What’s a piece of your physiology you want to know more about, and what herbs have you been curious about along the way?

Hi all! I'm Agy, and I'm really excited that you're here. Let me quickly introduce myself. I trained as a physician at Wrocław Medical University in Poland (MD, non-practicing). From there I moved into herbal medicine, earning my MSc in Herbal Medicine from the American College of Healthcare Sciences, where I'm now finishing up my DSc in Integrative Health. My clinical herbal training came from two beautiful schools, Heartstone Herbal School under Tammi Sweet, and Northern Appalachia School of Herbal Medicine, where I studied bioregional herbalism. I'm also published in the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, where I wrote about the gut microbiome across the lifespan and which herbs are supportive at each stage. I'm a research NERD. Like, full-on. I love everything about it. With my medical background I have a soft-spot for science, and I'm also very much in respect toward the different traditions of herbalism that came long before modern research caught up to them. My work here is to help bridge those two worlds. Body First. Plants Second. This community runs on that motto, and I want to explain what it actually means. One of the issues I've run into in the herbalism world is that so many people are learning, memorizing, and building relationships with plants and their actions without ever developing a core understanding of how the body works. In my opinion, this is backwards. To build a meaningful herbal practice, we have to understand how the body functions without the herbs first. Once we have that foundation, we can actually investigate what's off and choose herbs that support the body with real confidence. That's the whole project here. Community Architecture The Community Feed is where I'd love for all the buzz to happen. Each week I'll be dropping mechanism questions, anonymized case puzzles, materia medica discussions, and the occasional spicy preparation debate. Jump in, push back, share what you're working through, ask the messy questions. This is the room where the conversations happen.

Most herbal education starts with the plants, and I think that's backwards. Materia medica first, mechanism somewhere in the back of the book, physiology mentioned in passing on the way to the next monograph. Students learn to associate symptoms with herbs without ever building the underlying map of how the body actually works. They can recite traditional uses and modern indications, and they freeze the first time a complicated client walks in with overlapping presentations across three or four systems. This community runs the other direction. The body comes first because every plant action has to land on a specific body, with a specific physiology, in a specific regulatory state, and that's the layer the textbook approach tends to skip. We map the system, we trace the mechanism, and then the plants slot in as tools that meet the architecture at specific points. By the time we get to the materia medica, the question stops being "what herb is good for X" and becomes "what part of the regulatory pattern does this herb actually act on, and is that the part that's struggling in this person." That framework has a name, and it's the one on the door: Body First. Plants Second. It's the spine of everything I teach here. What lives in this space: Lesson-by-lesson modules that build a body system from the ground up. Recorded presentations, walking through anatomy and mechanism at a pace you can follow. Case-based discussion threads where I walk through anonymized clinical reasoning from my own consult work. Direct back-and-forth in the community feed, where most of the teaching actually happens. Lesson 1 of the Nervous System Module lands May 9th. It maps the architecture of the system, from the central and peripheral divisions through the autonomic dial, the vagus nerve, the HPA axis, and the enteric nervous system. The next six lessons fill that map with neurochemistry, pathology, and the herbal actions that meet each layer. The community board is where the work compounds. I'm in here regularly, reading and responding and posting. Ask questions, push back, share what you're noticing in your own body or your own learning. The members who get the most out of a space like this are the ones who treat it as a working room.

What brought you to herbalism originally? Was it a person, a plant, a symptom, a book?