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

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.