Herbal medicine is a comprehensive healing modality that offers clients specific and
personalized botanical remedies that help to restore and maintain vitality, stability,
and harmony. The whole person is addressed in this approach to healing, which
means that diet, lifestyle, physiological, environmental, and emotional factors are all
fully taken into account. Herbalists understand healing as a process, one that
unfolds according to the unique needs, challenges, and requirements of the
individual seeking healing.
It is by carefully and attentively listening to the concerns of the patient that the
herbalist comes to develop a picture of the patterns of ill health and dis-ease that
need to be addressed. Herbalists strive to cultivate compassionate understanding of
the lived experience of the individual seeking healing. When such understanding is
coupled with modern diagnostic techniques, chronic illnesses and diseases as well
as the myriad states of imbalance that may affect us can be adequately addressed
with medicines that work in concert with the body’s own defences.
Herbal remedies do not force the body to change but rather work to support and
facilitate the body’s own innate healing capacities and potentials. Herbalists tend to
think in broad, physiological terms. This allows us to address to root causes of a
condition rather than managing or suppressing symptoms.
Herbal medicine is ecological medicine in that it is rooted in the teaching of the
interconnectedness of all life forms and celebrates and respects all of the living
beings that make up the complex web of life that comprises our planet. The body is
understood as a complex living system that is not separate from the rest of the
world. This traditional worldview is fully compatible with contemporary scientific
advances, not at odds with them. Through bridging herbal medicine and modern
scientific understanding we can arrive at a full and complete picture of the natural,
environmental, material, and cultural contexts of healing and the disease process.