Ann Armbrecht: Healing with herbalism and its deeper relational values (ep296)
Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne is a podcast exploring our paths to holistic healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. Subscribe to our show in any podcast app!
Ann Armbrecht joins us in this episode to discuss:
how herbal medicines became marginalized and discredited as ‘alternative medicine’;
whether the healing properties of herbal medicines get compromised with the scale of industrial production;
and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Leah Keane (IG: @leahkeaneofficial, Spotify: Leah Keane)
“With my husband, a filmmaker, I produced a film, Numen, to celebrate the values at the heart of herbal medicine—to show that it’s more than a product on a shelf.”
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Here’s Ann on the overly-utilitarian lens we tend to view medicines through:
“In the age of the internet, people search and find it’s a ‘this’ for ‘that’ kind of herbal medicine—without that cultural framework. So with my husband, who’s a filmmaker, I produced a film, Numen, to really celebrate the values at the heart of herbal medicine—to show that it’s more than a product on a shelf.
As we showed the film around the country, what struck me was that there was a real disconnect with how the film was received [among different people]. Herbalists loved it because it resonated with and captured everything that mattered to them. But for people who weren’t herbalists, while it was interesting, it didn’t speak in that same way because to them, herbal medicine was a product on a shelf.
I would speak with mothers and fathers who would only feed their children organic food and would shop as much as possible at local farmers’ markets, but they didn’t think twice about buying Advil or cold medicine off a pharmacy shelf for their kids, and they didn’t ask those same questions about where the products came from, how they were produced, what the chemicals were, or what the effect was.
It was much more a product to deliver certain results, which, to me, seems like the antithesis of that holistic idea that I think herbal medicine offers.”
About Ann Armbrecht
Ann Armbrecht is the director of the Sustainable Herbs Program under the auspices of the American Botanical Council. She is also a writer and anthropologist (PhD, Harvard 1995) whose work explores the relationships between humans and the earth, most recently through her work with plants and plant medicine. She is the co-producer of the documentary Numen: The Nature of Plants and the author of the award-winning ethnographic memoir Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home , based on her research in Nepal. She was a 2017 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar documenting the supply chain of medicinal plants in India. She lives with her family in central Vermont.
Her most recent book, The Business of Botanicals, explores the healing promise of plant medicines in a global industry.
