This class covers a full case study from the initial visit through the extensive follow-up on a case of chronic giardiasis treated exclusively with herbal medicine and nutritional guidelines. The case study includes information regarding appropriate lab testing for accurate diagnosis, in-depth explanation of all herbal preparations used and why, follow-up testing, post-treatment considerations, and long-term gastrointestinal healing approaches after a chronic parasitic infection.

The commercialization of herbs is limiting our use and knowledge of herbs so much that their uses are being lost. While many herbs throughout the world have similar uses in various cultures, the same herb is often used differently by different traditions. It’s time to bring back our herbal traditions and expand their uses by remembering their original uses and incorporating new possibilities derived from other traditions. Learn how to get more out of your herbs by teaching them new tricks. The presentation will include personal experience and case studies.

Margi will share stories stored in her heart of success and stupidity, joy and wonder, intuition and compassion. She'll share stories of herbal protection, magic, encouragement, and unwavering belief in our wonderful Plant kin. Forty plus years of practice does give one a rich tapestry of experiences to share.

We will review a case involving a 69-year-old male with co-morbidities, presenting with S/S consistent with acute UTI, dehydration, and beginning signs of urosepsis/SIRS. There was a documented reversal of symptoms began within 2 hours of initiating chosen therapy. The patient was closely monitored overnight, with therapeutic treatment continuing for 2 weeks after initial diagnosis. Their complete recovery was verified by negative urinalysis and C&S, abdominal CT, and cystoscopy as obtained 3 weeks later during a routine MD visit.

Two longtime radical herbalists from MASHH Clinic and Black Cross Health Collective share a case study of the progressive organizing and skilled public health planning that allowed medics to deliver holistic clinical care in the face of tear gas, pepper spray, and a range of “crowd control” weapons. This narrative ties the individual wisdom and bravery of herbal healers to a collective thread of resistance, mutual aid, and community empowerment.

This class will cover: understanding Judaism as an ethnicity, the narrative of genetic predispositions in clinical studies of Jewish people (breast cancer and Tay-Sachs disease), Jewish concepts of sickness, and herbalism in Jewish folk medicine: a cross-cultural comparison with uses in the Americas including the evil eye to herbal cleansing. There will be discussion of traditional uses of medicinal plants in the Jewish folk medicine tradition: Mandrake Root, Hyssop, Elder, Rue, Parsley, Herbs of Gilead, Frankincense, Myrrh, Balsam, and more.

Traditional medicine has always treated the central nervous system (CNS) but until recently there has been little work on how these remedies work. One of the possible modes of activity for this activity has been through enhancement of mitochondrial processes. Besides the fundamental role of mitochondria in metabolic processes, mitochondria are key in messaging in the CNS. Mitochondrial processes such as the unfolded protein response, mitophagy, fission, fusion, and cross talk between other organelles all have a significant role in brain health. Multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (fALS), are associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. In this presentation, we will examine a set of herbal medicines that either through traditional medicine or modern research are known for neurological activity and have a role in mitochondrial pharmacology.

Affrilachia healing is carrying on a legacy of women of color in the healing arts and wellness movement of the South. Throughout history, women of color have played important roles in the world of healing arts and healthcare. From the granny midwife, herbalist, abolitionist, and our food for the soul to the medicine women who healed, join me in speaking their names to understand their journeys and the importance of their contributions, folk medicine, and inspirational stories.

The use of herbal remedies with COVID-19 is constantly evolving as we learn more about the virus and how it responds to plant-based protocols. Three panelists, practitioners and medical botanists, will share their perspectives on our growing understanding of the role herbal medicine plays in managing community care in the face of this pandemic.

Click the link below to enter the live Zoom Meetup:

Patricia Kyritsi Howell: Becoming an RH

Margi Flint: Meet the Author of 'The Practicing Herbalist'

Tenby Owens: Essential Herbs for Animal Health

Katja Swift: AHG Herbal Business Chapter Meetup

Ashley Litecky Elenbaas and Kat: Exploring Plant Spirit Medicine in Practice

Susan Daniels: Guided Relaxation and Easy Breathing for Stress Relief and Providing Focus

Ellen Kamhi: Hemp-THC-CBD-Cannabis-Endocannabinoids: What’s all the BUZZ?

Jeannie Dunn: Propagation and Proliferation of Wild Woodland Species

 

Narrative medicine allows clinicians to listen and interpret the stories of patients to better understand and care for them. This is true for herbalists, as well. However, unlike the prescribing of many drugs, our herbal pharmacopeia is vast and rich in history, story, myth, and science. Expanding our understanding of the narrative of plants, being able to learn and share their stories, allows us to move beyond just the mechanistic and reductionist approach, so that we may enlist and strengthen the vital connection between the patient, their medicine, and the broader context of Nature.

This class covers herbal formulating and gut health based on personal cases and information from my herb school and new textbook. The SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) narrative takes on a tough case and considers intestinal permeability, the four R program, and changing formulas as gut healing progresses. This includes S.O.A.P. organizational process, choosing effective herbs using energetics with rationales, and dosage, dietary, supplementation, and lifestyle suggestions.

In March 2018, the WHO added ‘Disease X’ to a list of maladies that could cause a worldwide epidemic. The recent COVID-19 pandemic meets the description of this forecast event. Despite advancements in the development of antimicrobials, vaccines, clean water, and food supplies, modern civilizations are not immune to epidemic disease. This class provides an overview of pathogens, statistics, historic context, and the subsequent impact on society of these plagues.

In this exploratory class, we will navigate our way through mapping the space where herbs and words coincide. Potential topics covered include narrative humility, poetic medicine, tools for narrative knowledge, the language of the body, the language of the plants, and constitutional medicine. Attendees will encounter questions the practicing herbalist can ask a client, ways of teasing the stories out of others, skills of deep and reflective listening, and empathic connections.

This lecture will highlight medicinal mushrooms and their specific applications as preventative, antiviral, and virucidal medicines. Broad concepts will be introduced and reviewed. Research will be reviewed for treating major viral infections (including HIV/AIDs, Herpes, Epstein-barr, Flu, and the Coronavirus family). Clinical cases will be discussed as well.

In the United States 1 out of 3 birthing people will at some point have an @bortion. Whether someone is 4 weeks pregnant or 20 weeks pregnant the process of @bortion can have significant physical, mental, and emotional impacts. Often patients receive little to no aftercare inside the health care system and social stigmatization could mean clients can’t ask their closest friends and family for support. Knowing how to support this holistically in your practice will help clients heal after making this decision for themselves, their family, and their community.

What is your narrative about how the body and healing work? Allopathic medicine is still the primary narrative most herbalists follow in diagnosis and treatment. Herbalists often fall into a story of the body as being vulnerable to attack, toxic, and reactive. Heal this story with the classical Chinese medicine narrative of openness, relationship, and resilience in life. Learn how an herb's flavor, nature, and appearance help guide us to truly heal from the broken story.

This collaboration builds on the panel discussion at the 2018 AHG Symposium on aggregating bioregional sources of medicinal herbs. The coronavirus is already having a huge impact on medicinal plants and the herbal products industry, putting pressure on plants that in ideal circumstances take several years to source responsibly. Spikes in demand are never good for supplies of medicinal plants and the communities that provide them. This panel will discuss how the herb community can help create more resilient and regionally-based sources of medicinal plants. We will seek to identify concrete action steps to move the discussion beyond ideas and into discussions of strategies to implement in each of our communities.

In traditional cultures, when a woman no longer sheds her wise blood, she becomes an honored elder in the community. In our current culture, women aren't supported to feel that way. The intensity of hot flashes and other uncontrollable events makes one feel like they are skiing the black diamonds without ever taking a lesson. A tailored approach arms her with tools for the next wave of uprising challenges.

Joanna navigated many serious health issues, along with those of her two children, and her father, whom she helped heal naturally from stage 4 metastatic melanoma using Ayurvedic herbs and cannabis oils. She will discuss the Endocannabinoid system and the importance of creating homeostasis within this bodily system which influences the immune system and all other systems of the human body. She will teach about various cultivars, the "entourage effect", therapeutic extraction methods, and dosing.

All traditional systems of medicine rely on energetic systems (yin/yang, the four Western elements, the Chinese five elements, and so forth). How all these systems fit together has been a subject of study for me for over 35 years. I've created a new understanding of herbal energetics based on the idea that energy travels in cycles (or circles) and applied it to herbs, essential oils, tissue states, and emotions. I'll be presenting my energetic models for consideration and discussion.

Click the link below to enter the live Zoom Meetup:

Lucretia Vandyke: BIPOC Herbalist Meet & Greet

Katja Swift: Hosting Free Herbal Clinics Online

Anne Weiland and Elizabeth Moriarty: Grassroots Research for the Clinical Herbalist

Ashley Litecky Elenbaas: Getting an Herbal Education

Asa Waldstein: Claims, Compliance, Marketing and the FDA - Ask me anything!
 

The Queen Mothers of Manya Krobo Ghana asked me during a visit, “Is it true that in the United States, the farmer will put a seed in the ground and say no prayer, offer no song or dance, make no libation, and not even say thank you to the ground and expect the seed to grow? Well, that is why you are all sick!” Let us come together to learn how Black agro-ecological traditions inform a relationship of consent, reciprocity, and deep listening with the sacred earth and our plant siblings. Let us explore how our connection to plants contributes to our healing and liberation as a society.

Click the link below to enter the live Zoom Meetup:

Kristine Brown: Herbal Parents Hangout

Patricia Kyritsi Howell: Finding and Working With a Mentor

Pam Gould: Overcoming Roadblocks to Healing from Chronic Lyme and & Co-Infections

Susan Daniels: Magic 4 Yoga Poses that Create a More Blissful You

Ruth Glass: Organizing & Running an AHG Chapter in Current Times

Bevin Clare: Meet the Author: Spice Apothecary

 

Rates of anxiety, depression, insomnia, opioid overdose, and suicide have been climbing during this pandemic. Clearly, the mental health of many is suffering. Botanicals, along with sensible recommendations for lifestyle and counseling, can be highly effective for improving mental and emotional well-being. Using case studies, clinical experience, historical use, and contemporary science, this presentation will explore various treatment protocols for mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and burnout.

Grief is the white elephant health crisis of our time. At some point each of us will grieve someone or something we have loved deeply. Grief has profound physiological changes in the body that can worsen already existing health issues or precipitate new ones. Learn how herbalism can provide you with the tools you need to care for yourself or anyone who grieves.

This case presentation covers a 49-year-old woman with a 17-year history of Hashimoto's thyroiditis and pernicious anemia. I supported her with diet, herbs, and lifestyle modifications with the goals of using a lower dose of thyroid medication, emotionally anchoring, and making choices from a position of informed power. We will discuss herbs and strategies used successfully to help support healthy mood, improved resilience in the stress response, improved energy, confidence in one's own healthcare, and the body’s ability to regulate hormone levels.

We will explore the clinical importance - both in the intake process and in offering herbal protocols - of the Daily Routine. Our daily lives - a unique web of rhythms and relationships - shape who (and how) we are. In disease and in health, we are processes. We are verbs, not nouns. Healing supports the habits that make us well and restructures those we would do well to change.

In this timely presentation, we will begin with an overview of COVID-19 and what facts we know thus far in the pandemic. We will cover a general and more complex understanding of autoimmune diseases, including delving into initiators of autoimmune issues and the mechanism by which they occur. Treatment options for COVID-19 will be covered, including those from the medical model, supplements, herbs, and dietary approaches. We will also go over some emerging biological therapies and, finally, specific disease examples and case studies.

Sleep quality is a key contributor to overall health. This panel discussion brings together three experienced practitioners discussing various herbal protocols they have found to be effective in addressing the range of issues that contribute to poor sleep patterns. In addition to specific materia medica, they’ll also explore the connection between chronic sleep issues and pathophysiology.