When Knowledge Goes Beyond Caution

You prescribe a herbal formula. The patient in front of you has been using medication for various chronic conditions for years. You know that you must be careful — but on what grounds exactly? Intuition and caution are a start, but not a method.

This course day provides you with that method. A foundation for your own clinical reasoning: the ability to independently make an initial assessment of potential interactions or synergies between Chinese herbs and conventional medicines — supplementing the expertise of the pharmacist, whom you can always consult for further verification.

Yan Schroën and Edwin Lipperts are two of the few people in the Netherlands who can truly bridge this gap. Their combined knowledge cannot be found in a book. That makes this course unique!

Key topics of the course

The focus is on the translation between two systems that rarely communicate with each other. You will learn how Western pharmacological groups — such as NSAIDs, corticosteroids, immunosuppressants, and antihypertensives — can be interpreted in terms of TCM energetics, and vice versa. This provides insight into where they interfere with the chapters of your Materia Medica.

You will build a step-by-step working method that allows you to make an independent initial assessment and learn to recognize when to call in the pharmacist for further verification. Special attention is paid to patients with Bi-syndromes — chronic joint and rheumatic complaints — because they almost always use medication for a long period. It is precisely in this context that this knowledge is directly clinically applicable. That is why this day is held on the same weekend as the course on Bi-syndromes.

Benefits for you as a participant

From now on, you will work from a place of understanding rather than uncertainty when a patient is also using regular medication. You can make an initial assessment of potential interactions or support without relying on a pharmacy check for every prescription. This strengthens your position as a practitioner: you can engage in a conversation with the GP or pharmacist from a well-founded standpoint. Moreover, you learn to think in terms of the overlap between two systems.

This is a skill that structurally deepens your clinical perspective, even beyond this subject.