Swanie Simon grew up between two worlds. She was born in Bremen, Germany, raised in New York, and educated entirely in English before returning to Europe permanently in her early thirties. That double grounding shaped the way she approaches medicine: always looking for what crosses borders, what holds across traditions. 

Herbalism entered her life in 1985, when she received Juliette de Bairacli Levy's The Herbal Handbook for the Dog as a gift. What started as a deep interest in pet nutrition became a lifelong commitment to holistic medicine. Juliette herself later became a close friend and mentor, spending many years at Swanie's farm in the High Forest region of Germany. Like Juliette, she was troubled by the rise of chronic disease in pets and the limitations of conventional medicine in addressing it. This frustration sharpened her commitment to nutritional and herbal approaches.

Trained originally as a Tierheilpraktikerin (a certified animal naturopath in Germany), Swanie spent the early years translating human herbalism into animal medicine through largely autodidactic study. In those early, internet-free days, formal veterinary herbal training was rarely accessible to non-vets, and becoming a traditional animal herbalist meant learning the human tradition first and developing the skill to translate it into animal medicine.

Her foundational herbal education came through extended work with Matthew Wood, Michael Moore, Rosemary Gladstar, Michael Tierra, Rosalee de la Forêt, and Jim McDonald, among others, drawing on both North American herbal traditions and European botanical and vitalist frameworks. She later completed the Graduate Diploma in Veterinary Western Herbal Medicine (GDVWHM) through the College of Integrative Veterinary Therapies (CIVT). 

Over the decades, her training expanded into Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine (TCVM) and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), studied through multiple programs and institutions, including Shenzhou Open University and the Lotus Institute of Integrative Medicine, with teachers including Yifan Yang, Giovanni Maciocia, Signe Beebe, and John K. Chen.

She also trained in gemmotherapy, homeopathy, spagyrik, mycotherapy, and Hirudo (leech) therapy, as well as traditional European medicine and shamanically inspired healing approaches, which she explored through a three-year training with naturopath Hildegard Fuhrberg. 

Her clinical focus centers on chronic imbalance patterns in dogs and cats: constitutional support, digestive and metabolic health, skin and coat, trophorestorative herbalism, and long-term physiological resilience. She draws on Western herbal energetics, TCVM pattern differentiation, and functional nutrition as integrated, complementary lenses, not as competing systems. 

Swanie has been teaching since 2004, first through in-person seminars in Germany, now through online courses available in both German and English. She lives with her animals on her farm in Saarland, Germany and in the Provence region of France, where she also offers occasional in-person retreats.

You can see a list with some of her qualifications here >>