Professional: Herbal Medicine Chemistry – 6 Part Series 2024

HERBAL MEDICINE CHEMISTY – 6 PART SERIES

For billions of years, plants have evolved in response to the needs and challenges of their environment. Through these constant biochemical challenges, humankind has also greatly benefited from all these chemicals contained in those plants. Herbal constituents are the active ingredients of plants. They are plant compounds (phytochemicals), which, when consumed, have healing effects in the human body.

To a pharmacist, these are the active ingredients of the plant, the chemicals that have a physiological and drug activity upon the body. This is the area of pharmacology. While very valuable to study, these active ingredients are of lesser interest to a medical herbalist, because we use whole plants for whole people. Understanding chemical constituents in isolation does not tell us much about the activity of the whole plant, so we study them within a holistic context of therapeutics.

In this course series, we will dive into the chemistry of how plants do their job in the world of herbal healing. For those with herbalist training, who want to dig deeper into this necessary topic, or for interested herb afficianados, we will bring herbal constituents into focus to improve the use of plants as medicine.

Our main focus will include

· Organic chemistry as applied to healing herbs

· Acids

· Alcohols

· Carbohydrates

· Phenols, phenolic glycosides and polyphenols

· Tannins

· Coumarins & their glycosides

· Anthraquinones & their glycosides

· Volatile Oils

· Saponins

· Cardioactive glycosides

· Cyanogenic glycosides

· Bitter Principles

· Alkaloids

More and more, an understanding of plant chemistry is becoming necessary to excel in the herb world. Join us for this course and up-level your herbal chemistry knowledge. By the end of these six sessions, you will have dramatically increased your herbal effectiveness.

Teacher: K.P. Khalsa, Yogaraj (Ayurveda), A.D., D.N.-C, R.H.

Session Duration: 3 hours