Herbal Medic Sam Coffman at Medicines from the Earth Symposium - Stories From The Earth Podcast

Hi, my name is Sam Kaufman. I am the founder and co-director of Herbal Medics Academy, a.k.a. The Human Path. I've been around for over 17 years. Currently I'm located in Taos, New Mexico, or in the mountains east of Taos, New Mexico. I'm down here at Lake Junaluska for the botanicalmedicine.org, the Medicines of the Earth conference, which is fantastic. It's been a great experience. Linnea Wardell puts on such an amazing conference. I've never been to this one. I've taught up at the one in southwest before, but this is just a fantastic area to do it in. Everything's green and lush and beautiful. I haven't been in North Carolina in a long time, so it's good to see the people recovering also from the disaster from Helene. I gave two classes. One was on post-disaster herbalism, basically, which also includes austere herbalism, herbalism in remote areas, herbalism where there's no higher care, definitive care that's available. Along those lines, I gave a second class on wound management, wound and infection management using herbs. We've had really wonderful students. We've had some great back and forth questions. I did a demonstration a little bit, just got into a tiny bit of demonstration using charcoal and then using, of course, different herbs, different blends of herbs and poultices and how to do that, how to manage wounds, what the different wound colors are, how to manage the inflammation cycle as well as the proliferation cycle, but of course, any kind of infection and biofilm infection management in that process as well. I speak always from a perspective of professional experience and not just from books that somebody else has written. Basically, everything I do and everything I teach and everything I write is based on my own experience in the field, either through our outreach organization, Herbalmedics, in other countries and here in underserved areas, but also from my time prior to this when I was in the military as a special forces medic. I love to be able to share that and to organize that information in different ways. I have two books out right now. A third is on the way through Story Publishing, Herbalmedic, which goes into a lot of the detail of the things I just talked about, and then also one on gardening called Survival Gardening, which is based on the concept of how would you grow food that you had to live from that provided enough calories and enough nutrients for you if there was no food available. So that Survival Gardening is also from Story Publishing. I have a third one on the way dealing with water and everything that you can imagine about being able to get water, purify water, deal with waterborne diseases and so forth too. That'll be out in about a year. In addition to that, I'm writing a fiction series. I have the first book just about finished and that should be out this fall. That's actually going to be self-published. I'm working through Story on that one. And that's actually a post-apocalyptic main character. It's kind of similar background to myself. You can find us again at herbalmedics.academy. Herbalmedics.academy. You can find my store at herbalfirstaidgear.com. You can find my YouTube under The Human Path. You can find us online. Anything to do with Herbalmedics, our teleclinic is herbalmedics.clinic. And then anything online and Facebook and Instagram is either Herbalmedics Academy or The Human Path or both. So if you look for that, you'll find us there. Or look for my name, you'll find me there. Sam Koffner.