Herbal, Plant-Medicine Based Approaches To Managing Covid Vaccination Risks, New & Emerging Vaccines (NovaVax, Covaxin & Vaxxinity), Bias Against Herbal Medicine & More With Donnie Yance

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My guest on today's podcast, Donald (“Donnie”) Yance, is an internationally-known master herbalist and nutritionist.

Donnie received his herbal training through Sequoia College and is a professional member of the American Herbalists Guild. He was trained as a clinical nutritionist through the National Institute of Nutritional Education and holds certification through the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. Donnie is also professed as a Secular Franciscan (SFO), which equips him with the breadth and wisdom to touch on the spiritual aspects of healing.

Donnie has authored two books:

  1. Herbal Medicine, Healing and Cancer
  2. Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism: Elite Herbs and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging and Chronic Illness. 

In addition, he has been involved in authoring and co-authoring dozens of articles that have appeared in major industry publications and national journals. On the education side, each year Donnie Yance gives several lectures across the USA at major hospitals and conferences for both patients and health care providers, as well as making radio and podcast appearances.

After decades of extensive research and clinical practice, Donnie developed a comprehensive approach to healing called the Eclectic Triphasic™ Medical System (ETMS). Now also practiced as Mederi Medicine/Mederi Care, ETMS consists of a holistic diagnostic and therapeutic methodology rooted in American Eclectic herbal tradition, constitutional energetics, and contemporary clinical nutrition—continuously updated and honed with the latest scientific research at the molecular, cellular, and genomic levels.

In 2011, the Centre for Natural Healing (now  Mederi Center), where Donnie Yance has conducted his successful clinical practice since 1992, merged with the Mederi Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization established by Yance in 2005. ETMS is the care model employed by the Mederi Center's clinical practice team and the Foundation’s professional educational training and clinical research programs. Over the past two decades, Donnie Yance has built a library of well-established, world-class research on the medicinal value and multifaceted interactions of over one hundred botanicals and their key constituents, with major emphasis in the area of Oncology. This incredible collection will be available to health care professionals through the Mederi Academy.

Donnie Yance is also the founder and formulator of Natura Health Products, for which he created a unique line of therapeutic-grade botanical and nutritional supplements. The current Natura portfolio consists of over forty formulations derived from botanical and nutritional agents acquired from around the world. These products have made a significant contribution to his tangible success in improving the health of his patients, specifically by providing therapeutic amounts of key ingredients that would otherwise be unattainable anywhere in the world.

During our discussion, you'll discover:

Donnie's music

-Ben's music on Soundcloud

-The story behind Mederi Medicine…12:20

  • “To heal and be whole” is the translation from Latin
  • 3 wings of the Mederi Foundation:
    • Clinic
    • Research
    • Education
  • Donnie's specialty is oncology
  • The model is based on how to maximize the health of the patient via 3 targets
    • Hermeneutics
    • Microenvironments
    • Target the disease
  • Botanical medicine is the soul of Mederi care (God's humble pharmacy)
  • Nutritional medicine (supplements)
  • Dietary
  • Pharmaceutical
  • Spiritual medicine
  • A two-year certification school is in the works

-The importance of spiritual health when it comes to one's overall well-being…19:30

-Why plants are often overlooked in their ability to survive…24:04

-How plants as medicine can help mitigate some of the risks of vaccines…29:15

-Donnie's concerns about current Covid vaccines…39:35

  • Weighing the risk of benefit/ratio of Covid vaccines article by Donnie Yance
  • Consider a vaccine simply to acclimate to society
  • There is no long-term data on the efficacy of Covid vaccines
  • Lots of misinformation, selective pressure
  • mRNA vaccine is a new technology; susceptible to mutations
  • Vaccines give more risk of hospitalization than Covid itself for certain demographics
  • “Just trust us” was the mantra when DDT was introduced in the 1940s
  • Health biomarker assessment
  • Nourishing the yin and yang as one gets older (masculine vs. feminine)

-Donnie's thoughts on some of the upcoming vaccines…51:15

-Why we shouldn't be quick to ignore ancient healing knowledge when it comes to viruses…1:03:30

  • Huge scientific bias against herbal medicine
  • No reason we can't incorporate ancestral practices with modern medicine
  • The U.S. had great systems of medicine based on herbal medicine as recently as one hundred years ago
  • Clinical trials on herbal medicine are taking place currently
  • Potential benefit to support innate healing ability
  • 3 Rs of research: Rigor, Repetition, Robust

-And much more…

Upcoming Events:

Click here for the full written transcript of this podcast episode.

Resources from this episode: 

Donald (“Donnie”) Yance:

– Podcasts:

– Other Resources:

Managing the Risk of Blood Clots and other Possible Side Effects of the Covid-19 Vaccines

Synthesizing the Latest on Covid-19 Science on Vaccines, Variants, Natural Immunity and Essential Nutrients for Immune Enhancement

The Covaxin Vaccine, a Medscape Review of Ivermectin, and Herbal Medicine Bias

Episode sponsors:

Kion Clean Protein: Organic natural flavors, Himalayan sea salt, and stevia deliver rich chocolate and velvety smooth vanilla flavors that are out of this world—seriously, even in plain ole’ water.

CAROL bikeThe AI-powered exercise bike that is clinically proven to give you the same cardio benefits as a 45-minute jog in under 9 minutes, with only 40 seconds of hard work. Get a $100 discount off your CAROL bike when you use the code BEN.

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Paleo Valley Organ Complex: Contains not one but three organs from healthy, grass-fed, pasture-raised cows so you are getting a more diverse array of nutrients. Receive a 15% discount off your order when you use discount code BENGREENFIELD15.

Do you have questions, thoughts, or feedback for Donnie or me? Leave your comments below and one of us will reply!

Since the original release of this content, Ben has changed many of his thoughts and practices regarding plant medicine. To learn more, please read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

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30 thoughts on “Herbal, Plant-Medicine Based Approaches To Managing Covid Vaccination Risks, New & Emerging Vaccines (NovaVax, Covaxin & Vaxxinity), Bias Against Herbal Medicine & More With Donnie Yance

  1. Leslie David Norman says:

    Ben:

    The Donnie’s Covid PDF you mentioned at the start of podcast ? Can’t find it

    1. Hi Leslie! The presentation is above the comments sections, right above "Upcoming Events"

  2. Rick says:

    Has Donnie Yance website been blocked? It was working a few days ago.. but now I cant access at all:

    if I click the link on this page “My guest on today’s podcast, Donald (“Donnie”) Yance, is an internationally-known master herbalist and nutritionist.”

    It is broken.

    Even if I try from a VPN same issue

    Is website genuinely down or has it been blocked? otherwise internet and other websites work fine..

    Did a higher authority try and shut down? I doubt it but can someone else try?

    Anyone else can’t reach https://www.donnieyance.com/

    1. Hi Rick! Website is working fine on my end, thank you for reporting this though!

  3. David says:

    Ben, I am in the Novavax Phase 3 trial in the US and received it back in January. No issues beyond fever for 24 hrs. and sore arm for 2 days.

    Who knows when it will be approved, but it should be before the end of the 4th qtr. As part of the warp speed money given to them by the govt, I believe the US is contracted to get 100 million doses. Who knows if they will donate them to other nations though. If you have any other questions, let me know.

    1. Thank you for this information David!

  4. Robin says:

    I really enjoyed this episode and hearing another side for once with some good evidence of how we can help treat our bodies naturally and the benefits of God given plants that have been used for generations. This is exactly how I feel about it too! Everyone would benefit from doing their own research to determine what’s best for them and their body because not everyone is going to react the same. Jimmy Dore had the inventor of the mRNA technology on his show, Dr. Robert Malone. and it’s a great listen too for anyone that still wants to explore and understand more than what the media is spitting out.

  5. Anomaloid says:

    I was listening to an interview Ben did about seven months ago with a doctor named Leland Stillman. I feel that Dr. Stillman, Dr. Zach Bush, and the interviewee in this episode Donni Yance operate from a different paradigm than the mainstream medical model. It is very science-based, but it is holistic and nature centered. By holistic, I mean that the functioning of the body in the relationship between the body and the environment is understood from a systems base perspective rather than a molecular or genetic one. By nature centered, I mean that the adoption of modern therapeutic methods is for the purpose of enhancing and restoring the normal and natural functions of the human body. The mainstream medical model, on the other hand, remains as stubbornly reductionistic now as it was when I started studying alternative healthcare in the early 1980s.

    Consider the discussion Ben and Donni had about the different types of vaccines. A traditional vaccine is definitely a more holistic approach that can be designed in a way that mimics a natural exposure. For coronavirus, which enters through the nose and throat, the ideal vaccine would be one that is administered nasally and which exposes the body to a wide range of coronavirus antigens. Compare that to the highly reductionistic approach of the mRNA vaccines, which just exposes you to a fragment of a fragment that some researchers in their hubris have decided is all you needed for long lasting protection. I am giving the scientists at Pfizer the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that the company had good intent (which is something that is far from certain in my mind).

    The novavax vaccine addresses one of my concerns, which is a wider range of antigenic exposure that appears to give protection to all known coronavirus variants and appears to be durable for a very long time. However, it is still an injection, and that concerns me. There is no normal and natural way that the coronavirus enters directly into the interior of the body. Keep in mind that from the perspective of the holistic superorganism model, the nasopharyngeal passageways are actually part of the exterior of the body. And as long as the microbiome is optimized and the mucosal barrier is intact, it would seem that between the microbiota and innate nonspecific immune cells, the coronavirus wouldn’t stand a chance. However, if there was a breach in one of these built-in non-specific defenses, stimulation of specific immunity via the other normal route of entry is about as holistic and nature centered as you can get with a vaccine. Using an injection would seem to be a more extreme measure that should be limited to those whose microbiome and innate non-specific immunity is known to be compromised and not easily rectified in the short term.

    Right now, I feel that the pharmaceutical industry seems to be winning what has been a 40 year battle against the concept of holistic, systems-based medicine. The reason I say that they appear to be winning at this moment is because the vast majority of people practicing professional forms of alternative medicine, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, and naturopathic medicine appear to have jumped on the Covid propaganda bandwagon without hesitation. When I asked a colleague that I studied naturopathic medicine with in the mid-1980s about this, he rolled his eyes and said almost all licensed naturopathic physicians have subsumed themselves to the medical industrial complex and are essentially green MDs in his words. What he meant by that is they may use natural substances but almost exclusively from a reductionistic and pharmaceutical model. I think the commonly used word nutraceutical tells you all you need to know.

    If you’ve ever read Thomas Kuhn’s the structure of scientific revolutions, you may be aware of his theory about how paradigms shift. Medical paradigms shift when the prevailing medical model can no longer adequately explain, predict, or successfully treat the predominant pathologies of the time. It may be very possible that the obvious failure of this highly reductionistic vaccine platform may finally precipitate the paradigm change that many of us have been waiting decades for.

    To be clear, I do not believe that the prevailing medical paradigm has shifted one iota in the past 40 years. Sure, during this time Western medicine has accepted that diet, exercise, and even some herbs and natural therapies can play a role in medicine. However, in every case, this was by absorbing it subsuming these modalities into their pre-existing reductionistic paradigm. Consider the human genome project. For years, everybody in main stream science and medicine thought the decoding of the human genome would be the end of disease. However, it turned out that very few disease related genes are fully penetrant and that almost all chronic disease is due to multi factorial influences involving dozens if not hundreds or thousands of genes. When all was said and done, it turned out that age old methods related to diet and exercise were still the most reliable (and arguably the only) way to holistically optimize your genome by influencing gene expression. This has been a real conundrum for the pharmaceutical industry, because they have no way of interacting with this new paradigm.

  6. jon says:

    Ben,

    Please speak with Dr. Tom Cowan.

  7. Mike says:

    Yance made this statement-

    “if you’re a boy between the ages of 12 and 25, the possibility of the vaccine inducing hospitalization is much greater than COVID itself. And, that’s clear as day.”

    I’d rank this statement as “Four Pinocchios” AKA an outright lie. And the reason that “nobody is talking about it” as Yance complained, is that it isn’t true. It’s really that simple.

    “The risk of developing myocarditis, an inflammatory heart condition, is six times higher in male teenagers who have contracted Covid-19, compared with the likelihood of the rare side-effect emerging after getting the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, a new US study has found.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/29/cov…

    1. Anomaloid says:

      I interpreted the statement differently. I don’t think Donni was saying that the risk of getting myocarditis from the vaccination was greater than getting myocarditis if you had been infected. I believe he was saying that the risk of getting myocarditis from the vaccination was greater than the risk of getting infected with Covid at all for a person that age. If you didn’t get infected with Covid, then the risk of getting myocarditis from it is zero.

  8. Anthony Guastella says:

    I thought this was a overall great discussion. Ben, I would love to hear you talk about the relative, and absolute risk reduction. This is very important. The other thing that got me was that this is really more about our freedom. Even Yance himself said that “something fishy is going on.” Don’t you think that’s something worth looking deeper into? If you do, you will know with out a shadow of a doubt that there is something wrong. This ain’t even about a vaccine, this is about our freedom, and our future. I get that you may want it because of the restrictions, but it’s more important to stand against tyrants. How do you want to remembered during this time? Fortune favors the brave.

  9. Todd Luger says:

    I really enjoyed this episode. My background and perspective on herbal medicine is quite similar to Ben’s guest, as I also studied the Chinese, Ayurveda, eclectic, and Physiomedicalist methods. My main focus was Chinese herbal medicine, and I currently work at a school that has an acupuncture program. I want to share a couple of things that might interest others who also enjoyed this episode.

    UCLA is currently running an FDA approved study on the use of a Chinese herbal formula to treat symptomatic early Covid. You can learn more about the study here:

    https://www.pacificcollege.edu/news/blog/2021/09/15/groundbreaking-fda-approved-study-mushrooms-and-chinese-herbs-for-covid-19

    For those who are curious about 19th and early 20th century professional herbal medicine practice in the United States, this website is an amazing repository of many of the important textbooks of that era:

    https://www.henriettes-herb.com/eclectic/index.html

    Todd Luger
    Director of Lifelong Learning
    Pacific College of Health and Science
    https://pacificcollege.edu/p3/

  10. Anthony says:

    A great podcast, and a breath of fresh air after that trainwreck podcast with Dr Cooke. Great to hear the conversation about dismissing the one size fits all approach and instead focusing on personal risk/ health assessment. It was a very balanced podcast .

  11. Kelly says:

    Ben, you mentioned you had covid already. Why are you even considering the vax then for yourself? I’m sure you’ve read all the science out there now on natural immunity. Is it just because of the societal pressure and mandates? Serious question, I’m curious. Thanks.

    1. yep, societal restrictions, in short.

      1. Joe says:

        Ben if we don’t stand up for bodily autonomy now then we are headed down a very dark road. Prepare for a social credit score, boosters for life, and who knows what else. It’s a shame you aren’t actively standing up for what is right, I can assure you your followers would continue to support your businesses

        1. Anomaloid says:

          I feel that Ben made it clear at the end of the episode that he would not be making this decision as a result of force but rather as a result of deliberation. He speculated that a proper vaccine like novavax might actually constitute a biohack that potentiated innate and naturally acquired in unity. His motivation for going through this process of deliberation is the perfectly reasonable impulse to get back to normal life. I didn’t get the impression that the decision had already been made. I also don’t find it surprising that Ben is always curious about hacking the God-given functions of our bodies. He has never portrayed himself as somebody who only uses the products of nature and the built-in functionality of his own body to optimize his health. I’ll admit my default position is closer to the latter perspective, but I try to keep an open mind about all possibilities.

        2. Mike says:

          Yeah, “if you don’t stand up for body autonomy” aka be an antivaxer, then the “deep state” will get you.

      2. Jabow says:

        What a weak, pu$$y response. You are disappointing. What pronoun do you use?

        1. Jamie says:

          agreed. this is the most lame response i have ever seen from ben. really disappointed. i have been a long time follower. i am done now. his response shows zero integrity. i can’t follow or listen to people like that.

      3. Kelly says:

        Stand firm! I won’t comply with something that doesn’t make scientific sense. More people need to make noise about this. I, too, had covid and my husband also, who is now staring down the barrel of a work mandate. I’m ready to make a life change with family to stand our ground. Complying and doing what I know is the wrong thing to do unnecessarily is not something I want to live with. Wish the teammates of NBA player Kyrie would make a statement and stand with him and refuse to play any games in NY this season. These tyrants need to go. This isn’t the America I grew up in, and I’m not even 50 yet. Good luck.

        1. mike says:

          Kyrie is a fool, who would recklessly endanger his fellow teammates if the league wouldn’t stop him. It’s not surprising, as also believed the earth is flat A low information who doesn’t even know what the word “data” means.

    2. mike says:

      The reason Ben doesn’t get the vaccine is that he would never want to own up to being wrong or making a mistake. He’s not alone in that, it takes great ego strength to admit you were wrong. Ben is dead set against the old saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” He’d much rather get the illness and treat it with a phalanx of medicines and treatments then prevent getting it in the first place. He’s quite knowledgeable and I think he gets a kick out of devising treatments for himself and others and “curing” himself. Here are some of the illnesses that Ben has caught that a more cautious prudent person might have avoided that I’ve heard him talk about over the years. It’s quite a list and I may have missed some things but I believe Ben’s ailments include:

      Giardiasis- A water born disease caused by a pathogen. Typically caught by drinking contaminated, unfiltered water.
      Lyme Disease – Bacterial infection caused by an infected Tick bite.
      COVID – Virus – Easily spread and contagious. About the time Ben caught it he was going on and on about the dinner parties he was having. All this during the time that Medical Authorities were pleading with people to minimize social interactions.

      1. Big Mike says:

        Lil’ Mikey, you evidently have some sort of little man’s complex. Do yourself a favor and go to a mental midget’s forum of mindless socialists to make yourself feel better minion.

        You are too dumb and narcissistic to post here.

  12. Dale AKA Healthnut says:

    Here is the proper link to Flew Away. The link above in the show notes goes to Amazon
    https://naturahealthproducts.com/flew-away.html

  13. Dale AKA Healthnut says:

    Ben, another great podcast. I am soooo for his approach compared to just getting

    a “jab”. I will be excited to join his 2 year program next year. I look forward to a follow up

    podcast in the future. Blessings from Mexico!

    PS – any possibility of a A2 Cow Whey or Goat Whey in the future from Kion?

  14. Eggs Tyrone says:

    Gino Vannelli is the musician… The spelling he mentioned seemed a bit off.

    1. Jim says:

      I was going to say, the biggest surprise of this Podcast was that Ben didn’t know who Gino Vannelli was, well maybe Ben should ask his dad. LOL.

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