Hello, I am wondering if you have advice on a good way to source herbs for patients/start an herbal pharmacy collection. We are learning about so many herbs and obviously it is not reasonable to have everything on hand for a patient. I am thinking of the individualized tinctures especially. There is a herbal pharmacy that I can order from online by entering the recipe parts and they will make up the custom tincture. I have a colleague who uses this pharmacy with good success (ie. seems like high quality). Would this be a good place to start? Maybe once I get an idea of what herbs I use most commonly, I would keep those on hand? I also have access to a large TCM pharmacy at work but a lot of the formulas I find complicated and it gets a bit overwhelming to understand the energetics of the entire formula vs single herbs. Will we be covering TCM formulas or just individual herbs? So far I am finding it hard to select a TCM formula with complete confidence - some aspects of the patient/formula fit and others don't. I think this will get easier as we progress through the course....I hope, lol. Dana

Creating your own dispensatory is quite costly, so working with a dispensatory is an easy way to do this. There are quite a few and we have a resource page under important docs that can offer some good choices. When I was in full time practice I had a full dispensatory with over 200 tinctures, dried herbs, TCM extract granules, glycerites, capsules, etc (I still have a pretty large inventory of dried herbs, tinctures, capsules, etc, but much scaled down from what it once was). I created this over many years of practice, and had senior students making formulas for patients. It worked reasonably well and kept the costs down for my patients, but was very costly to manage, stock and run. As for TCM formulas in China they are rarely used as is, they are altered to fit the patient. In order to do this you need a full dispensatory. As an example su wu tang is a very commonly prescribed formula for “women’s issues”, but if you want to use it for uterine fibroids, you add cinnamon and tree peony. Using already made TCM formulas will often mean some herbs make sense for your patient , while others do not. I see practitioners who only use pre-made formulas often giving their patients 3-4 TCM formulas, they often overlap (for example a small safe dose of Licorice in one formula, but now they are getting it in 3 different formula and the possibility of adverse effects goes way up) or while most of the herbs make sense there are some that do not. This is why we teach individual materia medica and you will learn to construct your own formulas. You want to fit the formula to the patient, not fit the patient to pre-made formulas, it does not work well.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I am much more comfortable with the single herbs anyway so that was all I needed to hear. I want to know exactly what each herb's purpose is in the formula. I haven't ordered from H&A yet - I wasn't sure about shipping to Canada, customs etc but I should look into that as well.