A Practitioner's Guide to Topical Herbal Remedies
The Plant Path: Herbalism, Medical Astrology & Spagyric Alchemy
Sajah Popham
4.8 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What do you think of when you hear "topical herbs"? Chances are, you think about putting herbs on your skin, perhaps in the form of creams, salves, or poultices.
But this is only one type of topical application.
In herbal medicine, topical use is much broader than applying medicine to the skin (though this is also a critical treatment). Any time an herb comes into direct contact with the tissue it's meant to treat—whether the skin, or the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract or digestive tract—it is acting topically.
Here's what you'll learn in this post:
- The broader definition of topical application, beyond application to the skin
- How herbs act topically in the respiratory tract, digestive system, female reproductive system, and on the skin
- Key herbal actions like vulnerary, antimicrobial, demulcent, and more for topical use
- Preparations for topical use, such as poultices, infused oils, liniments, and medicated neti pots
- Recommended herbs for each organ system and their unique roles in healing
- Important cautions and considerations for using topical herbal remedies safely
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ABOUT THE PLANT PATH
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The Plant Path is a window into the world of herbal medicine. With perspectives gleaned from traditional Western herbalism, Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, Alchemy, Medical Astrology, and traditional cultures from around the world, The Plant Path provides unique insights, skills and strategies for the practice of true holistic herbalism. From clinical to spiritual perspectives, we don't just focus on what herbs are "good for," but rather who they are as intelligent beings, and how we can work with them to heal us physically and consciously evolve.
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ABOUT SAJAH
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Sajah Popham is the author of Evolutionary Herbalism and the founder of the School of Evolutionary Herbalism, where he trains herbalists in a holistic system of plant medicine that encompasses clinical Western herbalism, medical astrology, Ayurveda, and spagyric alchemy.
His mission is to develop a comprehensive approach that balances the science and spirituality of plant medicine, focusing on using plants to heal and rejuvenate the body, clarify the mind, open the heart, and support the development of the soul. This is only achieved through understanding and working with the chemical, energetic, and spiritual properties of the plants. His teachings embody a heartfelt respect, honor and reverence for the vast intelligence of plants in a way that empowers us to look deeper into the nature of our medicines and ourselves.
He lives on a homestead in the foothills of Mt. Baker Washington with his wife Whitney where he teaches, consults clients, and prepares spagyric herbal medicines.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Well, hello there and welcome back to the plant path. My name is Saja Popham, and I just want to say thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy life to check out this |
| 0:22.6 | episode here where I'm going to be talking about the topical application of herbs. So when I say |
| 0:30.9 | topical application of herbs, what's the number one thing that pretty much everyone is going to think about? |
| 0:41.1 | Well, I would say a majority of the time, it's going to be thinking of putting herbs on your skin, |
| 0:47.0 | right? It's going to be some way of applying an herb to the skin for whether it be wound cuts, scrapes, um, contusions, injuries, broken bones, |
| 1:01.9 | stiff sore muscles, um, whatever it might be. |
| 1:07.2 | More often than not, when we think of topical application of verbs, we think of putting it on the skin, |
| 1:12.0 | which is not incorrect. But what I want to talk about here is I want to open up our understanding |
| 1:20.8 | of topical application in a much broader sense, technically the definition of topical application |
| 1:32.4 | isn't putting it on the skin the definition of topical application is you know in regards to |
| 1:39.2 | herbal medicine herb coming into direct contact with the tissue that we want to treat. Okay. So anytime herb touches |
| 1:50.0 | tissue that we want to treat, we would consider that a topical application. And I think that this is an |
| 1:59.7 | important concept to consider because there's certain herbal |
| 2:03.4 | actions that we tend to really only think in terms of something that applies to the skin |
| 2:10.8 | when you put the herb on your skin. |
| 2:13.4 | That totally kind of blows open the whole really for me is revolutionized my |
| 2:19.6 | understanding of some of those herbal actions because we can have internal topical application |
| 2:25.9 | of herbs as well and this is really really important for a number of reasons. |
| 2:35.1 | One of which is that certain herbal actions only really happen when the herb comes into contact |
| 2:42.1 | with the tissue. |
| 2:44.1 | Other herbal actions, like, there's certain qualities and herbs where it does that property doesn't happen systemically |
| 2:56.6 | it only happens topically a really good example of this is you know you open up any herb book |
... |
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