Ruskin Apothecary

Herbalism is a vast field of knowledge, wisdom, skill and enquiry. For the sake of a simple page I could subdivide it into:

• Structural approaches
• Evidence based approaches
• Intuitive approaches

Structural approaches

There are many conceptual frameworks for making rational prescribing decisions in herbal medicine. You may choose a biomolecular model (orthodox medicine), traditional chinese model (TCM), ayurvedic model, unani tibb model, a humoral model (tracing back to Hippocrates), or one of a multitude of psychotherapeutic models.

They don’t all always agree with each other.

My experience, as seems to be the experience of many of my professional colleagues is that we have to a great extent lost our traditional framework for prescribing, and the adoption of a purely biomolecular framework fails to ask or answer many important questions within herbalism. This failure is most apparent in the artificial mind-body split of biomolecular medicine – a split that is not found in traditional systems such as TCM or Ayurveda.

However, I live in Britain, working with European herbs. Thus for me, though I can draw incredible value from studying non-European heritage (and I do), this does not satisfy a need in me to work in a way that is congruent with this land and our herbs.

Evidence based herbalism

Evidence based herbalism attempts to compile the best available evidence for any intervention and make a decision based on this data. In theory this is great. In practice, we so far have only about 1% of the data we need to cover the vast range of herbalism.

Evidence based medicine will often draw heavily on research completed within the last 20 years or less. Whilst this is valuable, in herbal medicine we have another 3000 years of evidence that does not particularly fit an EBM mould. There are those who see little value in this previous knowledge base, though I would consider that to reject this is to reject the wisdom of our ancestors and the very knowledge base that we can draw on to study further.

Intuitive herbalism

We have a vast amount of learning passed down from our ancestors, yet this learning needs skillful interpretation. There are two distinct ways you could do this. One would be to take an academic approach of attempting to evaluate old information within the context it originated. The alternative is to attempt to experience the herbs as our ancestors did – in other words a phenomenological approach.

My interest leads me ever deeper into how to work with our experiences, ourselves, our human organism, our consciousness, our awareness in ways that open up the wisdom of this ancestral heritage. So far I find this has been something you experience, it is not something that can be easily explained or understood through intellectual enquiry.

Like learning to carve wood – you could spend your whole life reading books about wood carving, but have no real wisdom until you set your hands to a piece of word and let the wood teach you itself.

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Simply put, I teach intuitive herbalism because I see, experience and believe that the plants will teach us themselves if we allow ourselves to listen. Learning to listen is a task in itself, but a very rich and rewarding one.

In clinical practice I have a continual dialogue going on between structural, evidence based and intuitive approaches, yet I find it is my direct experiences of the herbs and with people that build my skills, understanding and compassion in the deepest way.