From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio American Institute of Medical Herbalism in Boulder. He's been practicing and teaching natural medicine since nineteen seventy three. He's edited the Medical Herbalism Journal since its founding in nineteen eighty nine and has written books on medical herbalism, nutrition, Chinese medicine, ethnobotany, and naturopathic medicine.
The North American Institute of Medical Herbalism is in the vitalist tradition. You can find out about its programs and distance learning opportunities at naimh.com. That's N as in Nancy, A I M as in Michael, H dot com.
Paul, welcome.
Hi.
Well, you know, this is kinda cool because like we're hanging out in my kitchen just a few days ago but now we're back in our homes. But it was a lot of fun hanging out to you and getting to know you.
And but we first got in contact. Paul and I first got in contact years ago when he signed up for the kamana naturalist training program and awareness school. And Paul, I was into studying herbs a little then.
But you know, I was doing my apprenticeship at the time. But you know, I guess the internet or whatever and searching and websites and all it isn't, you know, it's a long time ago, you know, that might have been what? Seven, eight, nine years ago or something.
And, so but, I didn't really understand like what you've done or exactly how much you've done in the herbal field until I was like looking in bookstores and started seeing your books on the shelves. Now, oh Paul Bergner, right!
And later, you know, discovered and showed up at a couple of ERPOL conferences you were teaching that I went to, and and it was great, you know, to finally connect, after their relationship, with the in the KAMANA program at Wilderness Awareness.
I'm always ready to start over and learn something new.
So Exactly.
Which is, you know, that that's actually interesting because, that's a great place to start just about learning, learning something new. Because, you know, what what I'm was really, really, is awesome to to to hear is when you were talking to me about how you have, put in or integrated or infused nature awareness and connection to nature into your herb program because, you know, as we both know that, you know, many programs will just kind of get so hyper focused into the, what's this for that or or what do you take for that or this or dried herbs and this that they kind of lose contact with where where the where the plants came from and their connection, people's connection.
So I was just curious if you can maybe we could just start talking about that about, you know, like how nature can Yeah.
Yeah. I could explain it. Just kinda my my background.
Mhmm. Okay. Great.
Philosophy.
I was, trained in the nineteen seventies, you know, in some elements of a system called Nature Cure. Mhmm.
And Nature Cure, you know, the formal kind of Nature Cure movement, came out of Germany. It started there around, eighteen ten, eighteen twenty, and it spread to North America and, its descendants are the current naturopathic medical profession here.
And, the, nature cure, is all about, the healing power of nature. That's a phrase that was taken from Hippocrates, in Hippocrates in the writings of Hippocrates. And by the way, Hippocrates wasn't just one guy. Hippocrates was three generations of a school. They all wrote under the name Hippocrates.
And, this is why his writings were so powerful because, in that school their culture was to do direct observation.
Rather than practicing by the book, they wanted to see what was actually happening, and they recorded that. And, three generations of that using the same sort of principles.
And, anyway, they referred to the healing power of nature and they capitalized the n.
Mhmm. You know? And, you know, like nature.
And, so that, you know, that approach and all its related, descendants and cousins and, you know, similar creations force of life itself Mhmm.
Is the healer.
The herb isn't the healer. The drug isn't the healer. Nature is the healer.
And, this is the underlying idea of say, Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine.
Chinese medicine they may call that chi, you know, or Jing. In Ayurvedic medicine they may call it prana or ojas.
But they're talking about the same thing Hippocrates, was that he called nature.
And, so that force the problem is here is if you wanna talk about plant constituents, it's easy to talk for a long time. I can find a whole lot of words to say about alkaloids.
Mhmm.
Right? But try to find a whole lot of words to say about life.
Right. Right.
It's sort of like I think it's like, you know, when your girlfriend says, you say you love me. What do you mean by that?
And and very quickly, you turn into a blubbering idiot.
Well It's it's your eyes?
Wait a minute.
I I I I love you.
You know, love. How do you talk about that? How do you talk about life? Yeah.
Right? True. So, it's much harder to be articulate about life. And, then as soon as you give it a name, that becomes problematic, you know.
So the the physician level herbalists of the eighteen hundreds in North America, they referred to life as the vital force.
Right? And they would use the same language Hippocrates did, but they had said the vital force is the power behind all healing. And Hippocrates would say nature is the power behind all healing. Right?
So, yeah. So, what what is this? So the basic principles of vitalism are, life itself, the power of life, the ecological power that that welds all the levels all the complex levels of a human being into one thing, one life, you know. That that's the power that wants to heal and restore and it's constantly working at healing and restoring.
That would be principle number one. Principle number two would be it needs all the nutritional building blocks, in order to do its work.
So, it's like you get a get a a kit, piece of furniture, or a toy you're gonna construct for your child at Christmas, you know, when the kit comes and it's missing some bolts and screws, you you can't do it. I mean, you can put it together and it doesn't work. So you have the human being. If the human is missing protein and magnesium, then the person's gonna be sick. And the vital force can try all it wants to heal that person but but doesn't have the building blocks it needs, doesn't doesn't have the tools it needs to produce life. So the, so nutrition becomes the primary therapy of the vitalist and Hippocrates version of that is food is your best medicine.
Right. And then, then the third principle would be, well, okay, but that food has to be well digested.
And there there is the rub. Right? So, one of my old, naturopathic mentors, you know, cranky old guy, he'd say, you're not what you eat. You're what you assimilate.
So we have this principle you need to select food, you know, energetically according to whether it's warm or cold, you know for different people it has to be different and it has to be foods that don't cause digestive uproar.
So a lot has to do with food selection, food balancing, macronutrient balancing, screening for food intolerance, things like that.
And then here's where in most of the major herb systems you end up with the center of gravity of herbalism is herbs aimed at the digestive tract. Okay. So, Greek, Greek, Roman, Arabic, medicine, it continues on today in Asia.
They talk about the four humors. And if you read their books they say well here's humor number one, here's humor number two, number three, number four and they each rise at a different point in the digestion and processing of food.
So their chief target for altering you know constitutional imbalances, energetic imbalances in the body is to do herbs that will tweak the way the humerus are produced in the in the gut and in the liver. Nice. And, Chinese medicine, I mean, they have more than that, but Chinese medicine has the whole field of treating what they call the spleen.
You know, the, the earth element is the digestive tract. It's like the garden.
And there's a beautiful sketch of the the actual Chinese character for the spleen and it's like a granary at the middle at the center of a village.
Oh, wow.
And everything in the village depends on getting the grain out of the granary and feeding them.
Yeah. Because, right. Because, at least in the five element system that I practice, this, you know, this this stomach works on churning and grinding down, but it's a spleen responsible for moving it everywhere.
Yeah. For transforming it.
Transforming it.
And storing it and bringing it back out of storage just like a greenhouse. Mhmm. You know, at the end of fall, you put your grain into the greenhouse and then over the year, you have to bring it back out.
That's very similar to what happens with our nutrients, you know, going into their reservoirs, you know, and then, after a meal and then coming back out as you need them, you know, over the course of the day.
So, that's, you know, that's vitalism and another really big, big piece of all those systems is that the practitioner really needs to study how the body works.
You really need to see what's going on with the body and you're going to view the body as a garden, right? You really want to see how it works and when you see the body having a fever or having inflammation or having a nasal discharge or having diarrhea or whatever, you you're looking at those and you're seeing those as the vital force healing the body.
Right.
Right. Those aren't diseases.
Right? The fever is is cranking you into metabolic overdrive and to where you can produce a whole lot more antibodies and white blood cells to fight off an infection. And inflammation is the increased local activity of the immune system in order to get rid of something.
And the you know, and so on diarrhea is cleaning the bowel, you know, a cough a nice mucusy gurgly cough where you're coughing the stuff up is cleaning the airway.
So, we can go way back to Hippocrates and say at the time of Hippocrates and in almost any era, if you're interested in healing you can look around and you can make mistakes yourself and, you can see that some of the things you thought were going to be therapeutic made the person sicker.
Like you selected an herb, an astringent herb like say golden seal that dried up somebody's mucus, right? And then the people you did that with got were sicker longer, right? And that that will actually be the case.
And then if you now we know more about science of why that is a lot of the you know, we know for instance a mother's milk will confer immunity to the baby because of all the antibodies in it.
And all those antibodies that are in mother's milk are in your mucus. Right? So if you are coming down with a viral infection and your nose is going drip, drip, drip, you want your nose to go drip, drip, drip. You want your mucus membranes coated in that nice clear thin mucus and, that's full of antibodies that that helps, you know, fight off the, the infection.
And rather than trying to dry it up, the vitalist would give you a bunch of water to keep it flowing in a nice, thin, you know, nice thin form where it's not too uncomfortable.
So in any era, you, and any honest practitioner can see that sometimes they made the patient worse. And that is, that's mortifying when it happens.
The, there was a beautiful story.
A man, he was a very good writer. I admired his writing and he, was writing in, I forgot the name of the magazine, but he had been diagnosed with cancer and was writing about his dying of cancer, telling the story.
And, he has this very poignant, moment in there where he says, so, my general practitioner referred me to an oncologist and when I walked in the oncologist door, there before me was a young doctor.
And then he says, if I'm dying I don't want a young doctor.
I want an old doctor with their face all covered with wrinkles. Every wrinkle, a terrible fatal mistake that they'll never ever make again.
And, Hippocrates' version of that was above all, do no harm.
Right. And, why do you think the Hippocratic school came up with that as one of the three basic principles of medicine?
It's because they'd seen a lot of harm done in the name of medicine.
Right.
So, when you accept that as a principle, you approach your patient much more gently.
So well, it sounds like you're putting your lower your ego and everything you think about who you are and your role in the healing process, empowering your observation skills, connecting You took the next paragraph out of my mouth.
Oh, go right ahead.
No. No. That's that's exactly it. When you realize that you can make a model of things really quickly, observant.
You start to see what's actually going on. Right? And, then when you're observant, you start to see how how life is manifesting in that person at that time.
And so, yeah.
You have what, I guess you can are you gonna cut out a little piece in the middle here, I hope, when I'm stammering?
I had a conversation with some elder herbalist from England, some time ago.
And, we were talking and we talked about as we got older and we all agreed, there were about five of us, and we all agreed that as we got older we stopped thinking of ourselves as herbalists and we had a conversation about who we thought we were because it had more to do with using herbs as tools and who we started to define ourselves was the approach of how we use those herbs, right? So, someone can be an allopathic herbalist just like an allopathic doctor and they can here take this herb for that and make that go away and and and pay me, right?
Someone else could also a different person could actually view the client and say okay well the force of nature is working there and ask the question how can I cooperate with them? How can I observe that and cooperate with that in my treatment?
Sometimes people have a very complicated disease and the only way you need to cooperate is help them tweak their diet.
And, of course there's plenty of place for herbs, especially herbs like that might remove, indigestion, herbs that might, promote circulation, you know, support circulation, herbs that might help a person ward off fatigue to the point where they can deal with some of their health problems better because they're not so tired all the time and addressing them at their at their, you know, addressing at their root cause. So we're having this conversation and the words pop popped out of my mouth, I hadn't particularly thought them before, but I said, yeah, I don't think of myself as an herbalist anymore, I think of myself as a student and a servant of life. Oh, yeah. And this is the approach of the vitalist with their client, right? But not just with their client, right? I'm studying how life moves through me.
I'm studying how life moves around me. I'm studying how life moves through my client or my patient.
And the point of view of the vitalist, this is all one life.
Right.
It isn't like, so what's around me, is life in nature. What's in front of me is the life in a patient or a client. What's inside me is the life in me.
So I'm constantly observing all of that and it isn't like, oh I just do that when I'm sitting in a clinic with a paid client sitting in front of me, I'm doing that all the time. Right, Right.
And, so, for my own sanity, my own peace of mind, I started many years ago, twenty five years ago, I started, spending time alone, in the nature. And, maybe in kind of domesticated nature like the public parks in Portland, Oregon, but a lot of that time out in wild wilderness areas.
And when I would do that and shake off the stuff from the city, you know, and shake off the way I think when I'm in the city and my worries and my anxieties of the city and just be with what's there, I would start to experience you know being that this was all one life, I was part of that, Right? I was part of what was going on in the tree and I started to experience this personally. You know, I mean I experienced it wasn't a thought, it wasn't a philosophy. You know, I started to experience it.
And I would have this I'd feel so vital when I came back. I'd be so inspired and rested and you know, sleeping in the circadian rhythm and, have new insights on life and things. And just feel the life in my veins and feel the life in my spirit and in my heart. And, you know, I I I love that.
Now we can go back and read the Hippocratic writings and it's really I think it's really fascinating that Hippocrates wrote. He said the requirements for someone to be a physician And one of the requirements is leisure.
Interesting.
And that's how they translated the Greek word. But what it means is they need downtime. Right? And, I I am quite convinced in the Hippocratic era on the island of Kos in the in the Mediterranean Mhmm. That leisure time for them was leisure in nature.
You know, nature was very imminent and very present there. You have all the weather from the Mediterranean, you don't have cars, the fastest thing moving is a donkey cart, All the food you eat is stuff that's being grown, you know, and and wild boots from the forest in the fields there. And I'm convinced what he meant by, by leisure wasn't what we mean like going for a Florida vacation or something, you know, or relaxing with a nightcap on the deck of your condo.
Right? Thinking leisure is time to be in nature and to mull, You know, mull, what's going on? And do you see where we're headed here?
I do.
So I train my students in herbalism, but I train them in vitalism.
And essential piece of vitalism is getting in touch with your own life and periodically immersing yourself in the ocean of life in a natural setting.
And, the, what this eventually gets to, you know, in the modern era, we'd have the idea that, like, nature, the thing Hippocrates capitalized, that nature is a small n, right? And it lives out in wilderness areas the way, traditional people were put out on reservations, And what we eventually have to get to is to witness nature in our client in the city, in our clinic, right in front of our nose.
And the, you know, I can say what I got from that Kamanah program where you go to a sit spot in nature and you go every day, You know you go when you don't feel like going.
It's raining.
And that course of going when you don't feel like going. You say I am committing myself to this. I'm committing myself to nature and to the earth and to the nature inside me and to unfolding my own, you know, awareness in my own soul in a natural setting.
Then of course anytime somebody does something that momentous you, either it's gonna be obstacles. And most of our obstacles are internal.
Things like fear of the rain, fear of the cold, not wanting to be uncomfortable, afraid of animals, afraid of bugs, you know, or whatever.
And I I just wanna mention too just so people are real clear what we're heck we're talking about here is that, that an exercise in the kimono naturalist training program is, from Wilderness Awareness Schools.
You don't need to do that program for this exercise. It's simply to, call it a sit spot, sometimes called secret spot.
And that's just a place that's easy for you to get to, that you can go every day on a regular basis if it maybe it's your backyard or the the park down the street or somewhere by a tree, somewhere you feel comfortable, connect with outside and visit that on a regular basis. Just take time to sit by that tree, sit by that stream, sit by that bush, whatever, and observe and feel what's around you. And and it's amazing and profound what happens when you start to really, connect with the natural world day after day with that simple exercise. And, Paul, you told me that you were doing that you've done that, for ten years.
Well, I started in, in I think I started going to that spot in, September of two thousand. Mhmm. August or September the Yeah. It was September the year two thousand.
I made the commitment to go to that spot every day. Now, I went there more day way more days than not for about six years and now I go over there not every day, but I still go over there.
And that was like the first year I think I missed eleven days Wow.
Of going going to that place.
You know, and the place, you know, you can go a hundred yards in one direction and there's a mating coyote den. Right? You go a hundred yards in the other direction and there's a beaver pond.
Right.
And, in the in the next to the nice spot in the forest, there's a herd of mule deer, there's cottontails and squirrels, and down in the pond there's muskrats, and down in the you can go a hundred yards another direction and there's a wetland full of cattails and all the wetland plants and the other side of that is a prairie dog village and you get all the migratory birds come and land on that pond and this is all within two hundred yard stretch.
And, what what I've seen there, I've seen such beauty there as as I never could have imagined would have happened.
And I will say this is this is inside the city limits of Boulder, Colorado sandwiched somewhere between a pharmaceutical company and the city recycling dump. Wow.
And, the place is not pretty, you know, when you first look at it. It's not pretty, it's kind of a beat up area, you know. And, but really what I got there, it was interesting, from the kamana program, what I learned is that if you know one spot, you know all spots. Mhmm.
And, I take students to Oregon every year to the rainforest there and the work I did unfolding my perception in this kind of junky area in Boulder, Colorado completely opened up my knowledge and understanding of what was going on in the rain forest, you know, in ways I wouldn't have anticipated.
And, so, really what we wanna do, the training of a vitalist, we wanna reframe our our nature, our idea of nature as something that lives out in wilderness area to something that lives in us.
And the full total nature, all the seasons, all the phases of nature, all the beauty, the storms, right, the balmy days, that all lives in us. And the transformative power of nature which can take a seed and turn it into a tree, you know.
That's all in us. The power that makes spring come back every year, that's inside us. And that's what see what now I'm getting, you have to use a lot of words instead of the healing power of nature. Let's just say, wow, you know, the power that makes spring come back every year is inside me and it's inside you. You think that way with a client.
You're thinking that way with a client and, and then also you know this from experience. Right. You know, I've I had a a patient one time who had a terminal autoimmune disease in cancer at the same time.
This was nine years ago.
She's alive and a practicing herbalist without auto immunity or cancer anymore. Wow.
And kind of to put that in that's the healing power of nature.
And the principles I mentioned at the beginning those were each followed in her case.
And, I have two pieces where I got, it wasn't all you know, in the Kumano program. I spent a lot of time in nature, you know, before, I started doing that Kumano program, but I had two really profound, formative experiences which, trained me as a healer. And, in one of those, in, Oregon, there was a place I like to go. I love to do solo there and, you could, walk down this kind of exposed sunny hillside for a mile and a quarter, descended about eight hundred feet, down a trail, and you could go down into some some, low altitude old growth forest.
Most of the old growth left in Oregon is either just little patches on the coast or, sub alpine, you know, old growth up in the mountains. And this is a rare little patch, you know, that's preserved and I used to love to go down there. There's a little sandy beach and stuff. And, but you'd walk down that hillside and at one point you pass this place where there's a little trickle of water, running down a little cliff and around that was a cedar grove.
The rest of the whole mile and a quarter was fairly well exposed, You know, there was just this cedar grove and the cedar grove put shade on the cliff and there's these beautiful waves of maidenhair fern growing down, going down the cliff and you go in there and the temperature would be ten degrees cooler.
And it was like walking into air conditioning and the feeling of these great big old trees leaving their happy completely mature lives, you know, in this this beautiful little water pot, it looked like an altar. And you just go in there, anyone, I don't care what your philosophy or your religion, you go in there and you get a feeling of the sacred, you know.
So so I I I'm, Let I I I wanna continue this.
Go ahead.
Okay. So, I went there a lot and I found personal solace there and especially in that little grove and that became my my symbol, my little footprint for the sacredness of nature.
And, I moved to Colorado and used to go back every year. And one year I went back and to make a long story short, the whole thing was clear cut.
As far as you could see up the hill and down the hill and every one of those trees and everything looked like somebody taken a bulldozer to it. There was nothing left standing.
And, this was like one of the most devastating experiences in my life, you know. So I continued to go back, And do you know what happened in that clear cut?
What? Amazing biodiversity came back into that clear cut.
The it filled with berry bushes and the bears would bring their babies up to eat the berries.
Down below it filled with shrubs and the deer and the elk had better feed than they had before and they started to thrive more.
And in the tenth year, the big leaf maples had grown up and were now shading the cliff again.
And once again, it was all covered with maidenhair fern.
And I brought students back there every year for about almost ten years and you can now walk through that clear cut and there's more than thirty medicinal plants in there.
And To me, this was like the only way I could say this was like the Creator showing me the healing power of nature.
And that what's been injured and healed may be more powerful abundant and beautiful than what was never injured in the first place, Than what was never injured in the first place.
Wow.
And I could mention the person who had lupus and cancer that person is a practicing herbalist.
That person helps out.
This person was made into a healer by her experience of illness and recovery.
And she is now a greater gift to society, to the people around her, you know, and to the universe than she was before because of the gifts she acquired during her healing.
So I can go show that spot to people and I can say, now isn't this amazing? And everyone's oh, wow. That's really possible is because of the nutrients in the soil.
Mhmm. If you look at the relationship there, you see what I described as vitalism, that's also the relationship of nature.
Now that would they basically clear cut an old growth forest there and there there's twenty or thirty feet of really dense nutrient rich soil in the bottom of there and all that could spring back.
Right. And this is this is the that's the principles of vitalism are are right there.
So anyway, what does the study of nature have to do with training of a healer?
Okay, there's one.
I had another one, this has become a symbol for me, sacred symbol of life for me. There's a place south of Albuquerque, it's called Bosque de la Pache. It's a wetland and an overwintering place for these astonishingly huge, birds, snow geese and sandhill cranes.
And, one year I went there and the the count there was seventy thousand snow geese and sandhill cranes were all there in this wetland And, the government, plants vast huge tracts of grain over at one end so they will have something to eat there and they go over there during the day and then then then they go back at night to stay in the water where they feel safe. And there is this phenomenon that happens at sundown called liftoff.
And if you've never seen seventy thousand birds, some of whom stand four feet tall, taking off over a thirty minute period and making every manner of screech, crack, crackle and caw that you can imagine, the sound of it and the sight of it is unimaginable.
It's so powerful.
And that is when I go back there almost every year I go back in order to witness that, you know, around the winter solstice and they, it's a place of renewal for me. And I found out that back some many many years ago, those birds were nearly extinct in North America.
Wow.
And they started a conservation plan.
And they went from like one of those species had only like three hundred members left in North America.
They did a conservation plan and now it's come back to what it what it is now there.
So, you can say, what do those two things have to do with vitalism?
You know, you can say one, you have to have the nutrients in the soil. And number two, you have to stop killing the geese.
And if you just stop killing the geese, they'll come back.
Right? And this is Hippocrates above all do no harm.
And, the level of demolition that's happening to modern people with the drug therapies we use today is simply astonishing.
The you know some people if somebody is if somebody is taking those anti ulcer medicines, they call them proton pump inhibitors.
What are the names of some of those? The little purple pale ones.
Prilosec or Prilosec and those things.
You know what those do? Those shut off your stomach acid. Yeah. In other words, they do, they cut off your new your vital your vital transformational process at its root. Mhmm. And a person who's taking those will never ever ever get better because essentially what they are doing, they are killing the geese.
I have had so many patients that if I could get them off their drugs and their doctor would get them off their drugs, I mean you some people need their drugs to stay alive, right?
That the vital force will restore them to a very very high level of health.
And so see these are some principles of medicine.
Now I have my healer, I want to bring my healer, train my students to the point where they can sit and feed and all the nature inside themselves and know it inside their client. Well that isn't going to happen without taking them out into nature. So we as soon as people come to school we spend a lot of time out looking at plants.
While we're doing it, we're also looking at kind of that question you look at a place, there's a bunch of plants there and there's some trees and that you kind of look with your heart and you say okay what's going on here and you try to feel with your heart, you know, the ecological life in that place.
And, see the plants in the community that they're in.
And, so we do that right away and then later on, we take people out and we take them camping.
We do a in the Colorado front range here we're really lucky. You you can go all the way from the glacier, you can drive all the way from the glacier in the alpine plants out to the short grass prairie out of side of the mountains and all the plant zones in between. All the elevations in between, the creek sides and the hillsides and all that. You can drive all that in about four hours.
And so we we take six days and go from the higher elevation to the lower elevation and we end up out at a sacred vision questing spot out on the Shortgrass Prairie.
Yeah.
The, and then later we go to the rainforest around Mount Hood. You can do the same thing at Mount Hood. You can go from snow line to sea level. I mean, there's tides in the Columbia River Gorge.
You can go there in about a ninety minute drive.
So what what I found you know in the if you would say the average urban person who's never slept in a tent, say that person's at zero. This is to use some language we were using last week And, the person out living in the wilderness doing first doing survival, full survival would be at a ten.
I find you have to bring a person and let's just say five is camping in a tent and being comfortable doing so.
Maybe that's actually four or something, right? But I find I want to bring my healers at least up to four or five.
Some of course some people come to my school, they've done a lot of camping you know, and they've lived on the trail and stuff like that, but some people come straight out of the city and they've never slept in a tent.
So we do that and I I find, you know, as far as nature, wants to give you your vision. This is one of my theories.
Nature really, really, really wants to get you to see who you really are in the greater order of things including your calling to life. This is one of the powers and forces of nature.
Hunter gatherers, you know, who were living at seven on that scale, maybe they had to go out and do a formal vision quest inside a circle of stones, you know, that to get their vision. But I find modern urban people, you can take the person you know, just out somewhere where there is no services.
Mhmm.
And no trails. Right? And sit down and that that'll be enough of of sort of breaking the mold and opening them up to nature where they can start to have their vision. Mhmm. Yeah. I really believe a healer needs to have that vision, to be a good healer.
That you know that vision that they that of themselves that they get from nature, from being in nature. Wow.
And I haven't even started talking about the plants.
The plants, I, you know, I figure a person, the the typical plant walk, the herbalist will take the person around and everyone's standing there with their notebook and they stand around a plant and it's kind of like as if it were dark and you had a flashlight and the only thing you're looking at is this little circle of light around the plant. Right.
And people are all looking at that and if you actually watch a plant walk like that from afar, it looks like a funeral, you know. You know, everyone sort of their head bowed, looking down, and going kind of, we have gathered here today, you know. It's kind of grim. It's very, very, very hard to connect to a plant and to know a plant. Right?
Listening to a lecture about it, taking notes, and standing up.
Right? So, and I think it's part of the training of an herbalist is, maybe not every plant you're ever gonna meet but there's in the actual reality of herbalism and herbal history and in herbal practice, herbalists fall in love with plants the same way people fall in love with people.
And people will have their three plants that they've really fallen in love with. There may be, you know, they're really outdoors a lot and really committed to it, a hundred plants that they've met, you know, and loved, right? But typically people will have one or two or three or four plants that really have become their life companions and whether they use them medicinally or not, I had that experience with marshmallow, right?
Way back in the eighties, we made a marshmallow medicine in the class I was in. And the teacher, we dug up the whole marshmallow plant, we cut off the top and we cut off the root but we saved the root crowns. And the teacher had me go replant the root crowns in the garden, aft after we made our medicines out of the root and the top. And I also saved the seeds. And that night I had this very very powerful dream about about Althea, right. And I became actually totally committed to that plant and I just love that plant and studied it and I grew it in my garden, for five years and I never used it in that five years. I just love that plant.
That's cool.
And later, I moved to Colorado and later I'm actually treating a number of patients with autoimmune diseases and they tend to get very hot and very dry and they are just burning up. And also, I moved to Colorado. I moved from Oregon where it's raining all the time and Colorado where it's windy all the time, you know, where we live. And, people had one kind of condition in Oregon, very different kind of conditions here. People here it's like they're sleeping inside a crop dryer every night and then they get up and everything is dry. And so for those, autoimmune patients and for the general constitutional dryness here, I kind of with my patients and my community kind of discovered this method of making an Althea tea and then diluting it out in your Nalgene bottle, you know about three or four to one and having that be your beverage, what you drink instead of water.
And you will see the whole dry constitution to moisten up when somebody does that habitually.
And I'd like to say this is not you won't find this that treatment. I haven't been able to find that anywhere in Western Herbalism in in the past. People use Althea acutely, right?
You know as a demulcent for you know for the the stomach or maybe the lungs or something they use acutely but I have not ever heard of it used as a constitutional medicine that way. You know, and it's my opinion that Althea and I were fated to meet.
And that together we came up with that and that, Althea helped me actualize myself as a healer and I helped Althea actualize Althea increasing its potentiality to go and do do many more more things than what I had done before.
And I I've I've taught that method to almost two hundred clinical herbalists here. This is being used all over the country now.
Wow. And that that really sprung up from your from the from the place list relationship with the plant.
I had this connection with that plant. I, so, I know herbalists.
There's a wonderful herbalist, Deborah Francis is her name, Dancing Crow, in, she's in the Portland Bay Area.
Yeah. Yeah.
She had a remarkable connection with, with Red Root and also with Hawthorne.
And, I have her come talk to my students when I go up to Mount Hood and she just gave this long talk about everything she learned about Hawthorne and Red River by just completely immersing herself in them. And she discovered new uses for both of those.
And, this is see we want a a healer. We wanna be not just memorize some wrote old thing from old books. We want a dynamic connection with our tradition but we're bringing our condition our tradition into the present and into the future.
You know, we're bringing basically our all our traditions are basically from the agrarian era, and we're bringing them into the urban area, the urban area.
And, you know, and nature is very much changed now from when we almost all lived on farms. And, so, anyway, I want my, I want my students to find their connections like that, right? So, while they're at school we spend a lot of time outdoors but I try to set in them the pattern where for the rest of their lives they'll spend time in nature that way and teach them a way to know a plant.
Like the first week of school, we do our first plant walk and the students are all on their belly next to a plant of their choice with their navel on the earth.
No funeral here. Right?
And we're and, they're studying that plant and this this I also learned in the Kamanu program until they can memorize the plant and draw it from memory. Mhmm. And making that connection with that plant. And I'd rather have somebody do that with six plants and remember them all for life than meet forty plants on or thirty plants on a plant walk and not remember any of them or remember three of them or something like that.
And we had a very, very, very amazing experience one time doing our plant our plant drying. And I had always thought, I learned in Kaman, you know, ways to relate to animals and some of it I learned out of the books and some of it I learned by from the animals. But, like, generally it's not polite in nature to stare at an animal.
So I I have my students all trained to look at it if they see an animal while we are out there to look at it with their peripheral vision, you know, not to stare. So we were out, I guess there were six of us, seven of us out, lying on our bellies and we were drawing mallow.
You know, mallow has these, kind of roundish leaves and you look up the leaf and it has these pretty little flowers hide under the leaves.
So we were all navel on the earth down there, next to some bushes, there's big thicket of bushes in them, just really bedded down. Right? And drying those plants. We've been there about ten minutes. And out of the corner of my eye, I see this little yearling deer sticks its head out of the bushes and looks at us and then walks over to the one of the herbalists and sniffs her hair.
And as soon as I saw her, I said I said, remember peripheral vision, don't stare.
It's not polite to stare. So everyone just didn't stare and stayed there. And to the deer, we looked like a bunch of bedded down deer.
Now, I'm not saying the deer, thought we were deer, but the deer sure knew we weren't cougars. Right? And the deer was very curious. Right? And two of those women were nursing moms and that deer walked over and sniffed the breasts of the two nursing moms. Oh, wow.
And then quietly walked away.
They're like, nope. Not my kind of milk.
You can't buy an experience like that. It's and think of that, the connectedness to nature those students feel.
You know, my experience in nature, you'll have an event like that and you'll never forget it.
It it's created some new connection inside of you.
And, you know, a close animal encounter is something you never forget that. And, so I I consider that part of the training of the herbalist. Right?
And, anyway, part of the, one of the things I try to train people in because as herbalists, we also wanna have the ability to make our own medicines.
And there are certain ways to relate and not to relate to how to harvest plants. And, part of this, I just have to say it's my my personal experience, but I'll tell the story of an herbalist I know who I was talking to her a couple of months ago, and she, we were talking about harvesting plants and she got a look of grief on her face.
And she says, you know when I was in school ten years ago and she's, you can see she's heavy with grief and she says our teacher took us out and found a stand of Osho, right? And Osho is like a very powerful plant and I have very everyone who's been around it says this is a sacred plant. The traditional people, it was always one of their sacred protector plants and and treated with great respect.
And she said the herbalist took us out, our teacher took us out and there were twenty of us and we stood around a kind of a big stand of osha and, she the teacher talked about it for a while and then looked at her watch and said, okay. You got thirty minutes. Dig in.
And the people proceeded to absolutely totally ream and usurp that stand of Oshawa, ripping up the roots.
And ten years later, she's remembering this as one of the big regrets of her life of having been there when that happened.
And, this is this is my heart sensitivity when I'm around plants.
I have I have trouble picking a flower off a plant. Right? If I don't have a good reason to pick it, that's just my heart sensitivity from the time I've been in nature. Those, trees and those plants feel like my flesh and blood. Right? And, so there's a way, a way of tapping into observation, nature observation and wisdom in order to find a way to harvest plants that that does no harm.
And, so this is this is one of my big, one of my educational goals for my students is to have them be aware of that.
You know, you can, there's certain ways you can go to a stand of OSHA the way they had and, I happen to know those I I know that school and I know those people were taking way more medicine than they actually needed for anything.
Right? I had I had twenty students who ran a stand of OSHA in September and I asked the students, who here needs some OSHA? Think about it carefully.
Right?
Right.
And no one could come up and say they needed it. You know, so and, it's very common at herb schools that that teach wildcrafting that, you know, at the end of the year, the person has twenty gallons of tinctures on their shelf. They won't use those twenty gallons of tincture in their lifetime.
So, you know I don't know what I was telling you about Devil's Club last week.
It's like I haven't really felt that need for it. Yeah.
There you go.
You know, and then that's why I had never harvested any from from that spot we were standing at.
Yeah. Well, I I think, you know, we have our connection with nature and there are times when you can feel that connection with your patient and all kinds of magic can happen. Alright? And it's because you are both part of this greater life field and wisdom can come into you and the person can say things they hadn't thought they were given a say and so on. And it's like life is trying to heal life and it's happening all the time. And I think if people, approach their plants in the wrong way, you can injure that connection.
Interesting. Interesting. That's really important point right there, folks.
And I can't prove it, but I think someone who has their four ounces of an OSHA tincture that they will actually legitimately need that year instead of making a quart of it, right? And, if they've been through that process and they've stood by that OSHA and they could explain to the creator and to the OSHA why they needed it and exactly how much they needed And taking it in such a way that that saint that plant will be alive next year.
Right? In that case, it's very easy to come in from the side and take some of the osha root from beneath the ground, leave the root crown in place and that whole plant will be there next year.
I'm not sure it, maybe it'll even grow in response to where you break it.
You know, you break the root, I'm not I'm not sure of that. But I think the person who's done that, I think that medicine is gonna work better. Mhmm. When they give it to their patient than than someone who either ripped it up or someone who just bought it on the on the herb market.
Wow.
Because you're you're having your own your own spiritual intensity is connected to that plant then. Your your own integrity, your own ethics, your own connection not just to the OSHA but to that I Aspen stand that it was in. Into that sub alpine Rocky Mountain whole neighborhood it was in.
You know where you went there and you felt so refreshed and you felt so sacred. All of that is now associated with the medicine when you make it.
Now like I said, I can't prove that in a double blind clinical trial, but I believe that's true.
So this is yeah.
Well, you know, what really strikes me here, Paul, is that it's it seems like in order to work in in health and and to be to work in healing and because we were talking earlier about a lot of modern natural practitioners not really trusting nature and being caught up more in other things you know not that not the vitalist types of things we've been talking about but but it seems the only way to develop that trust and to trust nature is to do exactly what you're saying is to I guess you bring your students out to have those experiences in nature because how could you ever trust it unless you see it and have a personal experience and that's probably imagine if that you know that was built into the curriculum of all the, you know, naturopathic schools or the other places where people are struggling to to learn about natural medicine.
Yeah.
A friend of mine, an ND in Portland, his name's Glenn Nagel. He actually takes the he takes NDs out into nature.
Great. Glenn's great at him.
Yeah.
Is that that trust? So that's like the, I I talk about on learning herbs. All the the secret to learning about, herbs is, you know, simple. You just go have experiences. You just make one recipe at a time.
Uh-huh.
That's great in one sense the thing. But as you start to get into it a bit, now you're what you're hearing, you say to me is, like, really where I'm going with everything on Herb Master and really what it's about. It's that connection to nature and that's really the secret right there. It's the inner Yeah.
And you have to do those. I mean, you have to, get the herb and taste it it and feel what it's doing in your body and pay attention to that. And, I kinda like to say that, you know, for I'm kind of a four directions model for training herbalists in the, you know, the North would be, studying the old books. Mhmm.
You know, what do the books say about it? What does Mad Grieve say about it? You know, what does David Hoffman say about it? What do the, you know, the old eclectic herbalist say about that herb?
And that's part of learning the herb. Opposite that is the self. This is the only way you can do that is you gotta take some. Right?
You know for me, I mean this is just kinda my representation of it, but the, in the, you know, the south is where you get direct experience, what the tracker is called their time. And, there you are, you're taking the herbs. Right? And, there there are things you can learn in the south that you can't learn in the north.
I'll give an example, my students all take an herb of the week and, this just happened yesterday.
Woman was taking turmeric, right, one capsule and she says by the third she says by the third day, I didn't wanna see turmeric again.
You know, it was making me hot.
Another woman was taking a different herb and she says, wow, by the third day, I was really tired of that, right? And the third woman, three in one day, you know, said, Oh, I took I think she was taking red clover or something. She said, I really liked it so I drank about three cups and I drank a lot of it. By the third day I was really, really didn't want to see any more of that.
Where is it ever written in a book how long before your patients gonna get tired of their room?
And how much dose you need to give to somebody? What would be the dose of turmeric to keep a person from getting overheated?
Right? And so, see this kind of training has to be done by trying it. And of course we're in a community, so we all get to learn from each other. Right? So everybody learned about her experience with turmeric. And then that opened the door for me to talk about herbs you can combine to turmeric which will negate some of its heating effects.
So you can take it longer.
And, also, you know, it's my opinion, most people if you want to take a tea, now I'm assuming you're making a strong tea not just a little weak celestial seasonings teabag type of tea, but you you know, you're making a strong tea. You know, the medicinal dose is one or two shot glasses of that tea.
You know, in most cases, that will do what you want that tea to do. If it's a, say an expector and you know, you want to clear some mucus, you can do a couple of ounces. If you think about it, if somebody took a whole ounce of tincture, you'd think that was a great big dose. But, then people take eight ounces of of a strong tea and people think that's just a normal dose. So many times medicinally, especially a strong tea, the dose is a shot glass or two or two ounces or four ounces, you know, not a whole cup. When people end up taking a whole cup, that's when they get to where, oh boy I just didn't want to see anymore of that, that was like way too much.
And, this can arise from the psychology of relying on the herb instead of relying on the vital force.
People think, oh I like, I need a strong tea for me. No, life is really strong, that power that brings, that brought the geese back and brought the forest back and made it more diverse, right? That power is there. That's the power that's going to do the healing.
And you're you may take the tea in order to support what that's trying to do. You know the the vital force is trying to clear the airway, you can take some tea that will help you clear the airway. You're going the same direction as what the vital force is doing, but you don't have to take huge amounts of it to do that. You know, or you can take herbs that'll keep the airway moist. You know?
So and and then the vital force will do the do the coughing for you. Right? You don't you don't need the herb to do the coughing for you.
It's amazing stuff. Makes sense. Great.
So that the hands on piece, that's how you learn things like how much, how long, side effects.
This is common people who take lavender, you know, they take lavender, they'll take a cup cup of lavender tea or half a cup, they'll feel kind of blissful and say, I want to take one of those every night for the rest of my life. Right? By the third or fourth day you know lavender is warm and dry. Third or fourth day they're getting cracked dry mucus membranes and puckered lips and and they're feeling hot in the face, you know.
So, a lot of that, see the field for learning for that is dirt time. It's taking those herbs. And, so and then kind of what I see, that's the North South axis and that kind of the East, you know, traditionally the East is like sunrise and that's where new new things are coming in and there's various new things coming into herbalism but, one of them is science. Right?
You know, scientific experiments with herbs.
That's like what? A century old out of, you know, probably several million years of primates taking herbs as medicines, you know. So, and then, that that has its place so we do some some scientific study. I can say at our school, we are more interested in nutritional science and the physiology and pathology like how the body works and how the body works, how the body works when you give it proper nutrients, right? We're more interested in that science than saying well this plant has this constituent with tags like that drug, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Okay, okay.
Generally, I just did this class yesterday, I gave my students a list of all all the plant constituents in Yarrow and all their pharmacological actions.
That's three columns, six point type, four pages. Oh my goodness.
And then I gave him a list of the traditional actions of Yarrow, which is like bitter tonic, astringent, hemostatic, you know, topical anti inflammatory. You know, there's about seven of them.
Easy to remember.
No. And I see. Now which one I'll give ten of you the plant constituents and their pharmacological action. I'll give ten of you the traditional action. Who's gonna be able to develop a clinical practice?
You you can't base a clinical practice on everything that is known about herbs from the scientific point of view.
You will never be able to successfully develop a clinical practice. And, whereas you could take all the traditional actions that have been known for years, and especially if you've grounded them by with your own experience in tasting and those are your colleagues, you could build a whole clinical practice on there. Yeah. Nevertheless, science can add some information, you know. It can add a little bit of information.
What were we doing the other day? You, there's a very nice cool way you can make an herbal preparation. You powder the herbs and then you heat honey almost up to boiling and then you stir the herb powder into the honey.
This is a traditional for humorous method of of making herbs.
And that sort of then even if you take it off the heat that then sort of cooks those herbs a little bit. It decocks them kind of like hot water will decock a tea.
And, you do it kind of like so it's thick like bread. It makes a nice paste. Right? And, but at the end there, you can add essential oils, right. The problem is the the heat drives those essential oils off really, really fast.
So just where some knowledge of science can help. Well, the essential oils are fat soluble, right? Resins in plants are fat soluble.
So, you could make them as tinctures cause the fat soluble will go into alcohol, right? And you could add tinctures at the end instead of the essential oils cause the tinctures are less likely to cook off, right?
Or you understand that they're fat soluble, you can, you can stir fry those herbs in a just very very low heat short time in some oil.
They're fat soluble. Like myrrh gum will go right out into an oil if you lightly stir fry it. Right? Then you could add the oil to that thing.
And, there it's way less likely to cook off than than if you just put the essential oil which just goes it almost vaporizes. Poof. You know, it goes off. And, I mean, so I mean, that's an example of where you can use knowledge from science.
You know, science of solubility, constituent solubility, right, in order to make a medicine, you know, or or a better medicine. So there's a place for, you know, for for science. The thing for me for herbalism, science what's in the east, what's new can bring new information, but it won't negate the old information. Mhmm.
Right? It can add and that's the beauty. Every sunrise adds something new to your life, but it doesn't negate your your life before that time. Right.
Right. The experience you had before that time. So this is, that perspective and I will say that the problem in our modern, you know, our modern society and our souls are being eaten up with a materialistic philosophy which says that science is the center of the four directions, you know, and that the north is, superstition.
The south is unreliable anecdote and the west when we get to intuition and instinct is just some form of lunacy.
Right? And, what's part of the reason our society is literally ripping apart at the seams is that's not the center of the four directions.
Science and all the scientific endeavor in the world is not.
Right? And the old traditions are not superstition and your direct experience is not unreliable.
Right? It's very reliable. Right? And, it doesn't mean each of those ways of knowing. Right? Science, tradition, personal experience, or instinct. It doesn't mean that they don't have their own pitfalls or their own possible blind spots.
But, they're I think they're all equally valid ways of knowing and that you have to be the synthesizer in the middle. And sometimes any one of those four directions can answer your question and trump all the other ones.
You could say, well our ancestors drank milk for ten for for the last four thousand years, right? And science says not more than one tenth of one percent of the population are allergic to milk, right? Well if you eat milk and it gives you arthritis, the rest of that's all irrelevant. Right. Right.
The South the South just trumped the other ones.
Right. Right.
And, I've had situations where my intuitive and instinctual insight was accurate when the other three were not.
That, some of that for diagnostics, some of that perceiving when a student is is there's something more going on than what they thought.
I had a a patient one time and there was some clinical information but she had a was diagnosed with a uterine fibroid And, I, get and had severe fatigue and, I just gave her some, you know, some stuff and a week later she came back and she didn't respond the way you would have normally expected.
And my instinct, I I don't have diagnostic skill for this. My instinct said to tell her to call her doctor, go straight home, do not pass go, call your doctor, tell your doctor you wanna see your doctor in the morning. You don't wanna wait three weeks for a diagnosis, for an appointment. You have to see her in the morning and that, and insist on that and she did and she had cancer. And she had a growing, uterine cancer that had spread to her colon.
Wow. And, it was my instinct that said there's something seriously wrong here.
Alright. I don't I don't have the medical training to have diagnosed what was going on there. But I detected, you know, there's a disturbance in the forest.
Something's not right here. I'm connected to the field of life. She's connected to the field of life and that field told me there's something seriously wrong here.
And a couple of years ago she and I celebrated her five year survival.
Wow.
And she had had to have all the conventional treatment for, she had metastasized cancer to her brain and her liver, Right? Which is this is all totally completely incurable. Right? And, she, did some, you know, she the best predictor for survival of cancer is that you become your own decider.
Right? And don't give yourself over to other people. And she, picked and chose her therapy. She did conventional therapy.
She did supportive vitalist therapy and all that. And, she's alive now seven years later.
And, and I like to I tell my students we have classes in referral skills.
I said, you know, a timely referral could be the most important thing in your material medica.
You know, knowing your limits, Right? And knowing when somebody really, really needs to see a doctor, you know, could be could be, critically, you know, important. And I I tell them that case. Yeah.
I've done that too. It's, take a blood pressure on the first treatment or something and I've been like, I'll do acupuncture on you after you go see your doctor.
Yeah.
And that's important.
Yeah. So, yeah. The, I think that I think that's about it for me today.
Well, Paul, I just wanna, you know, this this is perfect because I I really after hanging out with you and getting a sense where you're coming from and and your background and and your way of going about teaching as well as working with your clients.
What you shared today was really, in our first interaction in your first interactions with your mentor community because I hope you'll be back.
I wanted to kind of people to kind of get a sense of where you're coming from and how important, like, that really touched me when you're talking last week about some of the stories that you shared and, you know, the core of the vitalist tradition and the different traditions and and all. And and, and I it's just, you know, this is just amazing. And I know that this, talk like this that we just had can really shift a person's perspective and also help guide someone new who's coming into the, perhaps, the kind of, herbal study and the kind of approach that they wanna take.
So what I wanna do now to just finish up is just, and speaking of referrals, I know that, you know, places online where people can find your work. And, so the medical journals, the website for that for folks is what?
It's med herb dot com, m as in Michael, e, d as in dog, h e r, b as in boy, dot com.
And that's, many back issues of the journal?
Back issues of the journal. There's a whole lot of resources and links there.
And you can subscribe to it too there if you want?
No. It's all free.
Oh, it's all free. Great.
And, what I did I that I put that together as, you know, the Internet was kinda new back in the nineties. And in in nineteen ninety eight, I took a, I turned fifty and I I did a sabbatical, a three month sabbatical. Herbalists get three months sabbaticals, if they're lucky. And, but I was the internet was all pretty new and, I just made a bunch of links and annotated them for my students and posted a website for my students.
And so there's a lot of you can find information about botany or physiology or just all the kind of things a person would have in an herbal curriculum is is on there and, including, like almost twenty years of back issues of of my medical herbalism journalist there also.
Very funny story because a couple of weeks later I got a, an email and it was from Encyclopedia Britannica and they wanted to give me a best of the web tag. Nice.
And then a couple of weeks later, the National Cancer Institute linked to it.
Nice. As an authoritative site.
Nice. Good work.
So it's kind of a mixture. I kind of, I kind of, my position is any information from traditional herbalism, that's great. Any information from scientific herbalism, that's great, you know. Just herbalists, we want us to get all the information we can because whoever has the most accurate facts in the end wins. So that's what that site is.
And, And I'll put that link right on the page where this, audio is hosted on our adventure dot com.
And also we we shot a little bit of video which I'll get up on our mentor soon. I hope I get some time to edit that together. It's a nice stuff. There's also, videos, new videos.
Are they released yet on our TV online dot com or did did they release those as DVDs yet you can buy the videos he did with you? I I I I didn't look.
I I don't know. I think so.
Well, there's on the on the HerbTv section on HerbMentor, there, I have, Paul talking about h one n one. You can go look at that. There's a link over to her TV from there and you can see because Dave from her TV went and hung out with with Paul and did some great stuff.
Your books, you can find where do you recommend people try to find your books these days?
Most of my books you you can get for like about a dollar on the used book market. Okay.
So just put your name in a search engine and off you go.
They're they're all just as good as the twenty dollar books that were out last year last decade, except they're the same books actually, but you can get them for about a dollar. The exception is a nutrition book I I wrote and that one sells for like about a hundred bucks because it's in in kinda high demand.
I I love your book on the on garlic, healing power of garlic. And so that's one of those buck books you could probably get.
Yeah.
And let's see.
And, finally, to find out about your long term what you call it, a certification or degree program or or or what have you Well, our school is, regulated by the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
We're, regulated as an occupational school. Mhmm. And the, so as such, we're not academically accredited but we are regulated and you get a certificate and this certificate says, Colorado Department of Higher Education on it. And, the, it's a two year program.
You spend, the first year in the field and and in the classroom and then the last, nine months you spend actually working in our public clinic, with a mentoring and supervision in a clinical setting. And and you can go through it and you can get completely certified as a clinical herbalist and you can take a little extra classes and be also be certified as a clinical nutritionist.
Cool. Wow.
And then you can do a few more extra classes and you can be certified as a flower essence practitioner. Wow. So I all all in all in the same twenty months.
And then people can start out learning from you by, on your site by, with CD sets you put together. Right?
Well, I yeah. I have audio courses, their segments are actually recordings of our program here in Boulder, but they're broken into little segments, the seminars. So like there's one on formulation, you know, and there will be one on insulin resistance, there will be one on detoxification, things like that. And there there are actually recordings from our advanced program here. So if people want a little more advanced training than basic, this can take a person who already knows a little bit about herbs and take them further into a particular field.
K. And, you can find out about that once again on n a I m h, that's North American Institute in Medical Herbalism, dot com.
That's it. Paul Burrow.
Go ahead.
I did just look on, I did just look on Herb TV and then he has my influenza set up there.
Oh, okay. Great.
That's a a two DVD set on on, influenza pathophysiology and natural therapeutics. Kind of a timely topic.
And very timely topic. Yeah. Well, Paul Bergner, it's been a total honor, total pleasure. It's been great. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. It's awesome. I had a really good time and learned a lot.
Well, thanks so much, John. Alright.
Well, we hope to have you back here.
Here. Okay.
Okay. Thanks, Paul. Have a good day.
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