This course was incredible helpful... the professor explained everything so great that I understood really good and I was able to start helping patients right away.
I already have a background in naturopathic medicine. I took this course to revise and extend certain aspects of my knowledge in herbal medicine. I thought it was a very well constructed course and I enjoyed taking part in it. I do have this reflection... Clearly this course was designed by people coming from a conventional medical background. There is an evident and laudable attempt to make medicine more holistic, something reflected in the title of the wider course to which this course belongs, Integrative Medicine. However, you are still looking at things from the conventional view point of using a technique or modality to treat a symptom. You are still not looking for underlying patterns of imbalance and treating them, which is what holism is really all about. Another reflection... There is rightly an emphasis on seeking research evidence. However for the majority of herbs good research is lacking. It would somewhat limit our range if we restricted our use of herbs to those with good evidence. Naturally a balance has to be struck between considering evidence from gold standard trials and other types of evidence such as personal and collective clinical experience (regarded as non-evidence by some). It was telling when in one video, the instructor remarked that if we were in the habit of using botanicals ourselves and they worked, then if we chose to prescribe one of those to a patient we could tell them with confidence that it worked. Well, actually we couldn't, because interpretations of personal experience are notoriously unreliable! So in some respects this course has got a foot in both worlds and does not manage completely to resolve the areas of conflict between them.
