Not sure yet if I’ll stay and practice in Illinois, but it is good to know that legislation changed recently and now our scope of practice as oriental medicine practitioners includes nutritional counseling, supplements and much more.

I haven’t decided how much of my practice will focus on herbs especially in the beginning since it requires a bigger investment, storage, preparing the herbs, etc. But I am happy to know I have the possibility to work with supplements.

Most of the patients say raw herbs work the best and are the most potent, but storing and taking the time to prepare them is time consuming. I don’t plan on having employees in the beginning so raw herbs might have to wait until I’ll feel comfortable to add them to my practice. From what I’ve figured out, most of the practitioners are using granules or patents, both easier to store and they don’t require time for preparation.

I know herbs play an important role in healing but somehow I never got very attached to the Chinese way of using them. Coming from Europe and being raised with tinctures made by my mom in the kitchen, I still prefer a tincture to a raw herb or a patent. I’m not even talking about granules because I just hate seeing them. They all look the same and don’t make any sense to me because I don’t really see them as herbs anymore after so much processing.

But that’s just me… I know each of us have our preferences and a vision for our own practice and mine seem to have tinctures in it. Two years ago I heard Dr. Kim saying that there are companies out there making Chinese formulas as tinctures and I started researching online to see what I could find. I haven’t decided which company I am going to choose to work with but I’m happy that there are a lot of choices for each of us and we can all build the practice that we want.

With that in mind, I’ve started the countdown! Ten more months till graduation and Biomed board coming up just between Christmas and New Year!