When Did We Start Carrying a Litre of Water Around? We are in one of those extraordinary British hot spells as the Met Office has reported temperatures pushing into the high 30s in parts of England this week, and 2026 is currently on course to be the UK’s warmest summer on record. So yes, drink more if you’re hot. […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
07
Aug
Aug
Where my vitamins go to die…. Please, somebody… Tell me you have a supplement cupboard like mine. I wish I could tell you that I know exactly what I am doing when it comes to supplements; but I have a horrible feeling that I buy them on impulse and then forget what I have bought, why I […]
12
Jun
Jun
A Tale of Loss and Persistence Visits to Kew are spectacular; the glasshouses, the architecture, the sheer number of plants, the curated beauty. Visitors take away impressions of the huge leaves in the tropical palm house, the exhilarating experience of the Treetop Walkway, or the interesting Hive structure. My lasting impression was about two trees. One is already gone from the world. […]
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 […]
13
Feb
Feb
Or are we judging by the wrong standards? One of the quiet absurdities in contemporary medical discourse is the claim that medicinal herbs are ‘not proven to be safe’. This is usually said with a straight face by the same system that routinely prescribes substances known to cause liver injury, anhedonia, B12 depletion, suicidality, metabolic syndrome, withdrawal syndromes, and cognitive decline. The […]
26
Dec
Dec
But have I got time? Self-care takes commitment. That, in itself, is not a fashionable thing to say. Commitment implies effort, repetition, and the possibility of failure, which are all awkward companions in a culture that prefers hacks and shortcuts. The real difficulty, though, is not that self-care is demanding. It is that it requires […]
07
Jun
Jun
Plants v the NHS… In 1948 a medical herbalist set up practice on the Talgarth Road in Hammersmith, West London. This was the worst time to start practising as that same year the government in the UK launched the National Health System [NHS] which was to deliver emergency, acute and chronic health care at the […]
01
Mar
Mar
For the last few months we have been moving the herbal medicine school to new premises. Up till now we have been hiring village halls etc. once a month for a weekend of seminars. This always involved a lot of carrying of equipment around [microscopes, skeletons, pharmacy stuff like bottles/jars /herbs/scales/bowls/capsule making machines/pessary moulds/tincture press/jugs […]
23
Apr
Apr
When I was a young Mum I realised one day that I was weeding the garden and throwing plants on the compost that could be used as medicine. [I had been reading social history books. What did parents do when their kids were sick before the NHS?] As I started to investigate the traditional therapeutic […]
14
Apr
Apr
Grass pollens may produce symptoms from April through to July. Tree pollens may cause symptoms from as early as February to as late as September, this varies due to when the tree species involved shed their pollen. Other pollens and moulds may cause symptoms at other times, and house dust/animal fur/mould and fungal spores will […]