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The North American Institute of Medical Herbalism (NAIMH), located in Boulder, CO, is offering new onsite and distance education courses and clinical training programs in medical herbalism and clinical nutrition. Any of the courses are available for continuing education credit, and many of them are offered as certificate programs. The distance learning courses are written and reviewed by practicing clinical herbalists and professional herbal educators, and materials for such courses include edited audiotapes of actual classroom lectures.
NAIMH, which began offering classroom and clinical education in January 2004, is approved and regulated by the Colorado Department of Higher Education, Private Occupational School Board. In addition to offering coursework, the Institute publishes textbooks on medical herbalism and other topics, prints the quarterly journal Medical Herbalism, and operates a sliding-scale holistic center called the Evergreen Center. NAIMH promotes the Vitalist Tradition of healing, which emphasizes the inter-connectedness of mind, body, spirit, and nature.
According to NAIMH Founder and Director Paul Bergner, NAIMH is an important institution due to the hands-on clinical training available to students, as well as its emphasis on clinical nutrition (e-mail, April 25, 2006). “This has always been the tradition in herbalism, that the herbalist uses diet primarily and herbs secondarily. This is how it is in the traditional Chinese, Ayurvedic, and Thomsonian-Physiomedicalist systems of herbalism. We also teach in the paradigm historically known as Vitalism, which today would best be described as ecological medicine, the opposite of single-bullet medicine, whether the single bullet is a drug or an herb. With the Vitalist approach, you look to modify multiple factors in the lifestyle and then let Nature do the work of healing, the same way a farmer might pay attention to soil, fertilizer, weather, seed quality, and weeding, and then let nature produce a good crop.”
The 6 distance learning courses that will be available through NAIMH in June are: First Course in Medical Herbalism; Materia Medica Intensive; Fundamentals of Herbal Formulation; Herbal Detoxification; Adverse Effects of Common Herbs; and Insulin resistance: Pathophysiology and Natural Therapeutics.
Further information about NAIMH and applications for course admission are available at the organization’s Web site, www.naimh.com.
-Courtney Cavaliere
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