Integrative Herbalism & Wilderness Medicine with Sam Coffman

#46 - Join us for an amazing conversation with Clinical Herbalist & Teacher Sam Coffman on how incorporating multiple paradigms in clinical herbalism can support an effective and truly integrative approach to health.

In this episode, Sam shares first-hand experiences on working with the healing power of herbs in Echinacea, Comfrey, Horsetail, Prickly Pear, and others in wilderness medicine, wilderness first aid situations, and complex clinical cases.

He also offers deep wisdom on how his journey in many different realms of life including clinical herbalism, martial arts, the Special Forces, linguistics, philosophy, music, western medicine, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has shaped his relationship with the Earth.

Sam Coffman (MSAOM, RH[AHG]) began his medical education in the Army as a Special Forces Medic (aka Green Beret medic) in 1989. Over the years that followed, he looked toward herbalism as a way to provide sustainable health care in remote and post-disaster regions for chronic, acute and physical trauma care.

Over the following three decades, Sam’s primary goal has become the creation of an integrative medical model that embraces vitalistic, TCM and western medical approaches to herbalism into a collaboration with western orthodox models of diagnosis and treatment for acute and chronic health care conditions.

Sam has taught herbalism for over 30 years and has worked as a clinical herbalist for over 15 years. He founded and runs Herbal Medics Academy (AKA The Human Path), which offers four primary programs - Clinical Herbalism, Austere Medicine, Advanced Medicine Making, and Family Herbalism.

You can find Sam at https://herbalmedics.academy and https://herbalfirstaidgear.com
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herbalmedicsam/ and https://www.instagram.com/thehumanpath/
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ahgherbalmedic
On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheHumanPath 
Herbal Medic book: https://herbalfirstaidgear.com/product/the-herbal-medic-book/

For more info visit Sara's website at: https://www.multidimensionalnature.com/
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Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/plantspiritherbalism
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Learn how to communicate with plant consciousness in the free workshop on How to Learn Plant Language: https://www.learnplantlanguage.com/

Transcript

Sara Artemisia: 0:05

Welcome to the Plant Spirit Podcast on connecting with plant consciousness, and the healing wisdom of Nature. If you'd like to learn more on how to communicate directly with plants, visit www.learnplantlanguage.com. To register for the free workshop, that's www.learnplantlanguage.com. I'm your host, Sara Artemesia and I'm deeply honored to introduce our next guest to the show today. Sam Coffman is a Clinical Herbalist teacher and founder of Herbal Medics Academy. He began his medical education as a Special Forces or Green Beret medic, and has taught herbalism for over 30 years. Sam founded and runs Herbal Medics Academy, also known as The Human Path, which offers four primary programs, Clinical Herbalism, Austere Medicine, Advanced Medicine Making, and Family Herbalism. So Sam, thank you so much for being here, it's such an honor to have you join us today.

Sam Coffman: 1:24

Hi Sara, I feel blessed to be here as well. Thank you for having me.

Sara Artemisia: 1:28

Thank you. Yeah, I'm just so excited for our chat today and the many layers and ways that you work with plants. And I'd love to actually start there. And if you'd be open to sharing a bit about your experience in specifically, how has your journey through so many different aspects of working in the military, with language, western medicine, and also TCM really shaped your relationship with the Earth?

Sam Coffman: 1:59

Sure, yeah, I think that's the overlying or the overarching kind of concept in my life, it's just that my life has always had a purpose to it of some type, right? The things that I'm doing now, for instance, with TCM, they started for me when I was 13 years old, I remember, I was really into martial arts and as much as my parents hated that, because I was actually a classical pianist to start at the age of five. And I want all these different like state competitions and became I actually became a jazz pianist for a period of time for a living and have a couple of CDs out for posterity sake, from that period of my life. But at the time, I was into the idea of martial arts and not just just from a standpoint of fighting, but really from the standpoint of the philosophy behind it. You know, I remember getting a copy of the delta gene from the library, and I found a book on on kung fu that had all these types of these Qigong exercises. And as I was doing Qigong, Qigong exercises at age 13, when I think back on it, that's all come first full circle to when I finally after all these other things I did in my life, I was ready to enable to go to TCM school, get my MSAOM, and so forth, and become a Licensed Acupuncturist/TCM Herbalist. And that was where when I first started working in the occupational clinics, you know, my internships and stuff was like, oh, yeah, all that work I did with chi, you know, that I did. And that took me through Special Forces, through the assessment and selection phase, which is they're trying to reach out all the way through the qualification phase, I would do, I get up with the exception of maybe during med lab, when we had less than four hours of sleep a night, for the most part, I would get up early and just do even if it was just and even then, even with four hours of sleep, I would wake up, and I would take about like, like 18 breaths in my bedroom before I'd even open my eyes, I just like to breathe. So my point of that is that the overarching concept of Plant Medicine have a connection to the Earth, or connection to plants and, and all the things I've done. It's never been a disparate set of looking back on it. It's never been a disparate set of tasks, you know, that I accomplished even with all the different things I've done, right? But all of that is absolutely a part of who I am today. And all of that is a part of plants and plant medicine more than importantly, my relationship to the Earth. What is the Earth? And why are we here? What are humans for? What is our purpose here, as a species? And I believe in over the years, what's come to me is that we are here, if we make it as a species to be almost like the CNS, or maybe even the cerebral cortex of the planet in a way that relates to working with the planet as a protective species as being able to understand Nature both in it's what we think of as cruelty and its love, whether that's really what it is or not, but what we think of it as and you know, as we put all our human emotions in there, and being able to just connect and be a part of that in a way that fulfills our purpose as a species here, so that's a whole another rabbit hole that we literally could talk about for the podcast and way beyond but that's kind of the the overarching piece of my life, I think that connects me to plant medicine.

Sara Artemisia: 5:03

Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And I'm curious to hear if there any particular plants or maybe even just a few plants that you could share with us some stories of your experience with plant connection that you've, that you've had in your life.

Sam Coffman: 5:18

Absolutely. So, I mean, I mentioned two earlier, and it's in my book in the prologue, I think, or the introduction or whatever, talking about how I broke my thumb at the start of the most strenuous and difficult part of, of the Special Forces Qualification Course as a medic, which is called goat lab, or med lab, and how I broke my thumb as avulsion fracture and how I basically healed it by using Comfrey and Horsetail. And I got through the course with a broken thumb that healed while I was going through the course. And that was really like my trial by fire with herbs when I was first really understanding herbal medicine to some extent. And so from them, you know, many, many, many clinical stories, of course, over the years and the thousands of people I've worked with as clients or patients and through today, but I think that the most important stories for me as such, are not always stories necessarily of healing even but just of connection. One plant that stands out to me a lot is Datura. I've always loved Datura, all of you know, the species that I've known of Datura that have grown and when we lived in Central Texas, the Datura that grew there in our yard and just wild and just came up in there, we had Datura all over the place, and is the only plant that I ever did an actual flower essence of. And I remember taking, you know, making a flower essence, a moon essence out of it, Datura flower, which is the most incredible flower and scent, I think of any plant almost for me. And just having these amazing, these lucid dreams for about three nights, you know, and it was probably I mean, there was I'm sure there was some psychotropic activity in that, too. But I felt so connected to the plant from then on and meditating with the plant. And it went through. So this particular story kind of illustrates how you can think you you know, something, and maybe you don't, and we were at a, my wife and I were at hot springs in southern New Mexico favorite Hot Springs once. And this was like maybe two years after that kind of experience with Datura. And we're just sitting there, and it's moon, it's a full moon. It's beautiful out. And we noticed that in the moon, we can see there's this beautiful, they turned us in bloom that we had noticed, we came in from a different side. And so we're sitting on the hotsprings, naked and it's midnight or not mean, but it's late at night and the moons up. I'm like, Oh my God, and I jump out of the hot springs and run over here. And I can just feel the Datura going, get the way for me, right? Get away from me, I'm cussing. Get away from me. And I'm like, What? What the hell we know each other? And it's telling me no, you don't know, you know, my sister, you don't know me? And I'm like, Oh, well guess what this had to, I'm human and if I want to smell your flower, I was not you know, so I leaned down, I'm smelling the flowers, of course. Amazing. I stand up and there was this mesquite tree right above my head that I hadn't even really noticed the branch was low. And this thorn in the Mesquite, just like ripped a furrow in my scalp from once end to the other end, like I was bleeding right down in my eyes. And I can hear this Datura going, "Ah, I told you". It's just like, Alright, I guess I don't know, you know, whatever. But it's, you know, the relationships we have that we've formed through this sort of this linguistic bond or the sense of a language that, that there's no way we can describe that with a physical human language. But they exist and there's a mental, telepathic, or a mental connection that we form with the plants. And anybody who's done this and has, has meditated with plants at all knows this, you felt it. And the cool thing about intuition and that world and the dream world and all those things is, the more you trust it, the better you get at it, the more you use it, the better you get at it. And so it's just a question of practice, really, more than anything. And once you start to trust it, you realize this is real, it's not just something that's made up, you know.

Sara Artemisia: 8:55

Amazing, yes, so much in what you just shared there. That aspect of how, you know, when we think we know something, there's probably another layer in there that we don't know that the plants are constantly showing us that, that what you just shared about how the relationship that we have formed, that there's a linguistic bond there, but it might not be in the same way that we form words in our human to human relationships. And that aspect of the practice piece that it's similar to exercise or any kind of mindfulness practice or anything that the more we do it, the easier it becomes that connecting with plants is the same thing. That's amazing that you just shared that. Thank you and any other plant stories coming to mind, I just, I just love this that you just shared.

Sam Coffman: 9:38

Of course. Around like seeing how incredible a plant is at working with a body. I think probably one of the biggest even though I've had some really incredible clinical stories, I can say things that were horrible chronic cases or even acute cases and infections, but one that really spoke to me loudly was when I first started really doing a lot of research on snake venom and snake bites. And I really got into it. I mean, I was very interested in the concept of neuraminidase, neuraminidase and, and some of the different proteins in venom that break down our own Extra-celllular matrix that break down our tissue and allow venom to move the actual venomous portion of venom, which is probably less than 5% in most snake venom, it's one of the herbs that of course, I was fascinated by was Echinacea, you know, in particular Echinacea angustifola root, we've been having these alkylamides that are very inhibiting to how neuraminidase as a which is an enzyme in the snake venom, particular rattlesnake venom, in this case, and I was teaching a wilderness first responder, of course, and also in New Mexico, in southern New Mexico down by the Gila, and their hot springs there. And Michael Cunningham, if you know him, he's an herbalist down in that area. And he was his sort of his class. But he wanted to do the WFR. So he had me come in and most like probably 70% of the of the class was his students, about 3% of my students that showed up, it was a huge class 10 day course. And we pull in, my wife and I pull in and David, who was also he's now an instructor of ours, too. And at this dog, somebody, a student had just gotten there and their dog had just been bitten by a rat, like literally like within a minute from the time we pulled in, it had just happened and this dog was had moved to the time until the rattlesnake bite was not just puncture wounds, but also like a laceration above a tie. And it was Envenomated you could tell it was a full envenomation bite because his face within a minute, his face was swollen up like your eyes were were just looks like like somebody had just taken a pump and started inflating this poor dog's head, it was just lying there, with tongue laying out couldn't even breathe. And I immediately you know, grab Echinacea slowly, I had some, Michael had some too, we grabbed it, we had student cut open on Prickly Pear pad and start and get the needles off and start cutting that open. And we just started working with it. So because it was a personal laceration, we could drip the Echinacea angustifola into the wound itself. And so we did that and let it, just let it drip in. And just like tiny drops, of course, is mostly alcohol, so had to be really careful, it was a bout a 60 pound dog, but we could still rip a little bit into its mouth under and so we did that sublingually. And not even 10 minutes later, the dog starts to kind of thump its tail, and then within half an hour its standing and it's kind of wagging his tail. So anyway, we continue that treatment between that and Prickly Pear pads, the owner of the dog worked with the dog for you know, all night, or at least until like two in the morning or so next morning at a dog was totally normal except for the fact that all of the swelling around us so it looked like it had goiter all the swelling was in our on a sort of on his limp face was not swollen at all, you can still see the laceration but otherwise, almost no swollen on tail at all, behavior was totally fine. Almost no swelling in the face. And then we started just working with some lymph movers with a dog and three days later, it was like nothing that ever even happened. And so again, these little things that you see, not necessarily even because that's something that may be that big of a strike striking of a story by itself, but given inside of the cultural aspect of what we consider to be the medicine, quote unquote here of rattlesnake bites, which if you think about it, you know, is one of those areas that never has been deprogrammed over the last century. So if you think about it, really pharmaceutical medicine started programming, what it is and what herbalism was not supposed to play in this sort of propaganda. Not you know, I'm not saying that this is necessarily intentional, even it just happened, well, maybe it's intentional. But if you go back to the Flexner reports 1910 or so, with being a way a gateway to be able to say herbalism isn't real, and herbs aren't real, and until they're really kind of a renaissance of them around the 60s. And then going way into kind of you know, wound land about it and not really being it's taken a long time to kind of come back around and be actually physically manifested. Clinical herbalism is starting to be something now. And it's and I started this back when you had to look over your shoulder all the time, that because somebody could FDA or whoever was going to be a problem for it for that. So anyway, my point is rattlesnake bites and rattlesnake venom is something that never has been deprogrammed out of that, and it's anti venom or nothing. And if you go into if you're into wilderness medicine, which I very much am, then of course, you know, if I'm teaching the WFR, the last thing in the world that I would ever do is tell somebody in a classic WFR, yeah, you can use herbs. I couldn't I can't do that. I would never do that, you know, it's yep, take care of it, make sure they're rid of anything constricting, get them to higher care, get them to anti venom clinic, and so to be able to experience how effective that was, I had experienced a copperhead bite but never for rattlesnake bite to see and it was a dog, not a human. But that was still incredible to witness that.

Sara Artemisia: 14:37

That is incredible. Thank you so much for sharing that just really highlighting the power of herbs and how quickly and effectively they can support the healing process. Any more related note, I'm curious to hear a bit more about how do you approach complex clinical cases in your work?

Sam Coffman: 14:55

Yes, that's a great question. And that's something that's changed for me a lot over the years. So I've always had this approach that because of the fact that we run clinics, especially in underserved areas, free clinics, and sometimes we'll see hundred people in a day. And it'll be a small team of people myself, and you know, enough students to be able to run an apothecary in the clinic. And I'll rotate through tables, like three tables one at a time, and I'll spend no more than 15 minutes at any given table, where the students have already done the initial intake. And so how do you approach a complex case where all you have is maybe 15, or 20 minutes to work with somebody, because you've got a lot of people standing in line, and you still gotta see, and you want them to come back? Well, the way I used to do always, and it just hasn't changed substantially, but was, what can I do, that's going to help this person enough to where they're going to come back in a week or two weeks and say, well, that's working. So I usually would go at the approach would be dealing with these more superficial symptomologies that, you know, you can affect with herbs, and at the same time, being aware of the fact that there's much deeper stuff going on. So like peeling away the layers of an onion, some sort of sort has always been because I really feel strongly that you're not treating somebody with herbs at all, until you've done at least one follow up or to at least you know, and multiple is better. So more complex has changed since I have become educated in in traditional Chinese medicine, working with Chinese herbs from an energetic standpoint, as opposed to how I was doing it before, which was very western bioscience kind of approach that I was using a lot of Chinese are with for that, which also works that way. But now, I kind of have two interspersing layers. One is the Western sort of Western symptomology. And then the more functional medicine Western deep, and then somewhere in there. And between those two is sort of the TCM, what they would call the branch, you know, as opposed to the root, the branch of what's going on. So more of a symptomology based, but from a TCM perspective, there's a little difference in there. And then below everything, the more TCM perspective on on what's going on there from an energetic standpoint. And the reason I got to that was because a lot of these complex cases especially what I think is an epidemic in our country is perimenopausal women a between 40 and 60 years old, unexplained and unlosable weight gain and just can't change it, blood sugar issues, thyroid issues, cortisol and stress issues. Of course, progesterone, you know, being a precursor of cortisol being a part of that as well. And approach him from a Western standpoint was like playing Whac-A-Mole with and with hormones, you know, it's like, oh, well, let's work with the thyroid, oh, well, let's work with cortisol or that you know, and one thing a pop up after you, you know, it's just not it's not the way, it's not the way to do it in any even if you're using pharmaceuticals, either, of course. But then I started finding there's these be when I first started my internship in the clinic, working particularly with this one woman from China with 40 years experience as an acupuncturist. And she was treating these cases that I would consider, like these complex, what I'm seeing as an epidemic, you know, women coming in with these issues she was treating like they were low hanging fruit, like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's no problem. We'll just do this, and blah, blah, will do this and do this. And they're coming back, like the next week saying, yeah, that's working really good. And like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And in a month, they're like, yeah, my blood works looking better on this. And I'm just like, Oh, my God, what, you know, there's something here. So really understanding that there is a balanced system in the body, that when you start to get to really complex issues, like endocrine disorders, there, you cannot possibly get to the actual root of the problem through the hormones themselves. You have to go beneath that to the actual human. What do you want to call it? You know, the human structure and by structure, I mean, we call it energetics. But what is it really, you know, one of the things I teach in our one of our beginning courses is that there's three rings that you can think of health from and one of the outer is spiritual. And by that I don't necessarily mean a religion, just but the spiritual, the next one is energetic. And the third one is physical, physical being what we do in allopathic medicine every day, energetic being maybe what we would see more, a lot of times and maybe Ayurvedic and TCM approach. And then spiritual being a lot of times that we might see more on, say, some different Indigenous types of medicine. I was in Nicaragua for a period of time, a very short period of time, working with an herbalist there, who asked me it is an example, he lives in a jungle, and learned from the Indigenous folks in on that side of Nicaragua, and he wants to ask me about the, like suicide and depression and all the different anxiety and PTSD and bipolar all the different, you know, he didn't know the name for them, but just like I hear all the time about all these different, like psychological issues there. And you know, what do you think about that was when we were talking about it. And so his impression was, I think that's spiritual. Those are spiritual diseases, because they're not rooted to the Earth. And if they were rooted in initial routing to the Earth, then they would be able to work through what their purpose is, and so forth. And so maybe that's one example of like a spiritual approach to slow people like, well, what do you mean by spiritual? So that's one way of looking at it. And I think there are many different paradigms to look at health from all of them have their value, you know, none of them are. I would never say that from a school of medicine doesn't have any value, of course it does in a certain way. But they're they have their limitations. And so I think the more paradigms that we can use and look at something from different angles, like anything in life, the more that you can do that, the quote unquote wiser you become about it, you know, that's what we consider wisdom is really is somebody who has the experience and failures, you know, the history of failure enough in certain things to be able to say, oh, yeah, that didn't work, or this didn't work, at least to be able to put it together and say, Well, this is sort of like what I use now as my best practice structure to be able to get through this when I'm looking at it three or four different angles. And I think that's the same thing with health very much.

Sara Artemisia: 20:37

That is incredible. Thank you so much for sharing that I love what you were just sharing at the end there about how there are many different paradigms to look at health and medicine. There's many different angles that we can approach an issue from. And I think this really speaks to your integrative approach and how you work with plants, how you work with medicine and healing, and particularly because so much of your work is focused in wilderness medicine, wilderness first aid, I'd love to hear your perspective on why is it really important for people to know wilderness medicine and wilderness first aid right now?

Sam Coffman: 21:11

Yeah, absolutely. I think even if the world didn't end tomorrow, even if we don't have a zombie apocalypse, and I'm saying that only half jokingly, we still become better at medicine, if we understand the true world we live in, this goes back to what I first started talking about just being connected to the Earth, right? When you turn on the light, it's not magic that the light bulb turns on, when you turn the water on, that water comes from somewhere, and it goes to somewhere, understanding those aspects of life is critical, and to not take them for granted. In my opinion, you can't be an effective healer, let's say, working with medicine, that is a living medicine that comes from the Earth without understanding the roots of what that means. And to me what that means is knowing how to deal with the worst case scenarios and be the best possible human in those worst situations. So yes, absolutely, I am when I first started this 30, 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, 1989 when I first started my journey into special forces, I remember sitting there and just kind of hanging out with some of the other guys that were getting ready getting trained training out to be able to get in, get through the assessment selection, of course. And out of everybody's sitting in the room, one person said, why are you here? And the conversation started to turn in and people were saying, I just feel like something's gonna happen, you know, some really big things going to happen, and I want to be prepared for it. So that was 1989. And people were there. And then granted most of the people the reason we had problems was because of human behavior. It wasn't even the hurricane it was the issue, it's a human behavior. That was the issue. It was people making a run on all the gas stations, so you couldn't get gas anywhere, there was plenty of gas but everybody made a run on it. So any situation that we have can be is multiplied on geometric scale really by human behavior. Knowing that and just understanding that's a reality that we live in in this country at least in this culture should be a good reason to want to learn wilderness first aid and, not just first aid but wilderness first aid. And the way I teach it is really I call them sticks and rags course like I want you to know the principles and how to do this with literally sticks and rags if you have to, because from there you can always buy the gear and the gear is easy for me as well once you know that the principles behind it so I think that that makes you a better overall person as any kind of healer if you're it doesn't matter if you're, I don't care if you're your your homeopath or if you're just using only energetic medicine and flower remedies or whatever, you know, you're still going to be a better at it. If you have that basic understanding and link to the Earth and to humanity in its bare form and not just mass hallucination that we all agree on to be reality right now.

Sara Artemisia: 23:56

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We certainly saw it with a human behavior piece, the beginning of the pandemic, with every single store running out of toilet paper, and the issue had nothing to do. The actual physical issue had nothing to do with anything related to that. So yeah, thanks for highlighting that just how important that is. I'm curious to hear a bit more about Herbal Medics Academy, could you tell us a bit more about that the four different programs that you work with there?

Sam Coffman: 24:21

Absolutely. And of course, we have lots of one off type programs as well, not programs, but courses everywhere, you know, that are great too, for people just want to pop in and get a two hour course here there. We have makers workshops once a month on all kinds of different stuff. But generally speaking, we have four areas that we concentrate on one of Clinical Herbalism being one of them, which also kind of corresponds to some degree with people that want to get their registration from the American herbalist guild. We offer a full spectrum of not just didactic, that covers everything and more than he wants, but also the clinical hours and more than he wants. And this is teaching students how to become better clinicians how to become herbal clinicians, and if they wanted to have their own practice, you know, at some point, the second area is advanced medicine making a recall the Apothecary's program. And that's just it's because there's just so many you cannot, herbalism is so much more complex than Western medicine, right? I mean, I got into med school when I was 42, when I was kind of given up on the school idea, and as it turned out, I walked away from it due to family and financial reasons. And that was what started me on the current school that you see now. The whole idea of allopathic medicine, as you know, is based upon pharmaceutical medicine. And when I started learning that, and it was like, Oh, my gosh, I don't get it. Now, all the physiology I'm learning is just basically reverse engineered pharmaceutical pathways and why we're learning that that way. Then I started realizing there's no medical, which I was just talking about healing paradigms, there's no healing paradigm that doesn't have its main factor that has to be there in order for it to be successful. And with herbalism obviously, it's plants. So what that means is you have to not just learn botany and how to identify plants and making sure you have the right plant, but you need to know how to harvest them the right time and what it is you need to know how to make medicine from them the right way, not just you know, everything's Maceration tincture, you know, there's a, there are multiple ways to be able to extract plants, and then administration is a part of that as well. So really, that's what the apothecary serve advanced medicine making. It's not just it's very much you know, making medicine but also making medicine in ways that administer it in ways that we're not used to, and we're not nebulizing them and nasal atomization and being able to administer and through the literally dozens of different ways we can administer to the human body, depending on how we get the Earth the tissue. And then the third area is Family Medicine, which also has to do with certification. It has emergency birth as involved. It's pediatric medicine, its prenatal, its postpartum, its birth, and it's run and by an amazing midwife herbalist named Katia Lemone, who also is helped by Mel Bailey, who's also a nurse midwife. And they just they run an incredible program there, she wrote a chapter out of meaning my book as well asked her to, because of those little emergency births. The fourth area is Austere Medicine, which is the kind of graduate level of the WFA, WFR kind of stuff, you know, it's like WFR gets you up to the point where you get somebody to hire care, what if there is no higher care. And that's where I teamed up with Dr. Steve Pehrson, M.D, who also used to be a, he started out as a Greenbrae medic as well, but 10 years before I did, and he's been a doctor for like 35 years in Rural Utah. And so we together created the curriculum for how to work with acute even even chronic to some extent, but acute and trauma in the field in a prolonged field care environment, Austere Medicine, where there's no higher care there. And we have to deal with the so what we do in our in one of our programs, where they're on site, here is a 13 day program, after they've done a whole bunch of stuff first, didactic online, where part of it is a three day WFR certification, they've already done a WFA, and an advanced WFA. And so we take that nine days and break it into three. And they do three days on site with the WFR, at the end of that some of the same scenarios, the same issues that they're dealing with in the WFR now. It's like the same scenario was their same post disaster situation. But guess what, there's no higher care and now we have to take care of them. So that's where we get into the Austere. And that's where Steve comes in. And so we're doing all kinds of incredible scenario based teaching, basic medical procedures, the field surgery type stuff that, you know, is post disaster related, like if there's no higher care, nobody else can do it. At least if you couldn't assist somebody in doing this, you might have to do some of it yourself. And we're talking, you know, basic stuff in the field, but things that are you going to have to know how to do to treat wounds? And even how can you do an amputation? If you had to? Can you deal with a sucking chest wound if you had to? How are these things and you're not going to create a doctor in you know, in a 13 day program, but on site program, but you're going to at least get people comfortable with the fact that they can take care of a minor wound that's become infected. And so we approach it both from an allopathic and of course, an herbal perspective as well, if we are trying to, for instance, limit and ration the pharmaceuticals that we have on hand, how much can we deal with, with herbs to begin with. So that's the Austere Medicine program. So those are the four programs.

Sara Artemisia: 29:14

That is amazing, so comprehensive, so multifaceted. Thank you so much for doing that work so powerful, and really so needed. And I love how it builds this experience of resiliency of how to be self reliant in an emergency and really how you're weaving plants into every single aspect of that in your work. Just absolutely amazing. And you mentioned your book there a little bit, too. I was curious if you could tell us more about that your book, Herbal Medic and also any other books that you're currently working on?

Sam Coffman: 29:47

Yeah, sure. Herbal Medic I see is actually had a self published version of it from 10 years ago or so that I wrote to be a sort of a textbook of the Austere program to begin with and the WFR. I used to call the WF, WH the Wilderness Herbal first responder at that time because I was incorporating extra days of just you know, there was a WFR portion. And then there was an herbal portion. And now that grew into the multi-Austere Medicine. Well, story publishing took that gave me a contract on it, and they rewrote and expanded and did a whole bunch more stuff with it. Well edited by them. And they turned it into, in my opinion, a really good book. It's their third best seller, last year story publishing, it's, it's doing really, really well. It's something that there's no other book like it, in my opinion out there that talks about it starts with first aid, wilderness first aid stuff, and then starts getting into herbs, and, of course, some medicine making and it's kind of Materia Medica. But then, how do we work with all these different areas? And how do I formulate? What is my approach to be able to deal with something like strep throat in the field or at home or whatever, wherever you're dealing with it, you know, even red flags, situations that normally go to higher care, and get into there, of course, it was written, I finished it in the spring that COVID started. So I've even got some COVID stuff in there as well. So that's, that's that book, I have two other books on contract with them right now. One of them is called Survival Gardening. And that'll be out next year, I'm not sure might not be out until 2025 Spring it, these usually try to put the gardening books out like January, February, so it might be 2025. And then that's everything we would need to do to be able to grow our food and survive off of our garden, right? If we we need enough fats and proteins, and this includes backyard agriculture to some extent as well, rabbit tree and chickens, but primarily know how can we do this with with our food we're growing? And how can we do it? So I kind of had this approach of like, how much you can get nutrition that we can actually eat in five days? You know, using sprouts and such? How about in five weeks? How about in five months? And how about in five years? And kind of looking at it from that perspective, because of course gardening, real gardening, you got to build soil, and you're doing all these things that are going to take, you know, seasons, if not years to be able to really create, but how can we speed that process up and get nutrition out of our garden to be able to live on. And then the third book is also, it's sort of like a primitive engineering program. It's a water collection, water storage, water purification. So it's salt sand filtration for community level, where again, we're using, we're not talking about, you know, going out and buying pumps and stuff, we may not have any electricity at all, how can we do this? What is you know, how can we work with, with gravity and with water and with salt sand filtration, to be able to do that, and hygiene as well. And then also hygiene in general. So that's that's what the third book is. And I have many other books on the way with your story or otherwise, that are they're specifically going to be herbal medicine related to advance medicine making, and clinical case studies, written together with Dr. Kyla Helm, M.D, who is also on our faculty and teachers. Together we teach the botanical functional medicine course, which is part of our clinical program as well.

Sara Artemisia: 32:49

Amazing. Well, I really look forward to reading those books. Just incredible, the information that you're packing in there, thank you so much for sharing that. And clearly you work with the plants in so many different realms and ways of support for people. And I'm curious if you could tell us a bit about how the plants really support you in your life's work?

Sam Coffman: 33:09

Yeah, I think I mean, I definitely have kind of a meditative aspect of connecting to this land now that we've moved up here to Taos in the mountains where I feel back at home, you know, in the mountains. And it's actually the same range the Sangre de Cristos but on the Southern side of it, that I spent a lot of time in when other than Colorado, and grew up in Colorado. So being here, and connecting to the Earth, in a meditative way, everyday just being able to walk and talk to the trees and talk toxic plants and listen to the plants has been a huge part of that. For me, all my whole life had been here, I feel like it's really finally coming full circle for me to be able to be in this environment, every day is incredible. That's probably the biggest way I think that incorporating some sort of a daily caller to practice for lack of a better word that you just you know, that you do every day, we're back to the whole idea of you know, if you use your intuition, the more you use it, the better you get at it, having some form of that I think will help steer you. And if you listen to your intuition, this is a message I would say I get asked this all the time, like, what do you suggest if a person wants to start learning herbs? Well, you know, you got to learn fundamentals, right, you need to learn some basic fundamentals that are actually useful and not just made up copy paste information, but actual empirical data. In other words, data that is related to hundreds or thousands or tenths of thousands of people and patients. That's why I like TCM even though of course, it went through its own changes, massive changes, but at least there's a history of these things working. And when I see these formulas and these herbs, and it's like wow, this is interesting, because I use the herbs the same way but from a different perspective. And this is why they actually may work and see all those things that are 20. So empirically, you know, how do these plants work? And how can we show that they need those fundamental Let's just start with of course, not not that that's the only thing you should be doing. But it's a part of it. And I think you need to learn just basic botany and some botanical names at least. And, you know, I mean, all our students have to our prof carriers are already set up by genus species, right? I mean, if alphabetically, so that's how we organize our plants, always. And so people at least have an idea of what they're working with, let alone families. But beyond that, you need to learn you need to have an intuitive relationship to the plants. It's a lot like music or language, right? I mean, if you learn a language, you learn a foreign language, but you gotta you have to know some grammar you have to where you're going to, you're not going to be intelligible, right? You can't, if you don't know how to speak in past tense, or future tense, or you don't understand plural versus singular, verb form or something, a conjugation, you can't, you'll never really be able to communicate very well. But as you learn that you still have to say things, right? And so the things you're saying, aren't going to always be can you tell me where the bathroom is, there going to be thoughts and ideas and philosophies. Same with music, I mean, of course, again, my, my background was classical music until I got to high school, I started getting into jazz, and became a jazz musician. Well, that, to me, that was everything was like all the technique and theory which I had, which was way advanced, you know, for my age, because I, I was just, I was putting these situations very strict kind of theoretical and technical practice to where I was, I had really a lot of good technique and knew the theory, but none of that mattered once I hit jazz was like, well, now how you actually make music at the spa on the spot, like, you know, you can take a piece and you can improvise through it. And yeah, and maybe you can read the chord changes, you know, in a real book, or whatever, for a tune that everybody else is playing the band. But at some point, it's not just a little blues riffs. At some point, it has to actually be music that's coming somewhere from inside of you, or through you out into the keys, right? And so are whatever you are using for your your instrument. Same thing with plant medicine. At some point, you have to learn some of the basic techniques stuff, but at some point, there's going to be an actual language, there's gonna be a song, there's going to be a sentence, there's going to be an idea, a concept that's going to come through you is going to lead you in a certain way. And you have to trust and follow that, because it is a living medicine. It's not a dead medicine. It's not a, it's not chemistry. Chemistry is part of life, but it's not broken into pharmaceutical, single constituent chemical, synthetic chemical or anything like that. And I'm not even saying that those are necessarily bad, those are all still part of the universe, right? Like, what how does that saying, if you really want to create an apple pie from scratch, you got to start by creating the universe, right? It's all part of Nature. But the human part that we linked to in the living medicine is these plants are alive, they have consciousness, and you have to be able to connect to that. And trust to that, that's the portion of it that you get better and better at and the more technique you have, the more you can talk the bright the more language the more grammar you know, the the better sentences where you can talk about, yeah, I can now I can talk about the meaning of life, right? Man, I was a German linguist. And I translate, I worked with translator and I was fluent, I still am fluent. But I was native fluent. I got literally I spoke no English for three years, once I got over there, and I had a knack for languages always had an ear for it. And I mean, people didn't know I was not German, you know, right. But there's levels to what I could talk about, right? I mean, I the funny because I, you know, I had all this musical background, but I couldn't talk about music in German, because I never really learned that language, I didn't learn learn it, it was a totally different vocabulary and words that I didn't really get around and work with. So I couldn't express myself in that area at all about that. But there were other ways I could I love philosophy, and I read a lot of German philosophy and I read, read all of the just read tons of that type of thing. And so I could talk about that in German very well, because I had the tools to technique but I also had the intuitive link between who I am you know, inside and what I wanted to express outside.

Sara Artemisia: 38:51

Well, thank you, Sam. So incredible. Just so incredible. And I love that you brought in language and music and how it's so it's the same exact thing when we're working with plant medicine. And that really is it's such a core foundational piece of the why of this podcast of really, what does it mean to learn the language of plants from many different ways, many different angles, many different layers. So you have certainly connected with multiple of those layers and angles today and so just so grateful for you for your work for being here. And so tell us how can people find out more about you and your work?

Sam Coffman: 39:28

Sure, yeah. So herbalmedics.academy or thehumanpath.net Anything that with word Herbal Medic and Sam Coffman and you're going to come up with us and we were all over the web. We're all over social media and Facebook, Herbal Medics, herbalmedicsam on Instagram. I post on there at least every day. I mean, tick tock, I don't really do much there but I you know, I have some videos there. Youtube, youtube.com/thehumanpath. So if you're looking for either of those two things, you're gonna find you're going to find us Herbal Medic is the name of my book. You can find it on Amazon all over the place and read the reviews If you want, of course, you can find it in our store. I have a store and a botanical formulary as well as called herbalfirstaidgear.com, herbalfirstaidgear.com. That started as being a formulary for doctors and nurse practitioners that wanted to be able to order my stuff. So that's where it started. And it's just grown so much that it's really, it's something now and it's really nice. It's a nice little online store, we've got tons of formulas, some of them are still a little bit cryptic, because of the time I would have like, PDF and send to the docs. And so you know, this is what the worst so I wasn't, we didn't want even deal with FDA GMP naming regulations. And so they were cryptic, so some of them still are, and that haven't been renamed into nice GMP safe name yet, but in general, you can find lots and lots of different formulas on there, both topical and of course, mostly internal.

Sara Artemisia: 40:46

Well, thanks so much, Sam. And thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. It is such an honor to have you here.

Sam Coffman: 40:52

Thank you for having me, Sara. It was really nice to be able to talk with you and it was fun. Thank you.

Sara Artemisia: 41:00

And thanks so much for listening and joining us today on the Plant Spirit Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and please follow to subscribe, leave a review and look forward to seeing you on the next episode.