About Herbium
An honest education resource for herbs and spices
Herbium started because good herb information is surprisingly hard to find.
Not the kind that tells you to drink chamomile tea when you're stressed. That's everywhere. The kind that tells you why chamomile has been around for 4,000 years, what the blue colour in the essential oil actually is, and what the difference is between what traditional herbalists believed and what clinical studies have actually found. That kind is harder to come by.
So we built it.
Every page, same depth
What the plant is, the history, the chemistry, traditional use across cultures, and what the science says. Every herb and spice gets the same treatment.
Built for Japan
Every page has a Japan section — the Japanese name, kampo connections, and where to find it in Japan. Not an afterthought. Built in.
Honest about uncertainty
Traditional use is labelled as traditional use. Clinical evidence is labelled as clinical evidence. We don't pretend they're the same thing.
Natively bilingual
The Japanese version is not a translation of the English. Both are written natively for their readers.
What we don't do
We don't tell you what to take for anything. No health claims, no dosage recommendations. And when a popular claim about an herb turns out to be marketing rather than fact, we say so.
Multiple traditions
We draw from Western herbalism, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Japanese kampo. The same plant often shows up in multiple traditions independently, sometimes used in completely different ways. That's one of the more interesting things about this subject, and we think it's worth showing rather than pretending one tradition has the whole picture.
If something on a page is wrong, let us know and we'll fix it.