Quality not quantity…
I’m a very small fish in a very small pond.
And I’m never going to have a six-figure income to brag about, or thousands of followers to tell me how great I am.
But these are measures of quantity, and in my small pond I think quality trumps it.
No, not my quality.
My colleague and I have worked hard for many years to build a training school for adults who want to become confident and competent herbal practitioners. Practitioners able to do physical examinations more often [and better] than most GPs. Able to take a thorough case history of a patient and assemble a mental list of differential diagnoses, and then able to confirm a likely working diagnosis.
These skills take time and patience to develop, and we have gathered a group of fantastic tutors who work together well and have each student’s development as a future practitioner at the forefront of their minds. We run our own in-house clinic where students get experience in observing consultations and of taking patients themselves. They take four whole years of clinical skills classes, six whole years of herbal therapeutics and clinical medicine, of materia medica, of anatomy and physiology. We take them through two years of immunology and microbiology, two years of botany, two of pharmacy. They get one year of history of herbal medicine, one of pharmacognosy one of public health and hygiene, and a dissertation module.
Perhaps it is because our Advanced Diploma takes 6 years to complete that our school is small. But we are OK with that, even though there are some people who have dismissed us.
That’s where the quality comes in.
We recently had a couple of students take their final clinical exam. This is a practical exam where students are observed taking a real patient, it takes over an hour, they must answer questions about anything medical after the patient has gone, they are judged on their competence, their rapport with the patient, their diagnosis, their safety, and their physical examination skills, and it is nerve wracking…
Observing them was one of our tutors as a moderator and timekeeper, and two very well qualified external examiners. These examiners discuss each student’s performance and give a pass or fail. Both our students passed with flying colours.
As the examiners left at the end of the day, one of them turned to us and said,
‘What excellent herbalists you are producing…’
