Five Flavors Herbs: The Herbal Pharmacy Now At Your Fingertips

It’s been a year of incredible growth for my practice, moving permanently to our lovely Soho office, and adding a wonderful, new acupuncturist. I’m excited to introduce another new element to my practice: my first herbal pharmacy, thanks to Five Flavors Herbs. In the past, I would have to mail patients herbs that I ordered from different pharmacies, or patients would have to pick up the herbs elsewhere. Now, when I prescribe different herbs based on a patient’s unique diagnosis, they can pick them up right after their appointment!

I’m especially excited to be working with Five Flavors Herbs, a company that is known for its extremely high-quality ingredients and standards of production. Based in Oakland, CA, Five Flavors Herbs combines eastern and western medicine practices, using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) approaches and techniques while taking into account and even embracing the western environment and ingredients.

The five flavors in the company name refer to the five tastes in TCM: pungent (or acrid), salty, sweet, sour and bitter. Each flavor has a different effect on the body and qi and correlates to the five elements—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—as well as to the five seasons. Five Flavors Herbs explains this on their website: “The botanical world gives us the full palate of five flavors suited to mitigate illness. With the skillful application of these five flavors, the body is able to return [to] harmony and health.”

Five Flavors Herbs sources from the most reputable herb suppliers, ensuring the purity and potency of all of their products. All of their “Western herbs” are organic, locally grown or ethically wildcrafted (i.e. harvested from uncultivated plants grown in their natural or “wild” habitat), and their Chinese herbs hail from distributors who employ “rigid standards and quality assurance testing.” Their process of creating herb tinctures (made in-house at a National Sanitation Foundation-certified Oakland facility), granules, and tinctures adheres to the FDA’s Good Manufacturing Practices Regulations, and they are also green business-certified, state-certified to process organic ingredients, and certified by the California Department of Public Health.

So come in for a consultation and get your very own herb blend prescription—you can pick it up from me right then and there and get started right away on your journey to strength, health, and wellbeing.