. Because they'll win, if you see what I mean. I do. Not not not that it's a fight, but, you know, they'll just make fun of you.
I've seen that. You know?
Yeah. I think I have as well.
But, you know, it it was amazing for me though even though I may not bring it up in conversation or whatever when I after taking a three year apprenticeship in in folk herbalism, when I once started acupuncture school, I had to do all these science classes and I was first I was like oh, this block, like, oh, no. Science classes and all Yep. Because I had to do it for my prerequisites. But as I got into it, I just found, like, I had this new interest.
Like, I was soaking it up and all of a sudden Yeah. Herbs were cut. Instead of herbs were coming in left and right, I'm like, oh, I see, you know. And, you know, believe it or not, I can, you know, look at, new holistic herbal the first time and I was looking through because it's SeaTalk.
You go through herbs and different body systems and and everything. And and when I take the class, I'm like, oh, that's what a lymphatic system.
Yeah. The the trouble with with science education is that most people doing it are really boring teachers.
Yeah.
And it's so easy to burn out. But it once you get the connection, it does illuminate so much stuff.
Mhmm. Yeah. That's so so then I wanna then you know, because it's it's it's it's it seems like, you know, because we have such an intellectual scientific culture that you can find this information.
You know, you can read books and find out. But you said first and from foremost, backing up to the natural world and nature.
Because I told you earlier I was in wilderness awareness school about twenty years where we teach people how to reconnect to the natural world through various native skills.
And, you say that many ills of our cultures stem from our senses of separation from the earth.
And herbal medicine can also be part of a personal and even social transformation.
So, I'm gonna get into that a little bit because then it's Let me give you a story.
There's a specific story that gave me that insight.
I was one of the places I was in practice was industrial South Wales, where the Industrial Revolution started four hundred years ago. If you want to see pollution, you go there. There are whole mountainsides where nothing will grow on.
And I was treating a man who must have been in his middle 40s, he seemed ancient at the time, but that was a long time ago, who had bronchitis, emphysema from working in the mines, really strong Celtic body, but he'd go up four steps and he'd be breathless because his lungs were ruined.
Hardly it's relatively straightforward to get a certain amount breathing capacity back. You can't cure it, but you can control it.
And cutting a long herbal story short, after about six months, he was cycling to the clinic and he was able to climb up the stairs and he still had the problem. If he wasn't taking the medicine, thought the symptoms would come back. All right. When he started talking after that six months, he started telling me about his grandson who was about to go down the mines because that was the only job. And he was really concerned because of what the mines had done for him. That gave me permission to start talking about ecology and stuff, which I would never do with a patient otherwise. And again, cutting a whole long story short, within a year, he was the President of the South Wales Friends of the Earth.
And last time I saw him, it was on television debating somebody from the coal board, full on by the government in England. And this man from the coal board was arguing that we're doing the best, we're cutting back on air pollution. And this patient of mine, all he had to do was just weans, just make sure he coughed a bit. And the cameras and the microphone would pick it up and everybody believed him because there was this real Welsh speaking miner who was in Friends of the Earth telling the government they were gonna kill his grandson and the government had to do something about it.
But what it all came down to was his experience with the herbal medicine that paraphrasing his words, he got one day that the stuff in his garden could have cured or treated his emphysema, even though they weren't the right herbs. He was aware enough that herbs, plants, green things were what were making him better. And yes, they did that. But look, the factory was killing off the things in his garden because of the air pollution.
So it was his experience of his improvement that turned him into a green activist.
He would never have listened to me ranting. It was his body and his insight.
And I've seen that happen a number of times. If you want to get somebody, want to get a vote for green issues, find somebody with a stomach ulcer, cure it with herbs and you've got to vote for the green issues because it's self interest. That goes against everything I believe in. It shouldn't be self interest. Everybody should get it spontaneously.
We should be at one with the environment. That's not where most people are at. So, I really feel that the more we can enable alienated people in the West to get in their own time and in their own way, the way in which plants nurture them. When people get that insight, everything changes in their life.
That's the biggest contribution I think we can make. And it's not something that we, the herbalist, has to work at. The person is going to get it when they're ready. What we need to do is make available to people in this strange end of twentieth beginning twenty first century period where the system thinks it killed off herbalism.
It thought it got rid of us and we're back.
And we're being incredibly subversive simply by turning people on to making metal tea. Mhmm. We're empowering people again.
And, actually, that's all we need to do. They don't need to listen to anything we say. We don't need to say anything to them. People being pointed at herbs and then if they take that opportunity, the herb and their inner self will mutate them.
They'll be moved in the right direction.
So people become activists of the earth and natural health care by just simply doing it in their day to day life.
Exactly. Exactly. I I really I'm no longer politically active the way I I used to be. Now I think the most politically active thing I can do is give people a cup of herb tea.
Love it.
And I I it works often.
Of course, for some of the fascists in this country, I would select my hub very carefully.
But yes, I trust the hubs. I trust the green enough.
You know, herbal activists don't burn out. Political activists do.
Well, I I have a new I have a new party I've I'm gonna start. It's called the Wild Foods party, and what you do is you invite your friends over for a Wild Foods potluck.
Yeah.
So I'm I'm thinking that in this election year, you know, I think we can make a big difference.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, Barack Obama drinks her tea.
I won't take that any further.
But strangely, it's the biggest opposition to the verbal availability in Congress is the Democratic Party for all sorts of weird historical reasons.
It's always been difficult for me to get a handle on that one, but that's not what we're talking about now We could we'll get into that sometime.
So I wanted to ask you, before I, you know, a couple of direct questions from some folks.
On, on HerbMentor, we do a different herb every month that we that we study. We have the herb of the month, and then people just, however they're inspired, try to learn about that herb through actually using it somehow whether dried or if they can pick it fresh, that's the best, of course, and do things.
So, we have calendula we're studying this month and elder next month. So I was wondering if you had any insights, based on your relationship with these plants?
Yes, especially about the CALENDULA. CALENDULA is used in rather different ways in Europe than it is in the U. S. It's not really thought of as a topical herb. It is, but it's that's a very secondary thought.
And by the way, it's usually combined with St. John's work for wound healing and reducing inflammation topics, wonderful combination.
It's used internally as an anti inflammatory and primarily a lymphatic system anti inflammatory.
Used in a very similar way to cleavers.
And I really recommend people reading up on that. The place where you find most about that is in German books.
So if you don't read German, go to some of the German Herb Company websites, all of which are in English as well as German. And sometimes they have their older guidebooks, practitioner books, just translated into English and you'll find what I mean.
Otherwise, look at the writings of English herbalists on calendula. It really is a wonderful herb internally with one thing people have to remember.
The yellow color of calendula petals is not flavonoid.
It's related to the curcumin and vitamin A, very big long molecules and it doesn't extract well in water.
So if you look at the British Herbal Pharmacopier on Calendula, it says you need ninety five percent sorry, ninety percent alcohol as the extraction vehicle, which sort of makes no sense at all unless you get that it's this weird chemical because for petals, twenty percent alcohol is going to extract normally everything. But I didn't believe this. And when I first started, I made extracts of calendula at different percentages of alcohol. And up until eighty percent, they all look the same, nice pleasant calendula color. Once you get above eighty percent, there's chemically what's called a phase change and it's like you suddenly get liquid sunlight.
It's totally different.
Just a really beautiful color and it's because those dyes don't come out, not dye, sorry, those color molecules don't come out, they just don't like water.
So people should experiment. Don't just believe me or believe the Europeans because on the whole, just because it's from Europe, you shouldn't believe it. And just because it's from Germany, you shouldn't believe it. But in this case, I think, yes, there's something in there.
I don't think CALENDULA internally has much to offer as an antifungal or anti yeast. Topically, it does.
I think some of the claims I've seen made for internal effects that way. I don't think the body makes the important constituents bioavailable enough internally, but topically it's excellent.
It's like St. John's word. I really don't think it's much of an antiviral internally, but topically it really is.
Oh, I see. Yeah. We because we had great success with top calendula topically with thrush when it was our first child, and that was the only thing that worked.
Yeah.
It's really, really good. You but then don't extrapolate from that and think if you take this one hundred percent tincture internally, you'd get internal equivalent clearance. It doesn't work that way.
I see. Okay. So what about what about now?
Where the pharmacology comes in, you know, it's just bioavailability issues. You can't make the body do something it doesn't want to do. You can help the body do something it's struggling to do. But herbally, you can't make it go against its own grain. That's called toxicity.
That's that's that's that's that's I haven't thought of it that way. How about a elder?
Elder. Yeah.
In England, the elder tree is all the old words imply the whole tree is a medicine chest and actually you can use every different part of it. I think other than the heartwood, I'm not sure of a use for that, but bark, leaves, flowers and berries. But the berries, I've only used them in two ways.
One is for making the best wine you can have.
Me too. Elderberry wine is just outrageous. But apart from that, it really does seem to increase resistance to getting the flu.
It really does seem to work.
I've seen it in people I've tried it with and the research on it is really good.
Did you do wine for that?
I've always wondered that.
You know, you probably could because the lectins would be in the wine, but the amount that's a lot of wine. Yes, yes. You wouldn't have the flu, but then your liver wouldn't like it. So it's probably inappropriate.
But otherwise, the whole elder tree, I really recommend missus Grieve as her entry on elder. If you use her usage things as sort of chapter headings, she really does cover what you can do with it. You can take it all a lot further than she covers it. But all the things that she claims for Elder are totally legitimate.
Wow. Wow. Great.
Excellent. They always wondered that about the wine and and, and all. So but a lot of people seem to just, you know, make remedies with the berries tinctures. I mean, I was thinking people would take a tincture of the berries.
Didn't seem that much different than the wine to me.
There may be a dosage difference.
And we the lectins, which are supposedly the important constituents, as far as I remember, and if any of your people are a chemist, they may say I'm immediately wrong. But I don't think the lectins would break down in fermentation.
So they should still be in the wine.
Mhmm. And then, so you're so so people wanna take it for anti flu, they're taking it as a whole plant tincture?
Oh, no. No. It would be the berry tincture. The berry. Yes. They're taking it as a preventive.
If it's a really deep colored elderberry wine, they probably could get away with that. However, I have no idea whether this will work for the bird flu if that ever happens. Exactly. Because that's different issues.
All different issues together. So, you know, before we kinda wrap it up here, because we're nearing at that point, and we'll be talking a while.
And, Yeah.
I guess I'll just take, because I I've kind of been weaving people's various questions into our into what we talked, so most of them have actually been answered.
And, and you've just naturally been knowing what to, you know, answering that. But one person, just to take one specific element, question, and wants to know about shingles. And a person who gets it so bad she's unable to function. They'd love to be able to get help. So herbally or like how would this person approach helping her shingle? You say before people should have a teacher, does this mean this person should find a practitioner?
Well, if it if it's bad, yes.
Because it it depends where it is. And if it gets if it's in any of the, the cranial nerves, that needs to be watched really carefully because it can end up damaging eyesight and hearing.
But if it's in the legs or the trunk, it doesn't necessarily need a skilled diagnostician.
But still somebody who knows the issue should just check.
The older the person, the more difficult it is to get it back into a band.
The virus that causes shingles, most people carry with them all the time because of chickenpox.
So I'm not going to give you treatment.
What I'm going to give you are some ideas which will be symptomatic relief. The treatment has to really have to be in the context of who that person is and and a full treatment is going to involve a practitioner who can follow-up those issues. But the very characteristic really bad pain of Shingles, There are two simple things which can cut it down dramatically.
The first one is straight peppermint oil, totally undiluted, the strongest purest peppermint oil you can find.
And if you can add that on without the person screaming too much, that is a topical anesthetic to that sort of nerve pain.
The person won't believe it while you're putting it on because it hurts.
But within a minute, it will numb.
Well, not numb, the pain deadens, you still got sensation.
The only drawback with that is that while. The other way doesn't involve that problem, it involves a slightly different problem. And this is using what's called colloidal oatmeal.
Do I need to spell that?
Actually, you can't make this at home. This is not a colloid is a very, very, very finely powdered powder or ground powder. And it involves technology that you just cannot do yourself.
So luckily, there's a company and I don't have shares in the company and normally I never mention companies, but thank God in this case, a company called Aveeno or sorry, a product called Aveeno, A V E E N O.
And if you use that stuff, the powdered stuff, not the lotion, but the powder, as a dusting powder instead of talc, Clothes don't hurt and sheets in bed at night don't hurt.
And that brings about the incredible improvement in the person's quality of life.
Beyond that, I don't want to say because they're they're not treatments for shingles. You have to treat the person because you can't kill shingles. You're not gonna be able to get rid of the shingles. What you've got to do is persuade it to go back to sleep, so to speak.
And that involves dealing with the person's physiological stress, a whole bunch of issues.
A very important part there actually is oats.
Oat tincture as the core nerve tonic is really crucial. But still that's not the treatment for shingles, that's the tonic around which I would build the treatment.
Okay.
And there was a question that you sent me from somebody who had heard me speak at Iowa about shingles. Yeah.
And the the local recipe. No. I never found out what was in it. Okay.
Okay. I was gonna ask you next because that was it.
Yeah. No.
Because all the people died.
You know, I I just locked in to the last generation of people who knew this stuff. And just when I got to the point of trying to ask the details, they weren't around anymore. The core issue was the man who knew the recipe, which had been handed down from generations, he hated hippies, and he hated the English, and I was the competition. So English hippie, herbalist.
There was no way he was gonna talk to me. So I had to find out the details second, third hand, and I couldn't get the details because one of the person there were fifteen, sixteen things in the mixture. And I actually found the person who collected the herbs for him. And unfortunately, she was one of these people who, you know there are some people who plant the type of the oak tree or there's grass, And they they can't see anything else.
They just don't have the ability to tell the difference. And unfortunately, she was one of these people. And she would just go out with him, and he'd point to what she had to bend over and pick up.
Mhmm.
So was she not the most, well, let me put it this another way. The cults are the most sexiest people I've ever come across. So she was just doing the hard work for them and couldn't recognize anything other than this one herb she had to collect off a roof. Because there were only there's only this one herb that grew on the roof, I could identify it. And it's this plant that's not in any of the medicine books called biting stonecrop.
And it may well be that that had something going for it.
But without knowing all the other constituents, I just don't wanna say.
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's interesting how we how we need to, keep the wisdom of our generations going so that things don't get lost like that again.
Yeah. It what happened in Wales sort of twenty, thirty years before I got there is now well, maybe one hundred years before I got there is now happening in the rainforest.
The children of the people who know this stuff aren't interested, and it's sort of dying out because there's nobody to pass it on to.
Oh, jeez.
It's happening all over the world.
Well, some speaking of passing things on, you're doing work with California School of Verbal Studies, and that's where people can study with you you mean, do you do a lot of the teaching there?
I I do.
Yes. Yeah. I do. But they have real herbalists who teach plant ID and growing and medicine making. I mean, nobody lets me teach medicine making anymore because we're doing this one class at a big thing in San Francisco.
And I was co teaching with Mindy Green, who some of your people might know about. She's she's a really good one, a therapist and medicine maker.
She just asked me to do the lotion while she was preparing something else to demonstrate to people. So I was talking and showing how he did it. I turned on the blender and I hadn't put the lid on.
So I got covered in ship and the first two rows were also covered. And it's all these San Francisco yuppies who were just not happy with what I'd done. All the hippies were at the back. So I'm I don't teach medicine making.
We've got wonderful medicine makers on wonderful plant ID people. I I teach the, well, I co teach the herbal therapeutics and then do a lot of their political spiritual stuff with other people as well. I'm I'm really glad that I'm not in my school. I I have no interest in being a name even though I am a name.
You see what I mean? So Yeah.
You can avoid it.
When you're right, seventeen. But what's the eighteenth book you're working on?
That's that's called paying the rent, you know. Alright. Even though it didn't, that's a different issue.
I don't think it's appropriate for there to be famous habilis Right.
Right.
At this stage of the game. So, you know, I I up until this year, I've been doing a lot of traveling around the country, but I've come to the conclusion that we shouldn't be doing that. If people want to study, they should come to a place and be still, or I should go to a place and be there for four months.
So there are lots of good teachers around now. So but the best place to find me is gonna be in Northern California.
And, I always recommend that people find the closest herb shop or natural health food store that might know of one in their area. Yeah. And it's always best to find somebody teaching near you.
Totally. That works just about everywhere.
The the only place I haven't been able to find local herbalists was some I was in some weird place in North Dakota because of a plane issue, and there weren't any herbalists anywhere near. But just about every other state, the first thing I do when I'm in somewhere new is go to a hub store and just hang out, look at the bulletin board. And, yes, you'll find people.
And they herbalists who are doing local classes know their limitations.
And, they will usually tell people which other teachers to go to for certain things. And because well, I think after a basic training, it's up to the hardest at the moment in this country to do classes with as many different teachers as possible don't become a follower.
Be very broad.
Yes. That's that's excellent advice.
Go go to the International Herb Symposium or the Herbless Guild Conference whenever it happens. Like, next year's is going to be oh, no. This year's is in Washington.
Yeah. You know you know, it's it's literally, that it's it's three blocks from my acupuncture clinic.
Yeah. Well, good.
And I'll be there.
But there you'll be able to see the difference between and that that this is just an observational thing, not a criticism. The difference between the naturopathic phytotherapists and the more old time herbalists who become modern?
The updating of the traditional stuff or the scientifically dumbing down of the traditional stuff.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yes. Yeah. This is a big mixed bag of folks who are teaching too.
Yeah. Because I I totally support the naturopathy schools. Theoretically, I'm on the faculty of Bastia Mhmm. But I don't go up there very much. I think they're doing a really good job, but it's good they don't call themselves helpless because they're not.
Right. Right. Right.
They're phytochemist.
Right. Exactly. They do have a botanical studies program, I think.
Oh, yes. Well, their degree program in botanical studies is excellent.
Yeah.
If you look at what the, doctorate the naturopath students have to do, they miss out some of the core herbal skills and just get into the medical side. Right. And it it just shows the world view if it's really wrong. They're really missing it.
Oh, I think I might have to go.
Oh, it's that perfect timing because, that's right where we're at. And, and, you know, I I just can't thank you enough. I know we could speak forever, but, we'll have to have you back sometime on here.
Oh, and and next time, let's get really specific about something rather than letting you around.
Well, and, you know, I'll have I'll have my people talk to your people and we'll let There you go.
Then we can do lunch. David. That was a joke.
David Hoffmann, it's been an honor, and thanks so much.
Alright. Bye bye. Bye bye.
Herb Mentor radio on HerbMentor.com is a production of LearningHerbs.com.
Visit LearningHerbs.com for free herbal lessons including Herb Mentor news, home remedy secrets, and supermarket herbalism. You'll also find the herbal medicine making kit and our board game WildCraft.
Herb Mentor Radio. Copyright LearningHerbs.com. All rights reserved. Thanks so much for listening.
