While some of this information is covered unto the "How to Use Herbs" page, it seemed necessary to answer the big question all by itself! What is the advantage of using bulk herbs? There are two answers.

FIRST, is the economic factor. A pound is approximately 445,000 mg. For round figures, lets say that you buy a bottle of capsuled herbs for $10.00.... an average amount. Let us say that these capsules contained 445 mg. of herb per capsule.... a typical amount. Then your bottle of herbs weighs about 1/10th of a pound, and is therefore costing you approximately $100.00 per pound. There is not one herb on my whole catalog that I sell for this much per pound. And if you pay this amount for what is an inexpensive herb, such as alfalfa, then you have paid approximately $96.00 for 100 gelatin capsules, because we sell uncapsuled alfalfa for approximately $4.00 per pound. By the way, we sell 1000 capsules for $9.50.
The SECOND answer is related to the first: When you pay $100.00 per pound for alfalfa, then you are going to be stingy with it when it comes to using it medicinally. But herbs are not chemicals. They are not concentrated. While some herbs have a drastic effect, such as Cascara bark, yet in most cases, the more the merrier. I have taken a whole CUP of Echinacea Purpurea root and taken it in a tea before, and all it did was make me get better. If you did that with Cascara, you would likely die of dysentery, and other herbs would have the same caution, such as Poke root, Senna, or others. The point, then, is that when you pay too much for your herbs, you will rarely take a therapeutic dosage. .

There are other factors. While the healing virtue of herbs is manifestly the design of divine providence, yet it remains that most of the medicinal herbal treatments are of such a substance and consistency that man cannot easily ingest them without significant preparations. Powdering and encapsulating them still leaves you to try to digest substances often difficult for men to digest. When you make a tea or a tincture, you extract all those herbal constituents for use, and then leave for your body the much easier task of merely assimilating them, thus facilitating the body's healing properties of the herbs.

While ingesting dried herbs will still yeild a sizable fraction of their therapeutic constituents, it is still less than what you will get by other methods, such as a decoction, or a tincture; the former of which is described on our How to Use Herbs page, and the latter of which is described on the How to Make Your Own Tincture page. The point being made here is that you are less likely to obtain the maximum healing virtue of medicinal herbs by ingesting them in a raw form.
Though you can still capsule your bulk herbs, and many people do, and we make encapsulators available here on our site. But when people buy their herbs in bulk, they sooner or later learn the other methods of taking them, and once they have done this, they are less likely to return to the "modern" way of using capsules, except for those obnoxious herbs such as Wormwood, or Goldenseal, which are so bitter that no one can stand to take them but in a tincture or a capsule. Its not as convenient as capsules, but it is more therapeutic.
So what is the "Advantage of Taking Bulk Herbs"? You run a much better likelihood of  having a healing experience without straining your finances in the process. Yes, some herbal protocols are expensive. But compare them to the standard fare from the A.M.A., and you will be glad that God made such a benificent accessible remedy. If it heals too many people some day, and they outlaw it, just remember.... it is a mercy that you will always be able go pick it somwhere, or to grow it yourself.