ON MEDICAL HERBALISM

Last weekend Elder Daughter invited us over for the Frome Festival. Not that it was an auspicious weekend, weatherwise. In fact in rained almost continuously. I rather fear than global warming has been replaced by global wetting, at least so far as southern Britain is concerned. There were, nonetheless, interludes between the wind and rain, which was fortunate as we were booked to attend what the Festival advertised as a ‘Medical Herbal Walk along the East Mendip Trail.’

This turned out to be most excellent value for the £5 we each paid. Indeed so full of insight and information was Zoe Hawes’ perambulating seminar that my one criticism of the event was that we should have been pre-warned to bring pencil and paper in serious quantities, and perhaps a camera too for the photographing of unlikely specimens of greenery.

Zoe’s job was to occupy us for two hours on the subject of medical herbalism and she did that wonderfully. If you get a chance to attend one of her walks (listed on her website zoehawes.co.uk) then you won’t be disappointed. I shall attempt here to record some of the things she said. But as I speak from memory I am sure I shall omit much of importance and may get other matters quite wrong. Please take my apologies therefore in advance.

She had, she said, begun her professional life as a nurse, but progressively began to have doubts about orthodox medicine’s approach to complex medical problems. Of course, orthodox medicine would be the first port of call should you have an accident, but for many chronic conditions, she concluded, orthodox medicine tended to treat symptoms and ailments rather than asking the more difficult question of why the body is no longer at ease with itself (and so dis-eased). Many different causes might give rise to same symptoms, she said.

So she had switched from orthodox medicine, undertaking five years of training as a herbalist and now having her own practice in Frome. She believes, so far as possible, in using herbs that grow locally and gathering as many as she can herself.

The walk began. We didn’t go far before reaching a clump of nettles that conveniently sheltered a patch of white ‘dead’ nettles beside them. I won’t try to rehearse her catalogue of life-giving properties attaching to these two plants, though I do remember that she said nettle seeds, the tiny, dusty strings that hang from the plants at this time of the year, could restore adrenal glands that had become tired and battered by stress. A teaspoon of these (I hope I remember the quantity right) sprinkled on your morning cereal or yoghurt could work wonders.

We walked on to stop under a lime tree. Zoe explained the restorative potential of lime flowers on the circulatory system, relieving high blood pressure and inducing relaxation. You can buy packs of these flowers in France apparently, where people use them regularly and not just to make a relaxing tisane at the end of the day.

And so walk continued along the trail beside the River Frome. We saw Comfrey and St John’s Wort, Vervane, Plaintain, Burdock and Meadow Sweet. And probably others too that I have forgotten. For each one she described its properties and how it might be prepared - tinctures prepared with vodka or neat alcohol, or dried and infused or sprinkled on salads.

However, herbalism is not about seeing the forest as a kind of free pharmacy full of wonder drugs for self-prescription. This may be one element if you know what you are doing, though I would always rather buy my St John’s Wort from Healthspan rather than trying to make my own preparation from something I might, or might not, have identified correctly.

The basis of herbalism might be the chemicals produced by plants, some of which are very powerful. That’s why we don’t eat hemlock or deadly nightshade. But if this were all that herbalism were about then we should be back to orthodox medicine - treating headaches with willow bark, perhaps, rather than with aspirin produce in a factory. No, if I interpret Zoe correctly, that there are at least two other major aspects to the science.

First there’s the history. People have been using plants to fight disease since time immemorial. Moreover, for much of this time herbalism practitioners have been cut off from one another: by geographical distance for one thing, and by an absence of books at the level of the ordinary village practitioner. Now that communications barrier has been removed.

Remarkably, we find that the treatments that have evolved in different places, using particular types of plants in standardised ways, have a great deal in common. Trial and error in many different places and at many different times has yielded a broad corpus of agreement. This would not be the case if herbalism didn’t yield practical results.

Secondly, there is the emphasis on treating the whole person. Seeing a person’s symptoms and lifestyle and history as a connected whole and therefore seeking to move beyond the presenting aches and pains and tiredness or sickness to a variety of possible deeper causes.

As I say, this is my interpretation of the gist of what Zoe was talking about. I cannot claim to be definitive. But in my own experience I know two people on whom orthodox medicine had given up - or at least whom at the end of a substantial period orthodox medicine had had to conclude a lack of any improvement - who subsequently took themselves to herbalists and have found the cures that they had initially hoped orthodox medicine would provide. Of course such evidence is anecdotal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong. And there have been umpteen studies demonstrating the usefulness of certain herbal treatments.

At any rate as we all huddled around at the end of the walk and Zoe produced several flagons of elderflower cordial we judged it to have been an excellent and informative afternoon, on which even the rain had deigned not to pour.

Image is from Zoe's website.