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!

Whether you’re a total beginner or you’ve been practicing for a while now, we can help you get to your goal! Here is a description of the complete path from start to finish, but if you’ve already had some training, you might start somewhere in the middle. If you’re not sure where to start, feel free to contact us – there’s a contact form at the bottom and we’re happy to help!

Building the Foundation

The Family Herbalist program forms your foundation for this work – you’ll learn over 100 herbs that are most important in our practice, and how to turn them into all the different types of herbal medicines, products, and even treats! You can work on this concurrently with the next step, if you like!

If you’ve already had some herbal training, and you’re already comfortable working with about 75-100 herbs, and you know how to make all the kinds of herbal products/medicines already, you will probably be comfortable skipping right to the next step. If you do skip forward to the Community Herbalist program, but you later decide that you want some of the material from the Family Herbalist program after all, you can always go back and get it – there’s no FOMO here! ❤️️

Most students do the Family Herbalist Program at the same time as the Community Herbalist program (below) – the two programs were designed to work in parallel, with the Community courses providing context and structure for the Family courses. You may choose to do them together or separately, but it’s definitely recommended (and typically faster) for students to do these in parallel. You can bundle all of it together here: Family + Community At The Same Time

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.

Most 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! 🙂

If you like, you can combine Family + Community into one step!

Most people like to take Family and Community concurrently.

The two programs were designed to work in parallel, with the Community courses providing context and structure for the Family courses. You may choose to do them together or separately, but it’s definitely recommended (and typically faster) for students to do these in parallel. You can see more information about that in the Orientation course for the Community Herbalist program – it’s free, and you can grab it here! The chapter titled The Syllabus is where you’ll find information about working on the programs in parallel, or choosing to work on them individually.

Whether you do them together or in succession, at the end of the Community program, you’ll take the exam and be ready to move on to your advanced studies.

Advanced Studies

The Clinical Herbalist program is where you’ll get the advanced coursework- this covers more 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.

The Clinical Herbalist program builds on the material in the Community program – you’ll use all of the Community skills as your foundation for your Clinical work, and no material is repeated between the two programs, so it’s not practical to try to skip directly to the Clinical program.

Clinical Mentorship

Most students apply to join Clinical Mentorship as soon as they complete the Community Herbalist Program – so that they can work on the Clinical coursework and the Mentorship in tandem. In Clinical Mentorship, you will be observing clients live, and working directly with clients too! All of our work is done online, so you don’t have to live in Boston. Even if you plan to work in your local community, it’s great to get experience with doing clinical sessions online, because having a session online means folks don’t have to get childcare, and makes your sessions more accessible to folks who have disabilities or who are immunocompromised.

This mentorship meets weekly, alternating between live clinical sessions and case review round table discussion. Clients are provided for you, so that you can focus all your effort on refining your clinical skills. When you’re ready, then we’ll work with you on getting good at finding new clients for yourself, too!

Mentorship is done 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. 

As you begin to build up your own practice, you’ll have the confidence of knowing you’ve got support for as long as you need it! We’ll review your cases with you as long as you like!

You can also check out this video about how Clinical Mentorship works and what to expect.

Business Skills

We also have a Business Mentorship track, which covers all of the administrivia 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 to do marketing without losing your sanity 🙂
It also covers finding an office space if you plan to do in-person work, how to pay your taxes, legal issues and business insurance, time management and work-life balance, learning GMP for folks who want to make products, and much more!

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.

If you’re outside the US, don’t worry! Our program meets or exceeds the requirements for most international professional organizations – you’ll find details in the tracking tool, and please feel free to contact us for more information!

And, we have special live Q&A sessions as well as special mentorship sessions to fit many other timezones – so you shouldn’t have to join the live sessions in the middle of the night!

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 let us know – we’re happy to help! 🌿❤️️