Kava Forte

[Richardg8092]

Hi Richard, thank you for the excellent post. You say that this is based on your experience "using and prescribing" the MediHerb product. May I ask if you're an herbalist or other kind of health practitioner? Just curious, as herbalism is one of my favorite topics of study.

Hi invisiblejungle, well this is the story.
In Australia, we're usually all lumped together as 'Naturopaths'.  The qualification is 'Bachelor Of Health Science - Naturopathy' regardless of whether we practice evidence based herbal medicine, nutritional medicine or homeopathy. 
This leads to a lot of eye-rolling among us, as practitioners want to believe that their chosen modality is the best / the original / the only truly effective / deepest acting one.   
I qualified in 1986 and practiced for a couple of decades - before deciding that clients were just too needy.
Good Grief, it was always about them them them - and never about me   
I moved out of private practice decades ago, but am still connected to the industry via my current NFP administrative role.

Herbal Medicine was my modality of choice, even though there wasn't a huge amount of scientific 'validation' back then, there was a long standing tradition. 
We had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't. 
Back then we'd say "St.Mary's Thistle works because it is a Liver herb" nowadays we say "St.Mary's Thistle works because of the silybin flavanolignans".

I'm more than happy to chat herbs with you at length (maybe via the Private Messages system in 25 posts time?) although I'm sure there are general herbal interest topics (like this Kava Forte one) which are considered perfectly suitable for the Open Forums.

If I may ask, invisiblejungle, do you have any favorite herbs?
Not meaning ones that you personally utilize, but rather the herbs that make you shake your head in disbelief and go "Wow! Amazing!"
I'll admit I've got that kind of thing going for both St.John's Wort and Kava.  
Any herb that gets the thumbs-up in the ultra-conservative Cochrane Library has got to be worth knowing about!

R