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Herbalism
wasn’t a job description when Christopher Hobbs, PhD, began his career in the
late 1960s. “I remember filling out a form … and they asked me what my profession
was, and they had all these numbers, job description codes, and I was looking
through there and I just thought, ‘Well, you know, there’s no job description
code for an herbalist,’” he said.
But
Hobbs, who has been a member of the American Botanical Council’s (ABC’s)
Advisory Board since the board was first established in 1996, and others like
him, have helped expand and bring more attention to the field of herbalism,
which combines the health of individuals with the health of the Earth.
Hobbs, who is also an acupuncturist and mycologist (someone who studies fungi),
describes himself as “quite restless” and as “a lifetime learner. I never, ever
want to stop learning,” he said.
An appreciation for plants runs in Hobbs’s family. “I’ve always been a lay
herbalist since I was young,” he said. His grandmother on his mother’s side was
an herbalist in Pasadena, California, in the 1920s, and she had her own organic
garden and would take the trolley into Los Angeles to study with a Chinese
herbalist. And Hobbs’s father and great uncle were both professors of botany.
“So, on my dad’s side I had botany, and on my mom’s side I had herbalism,” he
said.
Early
in his adult life, a terrible diet caused Hobbs to develop a severe jaw
infection, among other health problems, and, after being ill for several
months, he came across a book by natural healer Paul Bragg titled The Miracle of Fasting, which caused him
to turn his health around. He eventually studied with Bragg in 1968 in Desert
Hot Springs, California, and that experience had a profound effect on him. That
same year, he read his first herbal compendium, Maude Grieve’s 1931 classic, A Modern Herbal.
Hobbs
started off as a “hippie herbalist” teaching herb walks in the late 1960s and
1970s. In 1980, he studied polarity therapy, which combines different Eastern
and Western spiritual practices, for more than a year at the Alive Polarity
Institute on Orcas Island, Washington, and in Calistoga, California. It was
then that he decided he wanted to be a healer and realized he needed to set a
good example, and thus transformed his lifestyle.
In
1982, Hobbs and other herbal enthusiasts and herbalists, Paul Lee, PhD, Michael
Tierra, OMD, Subhuti Dharmananda, PhD, and Grace Marroquin, received a grant to
start an herb school, the Platonic School of Herbal Studies, in Santa Cruz,
California. Hobbs was hired to teach the chemistry, pharmacology, and botany of
herbs and later herbal medicine there until the late 1990s.
“And then, in about the mid-90s, I decided I really wanted to be a
practitioner,” he said. So, he studied with herbalists and acupuncturists at
Five Branches Institute, apprenticed at Tierra’s clinic in Santa Cruz, and got
his acupuncture license. After that, he went to China to study herbalism and
acupuncture. “That was a big turning point, just to see how they practiced
herbal medicine, and how it was integrated with elements of Western medicine,”
he said. In the traditional hospital in Hang Zhou, Hobbs studied with an
herbalist who had seen more than 50,000 patients. He would use pulse and tongue
diagnosis on his patients and then send them down the hall to get radiology and
other Western-style medical tests, prescribing herb formulas for everyone. Some
of his patients from the countryside brought in chickens to pay him. Hobbs
still remembers the smells and sounds of the scene in his office.
He then started his own practice in California, which he continued throughout
the 1990s.
Hobbs has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and has been going to school his
entire life. At some point, he decided he wanted to pursue a degree in science
(his first undergraduate studies focused on art history and music), and,
eventually, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences at Sacramento
State. Subsequently, he was given an offer to study integrated biology and
phylogenetics (the study of how organisms are related to each other) at the
University of California at Berkeley. The program involved extracting DNA,
systematics (taxonomy), evolutionary biology, and plant chemistry.
“So, it’s all integrated, and that really appealed to me.... Plus, it’s
Berkeley and I just couldn’t pass up a chance to go to Berkeley and get a PhD,
and I really liked the professors, chiefly Bruce Baldwin, the Jepson Chair and California
native plant guru,” Hobbs said.
At Berkeley, Hobbs did a lot of work involving the genus Artemisia (Asteraceae). “I extracted a lot of aromatic compounds
and terpenes from the genus.... There [are] about 500 species, mostly in Asia
and Russia and the northern hemisphere,” he said. Hobbs extracted DNA and
essential oils from different species in the genus, and looked at whether the
chemicals found in the plants are controlled by genetic or environmental
factors. “I’ve always been really curious about plant chemistry and the inner
workings of plants based on their chemistry and genetics, so I delved into that
in great depth, [and] did a lot of collecting in the field….” he said.
He
went to Hawaii to study the three Hawaiian Artemisia
species and worked out the evolutionary history of those species. “The
closest living relative of the Hawaiian ones is one single species, Artemisia chinensis. That grows only
around the Taiwan area and maybe on the China coast there a little bit. So, I
worked all that out and published that,” he said. Hobbs also taught
undergraduate classes at the university. “I got to teach a lot of eager, young
students basic plant biology, and that was really cool…. I also taught the labs
for medical ethnobotany and California native plant life for a number of years
there. So that was a really great experience,” he said.
His seven years at Berkeley were a big step in Hobbs’s evolution as an
herbalist. “And it just taught me that I don’t know too much, and that we don’t know too much, about this
incredibly complex web of life, that everything is interconnected, and that
there are a lot more questions than there are answers,” he said. He earned his
doctorate in 2014.
As he traveled throughout Europe and the United States in the late 1980s and
1990s, Hobbs amassed an 8,000-volume library of herbals, old pharmacopeias,
materia medicas, ethnobotany books, etc. Gathering knowledge and making it
widely available to people has been a lifelong passion for Hobbs. He has
written more than 25 books during his career and was one of the first to
integrate the European phytomedicine approach with folk herbalism and bring it
to the United States. “So I wrote one of the first books on echinacea [Echinacea spp., Asteraceae] and ginkgo [Ginkgo biloba, Ginkgoaceae], and I even
wrote one on kombucha and valerian [Valeriana
officinalis, Caprifoliaceae] and St. John’s wort [Hypericum perforatum, Hypericaceae]. We actually sold half a
million of those books,” he said.
He wrote his first book, Milk Thistle,
in 1984. During the process of writing that book, Hobbs realized that milk
thistle (Silybum marianum,
Asteraceae), which had been used in Europe as a hepatitis treatment, was
growing all around him. “So, we started harvesting it and making a product. We
made the first tincture product [in the US] of milk thistle,” he said.
Those books are out of print now, but Hobbs said he thinks they had a big
impact. Hobbs then wrote Medicinal
Mushrooms (1st edition, 1987; 2nd edition, 1995). “I think it was a major
influence in the country and I still hear people come up to me and say, ‘I read
your book, and it’s great, and it really got me going on the idea of the
valuable qualities of fungi for healing and health,’” Hobbs said.
In 1998, Hobbs wrote Herbal Remedies for
Dummies to reach a larger audience. “I still think that’s a really great
book,” he said. Then, in 1999, he wrote Vitamins
for Dummies with Elson Haas, MD. Those books are still in print.
Hobbs said he’s proud of the information that he’s gathered, and he’s tried to
be honest about the capabilities and limitations of herbal medicines. “Our
generation saw the need for natural health care and to continue the values and
the precepts of herbal medicine as the people’s medicine. Our call was to
preserve that knowledge, to gather it from every source … and carry it on to the
next generation,” he said. He hopes to see herbal medicine become more widely
accepted. “If we continue with the studies and the research, I’m hoping that
these more natural medicines will really be integrated and migrate into
standard health care in this country, and be paid for by insurance. Herbal
medicine and other forms of natural healing, such as a simple wholesome diet,
should be considered the first line of treatment for most ailments, rather than
just jumping to toxic drugs,” he said.
Hobbs
is concerned by recent industry trends, such as the proliferation of inferior
products resulting from ingredient adulteration and substitution. “Because I’m
trained in phylogenetics and DNA testing, I’m hoping to really be part of the
conversation of integrating and writing the SOPs, the standard operating
procedures, for using DNA technology and phylogenetics for the industry to
ensure the species identification,” Hobbs said. He is working with Alkemist
Labs, a leader in botanical identification services, to help ensure the quality
of products available on the market.
Hobbs is also a consultant for Rainbow Light Nutritional Systems, which
specializes in prenatal multivitamins. He helps the company formulate new
products, and investigates the safety and efficacy of the ingredients that go
into the products. He also previously served on the standards committee of the
American Herbal Products Association (AHPA).
He
also teaches workshops, and recently taught a course (as a lecturer) on
California native plant life at UC Berkeley. One thing he hopes his students
learn from him is that “health is our greatest wealth, and without health, we
have nothing.”
Hobbs
is a “yoga freak” and a “physical fitness buff.” He loves going to wild hot
springs, fishing with his son, spending time in the woods and being in nature,
hiking, backpacking, hunting wild mushrooms and wildflowers, traveling,
meeting people, etc. In addition, music and art have been a big part of his
life. He plays piano and guitar and appreciates music of all types, from jazz
to classical. Some of his favorite composers are Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré, and
he’s recently become interested in Stravinsky and Mahler. He has a son, Ken,
and lives in Davis, California, a suburb of Sacramento.
—Connor Yearsley
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