[Music]
>>K.P. KHALSA: Welcome, everyone.
I'm K.P. Khalsa, principal instructor
of the professional herbalist training program
at Portland Community College.
I've been a health practitioner for 40 years;
been very involved in this renaissance of natural healing
that we're experiencing these days.
I'm an herbalist, dietician, nutritionist, body worker,
and I wear many other hats in the area of natural healing.
I'm the National President of the American Herbalists Guild,
which is the professional association for practicing herbalists
that sets standards, establishes credentials,
and is our association for improving our profession
and delivering our services.
These days I function largely as an industry scientist.
I have a long history in the product development area.
Probably you couldn't walk into a health food store
in the United States and not find a product
that I've developed being marketed by somebody there.
I'm a long term educator.
I've written or edited 30 books and a number of DVD series.
I've written over 3,000 articles for publication
in health food magazines, that sort of thing.
For 30 years I was the senior research scientist
and medical formulator of Yogi Tea.
My recent book, The Way of Ayurvedic Herbs,
is an introduction to that healing system, Ayurveda,
the sister science of Yoga,
and its system of herbal medicine
that serves today over a billion people.
Ten years ago I founded Seattle's
first multi-disciplinary holistic healing clinic,
an idea that sounded great at the time,
probably a little ahead of its time,
but was the forerunner of the multi-party healing clinics
that you see today that have become quite the rage
to put holistic healing practitioners together.
Many of our students have now found themselves slotted
into one of those programs,
and they work alongside naturopathic physicians,
medical doctors, acupuncturists, message therapists,
and a wide range of healers of every stripe,
helping people get one stop shopping in the world
of natural healing.
Who is it that should take this course?
Well, we've designed this course for a wide range of people.
No experience is necessary,
although any experience that you do have
will contribute to the class.
So: established professionals, physicians, acupuncturists,
massage therapists, anatomists, even gardeners
and botanists would be welcome to bring
their particular area of expertise.
Herbalism is about helping herbs, healing herbs,
get into people, but it uses a wide range of skills,
from gardening to marketing.
So, just about anybody with any kind of experience
has something to gain,
and we especially would like to have established professionals,
people who have a career, join the class.
Maybe you have a successful practice
and you'd like to add the tool of herbalism to your toolkit?
We would welcome you in this class.
Maybe you're just out of school,
or you're looking to change a career,
and you want to start a new career:
health care is one of the burgeoning new areas
of employment for the next generation.
Alternative medicine is getting increasingly popular,
especially as the baby boomer age.
So, this would be a great time to start a career
on the ground floor.
Herbalism is going to do nothing but advance as a profession;
we know that.
The whole situation is getting more organized,
and we expect that people who train today
will be able to establish a formal career in herbalism
sometime in the near future.
Maybe you're not looking to treat other people;
you want to develop the tools to enhance your own wellness,
to get well and stay well.
Many people in the class are in that position.
They want to help themselves and their families stay well.
They're not intending to work in the industry,
but they're fascinated by the subject.
C'mon and join us in the class, and we'd love to have you.
How about people who care for their extended family?
How about being the grandma of the clan, the herbal grandma?
People who help their children, their siblings,
everyone in the neighborhood.
Great training for that kind of level of herbal knowledge.
We teach you about herbalism where the rubber meets the road:
how to actually use herbs to treat real people in the real world.
We back that up with good, solid theory,
but we're focused on actually how this works for real people,
how to get that as they need it.
Alright, so the professional herbalist program itself.
What could you do with such a credential.
The careers are many and varied that people have used
this credential to go into as a trained professional.
Many people think that they would like to go
into some sort of wellness, one by one counseling practice
and probably half the people in the course
are aimed in that direction.
That field is becoming more and more viable
as the generations go by,
and people are getting interested in herbal medicine
as a natural healing system.
You might be interested in being an educator.
The demand for education is expanding more rapidly
than there are people to fill it.
As the baby boomers are aging,
they're looking to find out more about herbal medicine,
and their children who have been raised with natural medicine
are looking to participate more in natural healing.
So, there's plenty of opportunity for people to teach at every level,
from basic consumer level classes, adult education classes,
private classes, all the way up to professional level training;
all of those are possibly ahead of you.
You may decide to get this credential to work in public education.
Maybe you'd work for a parks department, a recreation department.
You'd be the resident wild plant identification person.
Maybe you'd work in gardening, but teaching people
from the general public about the healing benefits of plants,
whether wild or cultivated, and using herbal medicine
in food and in their daily lives.
How about educational events, being the person
who's called upon to help learn simple medicine making for people.
Make a cough syrup at a, at a fair, that sort of thing.
Many opportunities for educated, well organized people
to present herbal medicine at its best at these kinds of events.
Well, retail is an area that always has jobs,
and people are going to be well qualified in this course
to be able to be the herbal expert at a health food store, let's say.
People ask you about their conditions, you help them understand
which herb is effective and which herb can be used.
Maybe you'd work behind the scenes at the retail store,
managing ordering of the herbal section.
Managing the display of the herbal section.
So, herbal medicine is more complicated than some areas of retail,
and it really takes an expert to do well there.
You would be that expert.
You'd be certified as having taken a course
to give you competency.
Store managers are looking for these sorts of people.
How about the technical expert,
a person that knows what these herbs look like, tastes like,
how they act, how they should be processed in the field,
taking things into the, into the plant for a manufacturer...
all kinds of opportunities to be the technical expert.
Knowing how the chemistry works,
knowing how to operate the lab machinery.
All the behind the scenes details that are necessary
to get herbs on the shelf to actually treat real people.
Industry is looking for herbal experts.
Industry...herbal medicine is a big trend in wellness in general,
from food products, to supplements, to dietary advice,
to people who are putting out educational materials.
Industry needs people who know what they're doing.
Many times they, industry, knows how to put a product on the shelf,
but they don't know the details of how to be able
to create that product. That's where you come in.
Regulatory compliance is getting increasingly complex
and necessary in our modern world
as herbal medicine goes more mainstream.
So, we need people that understand government regulation,
how to communicate with government bodies,
how to put together in-house documents,
create proper legal labels, that sort of thing.
Tremendous employment opportunities for people
to go into that area.
We'll teach you those kinds of details in this course.
Regulation at a company level, or an industry level,
or even a government level, is equally important,
and you'll need...you'll learn about herbal safety,
herb actions and interactions, that sort of thing,
from the practical point of view
of should we be scared about herbs,
should we use herbs effectively, all the way through
to how to use herbs properly,
and how to communicate about herbs in a legal and effective way.
Quality control is always a big area.
Companies need people that know
how to evaluate the herbal manufacturing process:
tasting, smelling, feeling herbs as they come off the dock,
as they come out of a truck,
as they're unpacked in your manufacturing facility.
Tests doing...tests on batches of herbs that are being,
that are being produced. Running laboratory equipment.
That quality control part is very important,
and needed by every company.
You'll be a qualified expert to understand how these herbs work,
and have the basic education
to be able to apply that in the real world.
Well, the world's always looking for more products,
and so in order to, to start a product you have
to do the basic research.
Tumeric, a very healing herbal medicine
that we'll teach you about, is the hot,
hottest topic in scientific research today,
and that means people that know about
how it works in the real world, and that's you.
So, you may decide to go into the research arm
of these sorts of things.
And then of course there wouldn't be a product
if the product wasn't actually developed.
So, a very fruitful area for you to look at
if you're interested in the behind the scenes,
development part of herbal medicine;
how to take your knowledge, make it into a product
that people actually will consume for their own well being.
Import/export is an area that always has a lot of opportunities.
I was just talking to someone from Japan
who says that American style natural healing
has become much more popular in Japan,
and they're interested in anything holistic from North America.
So, there's an opportunity for you right there:
work on shipping things to Japan, go work in Japan.
But how about the things that we import?
Most the herbs that we'll talk to you about in the course
are from out of the country.
They have to be imported somehow;
you're the person who can work for the company
to help facilitate that whole process,
and we'll train you with that in mind.
The course itself, the professional herbalism program,
is designed to train you to be able to practice after one year,
to give you a basic level of competence to be able to practice
with people within your scope of knowledge that want
to get well and stay well using herbal medicine.
Our curriculum is closely tied to
the standards of the American Herbalists Guild,
and we would like to train you in a way
that will allow to go right out there
and use this knowledge with real people, in the real world;
seriously backed up by theory,
but oriented toward the actual practice of herbal medicine
with real people.
The American Herbalists Guild, of which I'm the President,
grants a credential called "Registered Herbalist."
Our class is tightly aligned with that program,
and we intend that if you should choose to pursue that credential,
our course would supply significant hours
that you could use to apply in your professional pathway
to your application for that credential.
And we would expect that with the additional education required,
you'd be successful in getting this registered herbalist credential
so that you could join the ranks of practicing herbalists
that have that distinguished credential.
We expect that herbal medicine will become
much more formalized in the future,
and that your education in this area will be based
on having such a credential.
So, we encourage you to get on this pathway now,
grab this professional recognition,
and use that as things become more formalized.
This course is structured in a modular format,
which means that you need to take three modules
to graduate from the program.
You can start this program with any of the three modules.
They don't have to be taken in order,
and continue through wherever in the academic year that you are.
So, we'll have people joining us each of the academic terms
or modules, and people who are finished during that time.
So, your classmates will rotate through .
You'll have a different group of classmates that you'll be joining,
from all over the globe, in an online format.
We hope to see you at this course.
We'd love to have you, and let's together
and learn about the joys of herbal medicine
and build you a new career. Thank you.