Thoughts on Medical Credibility One of the more revealing features of contemporary medical discussion is not that people disagree about evidence; although I think that disagreement is frequently productive. Rather it is that they usually apply different standards to identical kinds of evidence, and that this asymmetry almost always runs in the same direction. This is not a problem of dishonesty. It is a problem of worldview. Mention that […]
Health, Herbal Medicine, The School of Herbal Medicine
Bringing Herbal Skills Back Into the Community
22
May
May
There’s a particular kind of energy that appears when people gather around a table covered in jars, leaves, roots, and the warm steam of a freshly brewed infusion. It’s the energy of people remembering that health isn’t something handed down to them. Rather, it’s something they can participate in. When we had our last trustees’ […]
15
May
May
On paper it doesn’t make sense to me. Thinking about it doesn’t make sense to me. But people [lots of people] maintain it works. When I was training over 20 years ago nutrition was one module in our degree course. Something that we acknowledged was a ‘useful’ addition to the complex mixes of medicinal herbs […]
08
May
May
Rethinking Cholesterol… Cholesterol has been turned into a villain, but the science tells a far more complex story. LDL and HDL are not cholesterol at all, statins are not the benign panacea they are marketed as, and the continual lowering of ‘safe’ cholesterol thresholds has expanded the pool of people labelled as patients. The real drivers of […]
01
May
May
And patients fall through the gaps… People may imagine that symptoms arrive one at a time, like items on a list. Fatigue. Pain. Gut disruption. Anxiety. Insomnia. They think each one has its own cause, and its own solution. But clinicians who sit with patients long enough to listen know something different: symptoms arrive in constellations. They cluster. They reinforce each […]
24
Apr
Apr
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 […]
17
Apr
Apr
Every so often a patient story lands with a thud, not because it is shocking, but because it is so tediously familiar. I want to be clear at the outset: most GPs are conscientious, thoughtful, and doing their best in a strained system. But the minority who default to dismissal rather than curiosity can cause disproportionate […]
10
Apr
Apr
And Why It Matters… People often ask why I continue to practise as a herbalist and teach herbal medicine in an era saturated with pharmaceuticals, protocols, and increasingly algorithmic healthcare. The answer is not nostalgia, nor a rejection of biomedicine. It is something far more pragmatic: herbs remain one of the most effective ways to treat illness while preserving […]
03
Apr
Apr
Walk through any historical garden and you’ll find a quiet truth growing between the labelled beds: women have always treated the sick. Long before medicine became a credentialed profession, women were often the primary interpreters of the body’s signals; the custodians of birth, the ones who understood which plant soothed, which stimulated, and which should be handled with […]
27
Mar
Mar
Even when you know the benefits…. Consistency is the most intellectually irritating of all health principles. Not because it is complex, but because it is insultingly simple. The physiology is clear. The behavioural science is clear. The long-term outcomes are clear. And yet the daily execution remains the point at which even the most educated, well-intentioned professional can find herself undone. […]