My Story & My Why...

People regularly ask me how I got into herbalism, I think most of us have a turning point, a place in which our family, friends, or ourselves are fed up with not getting the care or answers that we need, or the system just isn't set up for us in some way.

We know through SO much research [1, 2, 3, 4] and sadly, personal experience, that health outcomes for women, minorities, and people with unknown or misunderstood health issues or problems are often gaslight, called crazy, mis-diagnosed, or diagnosed with catch all conditions like "fibromyalgia" with little to no hope for remission. This was and has been disproportionately women due to the lack of research on women and the impact of more hormonally complex systems on ALL interventions and illnesses. I mention this becausee its it a key ingredient of the soup of my life.

As a child I was undiagnosed ADHD, had a hefty dose of sensory sensitivity, complex trauma, and an undiagnosed gluten and dairy sensitivity but things got very interesting at around 17 years old with a chronic case of tarsal tunnel that ended in exploratory surgery in which my feet were wrapped too tight in post-op care and I ended up with significant nerve and vascular trauma in both legs - it was about as fun as it sounds. I spent a couple of months in a wheelchair and a few more pushing through intense pain while walking - which lead to a chronic pain syndrome and a later diagnosis of chronic venus insufficiency. 

In college I was still struggling- waking up with deep pain in my hips with weather changes- that was okay with me at 70 or 80 years old but didn’t bode well for me at 18. I doctor shopped trying to find someone to take me seriously and treat my chronic constipation, my joint pain, my pain syndrome, my brain fog, my anxiety, and my severe menstrual cramps and inflammatory response with my period. 

After getting nowhere for nearly a year with gynecologists, primary care folks, psychiatrists, and orthopedists and even a arthritis specialist, I was on a run one day and Blue Vervain stared me down, and I thought “people used to be able to take care of themselves, treat what was wrong with them with things growing around them” and that was the moment - I had no idea where to start , but I knew that was the next step- reclaiming my health autonomy - taking MYSELF seriously and addressing my health issues and challenges as best I could. 

I knew my family has whispers of herbalism in it’s past - we ALL have whispers of herbalism in our past - I even had a family story about a great Aunt who credited a root she dug on Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama for the 14 healthy children that she birthed. I am pretty sure that it was “Beth Root” or Birth Root or Trillium. My father was a forester my mother was a florist but making medicine from plants was foreign to them...but even though it was forgotten to my family I have always had an abiding love for the wild places of the South and our vast botanical complexity since my father dug and handed me a sassafras root at 8 years old.

After little success with western medicine I started looking for ways to learn herbalism and on my 19th birthday I went on my first instructional plant walk and I knew this was a piece of the puzzle. I began to take on the responsibility of healing myself and dove headlong into the study of herbalism. 

Fast forward year or so and I remember making one of the first formulations I ever tried on friends or family and it worked, I was 20 years old. It was a VERY strong and acutely effective Cold and Flu remedy that I passed around to my friends- it made everyone a little woozy - sorry Cortney! (too much poke root). I remember the feeling of agency control that I had and excitement that I had the ability to help with something that was causing my friends to much discomfort. I now could make medicine from plants growing around me but also knew that I had a long way to go before I should be going around dosing my friends all willy-nilly.

Even with my newfound moderation, I made plenty of mistakes. I wasted time and money on herbs that weren't in the right form - like when I ordered 7 lbs of powdered herbs that sat unprocessed for 3 years. But, so often in life, the complexity that we crave and that piques our curiosity can simultaneously make us feel confused and overwhelmed and can leave us feeling lost as to what to bite off and chew first. As a beginner, I took the wrong dose of herbal preparations, or for the wrong period of time. I followed disjointed and pieced-together information that just wasted my time and made me anxious and unsure. I felt overwhelmed by conflicting information online and spent a few years spinning my wheels.

Five years later after finishing a biology degree, two herb internships, and graduating from two different herb schools I started my clinical practice and a few years after that my school.

And that long history is why I teach herbal medicine the way that I do - I don't want you proverbially wandering around in the vast landscape of herbal medicine with no instructions. I want to give you the confidence, base knowledge, and competence that you can use to get your bearings quickly so that you can be a 'simple human' once again without all the stress or trappings, I want to provide the guidance and structured way of learning, what I wish I'd had, to help you avoid those same frustrations, and to give you a clear path to becoming confident in creating effective medicines for yourself and your friends, family, and community.

What started out for me as a reclamation of power and personal health autonomy and also just a desire to not feel like crap all the time grew into a passion, then a practice, and eventually became a way of life and my full time career.

I am so glad to have you here with me at Deep Roots and inside of Roots & Reason.

[1] E. LaMandre, “Medical gaslighting,” The Nurse practitioner, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 6–6, Feb. 2025, doi: 10.1097/01.npr.0000000000000292.

[2] H. Major, “Women’s Experiences With Medical Professionals and the Impact on Mental Health”, [Online]. Available: https://search.proquest.com/openview/dca23992ba1caf266fe14b93fcaad760/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

[3] J. K. Dhillon, “Psychological Effect of Medical Gaslighting on Female Patients: A Systematic Review,” pp. 845–852, June 2025, doi: 10.38124/ijisrt/25jun646.

[4] A. Jannesari, “BIPOC Identity, Delayed Diagnosis, Pain, and Medical Gaslighting as Predictors of Post-traumatic Stress Symptomatology in Adults With Endometriosis”, [Online]. Available: https://search.proquest.com/openview/22343987d47a4e8fc247bd05269fab16/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y