Advanced Global Herbalism and Medicinal Mushrooms
Advanced Practitioner Session: What Is Actually in the Bottle
Oct 26, 2026
5PM, Pacific, 8PM, Eastern
90 minutes
Medicinal mushrooms are the fastest growing category in natural products, and they are also the category where the gap between the label and the contents is widest. A practitioner can recommend reishi, turkey tail, or lion’s mane in good faith and have the client take home a jar that’s mainly powdered rice.
That is not an exaggeration and it is not rare. Analyses of the North American market have repeatedly found products sold as mushroom that consist largely of grain, with very little of the active fraction. The labelling is legal, the marketing is confident, and the practitioner recommending it usually has no way to tell.
This 90 minute session is built for natural healing advocates who use these products and want to evaluate them properly. It covers extraction methods that determines whether anything active reaches the client, the growth medium question that determines what is in the jar, the species by species evidence, and the safety and interaction issues. It does not assume medical or mycological training, and every technical concept is explained from the ground up.
This session is ideal for herbalists, Ayurvedic practitioners, nutritionists, and anyone in practice who recommends medicinal mushrooms and wants to know what they are actually recommending. All are welcome.
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Advanced Global Herbalism and Medicinal Mushrooms
Advanced Practitioner Session: What Is Actually in the Bottle
Oct 26, 2026
5PM, Pacific, 8PM, Eastern
90 minutes
This is a working session for practitioners and the interested general public, delivered in plain language and organized around clinical and product decisions. It goes deeper than a general introduction, so that a practitioner without laboratory training can follow it fully and apply it the same week.
We begin with the fungus itself, because the biology drives everything downstream. You will learn the difference between mycelium and fruiting body and why it matters, what a chitin cell wall means for absorption, and why a raw powdered mushroom delivers very little regardless of the species. From there we cover extraction chemistry in practical terms: beta glucans require hot water, triterpenes require alcohol, and reishi requires both.
The substrate question comes next, and it is the commercial heart of the matter. Many products consist of fungal mycelium grown on sterilized grain and harvested whole, so the resulting powder is predominantly starch. You will learn why a stated polysaccharide percentage is close to meaningless, why beta glucan and alpha glucan figures are the numbers that matter, and what to ask a supplier.
This session uses the Global Herbalism approach. Rather than treating any one tradition as the whole answer, Global Herbalism draws on the best of the world’s great healing systems, the Western herbal and scientific tradition, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, and places them alongside
conventional medical understanding. Fungi occupy a distinctive position here, since Chinese medicine has used them systematically for two millennia, Japan has developed several into licensed pharmaceuticals used alongside chemotherapy, and Western herbalism arrived recently and largely through the supplement industry. Understanding those three routes explains a great deal about why the evidence looks the way it does.
We then work species by species, graded by strength of evidence and therapeutic use. We also cover and the immunological questions that arise in autoimmune disease and transplantation.
This session is taught with respect for the clinical questions practitioners actually face. The instructor, K.P. Khalsa, brings over 5 decades of hands on clinical experience in herbal and integrative medicine together with recognized expertise across Western herbalism, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, the very traditions at the heart of the Global Herbalism approach. Khalsa is a professor at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, and teaches at two natural medicine universities. He is committed to honest, trustworthy education that is rooted in both current medical evidence and real clinical experience.
No medical background required. All are welcome.
What you will learn
● Fungal biology for practitioners, mycelium versus fruiting body, the chitin problem, and why raw powder delivers little
● Extraction chemistry in practical terms, beta glucans, triterpenes, dual extraction, and how to evaluate a product from its label
● The substrate question, how to read a certificate of analysis, and why a polysaccharide percentage tells you almost nothing
● Species by species appraisal graded by evidence, with the Japanese preparations examined in detail
● Safety, interactions, and contraindications
Who this course is for
● Practicing herbalists who recommend medicinal mushrooms and want to evaluate products rather than trust labels
● Practitioners who work alongside conventional care and need to answer questions about mushrooms
● Ayurvedic practitioners, nutritionists, and bodyworkers who encounter these products constantly and want a working framework
● Practitioners who want to know which species have real human evidence and which have laboratory findings only
● Advanced students, and anyone who has ever been unable to answer a client asking whether their expensive mushroom powder does anything
In short, if you recommend mushrooms, this session is for you.
Join KP Khalsa for this live webinar.
