The Earthwise Herbal is the product of more than twenty-five years of active practice by the author

Introduction by Matthew Wood

It is founded upon personal experience in tens of thousands of cases—a lifetime portfolio that few of the biomedical chemists and researchers introducing plant products into the marketplace can claim. Building upon personal experience is followed by comparison of notes with other busy practitioners, careful reading of herbal literature in the light of personal experience, and direct education from Mother Earth and the herbs. Dr. Tradition—whom Culpeper distrusted yet utilized—has been checked against experience, natural history, and reasonable consideration for pharmacological knowledge.

I have called this herbal “earthwise” to contrast it to other herbals reflecting the pharmacological approach. It is based on sources that the scientific approach ignores: historical uses, folk medicine, folk practitioners, the experience of actual herbalists, intuitive concepts of energy, plant properties, and medicine, daydreams, and dreams. It is, however, “scientific” in a broader sense of the word because it follows an organized and reasonably critical approach to understanding plant medicine. The Earthwise Herbal is organized around the concept that each plant has an innate intelligence or core “essence,” as the ancients would have said, binding together the disparate properties and uses into a meaningful and logical or intuitive whole. The compounds in the plant, its appearance, growth habit, ecological niche, and medicinal properties are united by this common personality, intelligence, or essence. This knowledge not only represents the “inwardness” of the thing—as the Quakers would say—but it represents the whole that unites the parts. This approach is thus set upon a holistic foundation.

 

Welcome to the RadarOpus edition of the Earthwise Herbal Repertory & Materia Medica

Introduction by David Ryan

In a life of unexpected twists and turn, becoming project manager for the Earthwise Series for RadarOpus was never even a vague dream of mine until 2018 when Matthew was approached by RadarOpus to see if we wanted to do a conversion from the North Atlantic books to digital. Our main purpose was to create a repertory of plant tincture remedies for homeopaths and herbalists alike, with an eye especially to giving the herbal community access to a broader homeopathic world and its methodologies. Equally importantly we give the homeopathic community access to the MANY upgrades to the world of “organ remedies” and mother tinctures as homeopaths call them. Some of these are herbal polychrests unknown to most homeopaths.

Matthew Wood has long kept a hand in the homeopathic camp - learning many herbal remedies from homeopathy that had been lost to herbalists, and now returning the favor by adding to the vast homeopathic collection of remedies! By using the Earthwise Herbal Repertory and MM, you will understand how to use the best full-spectrum soft tissue remedy (Polygonatum /Solomon's Seal), expanded profiles of Calendula, Hypericum, Nettle and Lady's Mantle.

 

Herbalists will be introduced to the world of computer repertory work and can look forward to streamlining their complex cases greatly and being introduced to remedies they may never have suspected otherwise. How exactly can it speed your cases up?

Homeopaths discovered the brilliance of eliminative cross indexing 175 or so years ago, but until computer repertories, each rubric, even if it had 100 remedies had to be written out, to compare against all the other symptom rubrics, and then graded and ranked according to usage and likely effectiveness. This process, done after the case taking, could take a pre-computer era homeopath up to an hour to crunch say 20 symptoms. The RadarOpus software reduces this very time consuming aspect by 75 or more percent. And maintains the precision of repertorization, which Herbalists can only hope to equal through decades of subtle skills like pulse reading filling the gaps. In short, a repertory allows a prescriber now matter how green to have a much better chance at not missing the best remedy through a lack of a full as can be database.

Do you want a stronger basis for prescribing Organ support remedies?