Herbal Roots with Carrie: Nurturing Wellness from the Ground Up

09/03/2025

🦋✨ Herbal Medicine: A Little Magic, A Lot of Chemistry ✨🦋

One of my favorite teas that shows this beautifully? Butterfly pea + lavender.

💙 When you steep butterfly pea flowers, you get a deep blue tea. Add a splash of lemon juice, and it instantly shifts to purple or pink. It feels like magic, but it’s really plant chemistry — anthocyanins (plant pigments) reacting to changes in pH.

🌿 Pairing butterfly pea with lavender makes this blend more than just eye candy:
• Butterfly pea supports circulation, memory, and is packed with antioxidants.
• Lavender calms the nervous system, eases tension, and invites relaxation.

Together, you get a tea that soothes the mind, nourishes the body, and sparks wonder.

👉 Herbal medicine is like that — beautiful, practical, and rooted in science that feels magical.

09/02/2025

3 things that hurt your digestion more than food.

08/28/2025

This is what boutique access looks like:

🌿 Custom-formulated, small-batch, targeted support.

🍃 These client-inspired cough drops are crafted with care to bring:
✔️ Antimicrobial protection
✔️ Throat-soothing relief
✔️ Gentle clearing
✔️ Calming support for those dry, irritating coughs

🌸 Each formulation is tailored with intention—herbalist-designed, client-centered, and created with care.

✨ Boutique access means you’re not reaching for a generic option, but receiving thoughtful, plant-based support, matched specifically to your needs.

💫 Ready for access? Book a consultation to explore your own custom formulations.

08/26/2025

🌱 What Happens in a Herbal Consult?

If you’ve never sat down with a herbalist before, you might be wondering what actually happens. It’s not a quick “in-and-out” kind of appointment—it’s especially valuable for complex or ongoing health concerns like hormonal balance, digestive health, energy struggles, or immune resilience.

✨ We start with your story. I’ll ask about how you’ve been feeling—your sleep, energy, digestion, menstrual health, stress, and more. Everything is connected, and the little details often give the biggest clues.

🌿 We look for the roots. Using both Western herbalism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspectives, I look for patterns in your symptoms and evaluate how your body systems are working together—or where they may be struggling. For deeper cases, like hormonal balance or chronic fatigue, this pattern approach helps us see the why behind what’s going on. If you have lab work you’d like to share, I also review that as part of seeing the bigger picture.

📝 You’ll get a personalized plan. After our chat, I put together thoughtful herbal suggestions, simple nutrition tweaks, and lifestyle ideas that fit your unique needs. You’ll receive this plan within a few days of your appointment, so you have clear steps to move forward.

🤝 It’s a partnership. A consult isn’t me telling you what to do—it’s us working together to support your health in a way that feels doable, natural, and empowering.

08/24/2025

👀 With school around the corner, we know the colder months—and the usual round of colds and flus—are not far behind.

The best time to think about immune health isn’t when illness strikes, but before. Prevention helps strengthen resilience, and when illness does show up, having support already in place makes recovery smoother and less stressful.

Through a consultation, you’ll have access to personalized herbal care—whether it’s focused on prevention, building stronger defenses, or easing symptoms when sickness makes its way through. Options are available for both individuals and families, so everyone can be supported this season.

✨ All it takes is one consultation to begin.
Visit www.herbalrootswithcarrie.ca/clinic to see what’s available for you and your loved ones. ❤️

08/23/2025

Highly recommend Robynn, it has been a pleasure working with her in so many ways! She is one of my top resources and I love sharing her expertise with others!

🌟 Hey, friends! It’s been a while since my last intro, so here I am! I’m a busy hockey mom living in beautiful northern Alberta, and I’m fiercely passionate about natural and holistic living. 🏒💖

My journey began as I navigated my own hormone challenges while raising my neurodiverse son and my sports & art-loving daughter. 🎨✨ Through this experience, I discovered my love for helping others do the same. That’s why I got certified – to safely share this knowledge with you! I then returned to specialize in Pediatric Symptomology specifically in all the childhood epidemics to better support your family and loved ones!

👉 Remember, we are not victims of our symptoms! Our bodies communicate with us every day about what they need. And that’s where I come in! I love decoding your symptoms to understand what your body is telling you and creating a personalized plan just for YOU! Because let’s face it, no two bodies are the same! 🌈💪 Phase Wellness is certified across Canada and all appointments can be done through the convenience of virtual!

08/15/2025

Did you know I offer free 15-minute discovery calls? Message me for more info!

08/11/2025

Clearing out my probiotics so I can freshen up my stock.

HMF metabolic (capsules) - Genestra
Regular $78.75, sale price $40
Best before: 10/2025
Qty avail: 2

Probiotic 123 (powder) - Pure Encapsulations
Regular $38.75, sale price $20
Best before: 01/2026
Qty avail: 1

Don’t miss your chance to try these very high quality probiotics at a very discounted price 🙂
Message me if you are interested - pick up in Daysland :)

08/11/2025

🌿 “I can finally get through my day without crashing.”

That’s what a client told me after months of feeling like her body was giving up on her.
When we first met, even the smallest tasks—folding laundry, going for groceries—left her exhausted. She’d wake up tired, push through on caffeine, and collapse the moment she could sit down.

Now? She has more steady, reliable energy to work, play with her kids, and still have something left for herself at the end of the day.

So, what changed?
In both Western herbalism and TCM, fatigue is rarely “just tiredness”—it’s a sign that deeper systems need support.
When I assess chronic fatigue, I’m thinking about:
• Whether the body’s “energy reserves” are depleted (Qi and vitality)
• If the adrenals, thyroid, or overall metabolism need support
• How well the body digests and converts food into usable fuel
• Whether circulation is strong enough to deliver oxygen and nutrients
• If lingering effects from an illness (post-viral fatigue) are keeping the body stuck
• Whether there’s “dampness” or stagnation weighing everything down—what we might call congestion, sluggish lymph, or poor elimination in Western terms

Once we identified her main patterns—low vitality, poor nutrient assimilation, and lingering post-illness depletion—I created a plan that combined qi- and blood-building herbs like nettle, oatstraw, and schisandra with adaptogens like ashwagandha and eleuthero. We also worked on gentle movement, restorative sleep routines, and bitters to wake up digestion.

Over time, her body stopped running on survival mode… and started running on real energy again.

—If you’ve been told “your labs are normal” but you still feel exhausted—there is still a path forward. When we work with the whole picture, we can rebuild from the ground up.

08/08/2025

Each morning is a chance to support the body and the spirit.
You wake up — not by accident, but on purpose.
You whisper a prayer, and you reach for your herbal allies.
Because plants, like faith, meet us where we are.
Herbs help regulate the nervous system, calm inflammation, restore resilience.
And yet, healing is never just physical.
Scripture steadies the mind. His presence strengthens the heart.
This is whole-person care.
This is clinical herbalism rooted in grace.

07/24/2025

One of my all-time favourite plants — burdock. 🌿
I reach for this powerhouse often because it supports the body in such a deep, nourishing way. From the liver and lymph to the skin and digestion, burdock works gently but steadily to help the body move waste and restore balance.
It’s grounding, it’s resilient, and it grows abundantly — just like the kind of health I love to support in clinic.

07/24/2025

Dementia patients generally show a mixed pathology, and it has been found that patients diagnosed with Alzheimer disease (AD) often have other pathologies, such as white matter lesions, vascular dementia and LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy). A recent large cross-sectional study from Sweden has now shown the reverse: based on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers, an AD pathology was relatively common in people diagnosed with other dementias.

Specifically, an Alzheimer biomarker profile was seen in unspecified dementia, Parkinson's dementia and frontotemporal dementia. Moreover, biomarkers indicating an Alzheimer-like pathology were negatively tied to cognitive function.

While most patients clinically diagnosed with AD had evidence of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amyloid and tau pathology, those biomarkers also emerged in people with other dementias, said Tobias Borgh Skillbäck of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Molndal, Sweden, and co-authors.

In nearly 14,000 adults, a clear, Alzheimer-like profile based on three CSF biomarkers: amyloid-beta 1-42, total tau (t-tau), and phosphorylated tau 181 (p-tau181) was seen in 68% of people with early-onset AD, 65% of late-onset AD, and 52% of people with mixed Alzheimer and vascular dementia.

Among people without an AD diagnosis, the Alzheimer profile emerged in 25% of people with unspecified dementia, 9% of people with Parkinson disease dementia, and 8% of people with frontotemporal dementia.

In several dementias, scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were associated with CSF biomarkers. MMSE scores were linked with amyloid-beta 1-42 in late-onset AD, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and unspecified dementia. MMSE scores also were tied to t-tau in late-onset AD, early-onset AD, and unspecified dementia; and linked with p-tau181 in early-onset AD.

This study highlights the complex nature of dementia, with a mixed pathology evident in most people. To my thinking, such findings question the value of trying to find a single drug treatment and imply that a multifactorial approach (as for example via Functional Herbal Therapy) is more rational.

In particular, I feel that Ginkgo biloba is highly underestimated in this context by most clinicians. Its inherent multifactorial activity makes it the best starting point for a complex dementia pathology. Clinical studies have shown that it is neuroprotective and boosts BDNF and Nrf2, is anti-inflammatory, and promotes microcirculation and mitochondrial function. In addition, it is neuroregenerative (used for stroke recovery in China).

For more information see:
http://bit.ly/4kXVmz9

and

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40293734/