Emergency medicine herbs with Sam Coffman

Emergency medicine herbs with Sam Coffman
Sam: The idea has always been to be able to have a self-sustainable teams that can operate using herbal medicine in post disaster, off-grid austere rural whatever remote areas, but also, of course, function anywhere in an urban area, or even just make people better at what they do herbally in the middle of the clinic in downtown in an office high rise or whatever.
Lana: You are listening to Plant Love Radio episode number 66. Hello Friends. I hope you're having a good week.
There is a lot more unpredictability in our world these days. As a result, many are looking for ways to be more self sufficient, resilient, and prepared. These are just a few qualities that define my today's guest.
Sam Coffman began his medical education in the military as a United States Special Forces medic in 1989. At the same time, he became highly interested in herbalism as a way to provide healthcare in remote and post disaster regions with a minimum of medical supplies, both for acute care and trauma, as well as for chronic conditions.
This was the start of a long journey into the world of plant medicine for Sam, with thousands of clinical hours, as both a medic on teams and in military emergency rooms, as well as working with herbs throughout the following decades.
Today, Sam is a Registered herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild. He has taught herbalism subjects for almost 30 years and has worked as a clinical herbalist for over 15 years.
Sam founded and runs as survival and herbalism school called the Human Path and Herbal Medics Academy offering wilderness medicine training, herbal clinics online and on campus programs throughout central Texas and around the United States.
Sam also co-founded the outreach organization called Herbal Medics. The organization applies integrative medicine to help medically underserved communities in the United States and abroad.
Today's show notes are filled was incredible resources from Sam. To get access to those, please head over to plantloveradio.com/ 66. Enjoy!
Sam. Hello. How are you doing?
Sam: Hi, thank you for having me on here. I'm doing great.
Lana: I'm very excited to welcome you to the show. We met a few years ago at the American herbalist Guild. And I remember the first time I learned about you and the Human Path, you were demonstrating a set of first aid. And I was so inspired by you that I invested in it. Then the following year you were on a program as a speaker. And I remember for one particular moment, you were talking about emergency back pack. And you said that if you have one, but you never open it and have no idea what's in it, you will be completely lost when the time comes to use it. I was very much inspired by your presentation, in awe of the skills you teach others.
I wanted to invite you today and perhaps take a step back and talk a little bit about how your journey begins. Tell us a little bit about your roots.
Sam's introduction to plants
Sam: Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. I always talk about the fact that my Orthodox medical training came from the roots of special parts of medicine, which is by its own right in my opinion, probably one of the most intense medical training schools or courses that I know of anywhere in the world, certainly in America and then certainly the military.
And that means really innocent compared to civilian training as well. So that's where it started. It's true. But honestly, I grew up in a very plant literate family, we grew our own food. In the summer we gardened, I grew up as a child in Washington state until I was 11 and we moved to Colorado, which I always consider Colorado my home.
And we started again with soil and with gardening, but in Washington state we had about a quarter acre garden that we grew , the whole family participated in that. And I remember as long as I can remember back my mother explaining to me that she talked to the plants and the pants she talked to you always did better. And as a child, I remember talking to plants at that age, and getting this relationship through the plant world. My mother just recently passed away as I was just mentioning to you. We had a Memorial service on zoom with all my family, a big family, seven kids , and some other relatives and friends. And everybody was kind of sharing memories. And that was when that came up for me of how much influence my mother actually had on me, a lasting influence in the world of plants, by doing that, and she loved gardening.
We grew up in a very, what would you call like a high work ethic family. And from a very early age, you're out there. And we remodeled a lot of homes doing construction and doing gardening and doing yard work and, and all of that stuff. And I just remember doing so much work on the soil and in the soil and every spring, as a teenager going out to till the garden, this was how we did our gardens was still kind of the more Orthodox method.
And I remember doing that barefoot every spring and just that feeling of my bare feet in the earth , it was like an indescribable feeling and nothing else did that for me and plants. I love plants. Even at the age of 13 or 14, she gave me a special spot, an area of the garden to grow herbs in. And I didn't know anything about medicinal herbs per se at the time. It was more culinary herbs, but I was growing plants. That attachment to plants I carried with me. I got into natural medicine . At the time it was a distance education in naturopathic medicine before I went back in the military. For me, it was a reentry back into the military, a second time to go into special forces. And even going in, I had to make a choice between doing that or going to a TCM Chinese medicine school.
And it was really kind of weighing both sides. I had the desire to go back in the military just because I felt like I had lost that challenge in my life when I came back out. I was in for four years, came out, went to school, got a degree, and then really felt like I needed that challenge. And then second of all, after really looking at all the different, you know, different, special operations from Navy Seals to Army Rangers to Para Rescue, to Green Berets, I realized that the only place I was going to get the medical education I really wanted, in a way I wanted was going to be as a special forces medic, so long story, but that's what got me into my Orthodox introduction. In that I would say is sort of a cross between being a tactical paramedic on the one side and the medic and a field medic skills and being maybe a nurse practitioner on the other side. It's kind of a marriage of those two worlds. The old model when I was in, was still leftover from Vietnam was a prolonged field care austere medicine. What do you do when you are the higher care? Your medical director may be sitting a thousand miles away and you may only be able to get radio contact once a week. You are it.
And you have to have more than just doctor skills. You have to have nursing skills and you have to have medic skills. You have to trauma, but also acute care and also chronic and even veterinary medicine. It's just amalgamation of everything together.
I guess my point is that I was already very much into the concept of plant medicine before I ever even stepped into special forces, what's called the Q course and then did all that stuff. But, even in my entrance into the Q course, the qualifications course, I found that herbs played a huge role. I have a story that I've told a million times, and if you want to hear it, I'll tell it again.
Lana: Of course
Herbal medicine becomes a part of Sam's life
Sam: about eight months into the medical portion of the Q course, for medic the medical portion at that time was the first thing that you would do is things have changed now. But that time you did one year of medical training as an 18 Delta. That a lot of people fail out of in my class of 83 as an example, 13 of us that started that finished together. And there are recycles that come in and people that shuffled back from classes ahead of time, but that gives you an idea of how many people make it through that the first time. And, about eight months into that we get into at the time is called a med lab or goat lab. You're using it's called live tissue training. You're using, goats basically. And those goats are being, anesthetized and put into all kinds of situations from trauma to gunshot wounds, to longterm care. And they're your patients. You're not allowed to use the word goat there.
So I get there. At the time the first half of that course was in San Antonio. And so I did that there. I did my internship for four months and then went down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I get there and Oh, it was about a week before, maybe less than that before the gold lab started. And so I had a friend that was there already, who was an SF guy and we went mountain biking and I ended up getting in a mountain bike wreck breaking my thumb. So I had an avulsion fracture of my left thumb. And so I couldn't make a fist. I couldn't have no grip strength. The bone was completely pulled away.
I X-rated myself, we had our own x-ray facilities and all that, but I had to go to the hospital and do the real thing and work with the doc there. And so they said, well, it's no big deal. You're going to recycle medically, but we'll need to pin it. And I was like, at that point, There was no way I was taking a recycle, I was going to get through this course, one shot or not at all.
I had a son that I hadn't seen in a year and a half. And I was tired of being in this course at that point. And so I begged him and he allowed me to cast it and he called me an idiot so that I would never have grip strength again.
And I wasn't going to make it through the course anyway, with a cast on and what I was thinking. And he didn't want to ever see me back again, or he'd give me an article 15. So just get outta here, get a cast on your way out the door. So I got a cast on it. I got back to the barracks and I cut the cast off.
I knew there was a little new age shop that had some herbs in it. So I went down there and I didn't know, I probably had a materia Medica of maybe a dozen herbs at the time. I was just getting into herbs. But I knew comfrey and I knew horsetail and I knew what they could do for me.
So I bought those two herbs - about a pound of each and went back to the barracks and I put them into little packages and I put everything under my locker. I was scared. I was terrified. They were going to think I was hiding pot, you know? So I made a bunch of little poultices basically, and I carried around about five or six of those a day.
And you were working like 18 hour days there. It's insane sleep deprivation, but every three or four hours, I would go into the bathroom and I would wet another poultice using just some sterile four by fours, which we had mountains of those. And I put the urban there, get it wet. And I put it on that broken thumb. And I'd wrap it back up with ACE wrap. And of course you had tons of medical equipment, so it was no problem to do all of that. So I walked around with that ACE wrap and I had about three weeks before trauma started and in trauma, in goat lab you're going to have an airway and a breathing and circulation issue.
You're going to have a blocked airway. They're going to stuff goats latex gloves down the nose and throat. And you're going to have to do a quick cricothyroidotomy and you know you're going to have to do it, and you know, you're going to have to deal with a punctured lung.
And you know you're going to have to deal with an arterial bleed. But you don't know where they're going to be or anything. But the one thing you can count on is you're going to probably have to do a cricothyroidotomy. And that takes an immense amount of grip strength with the hand that holds the trachea.
And that was my left hand because I'm right handed. And so I was really concerned about being able to hold the trachea and do this, and you have to have like a Kung Fu grip. A goat has a much deeper neck than a human. But my point to this, it's a long winded story, but my point of this, I made it through - my thumb would ache afterwards, but this was my kind of trial by fire into herbs was realizing that in three or four months, I had full grip strength. I was able to totally use my hand to this day. I mean, I don't have any arthritis, no problem with that. I didn't get an open reduction, internal fixation on it. I used herbs and it was like my big trial by fire of the fact that, Oh my gosh, you know, these herbs not only work, they work extremely well. And I was sold at that point. It's like, I need to learn this stuff and I need to make a part of my life. And then that carried on through Special Forces. For me personally, as you know, I found situations where we were really low on medical supplies and you couldn't count on the drop coming in and what are you going to do? What was sustainable medicine around you, of course is herbal medicine.
And so I worked with teammates. There's the SF medic on a team. Oftentimes your teammates will bring their family and they'll come to you for medical stuff before they'll ever go to a doc, they trust you more.
And so I found myself using herbs for teammates and just saying, Hey don't dare tell our medical director that I'm using herbs, cause I would have just gotten hell for that. Oh, my God. I would have gotten in all kinds of trouble .
I mean, the herbs were looked on with such skepticism. They still are, but they're coming around slowly. But I would have been thought of as like a quack and a charlatan and Oh my God, he's using herbs. But the point is that they were working for my teammates. The buzz was on. By the time I got out , people knew that's what I was doing. I felt pretty confident about just kind of the friends and family approach, that I had done so far up to that point.
Lana: Absolutely. This is such an awesome story. Thank you so much for sharing.
In the past decade or so, probably longer than that, your passion for wilderness survival skills, first aid, and first responder situations have been sought out by so many different people. It feels like every day, these skills are becoming only more relevant and more important for all of us do have.
Most common emergency medicine topics
Could we talk a little bit more about several of the most common topics related to emergency medicine? For example, in your years of practice, where some of the most common areas that seem to come up all the time, what are some of the most practical skills that everyone needs to have?
Sam: Yeah, so that's an interesting question. To talk about that, you kind of have to look at the reality of what we call emergency the medicine at versus what we write about or think about when we say words. Back when I first was doing medicine, the emergency medicine specialty was just starting to be born and it was such a big deal. Everybody's like, Oh my God, it's actually a medical specialty. Now a doctor can specialize in emergency medicine, but they quickly became the gatekeepers really is what they became of medicine. So they're dealing with everything from people who don't have insurance that have a sore throat or a cough or a sniffle all the way to somebody who got hit by a bus .
Within that huge spectrum, what is emergency medicine? Well, the most common things that we really see day to day in a home environment are going to probably be infectious disease. It's respiratory, sometimes it's gut, and maybe a little bit of genitourinary, but generally speaking, it's going to be infectious disease that we have to deal with in an acute care situation.
And the good news is that herbs are amazing for this. They work so well, if you know what you're doing, especially if we're talking viral infections. They're incredible and far better than most pharmaceuticals for many different viral infections. I will stand behind those words based on thousands and thousands of clients over the last basically 30 years, but really the last 10 or 15 of really intensively, working with this.
So, emergency wise, the things that you need to be able to deal with just in terms of first aid, I feel like are being able to stabilize unstable situations enough to either transport somebody to higher care or for them to be able to heal and not get hurt further in just day to day moving around or whatever. Along with this you also need to be able to recognize red flags. So these are kind of the big things.
How do you stabilize? Well, there's just basic bandaging and splinting techniques. So you have a booboo or you cut yourself all the way to maybe a really deep laceration all the way to a broken bone, what are the things that we're going to be able to stabilize it with and B what are the skills that we've learned to tell us, Hey, this is beyond our level of expertise, and when it takes us to higher care, you need an X Ray machine, or we absolutely need stitches. Maybe we can get by without the stitches, and certainly I've done that many times. But ideally, if we can do that, let's get in there and let's make sure there's not going to be an infection in a couple of weeks or a week, you know?
That's a big spectrum of stuff where we're meeting be a little bit safer in terms of using herbs not necessarily on the trauma side, but on the acute care side is dealing with that sore throat maybe it's a viral upper respiratory tract infection.
I have these sinus infections, every time there's an allergy season comes up I get another sinus infection or, Hey, I eat some bad food and, diarrhea and vomiting, food poisoning type of thing. Not that that's viral. Or I keep getting these urinary tract infections. I get some antibiotics and then it goes away and then six weeks later, it's back. These are things acute care area where we're going to see a very common usage.
Three areas to consider studying first
And what I usually tell herbalists, students - there's three areas that I think that you can get up to speed with and be pretty functioning, at least for family and friends, pretty quickly.
If you can function in the areas of mucosal support. In other words, you're learning how to work with the mucosa and especially for infectious disease throughout the body, the mucosa that inner layer, inner skin that we have, and over 90% of infectious disease comes into our body through our mucosa. So if you can work with that, and know how to stabilize that and how to not only support, but also to be able to nurse that terrain.
The secondary, I would say is liver gut and an emphasis on liver, because most of the things that we can affect the liver with are going to affect the gut for a lot of different issues. So if you can work with the liver and this is generally more towards chronic issues or issues around digestion. Maybe there's an underlying chronic issue, but we have these acute flare ups that are more acute that we're having handled. And then, you know, so those two areas I feel like are really important.
And then the third area I feel like overlooked a lot, is being able to support and nourish the immune system and the lymph. If you can work with those three areas that gives you a lot of use across chronic and acute care type stuff if you want to be functional and practical, I'd say in a shortest amount of time, those are the areas I would suggest people normally work on first.
Creating apothecary for these areas of concern
Lana: That's wonderful. Thank you. So when you look at those three areas, if you had to build an emergency apothecary or had one of your kits, what would make it into one of those kits? What are some of the herbs you would immediately think of populating it with?Mucosal herbs
Sam: Sure. So, when we're talking about the mucosa, that's a pretty simple one. That's a slam dunk. If we can get herbs that are going to stimulate mucosal immunity. And at the same time support those mucosal cells themselves. So a lot of our herbs that are here are polysaccharides - our Marshmallow root and leaf, Plantain and Licorice and Ulmus, Slippery Elm. These herbs that have a lot of mucilaginous or demulcent quality to them are generally herbs that have these mucopolysaccharide support or type polysaccharides that are going to be really good at supporting that. Along with that, herbs that will stimulate mucosal immunity tend to be herbs like Echinacea and Spilanthes and Prickly Ash that have that ability as we coat the tonsils or we coat the inside of the back of the oral pharynx with them, we're going to get an immune reaction whether it's an increase in neutrophil and a macrophage activity or volume in that area, whatever it may be. What happens with a submucosal lymph a lot of times, if we stimulate that, we find that those two things there are going to work really well. So those are some of the herbs that are key around the airway, when I say the airway, I'm talking about the nasal pharynx, the oral pharynx, the upper respiratory tract, basically. So those are great.
Along with that though, if we're just sticking in the respiratory tract, it's also good to be able to do things that are going to help expectorate and relax the smooth muscle and help us with breathing. And this could be everything from allergies to an upper respiratory tract infection or even a lower respiratory tract infection.
So we start working with herbs, like our Pleurisy, like our Asclepias tuberosa, Asclepias asperula down here and even just the common milkweed, all of those are going to be useful to be able to do that. Grindelia is another one of my big favorites, gumweed is really useful for helping to bronchodilate especially for allergies type stuff, to lower that mast cell, to inhibit that histamine reaction a lot of times as well, back to Plantain. It's just kind of one of those herbs, it does so many amazing things on so many levels for the body. It makes a difference whether you're using a fresh or dried, in my opinion, when we're talking about something where we want a mucosal vulnerary and we want an effect on the respiratory tract. It's better to use the freshly made Plantain, generally, in my opinion. Whether you do a multi fractional with it so that can include a juicing or soaking, or all of the steps that we do with water before we add any alcohol to be able to preserve it. Those are all herbs that I feel like are really important up there.
Gut herbs
When we start getting down to the liver and the gut, of course, there are so many. Any of our bitters are going to be generally helpful. But we have so many different herbs that have different effects. What I do is I kind of divide it down into an even liver support versus liver decongestion. In classes I usually have a matrix so an X and Y axis that gives us herbs that are good at one and not as good as the other, all the way to herbs that are good at both and so forth.
So herbs that I use a lot for liver, one of them is a local Southwest type herb and that's Wafer Ash, Ptelea trifoliata. It's an amazing herb and that is both a decongestant, but it's also a very good liver supporter. But that's not when you're going to just be able to go out and find on the internet, unfortunately.
Lana: Can you repeat the name of it one more time?
Sam: It's called a Hoptree or Wafer Ash and it's Ptelea, P T E L E A is the genus. And then, trifoliata is the species. It's actually a citrus family and arguably, probably has some berberine in the leaf and it's got this citrusy berberine type of bitter taste to it in the leaf that's just pretty profound. The bark and the leaf both you can use, but there generally used for different different purposes, to some extent. Bark being more of a cold and flu type of a herb. I mean, other things too, but that, and then, and more of an eliminative and then the leaf being more of the gut and the liver.
But I use them both together. I'll just prune a branch. I have like a handful of herbs that I feel really work better fresh, and this was one of them. So, dried Wafer Ash doesn't really do it for me. So I always harvest it fresh. I used to separate them and then use them that way, but I just mixed the whole thing together and use a bark and a leaf together now. And I really like it that way. But I probably talk a lot about an herb that you can't even really find unless you grow it in Central Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, parts of California for sure.
Lana: What about our listeners from other areas? What would you recommend them to consider instead?
Sam: So what I usually go for then is I go for Gentian as sort of a substitute for that. Not quite the same in a lot of ways, but also in anti-infective in some ways. And it's definitely got similar uses as a bitter. I would say Gentian is maybe a little more of a decongestant than it is a supportive than Wafer Ash is, but that's just my personal opinion.
So yeah, lots of good liver decongestants and support. Milk Thistle obviously, Plantain again comes back into the picture and there, it doesn't matter if it's dried or fresh. In my opinion, the aucubin is what we're looking for. There that's a good liver support constituent. But then, Blessed Thistle of course comes in there. And then on the gentler side, we can get Artichoke leaf and Chicory root and then Dandelion root of course fits in there and Dandelion greens fit in there as well on the bitter side. And for a few other things that are a little bit different, all of those in so many more.
There's so many good herbs that we can use to help stimulate and decongest the liver, which really affects the entire digestive process. These are things that also help with eliminative channels. We start looking at things like Oregon grape, or even Barberries or Burdock root, as we start to get into where the decongestion of the liver affects the lymph and the skin. So you're working with somebody who's got maybe chronic, auto-inflammatory type stuff whether it's eczema or psoriasis or rosacea or whatever it is that you're going to start looking towards the liver there. Those are good herbs to be able to look to as well for something like that. So there is a variety of reasons that we want to work with with liver herbs, for sure. And many of those liver herbs also are going to affect general digestion in a number of different ways.
Quick announcement
Lana: I want to take a pause to let you know that I put together a quick guide, summarizing the emergency medicine plants we're discussing here today. To get this guide, please head over to the show notes at plantloveradio.com/66 and download your own copy.
One more announcement. The winner of our last episodes raffle is Lara. Lara, Zoe's beautiful sugar maple pitcher is being sent to you. Congratulations! Thank you so much for your support of the podcast.
And now back to our conversation with Sam.
Lymph and immune herbs
Sam: The third area that we were talking about just a lymph and immune. This range has everything from a really strong lymph movers, where we're actually moving the fluid or the lymph itself.
And you have to think about the lymph now, what is the physiology of the lymph? Our lymph capillaries are down at the level of our capillaries of our blood, our cardiovascular system. And they're picking up the waste products that are too big or maybe not the right polarity to be able to come back in and be flushed out through the venous system. In these capillary beds we have two different processes going on. We have a hydrostatic and we have an osmotic pressure differential that keeps the fresh oxygenated blood flowing out into those capillary beds. And then we have the waste pickup on the venous side.
So if we have molecular compounds and trash and debris or whatever at that microscopic level that isn't making it back into, the lymph plays a huge role in there and being able to drain that area out and get rid of those toxins. So, if we can move the lymph itself, that's huge.
And of course the classic lymph mover, that's very strong and also on a toxic side is our Poke or Phytolacca. But there are many other herbs that do that as well, and gentler at it. Stillingia is another Southwest herb you're not going to find in stores or online, but it's one that I like to use.
Ocotillo is decent. it's gentle, but ones that are really popular are going to be like your Gallium, Cleavers is a very gentle lymph mover. Arguably perhaps Dandelion, a root may be a little bit of a lymph mover there as well. We find Red root probably plays a role in moving lymph as well.
So we have a handful of good lymph movers, but then also we want to know how do we stimulate the immune system. And, and so the immune system, we divide it into a two levels, innate versus adaptive.
And our innate immune system is that part of our immune system we share with all the vertebrates, which is going to be something that recognizes self from non-self. And so here we have our macrophages and neutrophils and these white blood cells that are going to work on the innate level, and don't necessarily have a memory to them like our adaptive B cells and T cells do.
And so, that process, however, has a huge overlap to it. There's a lot of communication that goes on between these two worlds of the immune system. So, to support local and even systemic innate immune system the ones that I mentioned before Echinacea is very well known for this, to be able to boost those. Boneset, arguably, may do some of that as well. We can find herbs to kind of help support the immune system that way, as well as herbs, that help support the adaptive immune system of which herbs like Astragalus are famous to be able to do that. And arguably ashwagandha may help as well in that same way to be able to support the function of not only the memory cells themselves and maybe boosting that, but even just the creation of these white blood cells in the bone marrow, which again, that's where the ashwagandha gone to may be very helpful.
So these give us a general trifecta of herbs to be used in there that are going to have of course, a lot of overlap with other areas of our body as well. But that gives us a pretty good foundational, practical 'friends and family' type approach to be able to deal with infectious disease.
Lana: That is awesome. Thank you.
Sam's apothecary kits
I mentioned earlier that you create kits, they're little bags that contains different types of tinctures that someone can carry with them. So what is typical 10, 20, 25? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sam: Sure. So the kits are kind of ranged from being really small and being just maybe focused on one thing. Like there's a throat care kit, for instance, it's got maybe three tinctures in it. And it's got some other stuff in there for specifically for throat care and, and an application of herbs through that part of our body. All the way to a full on kit that's got a whole bunch of first aid gear in it and then has I want to say 13 different tinctures and two different powders, three different salves. I think something like that.
So the areas that those focus on are going to be some of the things we talked about, but respiratory, like our respiratory formula that's the biggest one we have. It's like a four ouncer and the rest are two ouncers in there are going to be like a cold and flu type of herbs. When we say flu, we can mean kinds of different upper respiratory tract, virus infections to include, help supporting us, even in something like coronavirus. Although that's a whole another topic that I have a set of protocols for, but still give us some help there to anti-infective for bacterial infections to parasitic, both helminthic and a protozoan infections. Gosh, there's so many, a urinary tract is in there and then a gut and liver kind of a formula in there. So kind of cover the spectrum of these, sort of shotgun approach to having these pre-made formulas.
A note on that is with our outreach organization, herbal medics, we noticed the very first year that we went to Nicaragua, I think it was 2011, we were packing in there a whole bunch of formulas, but also a whole bunch of simples of course, to be able to work within the apothecary.
We would literally be seen sometimes a hundred people in one day and that they would range like six in the morning until literally you think you'd be done at nine at night. And then a family that had walked twenty five miles shows up and you're open for another hour or something, you're not going to turn them away. I mean, they've walked literally 25 miles to get there and they're sleeping with a relative somewhere in a village. The first place we went you can't get in by car.
And so, I found that these pre-made formulas were very efficacious and efficient in there in the apothecary sense. You could just dole them out very quickly when you have this high number, but the bad side it's not as much harder to really individualize the form the way you need to for somebody that you're working with for the problems.
Lana: Of course, of course. So, you talked about your trips to Nicaragua and I want to talk a little bit more about this, but before you do, in addition to everything that you are teaching on this topic, have you found books, blogs, videos that you really love and that you recommend to others on the same topic?
Helpful resources
Sam: Yeah, I would say there's only one book that has followed me this entire time, this 30 plus years, that I still use as a reference. I don't really use books for reference much anymore. I'd much rather go online and find research stuff, but the one set of books is the Peter Holmes, Energetics of Western herbs, the three volume set. And it's probably going to cost you somewhere between 150 to 200 bucks, but it's worth it. I would say. And if you're doing that also the fourth edition, this that's the latest edition. There's a lot of publishing errors in the earlier three edition. So if you get a cheap set and you find out it's the second or third edition, I mean, one of them is actually missing like 50 pages.
The Human Path - Programs, Structure, Intent
Lana: Okay. All right. I'll definitely include them in the show notes. Thank you. So, Sam, today along was your lovely wife, Suchil. you run The Human Path and your school includes a number of different programs. So you have Herbal Medics Academy that you already mentioned. There is a Off-grid engineer and Scout programs. Plus a multitude of different courses. So I want to ask you to talk a little bit about how you came up with the themes for these programs and also, why do you find these particular areas to be especially important? And what type of training do they include?
Sam: Sure. So the idea is very well thought out on all of this. It wasn't just random like throwing a bunch of stuff together. The idea has always been to be able to have a self-sustainable teams that can operate using herbal medicine in post disaster, off-grid austere rural whatever remote areas, but also, of course, function anywhere in an urban area, or even just make people better at what they do herbally in the middle of the clinic in downtown in an office high rise or whatever. So it's always applicable. It's never just something that's only for one purpose.
But around that then is what are the skill sets that are necessary to do that and be self sustainable as a team. So let's say you're going in post disaster for hurricane or whatever it may be. The last thing you want to do is go in there and be a burden on the resources in that area that are already under burden. You need to be able to take care of yourself. So the core of that is the infrastructure, which is the human path is four areas. So those four areas are off-grid engineer and medic, and then what we call provider, it's gone through a few different name changes, but the functionality has always been the same and then a scout.
Off-grid engineer
And so the idea behind that is we're able to provide all of the structural stuff we need. You can't have a clinic without clean water, right? We need clean water. If we can, we need power, we need structure to be able to work. And we need at least a floor and a roof, even if it's just tarp and straw thrown down on mud, but we need something. We need the ability to have logistics, to be able to move stuff in and out and around and package and know how to pack up a trailer and know what a generator is and how to work on these things. And even stuff with engine and automotive stuff, at one point we were getting into. So you can make that as far as you want with off-grid engineering, all the things that fit under that.
Medic
And the next, the people actually providing care are what I would call herbal medics or herbalists and preferably herbal medics. And they've had at least a wilderness first aid, if not a wilderness first responder through us. Yeah. But the medic has really more, what are the infrastructure that we need specifically for the clinic to run the clinic? How do we do that? How do we set a clinic up? How do we run a clinic? How do we manage a clinic?
You know, everything from administrative and paperwork and all this stuff there to, to being able to put an apothecary and a clinical areas and have a flow of traffic. And understand, what our minimal requirements are going to be for that. Then of course, they have to communicate with off-grid engineers to be able to make that happen, but that's the medic.
Provider
And then the provider, which we used to call it the Hunter gatherer. And then we had the urban Hunter gatherer is really about food and about taking care of our own team. So the teams taking care of other people, but who's taking care of the team. You that's just been born out of experience because we've had some really dicey experiences with people getting really sick on the team and, when an off grid and in totally different country. And how do you deal with that?
So the provider that's their job. So kind of like a team manager, team medic, but also, how do we plan for our nutrition? So let's say we've got two people that are deathly allergic to something, and how do you deal with that if you're working with a group for food. Now we also have a format of teams where everybody kind of has to be responsible for their own food, but those are very short and small teams about three to four person teams that have to go into an area. And they're kind of more of a scout team providing a minimal amount of medicine as well. But for a big team and a big project, we got to have a provider in there as well for dealing with all of those things.
Scout
And then the scout is crucial for being able to gather the information we need in order to be able to perform and help a community or people that are in need and find out what it is they need from us, not what we think they need, but what do they need from us and what are they telling us they need that we can provide and we can help them with.
And that's the whole idea behind that information gathering, but also all the things around that. Where's your nearest level one trauma center, if we needed it. Where do we gas up when we did hurricane Harvey support out in Houston and all along the Texas coast.
We had an entire, really one part of our scout team was the dispatch. We had people running dispatch, literally, all the daylight hours of the day. And we had students all over the country that were plugging into that. And we have a great instructor for that. He's amazing in ham radio expert that was helping people with the dispatch. And so we had this all plugged in. We couldn't find gasoline. So we're driving from San Antonio and outlying areas and Texas up to Houston and all the gas was gone because of mass panic buying.
And so we had to have literally our Scouts or a dispatch phoning ahead and rerouting us. So we're all set up on Google maps and they can see exactly where we are telling us 'Okay. Take a left on this highway, there's going to be a gas station up here that says they've got gas.'
And that's how we had to go and make our whole way up there. So that's a good example of where scout comes in and, and also the security of the team. And by security I mean what are your security issues, and especially in a foreign country, this can be a real problem. If you in an area and you aren't aware of everything from laws to Folkways and mores, whatever, maybe, issues around that, if you're not already prepared for that ahead of time.
And then you also are really watching yourselves. Even in an area where you're helping somebody out, if you're talking about somebody on your team that's walking around with a wristwatch that costs more than the people you're helping make in a year, and you let that lying around, sorry. You know, the most honest people in the world are still going to be pretty tempted to take that. Even that kind of stuff too. And then of course, other even more severe security issues. So those are things that the scout has to, has to be really aware of. But that is all just, if you think of a pyramid, that's the bottom of the pyramid.
And then the next level above that really is our herbal medics and our herbalists who are able to run the clinic. And this includes our apothecarists and our medicine makers and people running the apothecary as well. That all sits on top as of a very well structured infrastructure that allows us to do that.
All of these ideas really, I have to give credit to Special Forces for that infrastructure piece, because that was what I did, and saw in a military sense and in a tactical sense and not for the purpose that I'm using it now, and totally different specialties.
I mean, you have engineering, camo, and weapons and medic on a special forces team. But, I took those and basically said, Hey, that's a great idea. How could we modify that and make it into something to be able to use in our medical mission to help people.
And then beyond that, more importantly, how can we have a school at the center of all of this, where people get the training they need both tactically hands-on, but then also under stress and scenario based where we put a little adrenaline and a little bit of pressure on people, a little bit sleep deprivation and see how they function. Then we can tell who's able to function in teams the way we need them to. As that happens, you kind of get people move to the areas that work best for them, as well as you really see some people that just really shine in that kind of an environment. And those are the people that we always try to make sure hopefully they're interested and we are able to get them along into our different Herbal medics projects and missions.
Lana: Really fascinating ideas.
Training with the Human Path and Herbal Medics Academy
So, in order for someone to actually train with you, do they need to be onsite? What are some of the requirements to attend? Anything that might be of interest to our audience?
Sam: Yeah, so of course with the pandemic, things have shifted, but not as greatly as you'd think with us, because we actually were pulling curriculum into a more of an online format about, started about eight years ago, and really been kind of hit the ground running right then. We probably have well over a thousand hours of online curriculum and the site didactic portion of it that people are going to need to learn that one way or the other. And so it's better that they learn that online. We have a whole system - it's not just like we throw it in your lap and you're left to your own. It's very interactive with lots of Q and A's and lots of study sessions, some assignments. And of course, quizzes and tests to make sure that people get that information.
So then when we come to the school for hands on intensive anywhere from three days to 10 days, they give students a chance to really put all that to work. But we expect students to be able to come in there and usually hit the ground running with the exception of a few courses where they're designed to be for anybody off the street. Otherwise as people have done this already online, when we start talking about a percolation tincture, or we're talking about certain style of suturing, whatever it is that they're here for, they're not gonna raise your hand and say, what are you talking about. They can hit the ground and they know all of that stuff didacticly. So that's the hands-on intensives. And then beyond that, you know, of course the scenario based training has to be onsite as well. But again, probably 80% of our material is online.
And so a person could get a lot out of the way without ever having to set foot on the 50 acre campus. So the pandemic hasn't really hurt us that badly yet in terms of the onsite, we're not doing anything this fall and we'll see how spring plays out. But even if we had to wait a year, we've got a backlog of a lot of students that are working through a lot of material online that they have to get through anyway.
We have two doctors on our faculty Dr. Pearson and Dr. Kyla Helm who's a functional medicine doc. Dr. Pearson is also a former Special Forces medic who became a doctor, has been a doctor for 40 years who works with us in the austere medicine program.
A lot of people get almost confused because there's so many different things to study at our school, but that's the truth of the matter is that that's what herbalism is.
So we have a clinical program that's it's at least three years to get through. there's a lot of material with pathophysiology modules, our phytochemistry and our botany and all the clinical hours you need. And it's designed to fit across with the RH requirements. And even some of our medicine making that gets you in there, or get you the requirements that you need.
The apothecary program is advanced medicine making it. We've got two 12 weeks semesters or a year of online didactic and then we've got six different three day intensive. Now we're this year we're taking those intensives online as well. So you can learn about multi fractionals in an intensive along with the basics you get in that one year. You get really strong intensive into mushroom medicine or multi fractional for internal medicines, external medicines, food is medicine and so forth. That's its entire program by itself, for people that want to maybe sell, they want to start a brick and mortar or an online store.
And sell formulas or sell tinctures, sell extracts, or whatever they're going to do with the herbal medicine, it's a medicine maker. We have an entire family medicine program. Most schools when they say family medicine, they mean it's like a cut down version of a clinical program.
And it's not, this is specifically coordinated towards female medicine and it's run and created by our midwife herbalist, Katia LaMone and a nurse midwife as well. They've worked together to create this program and this is all of our midwifery related, our pediatrics or our prenatal or postpartum medicine. We have a doula certification program. That's like twice the hours and far more demanding than a typical Dona, you know, DONA. I always forget what that stands for here in the U S program. We have an emergency birth intensive in that.
Then we have an entire program on stewardship and understanding how to grow plants and medicine as a business, as a small business.
And then really what my thing is at is the austere medicine program. And that's what I've been doing with Steve Pearson, so it's a really good program run by two former special forces medic taught in a lot of the ways that we learned to teach instead of special forces, medics, but with a huge Materia Medica and all the things that go into it with herbal medicine and all the pieces that go to that.
And then we have these, of courses that kind of are part of that with our wilderness first responder, wilderness first aid courses. Right now we've got the whole venom course, herbs and venomous animals. We've got wound healing herbs, and wound healing. We've got herbs and viral infections and all of these are our separate modules, but they also fit into, some of these other programs.
The wilderness herbal first responder and wilderness herbal first aid are the only courses I know of, of their type, anywhere in the world. They give you not just a certification, but you know, a card as WFR or WFA. But also give you herbal medicine actual experience based, empirical, tables and charts and protocols to be able to work with herbal medicine.
And it's the WFR is sort of the precursor to the austere medicine program. It's like everything that you do in the field and then hopefully, you've got higher care available. And the austere medicine program is okay, you did the WFR, there's a 10 day course to learn everything you do in the field and then get them to hire care. Hey, guess what? There is no higher care - bridges are out, the entire economy is collapsed or whatever, or the hospitals are completely full or we're in a civil war or whatever. Now it's the austere medicine course that we're talking about. And so the whole thing kind of ties together into that big piece as well.
And finally, I'll say in part of the clinical program that we've added in, that's really wonderful is with Dr. Kyla Helms, a functional medicine doctor also started as a doc in the army and then a it's a family practitioner and we got our functional medicine board certification.
And she and I have been working together for over eight years. And we've created this botanical functional medicine course that has three or four parts to it. Right now, we only have the first part out, which is again 12 weeks, very, very packed weeks. That'll come out in January again, and we're working on the other two parts are coming out and Kyla is an amazing teacher. She also does nutrition course sports as well.
Lana: Thank you. So Sam, this has been a really, really fascinating conversation, but I have have a couple of more questions for you. For our audience, if people want to learn more from you or about you, where and how would they find you? And then the last question that I have for you are your parting thoughts for this conversation.
Sam: Sure. so in terms of contacting and, and all that kind of thing, the best place to hit us on the web, type in the human path - .com or .net or. org they all will get you to the Human Path, that is the core school, but it became confusing.
The majority of people that are coming to our school are for herbal, for plant medicine, because that's probably 80 to 90% of our curriculum. And so, it became horribly confusing for people after a while to see a blacksmithing class and a survival course, and a bow making class and all those things wrapped up around a medicine making course.
So we took all the herbal stuff and we put it into a separate website. It's not a different company. It's the same school, just a different website. So it's more organized for just herbal stuff. And that's Herbal Medics Academy - and it's actually herbal medics.academy.
And then if you go to YouTube, it's the human path. It's youtube.com/thehumanpath. If you go to Facebook, the human path, but we have also the herbal medics community page. I think it's called. So if you look for herbal medics, you're going to see our herbal medics page. You'll see our herbal medics group, it's probably got 15,000 and that's very active. A lot of people are always active in there.
Lana: Okay,
Sam: Great. And then, on Instagram and I'm herbal medics Sam, but I don't really use Instagram much. I would say Facebook is probably the best way to see us on social media. And then YouTube will give some videos as well.
We have a store called herbalfirstaidgear.com where I sell lots of different formulas, the herbal first aid kits you were talking about. I have a practitioner formulary that is not limited to practitioners, but lots of functional medicine doctors and NP's, and even some naturopaths, chiropractors use it. Specifically, it's one of those things where you need a PDF to explain what's the different formulas are - if you ask for it, I can send it to you.
Lana: Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. And any parting thoughts for today
Sam: Oh, yeah. I wanted to thank you again for having me on your podcast. I think that audiences like this and things that reach out to people are really crucial, especially right now, to be able to help people, feel like they're connected, but also to help people, become informed. Especially with the COVID-19 going on you have to be careful what you say, but again viruses is one area where herbs are incredibly useful and work.
I've said this for years about my own protocols for herpes family viruses, for instance, but for shingles and HSV-1 and 2 are far far more efficient and push the problem back to where it's really not much of a problem at all if you are using them as opposed to something like acyclovir or pharmaceutical.
And the same thing is true here also with coronavirus, we're going to find, there are many different protocols. I have a whole set of protocols for this that are very, very useful, and I'm not here to say anything even remotely that I'm curing Corona virus with herbs, but what I am saying is working with herbs to support the body's health and allow the body to do what it does with a cardiovascular, with the respiratory, with the gut, the kidneys, whatever that that area is, that is under attack is extremely potent and works really, really well. So this is a time where people I think are reaching out and understanding that and realizing that.
Lana: This is absolutely amazing. Sam. Thank you. Thank you so much. I am sure that a lot of our listeners will be excited to visit the website and to learn more about you. Thank you again.
Sam: Thanks for having me again.
Lana: Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation with Sam Coffman. For all the resources and links mentioned during today's episode, please head over to the show notes at plantloveradio.com/66.
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