By Dr. Dilis Clare
After ten years of full time clinical practice in Integrated Medicine as a Medical Herbalist and a GP, what is the good news for herbal medicine? In my experience, the time honoured tradition of healing with herbs is effective in clinical practice, and traditional claims are increasingly supported by research.
One of the real strengths of herbal medicine is the flexibility of using herbs alongside pharmaceutical medicine, energy medicine or physical therapies. Herbs are excellent at supporting the body’s healing or even supporting its protective responses in an integrated manner.
Patients often delay seeing a herbalist until they have exhausted the hoops and scopes of hospital diagnosis. As a herbalist, such knowledge regarding your condition is welcome, but the earlier you attend, and the less entrenched the symptoms, the easier it will be to heal the body.
Patients that I look after over a long period of time, through different medical conditions, eventually realise this. After a while, they attend saying, “Remember how I felt before I got sick four years ago? Well I feel like that now. Is there something I can take to stay well.” They realise that life is better for avoiding illness, rather than treatment and recovery. Herbs have the constituent building blocks, the vibrational energy and long established evidence of safety and effectiveness to trust for holistic healing.
Normal physiology can be compared to the sweetest music, blending ten symphony orchestras with a brilliant conductor. And herbs are there to help keep us in tune with ourselves.
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