Episode Details

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 t