Healing’s In Her Nature Herbalist Offers Alternative To Traditional Medicine

Barbara St. Dennis is a gardener who does more than dig plants.

She communes with them.

“There is a life energy in plants that our bodies recognize,” said St. Dennis, a herbalist who hopes her craft will become an accepted part of American medical care.

She and her husband, Dr. Clark St. Dennis, are starting an herb farm on the Panhandle prairie. They dream of establishing an herbal medicine institute there.

Barbara St. Dennis makes medicines and uses them along with massage therapy, aroma therapy and other natural techniques to cure what ails her clients.

“My specialty is chronic fatigue syndrome,” she said Wednesday. “At least two Spokane doctors are referring patients to me.”

Many times, she said, people come to her in desperation when traditional treatment has failed.

“I catch the ones who leave their doctor and the doctor never finds out what happens to them,” she said. “I send a lot of people back to their doctors.

“I’m not anti-doctor. I want herb alism to be seen as complementary to medicine. Herbalists need to get over this holier-than-thou attitude.”

St. Dennis is not taking new clients this summer, as she goes about cultivating a longtime dream: growing the plants for the medicines that she makes in her kitchen.

She is, however, finding time to teach.

Besides a yearlong course in “Holistic Healing With Plants,” she conducts weekend classes.

They include “Wild Medicinal Plants of North Idaho,” at the University of Idaho’s Clark Fork Campus (the June 28-29 class is full) and “Making Wild Medicines,” slated for July 19-20 at Montana’s Glacier Institute.

She’ll introduce her students to a dozen plants found in the wild, or that they can grow.

“The Chinese say that local plants are a thousand times more powerful than plants from far away,” she said.

That’s because the plants are exposed to the same water, soil and weather as the people who rely on them.

St. Dennis marches her students into the woods to look for native plants. One of her favorites is goldthread.

“That’s our fabulous substitute for goldenseal,” she said, pulling out a catalog to find the cost of buying the popular herb. Goldenseal root powder is selling for $108 per pound.

“And you can find it right over there off Bunco Road, she said. “It’s a teeny, low plant.”

It tastes lousy, she said, but gargling with goldthread-laced water can ease a sore throat. She recommends taking a few drops at the first sign of a flu.

Her two grown children got used to such treatments, St. Dennis said with a laugh.

“Yes, they hated it. And yes, they admitted that it works.”

Now, she consults with her husband on the treatments she provides. Clark is a clinical professor for Washington State University, supervising pharmacy students who work at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center.

“He’s learned a lot from me. He adores making medicines,” she said. “And I’ve learned an enormous amount from him about dosing - the pharmacists’ rule is, ‘Start low and go slow’ - and about how much better the body heals when pain is controlled.”

St. Dennis is former owner of Radiance Herbs and Massage, an established part of the Olympia scene. She said she has a degree in psychology and has worked as a counselor.

She’s been a herbalist for 30 years. She said she learned the craft “in self-defense” after a childhood bout with scarlet fever.

“In order to save my life, the doctor just drowned me in penicillin,” she said.

The result was an extreme sensitivity to modern antibiotics. So she used goldenseal to treat strep throat and discovered that myrrh is a powerful antibiotic.

In the United States, she said, only 20 percent of drugs are made from plants. But worldwide, 80 percent of them are.

There’s a popular misconception that herbs are always harmless and impossible to overdose, St. Dennis said.

“Herbs are drugs. But so is coffee. So is tea.”

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