 Hello, welcome to CNM's Herbal Medicine One. My name's Ed Berger. It's great to see you again. So, today's lecture is Iovader 3. We're going to be building on all the knowledge we've gained in the previous two lectures and we're going to be synthesizing and bringing everything together in order to formulate really complete diagnostic and treatment strategies for Vata, Pitta and Kaffa. So, today's learning outcomes are as follows. We're going to be starting with basic Iovadic treatment principles. We've referred to them before, but we're going to deepen them at this point so you're ready to start working with them properly. We're going to look at the six tastes, which is a really interesting area in Iovader that the tastes and the textures of foods and herbs in the mouth can establish different energetic qualities and allow us to prescribe in certain ways. We'll be coming back to the six tastes in our final lecture of the series when we really go into detail about the therapeutic effects of different herbs, but we'll introduce them now and start kind of feeding this into how we approach Vata, Pitta and Kaffa. And then we'll be going through the different doshas, going through in a systematic way, looking at the signs of imbalance, the effect on the tissues, integrating some of those diagnostic signs and looking at all the qualities and treatments and herbs and foods and lifestyle advice that we need to bring the different doshas back into balance. The thing we need to remember in Iovader that all diseases are due to imbalances of Vata, Pitta and Kaffa. That's the unity of disease. We talk about unity of disease in naturopathy. Often the focus there is on the terrain, on autotoxemia, on lowering of pH. In Iovader, we're really talking about the same things, but we use a different terms of reference for it, whether Vata, Pitta or Kaffa imbalanced. We go down to the deeper cause of imbalance. If we can address that deeper cause of imbalance, the body will heal itself. The diseases will disappear. So there's always that great phrase, we're not interested in diseases, we're interested in the person who has the diseases. Diseases are good to observe. We can see the tissue state, we can see the energetics of the body. We can diagnose what's happening energetically, but the treatment is focusing on the dietary factors, the lifestyle factors that are causing the system to come into balance. So back to that unity of disease, the underlying causes, the energetic imbalance. If we get that sorted, the diseases disappear naturally. We're slightly oversimplifying things here, but in a way it's good to keep things simple. You're herbal medicine year one students, you're Western herbalist, but you're going to have Iovader as a basis from which to work, which is going to really help you. So we'll look at all these areas separately, but in brief, the first thing we need to think about is to identify what the energetic balance is. And the best way to do that is to look at the qualities, look for the key things like heat, coldness, dry, moisture, intensity, dullness in the system. We look at the diseases, we look at the presentation and we diagnose what the fundamental energetic balance is with the patient. Then we look for the cause of that. You know, we're not even treating the dosha in many ways. We're treating the cause of dosha imbalance. So we look to the patient's diet. We look to the patient's lifestyle. We work out all the factors that are causing imbalance and we use herbs to kind of calm those doshas down, to bring them back into balance. Critically, we balance agony. Agony the digestive fire, which is the central tenet of Iovadic medicine. If it's the only thing that you take away into your naturopathic careers from Iovadic medicine, it must be the concept of agony, the strong digestive fire. You can use herbs for this, you can make your meals delicious. You know, all your friends and family will thank you because by supporting agony, you're going to make your foods delicious. You're going to make the nutrients assimilable and you're also going to stop toxins from building up in the system. It's the most important concept you have to take away. And then we deal with toxicity. By looking at the tongue, by looking at the symptomology of the patient, you'll establish whether there is amma building up in the system and you address that, treat the digestive fire, clear amma from the system. That's the big picture of Iovada. It's a simplification, of course, but in some ways, on some levels, Iovada can be practised in this simple way. If you keep this focus in your treatments, you're going to enhance the cure for your patients.