When GPs Think Outside the Box 

Something good happens… 

Sometimes, an orthodox clinician reaches a point in their career where the official story no longer matches the lived reality of practice. The following quotes come from a GP who later integrated herbal medicine into her work, they taken from her book about how and why the medical profession left herbs behind.¹ This is a woman we know, as last year [2025] she was Guest Speaker at the School of Herbal Medicine².  

Dr Dilis Clare writes with a clarity that only comes from experience: 

“The early years of doctor training have been shaped by those who control the curriculum to be so intense and conformist such that nothing else seems possible. As they mature, though, doctors often take personal knowledge and experience more into account rather than blindly following a party line… Pressurised doctors, typically lacking sleep, time, and resources, want to avoid possible litigation as much as possible… In my own case, three main questions presented themselves: 

1. Why was I routinely prescribing patients medicines with known longer-term risks? 

2. Why was I in a position where I had to prescribe drugs to deal with unwanted effects from other drugs? 

3. How could I continue to benefit patients with my medical knowledge at the same time as expanding therapeutic options to offer patients?”  

Perhaps, all GPs could ask themselves these questions. 

Her questions were not fringe. They were not anti‑science. They were not nostalgic. They were the questions that arise when a clinician finally has enough distance from training to see the shape of the system they were trained into. 

And they expose a tension at the heart of modern medicine: the insistence that herbs are either dangerous or ineffective. They cannot logically be both. If they are ineffective, they cannot cause harm. If they are dangerous, they must have physiological activity. The contradiction reveals something deeper: the dismissal is cultural, not scientific. 

Once in practice, the tidy logic of the curriculum collides with the messy reality of human physiology. Doctors see patients who don’t fit the algorithm. They see side‑effects that require more drugs. They see chronic conditions that don’t resolve. They see people who want to participate in their own care rather than be passive recipients of prescriptions.  

Yet, to consider anything different becomes a threat, not because it is unsafe, but because it is unprotected by institutional authority. 

This is where the GP’s three questions become unavoidable. Why are long‑term risks acceptable when safer options exist? Why is polypharmacy normalised? Why is the therapeutic toolkit so narrow when the evidence base for herbal medicine is expanding every year? 

What could medicine gain if it stopped dismissing herbs? 

1. A broader therapeutic toolkit. 
Herbs offer modulatory, multi‑pathway actions that align with the complexity of chronic disease. They can reduce symptom burden, support physiological resilience, and in many cases reduce the need for escalating pharmaceutical interventions. 

2. A safer starting point. 
Many herbs have wide therapeutic windows and favourable long‑term safety profiles. They are not replacements for drugs, but they can often be first‑line options for mild to moderate presentations where pharmaceuticals carry disproportionate risks. 

3. A more collaborative model of care. 
Herbal medicine invites patients into the process. It requires engagement, observation, and participation. This is not a threat to medicine; it is a remedy for burnout—for both patient and practitioner. 

4. A return to clinical reasoning. 
Herbal practice is pattern‑based, not protocol‑based. It asks clinicians to think, not just follow. Integrating herbs does not dilute medical expertise; it expands it. 

The GP who asked those three questions did not abandon medicine. She expanded it. She recognised that the binary ‘herbs versus drugs’ is false. The real distinction is between a narrow toolkit and a broad one, between a system that fears complexity and one that works with it. 

So, what did she do? 

She began a Herbal Medicine degree at Middlesex University. 

What steered her towards herbal medicine? 

One shove was seeing the side effects of a medication given to teenagers for acne [Roaccutane]. She explains;  

“Refusing to generate prescriptions I could not justify proved very unpopular with the teenagers concerned, but most parents were grateful. A few did move to another practice as a result. I later came to appreciate that common skin conditions like acne are frequently responsive to a herbal medicine toolkit.” 

One realisation that Dr Clare came to was that during her training in herbal medicine, 

“the observation that the gradually increasing prescribing of herbs that I was doing was consistently proving effective for my patients, or at least more effective than what I had managed to date.” 

If modern medicine stopped reflexively dismissing herbs, it would not lose rigour. It would gain options. It would gain nuance. It would gain a way to treat the patient in front of the clinician, not just the condition in the guideline. 

The strapline to the book title states; A revealing history of medicine that restores herbs to patient-led care. This, surely would benefit GPs as well as their patients. 

And perhaps most importantly, it would allow doctors to practise with the independence, curiosity, and humanity that drew them to medicine in the first place. 

¹ Clare, Dilis, MBBCh, DRCOG, BSc (Herbal Medicine), and Tim Morrissey PhD. Uprooted Medicine. Tribes Press, 2025 

² www.schoolofherbalmedicine.co.uk