About me - a brief profile

A brief profile. It's difficult to know what to tell you. I am a herbalist - well, kind of. I find it awkward when conversational protocol sometimes brings up the question "So, what do you do?".

I have developed an affinity, interest and passion in our native (UK) medicinal plants. I seek out their folklore and soak up what knowledge I can from traditional herbal healers who still possess fragments of our herb lore.

I see great value and joy in traditional methods but also delight in accessing modern scientific insights as well. I am not anti modern medicine, nor am I always convinced by traditional methods. Both have their allocated places in my mind. If I am ill my personal preference would be safe and effective plant based medicines with no side effects - but if I got hit by a car I would want an ambulance and all the advanced life support paraphernalia available. Each has it's strengths.

The path that led me to start poking around in the countryside seeking out weeds that others wouldn't pass the time of day with started when Fate opened a doorway and pushed me through it into Paramedic training. As a Paramedic I was quickly conditioned by a hugely dominant, chemical based medical system that loved sterile fields, gloves, flashing lights, and shiny bits of equipment. I was confident in the belief that antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and analgesics were the answer to most people's physical ailments.

With a big bag containing many milligrams of tablets and injections, plus a stethoscope to allow me to look the part, the Universe now flung open another door to challenge my comfort zone. My work now took me to some beautiful and remote regions of the world where I was delighted to find that beautiful and fascinating people lived there. I spent many winters in the Arctic and a while in the Antarctic. Warmer episodes took me to jungles and deserts, and I found my spiritual home in the euphoric altitude of mountain regions.

I was amazed to find that I was the only one that had a big bag of tablets and injections. Such was the strength of my medical conditioning that I looked in wonder at how people had managed to survive without a pharmacy in the village or a hospital down the trail. Disconcertingly I was continually meeting people with glowingly heathy skin and big white smiles - and children who laughed a lot and played. Leaving my impressive bag in the corner I started asking questions.

Shaman and medicine men were delighted to answer my questions by showing me flowers, barks and roots, simply prepared and administered to great effect.

A local healer showed me which leaves to hold on a migraine sufferers head to relieve the pain. A medical culture shock at the time, but isn't that where our modern medicine is now going with trans-dermal patches applied to the skin?

In Siberia I asked a nomadic rheindeer herder "What happens if you get ill ?" He was a little confused by the question and answered the best he could, "We don't get ill". People get injured sometimes but if you are getting plenty of exercise, interact with a strong community, and eat a nutritious diet without added junk, it is difficult to get ill. Powerful lessons.

One day on a paradise island in the South Pacific I mentally threw the bag to the back of my mind only to be brought out at times of life-threatening emergency. I was working in an area where everything on the island was penicillin resistant, and I was trying to deal with a whole range of serious infections. Suddenly I realised our powerful drugs didn't work. Not at all. This was a sudden, cold, shock realisation. Our drugs didn't work. That was realisation number one, followed up immediately by the second hit. We have no alternative. Highly trained powerless paramedic with a big bag full of impotent medicines - and nothing else. On that day we were having the greatest trouble from soft tissue infections. So I asked. "How do you deal with this?" The young boy I asked couldn't believe that with all our advanced knowledge we didn't know - "Lime juice of course". A wonderful potent antibacterial and antiviral remedy. Freely available and common knowledge to all. It worked, and worked really well.

Many other similar experiences encouraged me to seek out the alternatives with more urgency.

Returning to England I became suddenly aware of the vibrancy and diversity of our countryside. We are surrounded by a huge wealth of medicinal plants of our own. It now seemed strange to me that we were importing exotic alternatives and spending billions of pounds on chemical substitutes that didn't seem to solve the problem too well.

Now I was talking to elders in villages in England who were telling me how their great-grandmother used to use Comfrey, or Elder, or Lady's Mantle. The great herbalist of the people, Nicholas Culpeper declared that he could only find one plant in England that did not have a medicinal application - Spinach (and we now know how nutritious that is). We don't need a rain forest or a pharmacy, we have everything we need right here.

Yes, I trained formally as a medical herbalist, but my passion and inspiration lies in the fragments of folk lore and generations of skills and experience still retained by our elders in the villages, Romany wise-women, and discarded old journals. It's my heritage and I want it back.

So, a brief profile. I'm a herbalist - well, kind of.