Herbalist – Astrologer – Holistic Health Consultant and Educator
David Osborn L.Ac. was born in Tokyo Japan in 1952 and grew up largely in the Orient as the son of a diplomat. His international, cosmopolitan upbringing gave him a broad, open-minded philosophical outlook and a heightened understanding of other religions and cultures. Since his childhood, he has been very interested in spirituality and alternative forms of healing.
After returning to southern California after a stint teaching English in Japan, David befriended a Japanese lady who was studying chiropractic who encouraged him to take up some natural, alternative form of healing. After considerable thought and meditation on the subject, he decided that what most appealed to him was herbal medicine. Working with herbs seemed to ground him and connect him to the Earth.
In 1982, David started to study herbal medicine by correspondence course with Michael Tierra, C.A.,N.D., author of The Way of Herbs. Michael’s eclectic system of Planetary Herbology, which integrates the herbal healing principles of East and West, exerted a very profound and formative influence on David’s approach to herbal medicine and natural healing.
Michael Tierra referred David to a job with the Oriental Healing Arts Institute in Long Beach, California, where he translated books and magazine articles on Chinese herbal medicine from Japanese into English. From there he decided to go to acupuncture school at Emperor’s College in Santa Monica, from which he graduated and got his California acupuncture license in 1987.
After graduating from Emperor’s College, David became an herbalist in private practice, even doing herbal consultations in the back of a Chinese herbal pharmacy in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. His specialties were immunodeficiency and chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic infections, menstrual problems and gynecological disorders, among others.
After studying yoga in California, Europe and India, David became a certified yoga instructor. David also incorporates yoga therapy into his holistic healing practice.
David started studying astrology with Edwin Steinbrecher at his D.O.M.E. Center in Los angeles, where he also taught introductory classes in herbal medicine. There, Edwin initiated David into the Inner Guide Meditation, which is a creative visualization meditation technique incorporating Jungian psychology, Tarot archetypes and astrology. While living in Berkeley, California, David started teaching astrology groups and continuing his astrological studies with Mariah Larkin, PhD, a protegee of Donna Cunningham.
David had long been looking for a way to incorporate astrology into his holistic healing practice. But none of the books he had read on medical astrology made any sense to him until he picked up a book on the subject written in French while visiting Brussels, Belgium in 2002. This book correlated the astrological signs and planets with the four temperaments and humors of Greek Medicine. This gave David the Golden Key to medical astrology; he was then able to relate everything he had learned and studied in holistic healing to astrology. This key to medical astrology also started David’s study of Greek Medicine.
A few years later, David was able to study Ayurveda with Dr. Vasant Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque New Mexico. What he learned there helped him greatly in his understanding and appreciation of Greek Medicine. He was also surprised to discover that much of what Dr. Lad had given in his evening lectures about diet and therapeutics had actually been written by Hippocrates in his Aphorisms over two thousand years ago.
This convinced David that the basic principles of holistic medicine and natural healing upon which the traditional medical systems of both East and West are based are indeed universal. Truly, Truth is one, but the sages of these different traditional medical systems call it by different names.
So welcome to my website, and to the wonderful world of Greek Medicine!
David Osborn L.Ac.