Herbal Medicine Festival: The use of Herbs in the context of self-management of health

The Herbal Therapy Festival is organized by New Guinea with the aim of bringing together different remarkable individual and collective projects in order to highlight through a series of practical and theoretical workshops the basic principles of herbal therapy and the possibilities it offers for self-management of health at a basic level in our daily lives.

The use of herbs to treat common ailments is a timeless and universal practice that has been practiced since the beginning of human history. Based on observation, instinct and experimentation, herbal medicine has evolved for thousands of years alongside human civilisation. The therapeutic potential of herbs has largely formed the basis for the development of traditional systems of natural medicine in countries such as China, India, Egypt and Greece and for the subsequent development of conventional medicine and pharmacopoeia, providing the raw material for a wide range of preparations including the most powerful drugs, the most powerful poisons, and the most powerful hallucinogenic drugs.

By utilizing the therapeutic potential of herbs we can cover basic daily needs of prevention and healing in a natural, ecological, and very safe way. By getting involved in the process of collecting or cultivating, processing herbs and producing our own home remedies, we become more and more actively involved in the healing process, gaining a real connection with plants as healing tools, while creating and supporting structures and relationships through which we will ensure access to knowledge and the healing tool, share our experiences and develop our knowledge (e.g. community herb gardens, self-organized educational activities, By accumulating experience and knowledge and creating new connections with our natural environment and the people around us, we can gradually achieve a higher level of self-reliance in our daily lives, and become less and less dependent on goods and services of the globalised health market.