People often ask me what qualifications you need to become a medical herbalist. It’s not a profession that you can do an online or weekend course in! In order to practise in the UK, you need to have studied a degree in Herbal Medicine (that’s one of the BSc (Hons) you see after my name). The degree very rarely takes the usual three years to complete as we had the added requirement of at least 500 hours of clinical experience – I was lucky enough to do over 750, including in an NHS hospital dermatology department – so if you study it full time it tends to take at least four years. Longer if, like me, you had a full time job as well!
