Build a Career as a Clinical Herbalist

A Clinical Herbalist helps people form a plan about how to improve their health holistically, and then follow through on it. You might sit down for a consultation with a client, talk about their health goals, and come up with a plan together that includes herbal formulas and other holistic strategies. Perhaps you then formulate the herbal blends together so that your client can learn how, or maybe you work with a local apothecary where your client can pick up their blend. You and your clients might check in every month to talk about progress and make adjustments in the plan.

This is important work: as more and more people are interested in herbalism, they are looking for Clinical Herbalists who can help them learn what they need to do to improve their own health. A Clinical Herbalist is part coach, part educator, and part problem solver!

Building the Foundation

The Family Herbalist program forms your foundation for this work – the herbs that are most important to our practice and how to turn them into all the different types of herbal medicines, products, and even treats! Once you’ve completed that, you’ve got all the tools you need to move on to the next level.

Managing Daily Health

Your next step is the Community Herbalist program. This covers all of the body systems: how they work, how they break down, and how to build them back up again; as well as phytochemistry, formulation, energetics, first aid, etc, to give you an organized, systematic understanding of how to approach all aspects of health support.

Some people like to take Family and Community concurrently.

At the end of the Community Herbalist program, there is an exam – but don’t worry! By the time you get there, you’ll be ready! 🙂

Advanced Studies

Then you can move into the Clinical Herbalist program – this covers more advanced topics like working with people who have cancer, autoimmune issues, endocrine disorders, Lyme, and more. This is also where you’ll learn clinical skills, legal issues, advanced formulation, and herb-drug interactions.

This program includes clinical observation as well as supervised clinical practice in our monthly Free Herbal Clinic as well as our monthly Student Clinic – both of these are done by web-conference so that you can participate from anywhere. There are dedicated live Q&A sessions after each monthly clinical event so that there is plenty of time to talk about what you observed or the cases you had – plus students learn from each others’ cases as everyone presents their experiences from clinic.

Family Herbalist and Community Herbalist are required pre-requisites for the Clinical Herbalist program. If you’ve taken similar programs at other schools, you can write to us and ask for the transfer exam to see if it makes sense for you to move directly into Clinical Herbalist.

Mentorship

At the end of the Clinical program, there’s one more exam, and then we have two mentorship tracks to support you as you start your practice.

The Clinical Mentorship, which meets every two weeks live by web conference, is where we go over your case files together in small groups. You’ll get our feedback, feedback from your peers, and you’ll get to share your ideas on their cases too. This means your mentorship time exponentially expands your exposure to different types of cases. Plus, because we’re working in small groups, you’re building community so that you have a network of support as you move into your career as a practicing herbalist. This work is done in small groups via video conference: you don’t have to be local to Boston to participate!

We also have a Business Mentorship track, which covers everything you need to start your practice or herbal business – getting registered, building your website, getting all the technical stuff in place, building your newsletter, learning GMP if you want to make products, finding an office space if you plan to do in-person work, even getting your marketing started.

The mentorships have a very active live component – they meet twice a month by video conference – and they start every year at the end of January.

Interactive Learning

We want to make sure that you have plenty of opportunity to have live interaction with us. Of course you’ll have access to our twice-weekly live Q&A sessions. And we’ve also got intensive workshop and immersion events, here in Boston, and in the forest in Royalston, MA, as well as online in small-group live web conferences, so that no matter where you live, you can get the skills you need. You can our full event schedule here.

These events are supplemental and not required for completion of any of the programs, but they’re available if you would like to attend, and can be beneficial for students who would like more in-person time. Because all of the didactic learning happens online, there’s no need for us to lecture during our time in person: these sessions are highly interactive and participatory.

Become a Registered Herbalist

We will also help you apply to be a Registered Herbalist in the American Herbalists’ Guild, which is the highest recognition that you can achieve in the US right now. Our program was specifically designed to meet and exceed the educational and mentorship requirements to become a Registered Herbalist, and we’ll help you at every step of the application process 🙂

We’ve even developed a free tracking tool you can use to keep all of your application requirements organized so that when it’s time to apply, everything is ready in one place for you. You can find it here.

You can do this!

We need more clinical herbalists. If this work interests you, we’d love to help you make it happen! You can jump right into the course work, and we will be so excited to meet you at the live Q&A sessions – and of course to answer all your questions in the discussion threads and community groups!

If you have any questions before you get started, just send us email at info@commonwealthherbs.com and we’ll help you out! 🌿❤️️