Podcast 283: Vetting Your Herbalism Sources: Red Flags & Green Flags

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How do you know when you can trust an herbalism teacher, influencer, book, or blog? How can you determine whether a scientific study has relevant information for your practice? Vetting your herbalism sources of information is an essential skill for students and practitioners alike.

Today’s episode, we lay out some red flags and green flags for this determination. These are indicators that you should be more cautious or skeptical on the one hand, or on the other hand that you can feel more trust in what you’re told. They’re not absolutes – no one data point is determinative – but they can help you more swiftly come to a decision.

You can absolutely learn from teachers with flaws. In fact, you’ll have to! We all have them. Still, if someone is out there telling you “this herb is Amish ibuprofen” or “this herb is nature’s Ozempic”, those are strong signals that this person isn’t interested in a grounded, nuanced, and detailed understanding of how herbs work in humans. Similar signals come from statements like “these are the lost secrets of ancient wisdom”, “everyone needs to take this one special herb”, and “the government & big pharma don’t want you to know…” Each of these might begin from a truth or half-truth, but they obscure true history, individual variation, and the actual causes of over-medicalization in our society. Those who pass them on uncritically, or use them to gin up likes & follows, are doing you – and all herbalists – a disservice.

Green flags for an herbal ‘authority’ include clarity of context: “this herb is helpful here, for these people, for these problems; but not there, for those, or that.” This context can include elements such as energetic indications, action-centered (as opposed to disease-centered) claims about herbal efficacy, realistic consideration of contraindications or drug interactions, and a lot of specificity about format, dose, frequency, duration, and the other practical elements of how people work with herbs in the real world. The more of these you see a person offer, the more reliable you may judge their information to be.

Scientific articles about herbs – and even moreso, popular press publications about those articles – carry red flags and green flags, too. The first step is always to assess whether a study, trial, or review article tells you anything which really applies to the work you do. If it’s billed as an investigation into calamus safety, but it’s actually a study of a single constituent of calamus essential oil, injected into mice at doses one could literally never encounter via eating calamus root, drinking its decoction, or taking its tincture – well, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t have any practical impact on whether you include calamus in a formula for your client.

The basics of reading & understanding scientific studies come forward here. Is it on general populations, or a specific group of people (children, elders, those with a particular disease state)? Is it an actual trial on humans, or an animal study – or an in vitro / in silico investigation? If it’s a review article, how did they select which sources to include and exclude?

All that is true even before we get into the issue of AI articles and AI citations, but when you see those it’s one of the reddest red flags of all. Even without the influence of AI, basic science errors (like mismatch between the botanical and common names of plants under study) can pop up. Then there are issues of funding, conflicts of interest, and the scourge of selective publication. Green flags, on the other hand, rise up when we find a study which includes traditional syndrome differentiations – the application of herbal energetics in the selection / review process of the trial. When a study’s done on a ‘crude extract’, like tea or tincture you can make at home, that’s another sign that this information may really matter to you. Ideally, we’d get studies done on free-living humans, with the types of remedies we actually recommend to our clients – so again, the question comes down to: how close is this to our actual work?

We’d like for everyone to go to an herbalism school where you can ask the teachers these kinds of questions, anytime you want. That’s the kind of learning environment we provide! We like to we raise green flags, and we’d love for you to learn with us! But… you might want to wait for July 1st, that’s when our big summer sale begins!

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Mentioned in this episode:

• HHP 065: How To Not Be A Guru
• HHP 125: This Is Not The Practice Of Medicine
• HHP 215: Don’t Let the Feds Get You Down

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Katja (00:00:16):
Hi, I’m Katja.

Ryn (00:00:17):
And I’m Ryn.

Katja (00:00:18):
And we’re here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ryn (00:00:22):
And on the internet everywhere, thanks to the power of the podcast. All right. Episode 283 naturally.

Katja (00:00:31):
That’s a large number.

Ryn (00:00:33):
That’s a decent number.

Katja (00:00:34):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:00:34):
Yeah. Is it a prime number? I don’t know. Let’s not do math today. Let’s do some herbalism. Yeah.

Katja (00:00:42):
Yeah. So, a question that comes up a lot for students and just people interested in herbalism is how do you know if the information that you are seeing is trustworthy? Whether that is a teacher, or somebody on social media, or a book, or whatever, how do you know if you can trust that or not? And this is a huge topic but… And it has grown a lot from the days where it was well, you just know every herbalist. You know them all personally, and then you just know if you can trust them or not.

Ryn (00:01:27):
There’s a couple dozen books, and you can read all of them, and that’s basically what you’ve got access to.

Katja (00:01:31):
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah.

Ryn (00:01:33):
But it’s a different world. We have the entire internet full of information of varying quality, and we need ways to sort through it.

Katja (00:01:43):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:01:44):
And that includes stuff produced by herbalists, and holistic health educators, and teachers, and so on. But it also includes scientific studies and papers that may be relevant to herbs, or herbal extracts, or commercial products, or maybe some mixture of all of the above. Yeah.

Katja (00:02:01):
Basically kind of any source that’s talking to you about herbs, and/or health, and/or your body.

Ryn (00:02:08):
Yeah.

Katja (00:02:10):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:02:10):
So we’re going to try and give you some things to look out for as you analyze information that you come across. Ways to identify what could be reliable and what you might want to look at a little more critically. Yeah. Looking for some red flags, some green flags, that kind of thing. But first we just want to give you our reclaimer. That’s where we remind you that we’re not doctors. We are herbalists and holistic health educators.

Katja (00:02:34):
The ideas discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalists in the United States. So, these discussions are for educational purposes only.

Ryn (00:02:45):
We want to remind you that good health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Good health doesn’t exist as one objective standard. It’s influenced by your individual needs, experiences, and goals. So, keep in mind we’re not attempting to present one, single, dogmatic right way that you must adhere to.

Katja (00:03:01):
Everyone’s body is different. So, the things that we’re talking about may or may not apply directly to you. But we hope that they’ll give you some new information to think about and some ideas to research or experiment with further.

Ryn (00:03:13):
Finding your way to better health is both your right and your own personal responsibility. This doesn’t mean that you’re alone on the journey, and it doesn’t mean that you’re to blame for your current state of health. But it does mean that the final decision when you’re considering any course of action, whether it’s discussed on the internet or prescribed by a physician, that’s always your choice to make. Even if you find somebody discussing things on the internet who you really, really love and you really, really like. And you think ah, they’re probably just right about everything.

Katja (00:03:39):
I should just do whatever they say.

Ryn (00:03:41):
I’ll just turn my brain off. It’s tempting, right? It’s a natural human, I don’t know, mammalian, I don’t know, living being temptation to look for something that seems like the easy way and then to follow that.

The Temptation to Trust

Katja (00:03:54):
You know, if we call it the easy way, then that has a lot of value judgment kind of associated with it. But if we call it the resource efficient way, then suddenly it becomes a little bit more understandable. There’s a lot of data that your brain has to process in a day. There actually always has been, but now there’s sort of an unreasonable amount, and your brain is looking for ways to conserve resources. So, any place where it can find a pattern and say oh, I like the way that person dresses, and therefore I think I trust them. That’s not like well boy, that’s a dumb criteria. Okay. Maybe that’s not a great criteria, but it’s also just your brain looking for efficiency. And so that’s challenging because brains look for efficiency, bodies also look for efficiency. Which means that we have to be holding them back all the time saying hold on, hold on, hold on. No, no, don’t trust that yet. I like their earrings is not enough information for me to trust them.

Ryn (00:05:03):
Yeah. We are all susceptible to this. Even once you’ve learned about cognitive biases and the ways in which our brains trick us, or look for shortcuts, or look for the resource efficient method to get to something that’s shaped like an answer. Those things can all be true, and yet you can be aware of those things. You can know about them. You can have researched logical fallacies and so on. But you can still be susceptible to them. That’s like the first, most important thing to keep in mind.

Katja (00:05:30):
It doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means you have a brain.

Ryn (00:05:34):
Yeah, right. Fortunately, your brain can also help with this problem. And we can learn habits of thinking, habits of interrupting ourselves in a moment like that. Ways to kind of trigger an internal audit when we’re encountering something and being like wow, that seems great. Hang on. Hang on. Let me check this a little more closely. So, that’s something that you can also teach yourself to do.

Katja (00:06:03):
Yeah. Yeah. And listen, it’s critically important. Because although I do want to be clear, there have always been bad herb teachers. There have always been significant problems in the wellness space. By the way, the wellness space has existed a lot longer than you probably think. And this talking about health, and how to be healthy, and what healthy even is has always been problematic. There have always been tendencies to make it quasi-religious, or to make it a morality statement, or a statement on whether you personally are a good person or a bad person, or whatever else. It has always also been hijacked by corporate interests. And I do not mean that in a conspiracy theory kind of way. I simply mean it as like this is a place to make money. And when people want to make money, they will do the thing that makes them money. And sometimes those things are not ethical or trustworthy. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to be uncool.

Ryn (00:07:23):
Yeah. The conception of the corporation as it operates in our society today is structurally inclined to do these things.

Katja (00:07:33):
Yeah. It’s hard to say that because there are so many conspiracy theories running around today. Even if you think you’re immune to conspiracy theories, you might be surprised to realize that you maybe have a couple in there in your brain. Because again, this is something that all people are susceptible to. But I’m really not referring to any specific one of those. I am simply referring to any time that we are talking about something where it’s hard to know the answer, and people can make money, then that’s kind of a recipe for some exploitation. And the reality is it is hard to know the answer about human health because there are no guarantees except that we are all going to die. And when the question we’re asking is how do I feel better, or not die, or whatever, then there are no guarantees. There just are no guarantees. But we want the confidence, we want the reassurance, we want the comfort. And so this is why it’s so hard to trust and why we have to say that you have to think two or three times before trusting people or more times than that even simply because this is an area where we as consumer, each one of us as consumers of information, or listeners, or learners, or whatever want to believe. And often the people who are telling us things that we want to believe are also trying to get money from us. And that’s just a bad combo.

Ryn (00:09:27):
Yes.

Katja (00:09:28):
But people have to pay bills. This is one of those awful spirals of if only we could do all this without money. But then how would anybody buy food?

Ryn (00:09:40):
You run into a different set of problems.

Katja (00:09:41):
It’s a totally different set of problems. Yeah.

How to Assess Herbal Information Sources: Verify It’s a Real Person

Ryn (00:09:44):
All right. So, let’s think a little bit here about how we can assess somebody that we come across. This is somebody who is offering information. Maybe they’re putting themselves out there as a teacher, or an expert, or maybe a product maker, or some other thing. They’re saying I’ve got information for you about herbs, about health, and you should check it out. So, that’s great. We want to have lots of people out there sharing their experiences, their ideas, their theories. All of those things are good. but we do need to be able to assess each one and say is this helpful to me? Is this realistic? Is this information that is actually going to be functional in some manner? Or is this misleading? Is there a gap here? Is there an error? Something like that.

Katja (00:10:31):
And that might be a little place to put an asterisk because it is really important to know that everybody makes errors. Every solid, good herbalist I know regrets something they wrote in a book. And then later they want to go back and change it because they got better information or whatever. Or something they said on a video, and they’re like oh man, I said that three years ago. And now I learned this new thing, and I really wish I could go back and change that or whatever. Okay. That is one thing. Everybody makes mistakes. And so please expect that your herb teachers, no matter how much you love them, have made mistakes. And then when you see something, and you’re like that doesn’t quite jive, ask them. Because maybe it is like when I think about our online program, there’s over 3,000 videos across all the different programs that we teach. And some of them I have not had a chance to go back and be like oh, I need to update this one thing in here or whatever. And so it’s important to always be able to ask. And that’s one of the things you should look for in a program is that you can ask. But I want to make a distinction between somebody made a mistake somewhere or said something but later had updated information that they want to update. That’s one thing. And that’s different than somebody who just is unqualified, or is putting up misinformation, or is scamming, those kinds of things.

Ryn (00:12:14):
Yeah, right. So, you can learn from teachers with flaws. You can learn from teachers who’ve made mistakes. And you’re going to have to because we all have flaws, and we all make mistakes. Okay. But then there are folks who are out there who are presenting information or sharing information. And whether they are aware of it or not, the things that they’re saying are inaccurate, potentially problematic, potentially even dangerous in some circumstances. It does happen. Herbs are very forgiving in this regard. There are many ways people could work with herbs that I think are not optimal or not realistic for the job at hand, like offering a dose of an herb for a symptom or a health condition that’s really too small to accomplish anything at all. So, I might have a disagreement with that. But that’s different from somebody who is just kind of running with whatever they’ve got and making a bunch of wild claims, and statements, and things like that. Not really following up on them. Not really basing it on anything super solid. And also really speaking in ways that kind of call out to you, and say something is amiss here. Something is off. So, those are the things we’re going to try to point out. Before that though when you’re trying to learn about somebody, they’ve come across your feed, or you’ve heard somebody talk about them, or you see their name on a book title or whatever else, you want to know who that person is. So, you can pause right there, and you can say all right, well what can I find about this individual? Can I find some things that they’ve put out there for free before I go, and I start giving them some money?

Katja (00:13:54):
And even in this category we have to ask ourselves are they even an actual human? Because that is now a significant problem. And a couple weeks ago this was a problem that a student came to me with. An Instagram account for somebody who had written a book, and it looked like a real human. And the book was an AI book with a fake author. It is not a real person, not a real author. And that book has been around for a little while. But now it looks like they hired an actress to embody the supposed author, even though the person that they hired is considerably older than the picture of the author. Okay, fine. And they’re putting out all these Instagram reels now. It might also just be an AI actor. It’s really unclear. Previously that account was only graphics. And then it was like turning a switch that suddenly it was this person or an AI that looks like a person making these reels. And also with fantastical claims and whatever else. But that was kind of amazing to be like we had already established that this book was an AI book by a fake author. And now there’s this person or maybe not even a real person impersonating this fake author. And it’s all about marketing trying to get people to buy this book. So yeah, so first find out if they’re even a real person.

Ryn (00:15:39):
Right. Yeah. And so if they are an herbalist, if they are a practitioner, then they should have some kind of a presence, right? One way or another. That could be some classes that they offer, some writings that they’ve got for you to read through. It could be that they’ve done interviews, whether on their own platform, or their own material, their own podcast, whatever. Or that they go over to somebody else’s show, and they turn up there, and they do an interview. And you can see what they’re like when they’re having a conversation or something like that. It’s maybe very helpful in the modern context with the AI situation if there is something live or something recorded with other humans where you’re like okay, that’s an actual human being. They take up space. They have mass. They breathe. They have a metabolism. All right, cool. That’s good to know. And that is, like you said, something we actually have to confirm in the world today.

Look for Depth to a Presence & Information That is Sourced

Katja (00:16:36):
We will come back to this number, but last September there was a study done on herb books for sale on Amazon by a group that studies AI in the world. And they found that 82% of all of the books in the herbal health space in Amazon were actually fake books written by AI. No actual human associated with it. And one of the ways that you can tell, and so this will be also how you can tell if this is a real person or not, is if their presence, like their website, and their Instagram, and their whatever is only about that one book. And they don’t have a website that has depth of dates, like it’s been around for a long time. Or they might be a new person who hasn’t been around for a really long time, but they should still have some depth there. And if it is literally just my only existence is this one book. This is the only thing I ever talk about. This is the only thing at all. Then that might be an indication that it’s not a real person. So, you’re looking for… It’s fine if somebody has a specialization, and they talk about a particular topic very frequently. But you want to see depth. You want to see a variety of things that this person has done.

Ryn (00:18:05):
Yeah. And when you’re listening to somebody’s recorded class, or you’re attending some little live event that they do every now and then to meet new people or to tell people what they’re up to and what they offer, that’s great. And that can tell you if you kind of jive with what they’re offering, if you like their impression, if they seem interesting to you. None of this has yet established for you if all the things that they’re saying are fully trustworthy or completely accurate. That work still remains. And then at the same level, things like how popular this person is, their follower account, the number of likes and shares their posts get, their name recognition, other things like that. Those are indicators, but they’re not determinative. Those also don’t answer for you in some kind of final way about whether you can put some trust into what this person’s putting out there.

Katja (00:18:59):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:19:00):
Yeah. All right. You should be turning all of these thoughts on us as well, by the way, just to make sure that’s clear from the beginning.

Katja (00:19:07):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:19:07):
Yeah. All right. So, imagine what we’re talking about here includes can I trust that person? But people are variable. So we’re really like can you trust what they offer in a class, in a book, on their blog posts, or whatever, that kind of thing. And so you can get very granular about this. You can say okay, so for each blog post they put out, for each chapter of the book, whatever, each sentence in there, what are they giving me about what they’re saying? Is there a source for the claims that are being presented in this manner? They’re telling you something about hawthorn being good for the heart. Maybe you’ve heard that before. Maybe they’re saying something that’s a little bit different from what you’ve encountered, or adding another layer, or whatever else. But you’re like okay, why do you say that? That’s the thing to ask. Where do you get this idea from? And people will have lots of different kinds of sources for those sorts of claims. That’s normal in herbalism. We don’t have only one source of information. We don’t take everything we say as only reliable if it comes from the scientific process. That’s one of our sources of information, but there are others.

Katja (00:20:22):
But also don’t expect a teacher to have a study to back up every single claim because there are not studies that will back up every single claim. Some things are from your own experience. And then the question is is that experience worth trusting?

Ryn (00:20:43):
Yeah. If essentially a person is putting a bunch of ideas, and claims, and so on forward, and ultimately what they have to back it up is my experience. Well, my experience as an herbalist has shown me that this herb is helpful for this problem. Or my experience as a practitioner has shown me that this herb extracts really well in this particular ratio of alcohol to water. And that’s the reason why I like to make my tinctures that way best. Okay, great. So, that’s not nothing. That’s not invalid. But it does make me curious, what is your experience then? How long have you been doing this? And in what contexts have you been doing this work? Like maybe somebody’s been doing their work for decades, but with a very specific population. And that could be that they’ve done all kinds of work with pregnant humans for years and years, but now maybe they’re looking to branch out a little bit. And now they’re making some broader claims about everybody. Everybody should work with this herb because I’ve seen it be helpful for these folks with this particular issue in the course of pregnancy. Well, that may not apply because someone’s biology could be different, or other factors could be going on. Yeah. Right.

Katja (00:21:54):
And then also to say my experience, some people are brandy new, and they don’t have a lot of experience yet. Okay. That doesn’t mean automatically that you can’t trust them. It’s not that you can only trust gray-haired elders, and nobody else has valid things to contribute. Also, you can only trust gray- and purple-haired elders, and nobody else has anything valuable to contribute. You can be fairly new at this and still have… If you are well trained, and throughout your training you were very active in experiencing the things that you were learning. I’m thinking of a specific student we have right now who just tests everything out, and has just started into mentorship, and is so solid. So, so solid and is really good at making analogies, and making things understandable to other people, and often contributes in our student community and stuff to clarify. And this is a person who has not been in practice yet. In practice for themselves and for their friends and their local sort of extended friend group, household, whatever, community but hasn’t had clinical practice yet. Is just starting that process. And so I would hate to say oh, well, you should never listen to anybody who doesn’t have decades of experience because they won’t have anything to contribute. No, this particular person I’m thinking of has a lot to contribute. And actually all of our Clinical Mentorship students, some of them are in private practice now, but whatever. All of them have things that are like their superpower that they’re really good at. And all of them are worth listening to. They do have things to contribute. So, don’t write off new people just because they have a small number of years of experience. We’re looking for nutrient density in their experience. And that’s the end of my sentence.

Investigate Casual References to Tradition

Ryn (00:24:28):
Yeah. And this connects to another source of information that people will cite too, whether explicitly or implicitly, which is tradition. And tradition is also not invalid as a source of information for herbalism, of course. But we can dig a little bit deeper into that. So we can say well, which tradition do you mean? Or whose tradition do you mean? And with that we’re looking for again, it’s basically a reality check that we’re looking for here. So, somebody could be like well, there’s a pretty well-established tradition of working with linden in Western herbalism in particular to help with spasmodic conditions in the heart, and to help to lower blood pressure when it’s driven by a lot of tension, and to help to calm people who are feeling anxious with that tension pattern. Because it’s a relaxant herb, and we can talk about other reasons why it does those things. But yeah, there is a tradition for that, and it is pretty solid. And we can look at that as a reason why we might want to recommend linden to this person who’s in front of me right now, and shows the tension, and has the heart issue, and so on. And so somebody who’s like well yeah, it’s linden. It’s traditional for these concerns. There’s something to it. But there’s another way that people might talk about tradition. They might be like well, this herb is traditionally used in… The way I thought at first was in Anishinaabe herbalism, but that’s not the way they would say it. They would say this is traditionally used in Native American herbalism for syphilis or for whatever else they’re going to go to next. And so when a statement is framed or shaped like that, then that should raise your ears a little bit.

Katja (00:26:13):
Right. Because that person is trying to use traditionally used by Native Americans to… They’re trying to borrow authority from that statement. Okay, y’all. By Native Americans is like saying by humans. There are so many different traditions that are Native American. So, if somebody’s going to claim that it was Native American tradition, first off, does that person have any right to make that claim? Any heritage to make that claim?

Ryn (00:26:53):
Yeah. The contact with the tradition is what we’re talking about more than your bloodline.

Katja (00:26:58):
Yes, yes. And then secondly, Native American is not specific enough. So, when you see traditionally used by Native Americans, that should make you wonder if exploitation is happening. When you see my family line, my Ojibwa family line has always worked with this plant in this way, that’s a really different statement. Yeah.

Ryn (00:27:31):
And this extends other places as well. If somebody says ashwagandha has been used in Ayurvedic tradition for thousands of years to give people energy when they feel tired. Again, that should give you some pause. Because first off, in ancient herbalism there wasn’t a lot of like oh, you just feel tired. Take this herb for energy. There would have been a context and a framework for when and where that herb was appropriate. There would have been a whole set of presentations, and symptoms, and patterns, and things that we would talk about nowadays as energetics, and other manifestations that would say all right, we’re going to try this herb for you. We think it makes sense for what you’re presenting with. It wouldn’t be flattened the way that kind of a statement usually ends up shaped. Especially if that kind of a statement is pointing towards a modern medical diagnosis or an experience of modern life. Like if somebody say this herb has been used, calamus has been used in ancient Ayurvedic traditions for brain fog for thousands of years. Okay, they weren’t talking about brain fog a thousand years ago. They might have spoken about different forms of mental struggle or difficulty or things that the cutting nature of the calamus could help you out with, and could sharpen up your mind, and so on. But that word brain fog, or chronic fatigue, or Type 2 diabetes, or whatever, if there is a tradition that connects to that, there’s a lot of interstitial material between what the tradition was like and what the modern presentation is like. And we can knit these things together. This is part of our work as herbalists who are interested in tradition, who are drawing knowledge from it. But we need to connect those dots.

Katja (00:29:21):
Right. Listen, they knew what diabetes was. They didn’t necessarily call it diabetes. But they knew what cancer was. They knew what a lot of things. They weren’t stupid. Just because it was a long time ago doesn’t mean that they didn’t have knowledge. But they did not operate in the same context that we operate in today. So, that kind of a statement again, it’s exploitive because it’s like stealing authority from a tradition. And usually it’s a tradition that does not belong to the person who’s making the claim. And then it’s out of context or disjunct context between the modern application and the traditional context for it. But sometimes people make these kinds of claims from their own tradition as well. So, I don’t want to just say that well, if the person is blonde hair and blue eyed, and they’re making claims about traditional use of ashwagandha, then you shouldn’t trust them because that’s appropriation. That’s not the only way this works. Sometimes people are exploiting a tradition that they do belong to because it’s profitable.

Ryn (00:30:42):
If some teacher is like I’ve got Western European heritage, and comfrey is an herb that grows in that part of the world. and people have worked with it in different ways for a long time. We’re on solid ground so far. But when they start talking about how traditionally people would take comfrey leaves, and they would make a long, nourishing infusion, and they would drink those to get calcium. Okay, hang on. Ancient people weren’t thinking about calcium. And also on another layer here, comfrey was not an herb that was considered like a standard pot green. Like an herb that you would just throw in with spinach, and amaranth, and goosefoot leaf, and other things. And just whatever green stuff you could grab and was food. And we throw them into the pot, and we cook them up. And then we eat them, and we get nourishment that way. Comfrey wasn’t actually taken that way.

Katja (00:31:32):
Except in desperation.

Ryn (00:31:33):
Except in desperation. And so that person is trying to talk about their preferred preparation of this herb, and they’re trying to connect it to a tradition that doesn’t actually exist.

Katja (00:31:46):
But it is from their own. It would not be appropriation because they themselves were Western European descent, sure.

Ryn (00:31:55):
So, some of that is basically a little bit of – I don’t know – manifesting or a little bit of hoping about what you would like tradition to have been. Rather than digging into historical context and looking at old receipt or recipe books. And being like well, how did people actually work with comfrey 100 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago? What evidence do we have for that from materia medica books written at those times or archeological studies about remnants of this and people’s teeth enamel and whatever, all that kind of stuff? We can try to piece these things together, but you can’t just gesture towards tradition, and then it happens to look exactly like your preferred way to administer herbs to your friends. And be like there, I’m done.

Katja (00:32:42):
That’s like fantasy or tradition core, like cottage core or whatever. And it’s so easy to grab onto that. So yeah, so whenever you see traditionally used for, or another phrasing is is known to X, Y, Z. Oh, is it known to do that? Who knows that it will do that? Who?

Ryn (00:33:14):
And I mean look, there’s cases where somebody will use that kind of language, or they’ll say things in that way not because they have nothing else to base it on. And so if this is a teacher that you can speak to or you can communicate with in some way, then you should be able to write in and be like well, what do you mean by is known to do this? Who knows that, and how do they know it? And if they have something to stand on, then your teacher should be able to provide an answer to that kind of a question.

Katja (00:33:42):
Actually, one of our students wrote me an email and was like Katja, in this document you wrote is known to blah, blah, blah. And you never say that. What is going on here? Like what do you mean it’s known to blah, blah, blah? And so first off, I was mortified. But yeah, it’s true. I had written that a long time ago. And the reality is that something is known to do something. Well, that is a turn of phrase that people say. It is something that as we try to put a sentence together, that is something you could grab for because it’s something that’s commonly said. Okay. Well, I went back and changed that document because just because something is commonly said doesn’t mean that it’s okay for me to kind of put a cop out in that document. I should put more information than is known to have this particular effect. And so I did. I went back, and I fixed it. And now I’m on the lookout for any other old document that I ever wrote that has is known to in it. And so yeah, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s evil, bad, appropriation, misinformation, whatever, but it is something that should catch you. And you can program your brain so that when you see that kind of a thing – traditionally used for, is known to, whatever – that that stops you and makes you question is this a reasonable statement? Is this an appropriate statement? Is this a trustworthy statement? And maybe your result is oh, that was a poor choice of grammar, but in fact that statement jives with every other thing that I’ve ever read about this herb. Fine. Okay. Well, now we can complain about grammar, but we don’t have to not trust this person just because they used a questionable formulation in their sentence. Yeah.

Question Herb-Drug Comparisons or Claims of Lost Secrets

Ryn (00:35:38):
So, we’ve kind of started with some yellow flags, I guess. Things that might raise your eyebrows or your ears a little bit, but they’re not definitively bad or great. But let’s get into some cases that are a little more clear-cut. Let’s start with some red flags for things that an herbalist may claim or may put out there to you. So, one of the reddest flags around is things like oh, this herb is Amish ibuprofen. Or oh hey, berberine is nature’s Ozempic. And you can get that from drinking goldenseal tea. Okay. So, what is the problem with a claim like that? And I mean, we should have an answer aside from that’s ridiculous, or that’s too superficial, or that’s just marketing speak to catch people’s attention. All those things are true, but let’s get into it a little further. What is the problem with saying valerian is herbal valium? Okay.

Katja (00:36:40):
Well, first off, it’s not.

Ryn (00:36:42):
And what do you mean by it’s not? Well, it’s not the same chemistry in that particular example. Willow is not Amish ibuprofen because again, very different chemistry going on but also different potency. It’s a different thing. An herb is not a drug.

(00:36:57):
And you can refer back to, I think it was episode 101. I think that’s the one it was, about how herbs are different from drugs because there are several different critical facets between the way each of them is constituted. An herb has many different chemicals in it, and many of them are going to be active or synergistic. Whereas the sort of ideal drug is one chemical over and over again. Many of that molecule, but it’s all the same one. And other facets there will be big differences between how they enter the body, how they operate inside of the body, what kind of effect they can have, what side effects they can have, and so on.

Katja (00:37:37):
Even just sort of thinking about that Valium example, Valium will knock everybody out. It is really strong, and it will overpower whatever the body’s doing. Valerian doesn’t work the same way in all people because there are energetic interactions going on. So, a person who is a very fiery, hot, high-tempered person is going to have a different reaction than a person who is cold, sedate, and kind of can’t quite get everything firing in the brain, like having like some brain fog sort of situation. These two people will have different reactions to valerian. And it’s not because you’ve certainly heard oh, 10% of people have an inverse reaction to valerian. I have absolutely said that in my life, in my young herbalist life, when that was the best advice that was going around. And nobody had yet sat down and said hold on a second. Let’s think about this energetically. What’s really going on here? Well okay, it’s not 10% of the people will have an inverse reaction. It is hey, this is logical if you look at the energetics of the plant, that a cold person and a hot person just simply are going to respond to this plant differently.

Ryn (00:39:02):
This warming plant.

Katja (00:39:03):
Right. Because this plant is warming. So, the people who feel relief from it are going to be the people in that brain fog cold category. Whereas the people who have the 10% of people have the inverse reaction. Well, it’s going to be bigger because more than 10% of the people run hot. All right. But they’re not having an inverse reaction. They are having a direct reaction to being warmed up more than they already were. So, they’re not like oh, it made them agitated for some weird reason. No, it made them agitated because they were already hot and stimulated, hot blooded, hot tempered, whatever and stimulated. And then we gave them an herb that warmed them up further. And so that was the response that they had. Okay. But if you give those two people Valium, they will not have these two different responses. Yeah.

Ryn (00:40:00):
Which is one of the reasons why conventional medicine tends to prefer these agents because they feel that they’re more predictable. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So statements like that, a direct comparison between an herb and a drug, those should definitely be a red flag for you. Because even if you’re just using that to catch attention, there’s so many misconceptions that are bound up in a framing like that, that I think that it’s counterproductive from the very get go.

Katja (00:40:29):
And also when we think about Amish ibuprofen or Native American whatever, insert drug name here.

Ryn (00:40:41):
Cherokee penicillin, whatever.

Katja (00:40:42):
Yes, exactly. Whenever they’re doing that again, that is stealing authority from a group. So, in the case of Amish people, that’s stealing the authority from the perception that this is a group of people who live a quotey mark natural life and supposedly don’t ever get sick, although that’s not actually true. Studies on Amish populations are in fact that they get sick possibly more often than the baseline population. But again, that is not necessarily about their herbs, or not about their herbs, or about their way of life, or whatever else. Although it might be, whatever. That topic is not for this podcast. But the point is that that kind of a statement is stealing from the perception that people have about a particular group of people. And so not only is it inaccurate. But again, it is like instead of working through your personal integrity and allowing that to be your authority. Like I’m really putting big, nasty quote marks around authority because I kind of don’t love that word. Instead of speaking from your experience and your integrity, you are trying to position yourself as an authority who should be believed because they’re in a position of authority/power. And those two framings are really different. We want the integrity one. We do not want the authority one.

Ryn (00:42:25):
Here’s another way that this might turn up, which is here we have found for you the lost secrets of nature medicine. These are things that people used to know. Or maybe somebody far away from your life experience, somebody over there, they know about it. But they’ve been hidden from you, or they’ve been concealed from you.

Katja (00:42:52):
Or stolen from you.

Ryn (00:42:53):
By nefarious actors, right. And this is usually connected to the drug comparison because again, it’s like well, you don’t need those drugs. You don’t need modern medicine in any way, ever, in any context, because natural medicine and herbalism has everything that anybody could ever require. And also I’m going to provide that to you in my book, in my course, in my podcast episode, in my whatever else. And that’s why you should trust me because I have secrets, and I’m going to sell them to you.

Katja (00:43:22):
There are no secrets, y’all. There are no secrets. There’s just stuff you don’t know yet, but there’s no secrets. Oh boy. And they’re not lost either because nowhere on earth are these things dead. Even in the United States, yes, herbalism fell out of fashion among a particular socioeconomic group.

Ryn (00:43:45):
For a few decades.

Katja (00:43:47):
For a few decades. And also herbalism, there were some regulations put in that made it not legal to practice in the same way that they used to practice. But even in the United States, herbalism didn’t die out. It’s just that it was not the preference of the middle and upper classes anymore. And so when people imply these lost secrets, well, that’s just bad history. You just don’t know history. But it isn’t because they don’t know history. It’s because that’s good marketing. That gets across to people.

Suspect Hype, Over-Promising, & Overgeneralizing

Ryn (00:44:35):
Yeah. And this often comes along in another way too, which is really a matter of hype or a matter of over-promising or overgeneralizing. So, that can sound like this herb or this special formula will fix everything for everyone. And sometimes that’s really just left there. This is an amazing thing. It’s so fantastic. Everybody should take it. You’re going to feel incredible. It’s going to transform your life. And there’s no real meat there. There’s no real content to that claim other than this is good, trust me. But other times it’s presented like well, there’s one underlying problem for basically every health problem that people have got. And maybe we call it parasites, or heavy metal contamination, or EMF exposure, or stealth viruses, or whatever somebody’s pet concern is or pet issue is. It’s really common for somebody to take that, and then to generalize it, and be like everybody has this issue. I don’t know. Everybody has gluten sensitivity. Everybody has mineral deficiency. Whatever it is. Even the ones that we like, and that we often talk about because we find them relevant, it’s not going to be the answer for everybody who’s out there. This is something that every practitioner needs to discover in the course of their work. If you have pet theories, if you have pet approaches that you find really reliable and very successful, that’s good. But you learn more when you run into the cases where you tried that, tried it for real, and it didn’t help the way you hoped.

Katja (00:46:10):
Yeah. Listen, every body is different. Every body is different. And there are some things that we can generalize on. We can look generally at diet and say, hmm, people just don’t eat as many vegetables. People just don’t this or that or whatever. Fine. But that is not the answer to everything.

Ryn (00:46:34):
Even if we broaden out and get all of our pillars: food, sleep, movement, stress mitigation, community support, right? Somebody could have all of those really dialed in and still have a genetic disorder that’s causing them a significant health problem. That’s real. That happens. We love natural methods of healing. We are holistic health educators. We tell you every time we do an episode, right? But there are things that are beyond what our tools and methods can do. And those are cases where what we try to say is what is the portion that we can help out with? What is the amount of support that our methods can provide in concert with others? With conventional medicine, with acupuncture, with whatever it is that does the rest of the job.

Katja (00:47:17):
I think that dovetails into the lost secrets thing too, in that when we’re thinking about history and how people are different today than we were in the past and whatever, that must be the answer. First off, a lot of people just don’t know a lot about history. And we can’t kind of look in broad terms through history either because which history are we looking at? A history where there was a lot of famine. A history where people lived in an area of abundance or a time of abundance. A history where there was a lot of exploitation. I’m thinking about the industrial slums in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Let me tell you, nutrition was not good there.

Ryn (00:48:10):
I mean, or a period of time when the dominant medical theories of the day were doing harm to the people they were trying to help.

Katja (00:48:16):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So looking back, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn anything from history, for sure. We can. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t make comparisons to history. But we need to be more savvy and nuanced about it. And that includes these ideas of oh, if we just fix this thing of this problem of modernity, it will fix everyone’s problem. That can’t always work because some people’s problems are coming from other factors. And the flip side of that is medical technology can’t fix problems. Nature will solve all your problems for you. Again, looking back in history, today we see natural medicine as something completely different and separate from conventional medicine. But if we look at human health, and the history of human health, and the history of trying to keep humans alive and healthy, it’s all on history. That dissension about herbalism and conventional medicine specifically is quite recent and also localized. It is not true in every country, but it is true in the United States. But throughout the history of trying to keep people alive, there have often been agreements, disagreements. Some of them had to do with personality more than science. Some of them really came down to I hate that guy. And some of those stories are really fun and interesting. But a lot of history or a lot of health and medical science was stymied by personalities literally of I hate that guy. And I’m thinking about Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur in particular, but there are so many examples of that throughout history. And so recognizing that developments in terms of surgery, surgery is not new. Surgery is prehistoric. But developments in all these aspects that we now call conventional medicine, separating them from herbalism and foundational health – like nutrition, and better sleep, and stress management, stuff like that – is really, really new. But historically all of this was just how do we keep people alive? And then petty squabbles between people with personalities. So, when people are talking about you don’t need that drug because conventional medicine is evil, and nature’s lost secrets will cure you. Okay. Well, that drug may or may not be appropriate for you, your body, your situation, your time in life, your whatever.

Ryn (00:51:38):
It may be over-prescribed. It may be heavily monetized. There may be bad reasons why these things are prevalent in the society. All of that can be true at the same time, and yet.

Katja (00:51:46):
All that can be true. And yet, it isn’t that there are these lost secrets versus the evil pharmaceutical whatever. It is that there’s a lot of tools, and sometimes throughout history, some people fight about them. And so sure, I can say, for example, that if I’m working with kids with an ear infection, well, antibiotics are frequently not actually the best approach because frequently the problems are not bacterial. And so there are other approaches that are going to work better. Now as an herbalist it’s not legal for me to tell somebody don’t take antibiotics. Because that would be practicing medicine without a license, which I do not do. I could have an opinion that I’ve got solutions that are probably going to work better than an antibiotic. But it’s never legal for me to tell somebody not to take an antibiotic. But it is fine for me to work with somebody who’s dealing with chronic ear infections in their kids. And say well, why don’t we try these strategies to see if we can prevent the next ear infection and see if we can prevent you having to deal with this problem again? And so it’s not bad to say looking at all the tools we have available to us, for this particular problem I think this tool is ideal. For that problem a different tool might be better. That’s okay. But this sort of idea of only the natural way is right, and the lost secrets of nature will cure you. That’s the flag.

Ryn (00:53:32):
Yeah. And this is a polarizing kind of a statement. It’s like putting things into camps and saying, I’m over here in this camp, and that means I reject things that are over on that other one. This is also with an element of fear mongering and an element of conspiracy that usually arises. And so those can start to sound like well, the government doesn’t want you to know about this cheap, available herb that can solve all your problems, and it’s going to be better for you than Prozac. Or big pharma is hiding the truth about the efficacy of St. John’s wort because they want to sell more Prozac. And honestly, I’m at a place now where I think that big pharma doesn’t really think about us.

Katja (00:54:09):
They do think about money. They want to make money, true. Although that’s at the high level of administration. I think individual scientists working for pharmaceutical companies just want to help people.

Ryn (00:54:21):
Yeah, by and large. Or just to have a job and get to their day, whatever. Humans being humans all the way down. But you can see the way that going from there are things that have been secret or that knowledge that used to exist and has been hidden. And there are things that can solve any health problem that exists out there without turning to modern medicine. That leads in this direction of being like they, capital T, they is trying to hide it from you. And it’s a conspiracy. And that pushes people further and further in that direction.

Katja (00:54:56):
There have been times through history where capital T, they have had some nefarious whatever. I’m thinking about the 1920s with the foundation of the American Medical Association, and the Flexner Report, and trying to put herbal universities out of business. And okay, those things happened. That was largely about profit and not about hiding things from you. It was really just about how do we position ourselves in the marketplace? So okay, I don’t want to say things like this have never happened. But the thing is that if you are teaching something as an herbalist, you don’t need that fear mongering. And so even if you are going to teach about some historical thing that did happen, it doesn’t need to be this polarizing statement of big pharma is hiding the truth. You know what? Just say what you got to say about when it works and when it doesn’t work.

Ryn (00:56:01):
Yeah. And I mean more – I don’t know – serious, it can be counterproductive. It can be counter helpful to people who may need more support. And that can include situations where like yeah, we could construct a complete herbal protocol, diet plan, and habit set for this individual, a total regimen for them that would effectively resolve their elevated blood pressure and their bad cholesterol numbers. We can feel very confident about that. But maybe this is a person who isn’t able right now to expend the time, energy, money, and effort to change their habits in all of those ways and to sustain that. And it may be that while they learn those skills, which can take some time, that it does make sense for them to take this or that medication. And so we’re better able to serve people in the real world as they actually exist, as they actually live if we don’t restrict ourselves by saying none of those methods are ever good. None of those methods are ever, ever appropriate.

Katja (00:57:10):
Sometimes those methods are the only thing that’s accessible to a particular individual. Yeah.

Avoid Gurus & Those Who Break the Law

Ryn (00:57:17):
Okay. So all of this stuff also tends to travel with something that we call the guru problem or the cult of personality. Which is where somebody is putting themselves out there and saying I have the lost secrets. I can tell you about what they are conspiring against you with. And we’ve got all of these herbs that are better than drugs and are going to solve all your problems. And I’ve got all the information you need. So trust me, don’t listen to anybody else. You don’t need to. I have all the answers for you. And whether it’s that explicit or not, that lean or that implication is present in a lot of these kinds of offerings or claims.

Katja (00:58:00):
Yeah. The reality is, okay, well, don’t be a guru. And we did a whole podcast episode about that too, How to Not be a Guru, but I never know the number of the podcasts.

Ryn (00:58:11):
Yeah, we’ll have to put that in the show notes.

Katja (00:58:13):
Ryn will know that one. I don’t know how he does that. Anyway, the thing is that you should have multiple teachers. Even if you are out there, and you see some information and it turns out to be bad. And you evaluate it, and you say yeah no, that’s not actually useful information. That’s still an important exercise for you. And so even if you find the perfect teacher who is exactly aligned with all your everything, it’s still good to hear things from other perspectives because it is good to have your ideas challenged and pushed against. And it is good to let new information in, and evaluate that, and practice evaluating it, and say how does that change what I think right now? How does that expand what I’m thinking right now, or how does that contradict what I’m thinking right now? And is that expansion or contradiction valid?” And even if it isn’t valid, it may make you think of new things. And so that experience is worthwhile. And even if it is hard to find good teachers to add into your collection or whatever, it’s still worth doing because that strengthens, and complements, and expands your knowledge. Yeah.

Ryn (00:59:40):
Yeah. All right. One last sort of red flag category for behaviors from people who want to offer information is basically breaking some laws that exist about what one can say and what one can do in the alternative health space or in the herbalism space. So, one big bucket here is what falls under the idea of practicing medicine without a license. And just to be clear, there is a little bit of difference here between I’m writing a blog, or I’m teaching a class versus I’m speaking to an individual person. So, there are some things that you can get away with, legally speaking, if you’re just like well, I’m at a conference, and I’m doing a class. And I’m saying look, nobody should ever take a statin. You don’t need to. You could just take hibiscus instead. It’s a natural statin. It’ll do the job. It’s fine.

Katja (01:00:32):
That’s not advice.

Ryn (01:00:34):
Yeah.

Katja (01:00:34):
That was an example. That was not advice.

Ryn (01:00:39):
Right. People can get away with that. They’re not going to get in trouble. If somebody goes and speaks to an individual person and says you should stop taking your statin, and you should just drink hibiscus tea every day instead. Now they have absolutely crossed that line because it’s specific advice to an individual. And now this qualifies as practicing medicine without a license. Because it is telling them to stop doing something that a doctor has prescribed, and because they’re saying that this herb can do the same job or perform the same function.

Katja (01:01:09):
Like making a medical claim.

Ryn (01:01:11):
Making a medical claim. Making a claim about a medical condition.

Katja (01:01:16):
Right. And so again, the purpose here is people get so frustrated that this law even exists. In this law is also that we’re not allowed to say that something will treat a disease or cure a disease.

Ryn (01:01:33):
Or prevent.

Katja (01:01:35):
Or prevent a disease, right? And we’re not allowed to diagnose diseases. So, this is all like a package here. Not saying stop taking that drug and take this herb instead. And then this herb will treat, or cure, or prevent your diseases, whatever. So, people get frustrated about that and angry. Like why do we have this kind of law? This is a stupid law. But I don’t think it is. First of all, it is helpful to just not step on the toes of other professionals. Actually, it is helpful to not be in an antagonistic relationship with your client’s other practitioners. It is always better to be in a collaborative relationship with your client’s other practitioners. So, that’s not why they made this law, but the reality is it is better. You will have better results if you are coming from a place of collaboration than if you are coming from a place of antagonization. So, that’s good. But also we do not treat, or cure, or prevent diseases as herbalists. We actually do not do it. And there’s a little bit of hair splitting here, but I think it’s very important hair splitting, and it’s worth doing. That a disease is a name. A diagnosis is a name. It is a label. It is a descriptive term that a particular group of people practicing a particular discipline use to describe what they see in a person.

(01:03:17):
Just like however many hundred years ago they didn’t call diabetes diabetes. They called it something different. It’s the same. Yes, we can say this collection of symptoms. We can describe it in our language as herbalists. We can talk about the cause in our language as herbalists. It will be a different perspective than the way that medical science describes it. Yes, we are talking about the same fundamental thing, but we are looking at different factors and prioritizing different factors in different ways. If it’s an infectious disease, if somebody has the measles, okay, well, the factor is they were exposed to measles. And measles is a really strong germ, and you in fact will get sick if you get exposed to measles and haven’t been vaccinated. That’s pretty hard to avoid. Okay. But if we’re really talking about an inflammatory disease, or a chronic illness, or something like that, which is the majority of work that herbalists do today especially. Then we are prioritizing different factors simply because our tools work differently. And those are the factors where we can have the most influence. So, I don’t even have a problem with adhering to the law about not treating or curing diseases because that’s like saying oh, well I’m not… They’re two different systems.

(01:04:51):
But whether I have a problem with it, or whether I don’t have a problem with it, it is still the law. And when you are getting information, and somebody is flagrantly breaking that law, this is not a hidden law. It is not an unknown law. It has been the law for a lot of years, more than 20 years. And so if somebody is just breaking it, that doesn’t make them a cool rebel. It kind of means they don’t actually understand what herbalism is. It kind of means that they’re not solid enough in their own discipline, in their own practice to understand what we’re really doing here. And they can only function inside the terms of a different practice. Then all you’re really doing is substituting herbs for pharmaceuticals and being like oh no, just take this instead. And that’s not actually the approach that we’re trying to make. So, it’s kind of like yeah, maybe they’re trying to be a rebel and cool and present themselves as bucking the system. Well, that doesn’t impress me. But also it’s admitting that they’re really not very good at our own system that we’re trying to work in.

Ryn (01:06:16):
Let us practice herbalism instead of practicing medicine without a license.

Katja (01:06:19):
Yes.

Ryn (01:06:22):
Yes. All right. So yeah, that’s a pretty big flag. Another one here, last one on this particular subtopic is going to be when people are telling and selling. And so that would mean that this person is both offering information and also products, remedies. They have a consulting practice. They have a teaching business, or practice, or whatever. And they’re also selling tincture blends, formulas, tea mixtures, whatever the preparation is. So, this is not something that you should do. And this is coming more from the product side of things in the sense that the FDA and some other authorities can look at the whole context of everything that you do in the world. And they can be like well, you sell this product. And even if you’re following the rules about what you’re allowed to put on the label, and what you’re allowed to call it and other things like that. Over here on this other page of your same website you’re talking about that formula or just talking about the ingredients in that formula and saying that they can cure this, and they can fix that, and they can solve all these problems again, in that kind of medical terminology and in that framework. And so when you do those things, then they’re saying okay, these actually constitute claims about your product. And the way that they look at that, and the way that there are connections drawn between the literal product, and the box that comes in, and the label that’s on it, or the sales page that you’ve got about it, and your TikTok account.

Katja (01:08:01):
Your marketing materials.

Ryn (01:08:02):
Your YouTube video, your whatever else, those things are seen as connected because they are. Come on.

Katja (01:08:08):
Because they are, because they are. And then what they’re saying is that you’re making claims about a medical product. Because you’re making these claims, it is clear that you are intending this to be a medical product. But none of those claims have been tested, and therefore this is a fraud that you’re perpetrating. And so people get mad about this too. And also you can check out the podcast episode, Making Peace with GMP and the FDA, something like that for a lot more information about this law and why it’s actually not a bad law. It helps us as herbalists. It actually protects us and helps legitimize us. But it does make people mad because they feel like I should be able to tell people. But the thing is that most of the time when I see product accounts on the internet making claims about their products, they’re not actually very solid claims. And the reality is that being a product maker is a full-time job. And being a teacher is a full-time job. You can’t really do two full-time jobs. And so what ends up happening is that the quality of teaching isn’t fantastic. And even if we’re just saying oh, oops, they just made a mistake or whatever. Okay, but that looks like you are trying to make a promise to somebody to get their money, and that promise wasn’t true. We don’t allow that about pillows, or children’s toys, or mattresses, or cars. Why would we allow that for herbal products, something that you’re going to put in your mouth? You’re going to consume this. There should be basic safety regulations in place, and there are. But when people are not following the safety regulations, whether that’s about cleanliness in the location that they prepared it, or whether it’s about how they talk about their product. And listen, there are very popular accounts that do this. And there are plenty of teachers who also make products and sell them. But it’s kind of counterproductive to creating this legitimacy in the consumer base. A lot of people feel like well, if I can’t teach and sell a product, I won’t be able to make enough money. But that is not actually true. You totally can survive, and make an income, and sustain yourself without breaking those regulations. And so I look for that in a person who is sharing information on the internet.

The More Context, The Better, Including Contraindications

Ryn (01:10:57):
Yeah. Okay. But it’s not all doom and gloom. So, let’s look at some green flags. So, these are indicators that the person and their writing, or their teaching, or their class, or whatever is more reliable, more trustworthy. And so we start with the more context that is given for claims that are made or statements that are made about herbs and what they can do, the better. So, if someone is saying yeah, this herb can be really helpful here but not so much over there. Not in that situation, not in that case, not in that type of individual, not for that variant of the name of this problem that we’re describing. The more context given in that sense, the more trusty it is. Or if the person says well, I found this herb to be helpful in these kinds of cases in these ways. Here’s the whole context about how we were working with it. And that can include things like these were the energetic indications that made me want to choose that plant. These were the herbal action-based reasons that I was choosing it. That’s better than well, because they had this disease, or because they had this symptom, I gave this herb, or I recommended this herb. Better to say they had this symptom. We want this action. The herb has this action. There’s the whole line of thought. There’s the whole thread connecting them all together.

Katja (01:12:27):
And specifically here, that’s important for many, many reasons. But I think the most important one when we’re thinking about evaluating whether or not information is useful and good is that just because two people have the same diagnosis, the same named condition, does not mean they have the same symptoms. And even if they have a lot of similarities, they don’t have the same body. And so when we’re choosing herbs, we have to consider their constitution. Sure, they have rheumatoid arthritis right now, but what else is going on in their body? Are they swollen in the joints but typically dehydrated? Or are they too much moisture everywhere in the body with a lot of stagnation? That’s going to change the way we would approach our work as herbalists, even though they both have the same name. They both have the same diagnosis name. So, when we’re thinking about these claims, it’s not even about like oh, Katja and Ryn said they’re not doing it right if they don’t give this information. Or if they say this herb is for rheumatoid arthritis, then supposedly I’m not supposed to trust them. No, it’s because you don’t actually have enough information to act on what you heard. And so that’s why these context ideas are really important. Because if you just hear cayenne for rheumatoid arthritis, that doesn’t give you enough information to be able to take action yet. You’ve got to have more context to go on.

Ryn (01:14:14):
Yeah. And it helps a lot in terms of confidence building for us when we see people who include things like contraindications or warnings about interactions. So yeah, cayenne can improve blood flow to the heart muscle itself, and it can be beneficial for a number of different cardiovascular problems because of that. But cayenne does have some contraindications, especially if we’re talking about taking it in significant doses every day for a long period of time, because it’s an extremely fiery, hot herb. And so it’s not going to make sense for somebody who’s already running really hot and dry. And it can have a decent blood thinning effect if you take enough of it, and you take it for long enough at a stretch. And so if that person is also on two or three blood thinning medications at the same time, that’s probably not the herb that I’m going to choose in that situation. So, because those realities of context exist in the world where people actually live, they should also exist in the teaching or the discussion of the herb when we’re raising ideas about what we can do with it or how we can help people with it. Yeah. That specificity should also include ideally, ideally things like well, what format are we going to take the herb in? What dose are we going to take it in? How frequently are we going to take it each day, and for what kind of duration? How many days at a stretch are we going to take it? These I put all under the rubric of people do not consume the names of herbs. Because so often when it’s like on the internet especially, or even in classes it’ll be like hey, what do y’all like to offer for this symptom or for this health problem? And then people will just name plants. We’ve shared like one bit of information. It’s not enough to do anything with.

Katja (01:15:59):
It’s not actionable. Yeah.

Ryn (01:16:01):
If somebody says that garlic is good for high blood pressure, well, how do you take the garlic? How much garlic do you need? Who is the garlic best for, and who is it not very helpful for? All those things make a huge difference in the real world, the real instantiation of what we do with it and whether it actually helps or not. Yeah.

Katja (01:16:23):
So, this is so common in Facebook health groups or whatever where somebody will ask a question, and then a million people will just be answering with just the names of herbs. Well, don’t even bother. If you are like oh, I guess I could research every single one of these names of herbs that people are saying. But it’s kind of like there’s just no context for you to even be able to evaluate if that’s a reasonable suggestion or not. So, what you really are looking for is the person who says okay, well, for that situation there’s a few different factors we need to consider. It might be this way, or it might be that way. And if it were this way, then I would be looking at these sorts of suggestions. And if it were that way, I would be looking at those sorts of suggestions.

Ryn (01:17:15):
Or even if it’s more limited. Just like well, I was in a situation kind of like that, and I took it this way. I took it this often. This is some detail about my pattern of symptoms that were manifesting at the time, and my constitution, and also what flavors I like best. That’s good information. That’s something that you can actually build on.

Katja (01:17:34):
Right, because then you can decide how much of that applies to your body and your situation.

Beware Exaggerated Warnings & People Monetizing Only Quick Soundbites

Ryn (01:17:39):
Yeah. Totally. Right. And so it also keeps it grounded in reality that way. It’s like so herbs are fantastic. We love them. There are some limitations to them. Okay. Let’s talk about what those are and what they look like. That’s very different from being like yeah, herbs are amazing, and they’re incredibly powerful. But also they might kill you if you take them with the wrong over the counter medication. That’s going too far in, I guess, the other direction or some other direction.

Katja (01:18:05):
Yeah. Well, and I think that again is one of those trying to steal authority by looking like you are the arbiter of knowledge of what is dangerous.

Ryn (01:18:19):
Ginger shouldn’t be taken in pregnancy because it could put you at risk of a spontaneous abortion. Okay, no, no. And also no. That’s not realistic. That’s not grounded in reality. That’s grounded in several different layers of theoretical concern. In this particular instance if you’re not familiar, this is rooted in people looking at anything that can serve as an emmenagogue and bring on menstruation when it’s slow and sluggish. And being like well, that must also be an abortifacient. And ignoring the fact that ginger is completely routine and extremely reliable for nausea during pregnancy and other facets like that. And is in no way going to put somebody at risk of spontaneous menstrual cramps, or uterine spasms, or whatever else. It’s way, way out there.

Katja (01:19:03):
Yeah, yeah. So, really kind of thinking like there are things that you shouldn’t combine with a common over-the-counter drug. I’m thinking like St. John’s wort and Tylenol. Yeah, okay, that’s not a good idea. Or even St. John’s wort and organ rejection drugs. Well, they’re not common over-the-counter drugs, but that’s also a terrible idea or St. John’s wort and psychiatric medications. But that doesn’t mean that St. John’s wort is dangerous in all situations. And it also doesn’t mean that we need to set our hair on fire about that situation. It’s just information that you should have. So, somebody trying to get attention by making something sound scary is different than somebody who’s just giving you clear context.

Ryn (01:19:51):
Right. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of times what happens there is that somebody has kind of adopted a statement out of some scientific context and taken it out of its scientific context. And that can happen like oh, you should never ever take passionflower if you’re also taking a benzodiazepine drug because passionflower has constituents that bind to the benzodiazepine receptor. And therefore when you take that with that drug, it’s going to have this additive effect, and it’s going to make you super drowsy. And you’re going to sleep for three days, or you’re going to crash your car while you drive home, or something else is going to happen like that. So, that’s based on some science. There are constituents in those herbs that do bind to those receptors in the brain. But they don’t do it at anything approaching the strength of the drug. And they’re not going to have the kind of additive effects that you would get between two drugs. They’re porting over that concept from drug-drug interactions, and now applying it to herb-drug interactions, and not paying attention to the potency of those chemicals in that plant. The concentration of those chemicals in that plant, maybe they’re there, but there’s not really much of them. And when you drink a cup of tea, the exposure you get is too small to really matter in this particular way. So, this goes into kind of the other main topic we wanted to get to today, which is about how do we analyze scientific information about plants?

Katja (01:21:20):
Before we jump to that though, I do want to kind of wrap up that green flag segment with a little reality check though. Because there are lots of people, especially on social media, who are spewing complete nonsense, even if they look like somebody you could trust, even if they sound like somebody you can trust. And there are a lot of people on the internet who do have a lot of experience, and are saying things that are reasonable. But in a social media environment where you have 60 seconds, 30 seconds. Maybe it’s TikTok, and you have a couple of minutes to try to get some information across, and your full-time job is not influencer. Then you may not include the complete context of every single thing in every single post. So, I do want to leave space for good teachers, good people to learn from, to put a post out there that does just say hey, this helps a lot with this thing, because it’s a short form whatever. And so if a person is always only saying those things, and they are an influencer or whatever, and they are monetizing their who knows what, we’re stacking up the flags here. Whereas if a person sometimes takes more time to be more in depth about some context. And other times does a quick Instagram story or whatever that is boy, I love my ground ivy. It really beat my headache today. Or whatever they happen to say. That’s something that I could envision saying. So okay. Just because they did that once or a couple times in a short medium doesn’t immediately rule out their validity as somebody to learn from. So, we’re trying to look at their body of work overall and also cut them a little slack for the reality that it is hard to get all the context into a 30-second video or a 60-second video. Okay, that is true. And that’s why we want to look at all their different sources, like longer form sources to see okay, but when they do have the time, do they say these things? When they do have this space to expand, are they including the things that I want to be hearing from a teacher?

Critically Evaluate Scientific Research

Ryn (01:24:03):
Yeah. So some of the things that we’re talking about have some echoes that are going to turn up when we’re looking at scientific sources of information, like an article about a study or a review article that draws together information for multiple studies and papers and things like that. So, the first thing we want to say here is that there may not be a study for everything that you’re interested in, right?

Katja (01:24:25):
There definitely won’t be. Yeah.

Ryn (01:24:28):
Yeah. Not every connection between an herb and a health problem, or some effect in the body, or whatever else has already been investigated. Or not investigated in the way that you would hope, which we’re going to outline more as we go along.

Katja (01:24:44):
Yeah. That’s a big factor. They may have investigated it, but their purpose for investigating it is not the same as your purpose for investigating it. So, the results might not be accessible to you. Yeah. Even if you can read them, they might not be actionable for you. Yeah.

Ryn (01:24:59):
Yeah. This does also, like what we’re about to say here, it does also apply to things that are not just in PubMed or some other internet repository of scientific data. If there’s a book, and it has a bunch of claims that are apparently backed up by citations to scientific information, then that still deserves a little bit of a critical eye. Remember that publishing companies publish books because they hope to sell them. This is a bigger motivator than to educate the populace.

Katja (01:25:34):
That’s in particular true in our industry as herbalists. They are not out there saying well, we’re only going to publish books by good herbalists. No, they will publish any book they think they can sell.

Ryn (01:25:51):
So I mean, even the ones that are not written by AI, they do still need to be vetted and investigated. And you look at them not with scorn but with curiosity.

Katja (01:26:00):
Yeah, yeah. And the sad thing is that there are some books out there that are worth writing that won’t get written because a publisher would say that wouldn’t sell enough copies to make a profit.

Ryn (01:26:13):
That’s true.

Katja (01:26:14):
Yeah. But I can think about some herbalists that I’m like man, I would love their book. But it won’t ever get written maybe because they don’t have the time, but also because they don’t have the publishing contract that would pay them to take the time to write it, whatever.

Ryn (01:26:30):
Yeah. But let’s think about scientific articles, the things that get published in some journal somewhere. And then the most common way for you to find them is you’re doing a search in Google Scholar, or at the PubMed website, or some resource like that. Okay. So, you found a paper that you find interesting. The first question to ask is even if this paper is good, and I’m not sure it is yet. But even if it is good, does it apply to anything that I can actually do in the way that I practice as an herbalist? So, there’s a few different ways that we can try to assess this. And the first one is like, does the headline about the paper, like maybe you saw that from EurekAlert, or Science Daily, or some other aggregator about news, about science, like new publications. And they make a little article that says these people at this university were studying this thing, and they found some results. And they have a little short article about it. So, there’s that. There’s that little article, there’s that little article’s headline. Polyphenols from cacao have been shown to reduce blood pressure, therefore eat as much chocolate as you want. No, hang on. Right? So, there’s the headline. There’s the actual paper itself. There’s the abstract of that paper. And then there’s the full text of that paper, especially the materials and methods sections. Because that is what did we work with and what work did we do with it? And that’s really where your attention should go most deeply.

Katja (01:28:03):
Right. Remember that, and I feel like this is really important, and that people have really forgotten this or maybe didn’t even ever know it. But as papers have become more mainstream and more accessible that anybody can read one, I see that the general feeling about a paper is that it is in and of itself proof of a truth. And that is not what a scientific paper is. A scientific paper is a report about an experiment that was done for the purpose of encouraging other people to also do the experiment and see if they get the same results. So that as a community, the scientific community can begin to get enough data together to determine whether or not something is real. Just one paper does not prove that something is real yet because they could have had some kind of outlier. They could have had some kind of contamination. They could have had some thing that somebody else would have done differently, whatever. So, really recognize that the purpose of any one study – and a meta review we’ll put aside – like an individual study, the purpose of any individual study is here’s some data. We need more. Who wants to add to my pile of data by rerunning my experiment? And when you remember that that’s the purpose of a study, then studies are no longer written in stone. And they should never have been written in stone. Science doesn’t look at a study as written in stone. But I feel like mainstream people reading a study do look at that and say well, this is written in stone. This is now obviously the truth.

Ryn (01:30:06):
Yeah. But the process of being like okay, we did this experiment. It had all these details to it about what we applied, and how we did it, and so on. And then kind of distilling that down into here’s the real short report on what we did. Down from there into the title of the paper or the headline of the little article about the paper. You can see where information gets lost along the way.

Katja (01:30:31):
Like that telephone game.

Ryn (01:30:33):
Yeah. Yeah. One real practical way this turns up a lot in the context of herbalism especially is that maybe the paper sounds great, really interesting. But it turns out when you look closely that it was actually not a study about the herb. It was a study about some super-concentrated special extract of that herb that you can’t actually make at home. So, it’s not about herbal tea. It’s about a super-critical CO2 extract that has concentrated all the fat-soluble components of this herb. And when you take this one capsule that they produced for their study, it would be the equivalent of consuming like 20 pounds of the herb material itself. So, there’s a gap there between what they were working with and what you have to work with or what you can give to somebody to work with or recommend to them. It doesn’t mean such a study is useless. It can still tell us something interesting. That’s fine.

Katja (01:31:33):
I mean it tells us stuff about the product that they…

Ryn (01:31:35):
It tells us something about that particular preparation, that particular extract, or concentrate, or whatever. And if we have access to that, if that is a commercial entity that exists, okay, cool. Maybe that can be part of my recommendation set for somebody who runs into that same issue. Okay. But just being aware of that difference between here is quote a study on spearmint, or saw palmetto, or kelp, or whatever. Versus oh, that was actually a study on a specialized extract of one of those things. Just being aware of that difference and looking out for it when you see this kind of information gets you pretty far ahead of a lot of folks.

Katja (01:32:15):
The problem with that specific thing and why this is so important for you to be aware of is because the headline will not say super-concentrated extract PS-128 found to help Alzheimer’s patients in this way. It will say ginkgo helps Alzheimer’s patients in this way. Oh wait, no, that’s not the same thing.

Ryn (01:32:42):
Right, right. Yeah. And I mean to some extent that depends on where this is being reported. So for instance, there could be a study that was done on an extract of ashwagandha. And in some publications it’s going to be headlined ashwagandha relieves stress symptoms in postmenopausal women. And then in some industry publication it’s going to say KSM-66 circle R was shown to relieve symptoms of anxiety in postmenopausal women. Because the people reading that industry publication know what KSM-66 is. They know that this is a branded extract from ashwagandha made by these companies that you can buy and put into your supplements. Okay. So, context dependent is going to apply here as well. Yeah. So, just like the study may have been done on a specific extract or a specific preparation of a given herb, it could also be given to a specific population or people who have a particular disease state. And the results you get there may not generalize to all people. So, a simple version could be maybe the preparation is fine. We are talking about linden tea. Okay. And they found that in people with elevated blood pressure, the linden tea at this given dose at this given frequency was able to reduce their blood pressure on average by this many points. Okay. That was people who already had high blood pressure. So, you wouldn’t want to take that report and be like linden reduces blood pressure by this many points no matter who you give it to. For somebody with normal, healthy blood pressure, we wouldn’t expect that to happen. And we’re grateful for that because we don’t want to take healthy, good-range blood pressure and drop it down by 20 points or whatever. If we had blood pressure that was 20 points too high, we do that. Fantastic. If it’s normal, and we drop it down, well now we’ve given you low blood pressure. and you’re going to have headaches, and you’re going to feel bad. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, and we’re grateful that it doesn’t.

Katja (01:34:51):
But that’s the way that pharmaceuticals work. So, a lot of people… Listen, we all grew up – well, most of us grew up – in a medicalized environment. And so it is not unreasonable that people hear the study about linden and interpret it through the filter of medical science and pharmaceutical science. And then decide that that study means that linden also will drop blood pressure in a person who does not have elevated blood pressure. That’s a reasonable assumption to make if the thing that you know about is pharmaceuticals. But again, that is like hey, that’s not our system. That is a system, and we coexist with that system, but it is not our system. It is not how herbs work. And so we cannot make the assumption that the herb is going to do the same thing that the drug is going to do. Okay. If you have a question, then we should find out. We should follow it up because also maybe don’t assume that it’s not going to do it. But we’re going to find that out. We don’t assume it.

Question Scientific Methods & Results

Ryn (01:35:58):
Yeah, yeah. And so far we’ve been assuming that the study under question was like an intervention trial with actual people, but that’s not always the case either. So, was it a trial at all, or was this some kind of theoretical investigation based on the shapes of the molecules that they found in the plant? Sometimes that happens.

Katja (01:36:18):
Well, and that’s not unreasonable. So, studies get funded because companies are trying to make something that they can patent and sell. And so before they’re going to spend a lot of money on an actual trial that’s going to require a laboratory, or a cohort, or a whatever, okay, that’s going to be expensive. Well, the first thing we’re going to do is just look at the molecules and say does this even make sense? Does it even make sense? We’re going to look at some ethnobotany and say is there any kind of reason to believe that this should make sense? Whatever. So, that’s not nefarious. And it isn’t like cheap, oh, you just copped out and did the cheap thing. No, it is the step they take before they take the next step. Of course, they may take that first step and then choose not to take any further stuff, right, because it does not look like it will be profitable. And now that study is still in PubMed or whatever. So, be careful. That might mean that that study is also not profitable for you. But I do want to clarify that it’s not bad that they do that theoretical molecular modeling or whatever.

Ryn (01:37:34):
Yeah. A lot of times nowadays those are referred to as in silico studies, which just means like on the computer. And then of course there’s in vitro. So, in a Petri dish or in some kind of little model organism or whatever like that versus in vivo. So, like in a living creature. Like the whole creature instead of just some uterine tissue cells from a pig that we put in the Petri dish, and we give some of them cancer. And then we take some herbal extract, and squirt it on there, and watch what happens. That’s like an in vivo study. Sorry, that’s an in vitro study. And then in vivo is like we have an actual pig. And we give it some of the herb, and we see what kind of happens to its blood pressure or whatever it is we’re looking at. Okay. And then of course this also raises is it a study on animal tissues or whole animals, or is it a study on humans? And that can matter a lot. There are frequently cases where what an herb or for that matter a drug does in another mammal isn’t the same as what it does in a human mammal.

Katja (01:38:43):
Yeah. We’re not mice, it turns out. Yeah.

Ryn (01:38:47):
And then of course things like how many subjects did they have to investigate. If there was giving this herb to 20 people or 20 mice who have this health condition or whatever, and we get some results on it. that’s not the same as 20,000. So, there can be issues with that as well.

Katja (01:39:08):
While we’re at it, who are the people? Let’s say that it is a cohort study. We gave it to actual people. Well, if the people aren’t a good match for the herb that we’re trying to study, then we have the inverse problem of a specific population. So, if we’re only studying something in people with elevated blood pressure, fine. But if we’re trying to say is this herb helpful for depression? Okay, well first of all, as herbalists we know that is not a helpful framing, right? Because we need to be more specific. But as medical scientists, that is a frame that they would be working from. So, they may say okay, is this helpful for people with depression? But then they’re not going to take any particular nuance around that. They’re not going to say what type of depression do these people have? They may give clinical separations, like diagnostic separations, but they’re not going to look at that energetically. And they’re not going to say how many of these people have a hot constitution? How many of these people have a cold constitution? How many of these people also have stagnation, or dehydration, or whatever else? And any given herb that they choose will work different in all those parts of the population. So, if we had sorted for I’m looking at heavy depression around menstruation in people who have cold, damp, stagnant constitution, and I work with a particular herb. My results will be really different than if I say I’m going to work with that herb for people who have premenstrual depression across the board. If we just do that across-the-board cohort, we dilute the results. So, it looks like something wasn’t very successful. And then science says see, herbs don’t work. But then they also say they’re totally dangerous. So okay, see herbs don’t work. Well yeah, when you set your study up that way, you’re not going to get good results. But if we had set the study up by having a professional herbalist on the research team, which we don’t do in this country, we would have had a better study that would have shown us for this portion of the population this herb was effective.

Ryn (01:41:33):
Yeah, totally. Okay. But then also, what are these results we got? What were they? How were they collected? How were they identified? Sometimes there’s an objective marker. We can be like okay, we were trying to see if this is going to lower LDL-C cholesterol numbers for people, and we can measure that before and after, and we can see what kind of change we got. But other times it’s going to involve a diary. So, the person is going to check in once a day. Or they’re going to write down once a week about how’s your quality of life right now? And those things are not meaningless, but they do leave a lot more potential for confounded results. For things like the healthy user bias or for people’s problems of recall to come in and muddy up the results for you a bit. So, we just need to keep awareness of what is the type of information that was collected and how was it gathered? And include that in our understanding of how reliable is the conclusion that came out of that.

Consider Meta-Analyses & Learning Anatomy/Physiology

(01:42:41):
Now, not all papers you look at in a scientific database like this are going to be about a trial where we do an experiment. A lot of times they’re going to be a review paper or a meta-analysis where we are looking at a bunch of different papers on that subject, maybe on that herb, right? And saying okay, when I look at all of this body of knowledge about this herb, what can I abstract from that? Papers like that can be really, really helpful because they can bring together evidence from several different intervention trials. They can help to draw out things like well, it seemed like it worked really well for that group. But then for this other one it didn’t seem to go so well. So, we can at least say there are some reasons why it might be better for an individual or worse, right, even if we didn’t identify what those were yet, whatever. But one really important element here is how did they select what articles to include and exclude from their review or from their meta-analysis? And of the articles that were included, not just from the scientist’s perspective but from yours as the clinical herbalist, did they all belong there? Did they do a meta-analysis on lavender, but half the results are about lavender aromatherapy with essential oil, and half the results are about lavender extracts and capsules. And then there was one that was about tea. So, it’s going to depend for you on whether you work with aromatherapy, whether you work with the capsules, or whether you only talk about giving flowers and tea to people. How is it relevant to you, your practice, your methods? Yeah.

Katja (01:44:24):
We do also need to put a little plug in here for AI. This is a negative plug because a lot of these papers are now being written by AI. A lot of papers all over the place are being written by AI. And they are hallucinating. I don’t know why we call it hallucinating. They’re just making it up. They weren’t whatever.

Ryn (01:44:52):
They’re selecting plausible word tokens to go after the previous word tokens.

Katja (01:44:56):
Right. And so they make up studies that don’t exist to cite, and they say the study is real. And then when you look, the study doesn’t exist. Those people don’t exist. The study isn’t real. There’s nothing about it. And this is becoming a problem that is so big that it’s actually a crisis in the scientific community right now. And this has really happened over just like the last three years or even the last two years. Because the generative AI has come so fast on the scene and started creating these that the people who, not regulate but administer and maintain all these different sources, like bodies of scientific studies, are having trouble determining which are which. And they can’t keep up for checking all of them to verify what is real and what is not. There are trackers out there for retracted studies. That when they find these AI slop studies and retract them, that then it’s published in these trackers that say okay, hey, this study actually wasn’t real. If anybody was using this, this one wasn’t real. But you’ve got to be checking in on that all the time.

Ryn (01:46:18):
It’s a lot of work to access that. And I mean, this is a problem that has existed as long as the publish or parish model of academia has existed. There’s been incentives for people to rush something to publication or to present something in a little more sensationalized way, to massage the data a little bit, or to dig through the data you’ve collected until you find a correlation that’s exciting. And to publish on that rather than on whatever your original plan of investigation was going to be. These are known problems.

Katja (01:46:53):
And paper mills have been around too for a long time, which is like an organization that is intentionally creating fake studies. But they couldn’t do it at the volume before. And now just the sheer volume of it is overwhelming the scientific community.

Ryn (01:47:12):
Yeah. And so the incentive still exists for somebody who’s a researcher trying to establish themselves and trying to build up their personal bibliography to the point that they can continue to get grants. And maybe they could get tenure someday if they’re really, really lucky and things like that. And so there is incentive there to be like I’m going to let AI help me to produce an interesting paper. So yeah, that’s a real problem. And one thing we want to make extra clear here, you might have heard this as we were talking but to make extra clear, this is not just a matter of you sitting down at chatGPT.com or talking to Claude, and it’s hallucinating scientific paper citations to you. We’re talking about ones that have now gotten into the corpus of scientific information and are poisoning it.

Katja (01:48:01):
Right. So Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever will do that. If you ask for something, it will just lie to you about stuff. But this is like you went to PubMed, you got a study. You were searching for something you’re interested in. This happened to me recently. I was looking at wild lettuce and chronic nephritis. And I got a study. And I was like wow, this is fantastic. I really didn’t know, I didn’t expect there was going to be something. I’m so excited. And the study was complete fake. It was real. It was in PubMed, but it wasn’t real. And all the citations were fake, or some were fake and some were not actually relevant to the study itself. They were about a totally different plant and had nothing to do with this paper. And it was sad. I was really upset about it. So, that’s the point is that it isn’t just if you say oh, is there any study that will tell me that this is good on your own AI account? Which don’t do that. But if you did, then the chances that you get a false result back where the generative AI is telling you yes, here is a study from 19- or 2000 whatever and blah, blah, blah. The chances that that is not real, it was totally made up, is very high. But this is about you got a study that was in PubMed, and the study itself was generated by AI and is not real.

Ryn (01:49:38):
Yeah.

Katja (01:49:38):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:49:39):
So it’s a difficult problem.

Katja (01:49:41):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:49:41):
And there is not an easy solution here, right? But the beginning of the solution is for you to develop some capacity to read, and understand, and to interpret these kinds of publications. So, we’re giving you some ideas to get started on that right here in this podcast episode today. You’ve already heard some. We’ve got a couple more. But I just want to make a note that we do get into a lot of detail about this in our course Clinical Skills. This is part of our Clinical Herbalist program. It’s a really big part of that program.

Katja (01:50:13):
It’s a big course.

Ryn (01:50:14):
It’s an extensive course. There’s a lot involved in it. Not only this kind of thing, but we do highlight this kind of issue and give people information and skill-developing methods so they can learn how to look at a study, to extract from it the information that’s relevant to your practice as an herbalist, and to identify cases where this is not actually helpful. This doesn’t say what it claims it does. Or again, there’s a mismatch between the data, the abstract, the title, the headline, whatever else. Yeah. All right. And actually as a side note here, you were raising this earlier that it’s not just about studies on herbs. Is this herb good for X problem? But studies about basic physiology are also very interesting to us as practitioners.

Katja (01:51:04):
I would say these are more interesting to me than studies about herb function simply because a study about physiology like hey, check this thing out that we discovered about the glymphatic system. That is interesting to me because the more that I understand how the body works, and listen, we are still discovering things about how the body works. Do not think that that is set science that is past tense. We are still learning about how the body works. And so the more information that I get about how this works and how that works, that physiology helps me to make decisions about what herbal actions I could apply to impact that situation. It helps me understand where I can hook into a problem because there are no herbs for a diagnosis. We have to find our own on ramps of how we’re going to improve the situation for this person.

Ryn (01:52:13):
Yeah. And so a study about physiology might ultimately help us answer a question that’s shaped like would that herb be helpful for this problem? It would help us answer that question by giving us more context and more understanding about what’s going on in the body. How the body works, how these things play with each other in order to make a plausible theory about what the herb could do or what the actions of the herb could do for that issue. Yeah.

Katja (01:52:40):
And I think that also applies to anatomy and physiology books as well as studies about new information about physiology. Just also recognizing that anatomy is generalized. Each individual body, if you opened every person up, they would not look like the book. The book is like a general representation. But we all grew our own bodies, and we didn’t grow them all the same way. So okay, we all have livers – almost everybody has livers – but maybe they’re shaped a little different. Maybe one’s a little higher, one’s a little lower. Maybe one’s a little bigger or smaller than expected or whatever. Some people have their organs on the other side just because that’s just how they grew them. So, kind of recognizing that when you are studying AMP, that’s good, that’s valuable, that’s going to help you. But it is generalized. And then we have to take that general information and then look at the specific person that we’re working with. And kind of try to line up what seems to be happening for them with the general expectation of what happens in a generalized body.

Be Cautious About AI Scientific Slop, Industry Propaganda, & Statistical Tricks

Ryn (01:53:57):
Right. Okay. So, some red flags when we’re looking at scientific information. First one we kind of talked about already where the citations that are given or the text of the study itself turns out to be AI slop. Like we said, difficult problem, not always immediately recognizable. But just like with any other genre of text, the more experience you have with it, the better able you are to recognize AI versions of it. So, you probably read a lot of emails. And you have certainly received some AI-written emails and been able to clock it as such because you’re like this is different. There are tells in here. And I’m not just talking about the em dashes and whatever. But it’s not this, it’s that. Okay. We know the basics, right? But there are things that kind of just feel a little bit funny to you.

Katja (01:54:53):
Like a little plastic.

Ryn (01:54:54):
Yeah. Because of your familiarity with that type of text when it’s actually made by a human. And the same thing applies to a short story, or to a scientific paper, or whatever else. The more familiar you are with human-generated content, the easier it gets to identify the AI-generated content. So, that’s the first step there.

Katja (01:55:18):
Yeah. And also just keep in mind, this problem is freaking out scientists right now. Seriously freaking. The entire science world has their hair on fire about this problem. So, if you are like oh my goodness, how am I ever going to know what is real and what isn’t real, and this is terrible. Okay. All of science world is also feeling that way. So, this isn’t good, but at least you’re not alone.

Ryn (01:55:51):
You’re not alone.

Katja (01:55:52):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:55:53):
And I mean all the things that we’re talking about here about how to read a study more thoughtfully, more carefully, things to watch out for, indicators of problems. Many of those come to us from scientists who are interested in the process of science and the products of science and how to improve them. It’s not all an herbalist meditating with a plant and being like I think the scientists have some flaws in their perspective here. Yeah, sometimes we can bring that in because we know the herbs better. But a lot of this is going to apply to any kind of science that’s being done. Social science, whatever, it’s not only health and medicine. Basic errors can be a red flag. So, like that study about lettuce you were looking at.

Katja (01:56:34):
Yeah, I was looking at wild lettuce, but there were two references that weren’t to wild lettuce. And they were of course the two most important references. One was to sea lettuce, and one was to a specific strain of vegetable lettuce for a salad that had been developed to have no potassium, like genetically-modified to have no potassium, so that people who were taking a specific drug could eat a salad. And okay, well that’s not how… neither one of those are helpful.

Ryn (01:57:10):
Not applicable to the wild lettuce in my yard right now.

Katja (01:57:12):
Yeah. Neither one of those have to do with Lactuca virosa. Not at all.

Ryn (01:57:18):
Right. So, when something like that happens. When you’re looking at it, and you’re like wait a minute. I thought this was about this plant. But first of all, your botanical name doesn’t match the common name that you’ve started using. And then later on here I look at your citations, and this one is about that botanical Latin name for the plant. And this is a different species. Okay. Maybe I don’t write it off yet. Are they close enough in physiology? Are they similar enough versions that we could swap them out as herbalists and not feel like we were losing something? Okay, maybe, but then maybe not, right? An old school example is like review papers about ginseng that included data on Panax ginseng, Panax quinquefolius, and Eleutherococcus senticosus. And you’re like okay, some of these things are like each other, but I thought we were doing a paper on Asian ginseng. That’s only one of those three.

Katja (01:58:09):
Only one. Yeah.

Ryn (01:58:10):
Come on, let’s tighten up the ship here a bit. Yeah.

Katja (01:58:14):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:58:14):
All right. So that kind of thing is a red flag. Yeah. Okay. And then how about some industry propaganda? And again, we’re trying not to do conspiracy here, right? But if I’m looking at it, and I’m like hey, wait a minute. This is a study about cacao polyphenols, and it’s funded by – I don’t know…

Katja (01:58:40):
Hershey’s.

Ryn (01:58:41):
Hershey’s, yeah.

Katja (01:58:41):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:58:43):
Then I’m going to have some hesitation in the way in how far I carry their conclusions forward.

Katja (01:58:50):
It’s not unreasonable for a corporation to fund a study about their product. In fact, one could even say that’s responsible. Because if I’m going to sell this thing, I want to make sure that it actually does what it says. It’s not any different than cars being crash tested, but…

Ryn (01:59:12):
Yeah. I mean Sambucol has funded a number of studies of Sambucol. This is a commercialized brand of elderberry syrup. And they funded some good studies. You know that they’re funded by that company. You know that they’re more excited about the positive results. We also recognize that there can be this situation where there’s selective publication and selective non-publication. If there was results that were bad or really didn’t do any better than placebo, there’s an incentive to not publish that anywhere, and put it in the drawer, and just leave it there. And that happens.

Katja (01:59:50):
That happens. So, the thing here is that just because it was paid for by the industry does not automatically mean that it’s wrong or bad. But it does mean hey, I should look at this three times. I should be really sure that this is solid. And when I’m doing it, I should think about what other studies did this company pay for that I’m not seeing?

Ryn (02:00:19):
Right. And especially if you’re encountering a reference to a study in the form of a headline, or a snippet on social media, or something like that. Just remember that oftentimes the magnitude of effect, even if what they’re describing is correct, the magnitude of effect could be very, very different. So, it could be like oh, turmeric relieves joint pain. Okay. Well, how much? And how much did you need to take to get joint pain relief? And is that in a dose in a format that we can replicate at home or at the store and give to somebody? And those all might cash out to be yes. Turmeric example is maybe not the best here because it can do a pretty decent job actually. But you can certainly imagine a case where a company makes a product, they want to run a little study on that. They get a result that’s promising but small. The degree of benefit that the study subjects received was statistically significant but still pretty minor. But then you just remove all of the references to magnitude, like potency, and you just say the end result. It improved depression. It improved joint pain. It reduced blood pressure, whatever.

Katja (02:01:34):
Instead of it improved depression for 1% of the people in the trial. Or it improved joint pain by 3% or whatever. It lowered cholesterol levels by 0.01%. Instead we just say it lowered cholesterol levels. Yay. Yeah.

Ryn (02:01:54):
Yeah. So, that can often be a bit of a mismatch there. And then individual researchers might also have an agenda of some kind that can go into the whether we publish or whether we put it in the drawer kind of thing. It can also go into p-hacking and other forms of statistical manipulation, especially when you have a big data set. We collected data from a whole bunch of people over a long span of time. And originally this was done for a specific purpose. But then we were like well, we’ve got all this data. So, why don’t we just kind of go looking through it and be like oh, but I can make a correlation between how much red meat they said that they ate on their one week or once a month diet journal, which is not super trusty. And the incidence of this health problem, or their levels of cholesterol in the blood, or whatever else. And I can draw some connection between them. So, that happens a lot in nutrition science especially. But it can happen in other areas as well where somebody has a bunch of data, and then they just look for some interesting or exciting correlation because they know they can get that study published.

Katja (02:02:58):
Yeah. Whether or not that correlation is actually valid is not as important as if it is publishable and will look great on their resume.

Ryn (02:03:09):
Exactly.

Katja (02:03:09):
Yeah.

Look for Energetics, Simple Herbal Extracts, Mechanisms of Action, & Actionable Studies

Ryn (02:03:10):
Yeah. Okay. So, a lot of things to watch out for. A lot of things to watch out for. But there are also some green flags in this realm too. One of them that we’d love to see, and this would be on a study that’s like we’re trying this herb for a problem. We’re going to see if it can help that problem, that kind of an intervention trial. What we like to see there a lot is if they include traditional syndrome differentiations or basically energetics. So one example I really like was a study that was done on working with rose essential oil or absolute, I think it was, applied to the temples to see if this could relieve headaches and migraines. And in that study this was being done from a Unani Tibb perspective, and so they were assessing people for their constitution under that system. Which is pretty similar to your sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic thing. But essentially what they came away with was the rose essential oil is way more helpful for people with heat in their constitution than for people with cold as the dominant factor. And of course that makes perfect sense to us herbalists, right? Because rose is cooling. And if you have a hot type of a headache, it’s going to be more helpful for you than if you have a cold pattern one. So, it matches up really well. It fits in with our framework for understanding plants and people coming together. And so that’s really valuable. We love it when that kind of thing is included in the study design.

Katja (02:04:41):
Yeah. That does not happen very often in the United States. But it does happen much more frequently in international studies, which are now much more available. It used to be really hard to get international studies, and then you also had to be able to read them. But now they are auto-translated and included in PubMed and whatever, so it’s so much easier to find them. But so yeah, when you see in the methods that they were making some sort of differentiation in their cohort about who they expected to benefit or who they found to benefit in the end, then that is a study to hold onto.

Ryn (02:05:25):
Yeah. Right. Because again, you work with those same kinds of differentiations, right? Again, directly relevant to your practice. Okay. Another one is very similar. It would be if the study is investigating what they’ll usually refer to in a scientific context as a quote crude extract, right? Or in some cases like a galenic extract might be a phrase that’s used. But that really just means the kind of remedy that you can make at home: tea, tincture, infused oil, salve, vinegar extract, all that kind of stuff. Crude. And why is that a green flag? Again, because that’s what you work with, right? Yeah.

Katja (02:06:05):
Right. Yeah. If the study is on a hyper-concentrated, isolated extract, you don’t work with that. Maybe you can buy it, maybe you can’t. It just depends. But if it’s on three cups of tea a day prepared in this method with this many ounces of herb, or this many grams of herb or whatever, and this much water, okay, well you can do that. So, that study actually is actionable for you.

Ryn (02:06:34):
Yeah. And that can and should catch your attention. For years I was really skeptical about the claim that spearmint could reduce excessive levels of androgens in the human body, particularly relevant in the case of PCOS or what they now call PMOS. And I was like that’s interesting, but people make a lot of outlandish claims about herbs, and hormones, and stuff like that. So, I’m naturally skeptical of those when I encounter them. And then I did a little bit digging. And I was like wait, these are studies on spearmint tea. These are studies on two cups of spearmint tea in a day, and they’ve got pretty significant results, and this is actually real. And that changed the way I talk about spearmint to people who are dealing with PMOS symptoms. And again, it was because of the format. It was because of the way they were preparing that.

Katja (02:07:29):
Right. If that had been an isolated extract concentrated to whatever percent, then it wouldn’t have been as interesting unless you could purchase that, and you wanted to work with that. Yeah.

Ryn (02:07:42):
Exactly. All right. Sometimes a study will propose a mechanism of action. Not just we observed this herb making a change in this blood parameter, or this symptom severity, or whatever. But here we’ve identified some of the chemistry in the plant and what it’s doing on those kind of microscopic levels, the mechanism of action. So, when those are more relevant to our work or we can make some kind of practical connection, then that’s going to turn into a green flag. So, an example would be self-heal, Prunella, has been identified as being able to reduce microclots in the bloodstream. And that’s pretty interesting to us. We know that microclots can be one of the components that contributes to long COVID symptoms that people are dealing with. And so that’s a very interesting connection. That might give us more reason or another layer – is probably the better way to say it – of reason to recommend self-heal to somebody dealing with those kinds of symptoms if we think that they’re contributed to by microclotting in that particular individual. Because not all long COVID is going to only be driven by that one issue.

Katja (02:08:51):
That particular study was actually really, really interesting because it included a chart of multiple plants and what was the mechanism by which they impacted microclotting. And so another favorite of mine, Erigeron canadensis, was in this study. It was a Chinese study, but they were still working with Erigeron canadensis, and differentiated oh, the self-heal is working in this way. The Erigeron is working in that way. And there were like 20 herbs in this chart, and each one of them were categorized as to what was the mechanism of action. But it was always like oh, it impacts the way that fibrin is working, or it doesn’t allow it to clot up. Or it impacts different –

Ryn (02:09:45):
Platelet formation or whatever.

Katja (02:09:47):
Yeah, exactly. And so a paper like that that has a chart where it is differentiating the mechanism by which each of those plants are working, that is super useful. Because that means that I have enough information to look at the actions of those herbs and think about how I can apply them to lots of different situations that might involve microclotting. Yeah.

Ryn (02:10:14):
Yeah. And just to contrast that with a sort of like molecular mechanism of action that’s not as relevant or not as powerful for us.

Katja (02:10:25):
Actionable. Yeah.

Ryn (02:10:26):
Yeah, actionable. There was a while when COVID was kind of first raging, and people were looking at different options for it. And some folks were talking about elderberry. And they were like well, some of them were saying I’m a little concerned about elderberry actually because I saw this study that indicated that it could increase interleukin-6. And that’s a pro-inflammatory cytokine in the body. And we wouldn’t want to generate more inflammation because what if we give somebody a cytokine storm, and now we have them really, really sick and in big trouble? And the thing about that was that that was one identified mechanism of components of elderberry, but it wasn’t the only one. And it turned out that yeah, elderberry could upregulate a couple of pro-inflammatory signaling molecules in your body. But it could also upregulate a whole bunch of anti-inflammatory molecules in your body. So, this is not yet enough information to say elderberry is going to increase inflammation in people or turn a basic fever into something life threatening. And also reality check, that’s not backed up by anybody’s experience with elderberry in the real world.

Katja (02:11:40):
And yet at that time the internet was on fire with claims about elderberry and cytokine storms, just based off that one result for that one mediator. No.

Ryn (02:11:56):
So that was, again, lacking context. It was one isolated piece of information that people were extrapolating from into a concern that doesn’t manifest in the real world. Yeah. And so in all this you can get a theme here that we’re looking for what’s functional. And ideally the study would be in free-living humans, not in some kind of artificial-living environment where they’re locked in a lab or something like that. Ideally in free-living humans with a relevant form and dose and frequency and so on. That’s closer to the way that we’re going to work with plants. And the closer the scientific information is to that, the more helpful it is. That’s the simplest rubric. How close is this to your actual work?

Katja (02:12:43):
Yeah. Otherwise it’s interesting maybe, but not very actionable.

Ryn (02:12:50):
Yeah. We’re not yet going to be doing things with that.

Katja (02:12:52):
Yep.

Ryn (02:12:53):
Okay.

When You’re Still Not Sure About a Source

Katja (02:12:55):
All right. Well, there’s one other thing here because boy, this has been a huge, long list. And sometimes you see something, and you’re like well, I heard you list all those ways, all those green flags and all those red flags, and I’m still not sure about this. Do I trust it? Do I not?” And first off, it’s okay to not be sure. Listen, no herb teacher is perfect. No anybody is perfect, but no herb teacher is perfect. And so you might be seeing like well, there’s some things that don’t make me feel very comfortable, but then there’s some other things that seem pretty educationally solid. I’m not really sure. If you have found teachers who you trust, you can ask them. Because well, the herbal community is getting bigger, and it’s harder to know everybody. But a lot of us know a lot of us. And it is okay to just ask, and say hey, you person who I’m studying with, and I trust your opinion most of the time. Don’t ever trust anybody 100% of the time. What is your opinion of this teacher? And so in order to do that, you need to make sure that you’re going to a school where you can ask your teachers questions. And I think that is maybe the most important green flag. Well, there’s many important green flags, but it’s an important green flag.

(02:14:28):
There are a lot of educational programs out there where they’re just shoving some stuff out, and that’s the end of it. You can’t ask them questions. Or you can, but the question doesn’t get answered by the actual teacher. Or maybe there’s some student group, and you just have to depend on other students to give you an answer, and you never are able to have contact with that teacher. So, that doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever the information is, it’s automatically bad. But it does mean that you can’t decide that for yourself. You can’t access more information for yourself. So, make sure that you are studying with someone who you can actually talk to and ask questions of. And when you find somebody that you feel comfortable with, not somebody who’s perfect because nobody is, but somebody who you feel comfortable with their judgment, comfortable with their opinion. And most of the time what they talk about either works for you or works for the people in your community for whom it is appropriate because maybe it’s not right for your body. And ask them what their opinion is on this particular source. Or hey, I saw this paper. Is this meaningful to you? Is this actionable? Is this whatever? Yeah.

Ryn (02:15:47):
Yeah. So, you can do that with us. We think we raised some green flags. We do our best to keep the ratio high. And so we’d love for you to learn with us. But hang on. You might want to wait a little bit.

Katja (02:16:04):
Yes. This podcast is coming out the last weekend of June. Don’t join us yet. Wait until July 1st because that is when our semi-annual 20% off sale happens. The code this year is CATNIP. And you can get 20% off all of our online courses from the smallest to the biggest. And you still get to ask us 100% of your questions. So 20% off is a pretty good deal, and you should take it. You can join the Community Herbalist program. If you’re a total beginner, get Family and Community together. Because that’s going to help you learn the material if you’re doing both of them in tandem. If you are advancing in your work, and you want to join us at the clinical level, grab the Clinical Herbalist program. If you’re just trying us out, just get a little taster course like the Stress Management course, which I really am very excited about how that course came out. That’s a brand-new course this year, and it is fantastic if I do say so myself. So yeah, the way that you learn best is when you have guidance, when you have a community, when you have people who you can interact with and teachers who care about making sure that you get your questions answered. And we’d love to do that for you.

Ryn (02:17:42):
We would. So, we’ll see you in July.

Katja (02:17:45):
Oh wait. And you can do all of that at online.commonwealthherbs.com.

Ryn (02:17:51):
That’s right. All right. So until then, that’s it for this episode of the Holistic Herbalism podcast. We’ll be back soon with some more. But for now, please take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea.

Katja (02:18:05):
Drink some tea.

Ryn (02:18:06):
And vet your sources. All right everybody. Bye.

Katja (02:18:10):
Bye-bye.