We continue this week with Katja’s series: Starting Your Herbal Business! Today the focus is on the practice of clinical herbalism.

Building and running a practice as a clinical herbalist isn’t only about your interview skills, your ability to formulate a personalized remedy, or your capacity to build a holistic health plan in collaboration with your clients. Support work, research, and administrative tasks will take a fair amount of your attention – not to mention continuing education!

Clinical work involves a lot of teaching. You teach your clients how to prepare their remedies, you teach them how the herbs work, you teach them how to build healthier habits. So, our advice for cinical herbalists in training is: practice teaching!

To do all this, you need to understand the herbs on their own terms, but also in the context of modern life. That means common pharmaceuticals and potential herb-drug interactions need to be part of your education, too. It also means that you’ll need to be all brushed up on the legal status of herbalists, and the ways you navigate that. Here in the US, that means understanding our scope of practice as unlicensed practitioners, and your first priority is to avoid “the practice of medicine” according to your state’s laws.

Don’t let uncertainty keep you unsettled! You can build a practice and feel confident in your skills, and help a lot of people. Getting over the administrative hurdles will allow you to focus on the parts that drew you to this career in the first place: the people and the plants.

Ready to start building your practice? The Herbal Business Program has all the nitty-gritty details about setting up your herbal business – whether that’s products, clinical herbalism, or another variety of herbal pursuit. From GMPs and labeling laws, to marketing, to taxes & insurance, to the technology you’ll need to make it all happen, this course has everything. You can do this!

Like all our offerings, this is a self-paced online video course, which comes with free access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions, lifetime access to current & future course material, twice-weekly live Q&A sessions with us, open discussion threads integrated in each lesson, an active student community, study guides, quizzes & capstone assignments, and more!

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!