Bespoke Botanicals

08/08/2026

I'm very proud of my BSc degree in Herbal Medicine. The course was intense, in-depth and demanding. Honestly I only got through it because I am stubborn and refused to give up. It’s frustrating when we get associated wth the more woo practitioners who have just done a short course and have no understanding of the magnitude of things they still don’t know. If you want help from a Herbalist, please check their qualifications and governing body. I’m a member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists. We have to adhere to continuing professional development standards as long as we are practising herbalists, undertaking further training and keeping up to date with current research.
We have much to offer and can work alongside conventional medicines.

Someone called a Consultant Medical Herbalist (aka - me) a “witch doctor & charlatan.”

Fine. Let’s be precise.

A Consultant Medical Herbalist is not an Instagram aesthetic.

Proper training looks like years of study. On a NIMH-accredited pathway such as Heartwood, that means roughly 4–6 years, around 3,600 academic hours plus 500 clinical hours. Anatomy. Physiology. Pathophysiology. Pharmacognosy. Phytochemistry. Materia medica. Clinical examination. Differential diagnosis. Manufacturing. A final clinical exam. Traditionally an apprentice herbalist would train for 14 years. There was nothing basic about the demands placed on them.

In the UK, Schedule 20 law exists for a reason. Some potent herbs are restricted to one-to-one practitioner consultation. That is regulation, not vibes. Only professional herbalists are permitted to use them in practice.

And “unregulated”? The National Institute of Medical Herbalists has professional lineage back to 1864. Codes of practice. A register. A complaints process.

Calling trained clinicians quacks protects a monopoly narrative. Actual quackery is untrained advice sold with commercial certainty and zero clinical grounding.

If you are choosing care, ask the boring questions:
What is the qualification?
Are they on a professional register?
How many supervised clinical hours?
Do they take a proper case history and examine you?
Not anyone is a Consultant Medical Herbalist. Further, not everyone should be.

01/08/2026

26/07/2026

This will be fascinating, though I do wish it wasn’t so expensive even to join the live stream 🙁

My next 🎓 presentation will be at the Integria Symposium 15-16 August in Brisbane.

Below is a summary of what I’ll be presenting, an important one for clinicians who have patients on GLP-1 analogue drugs.

🌿From Appetite Suppression to Metabolic Stability: Functional Herbal Therapy in the GLP-1 Era🌿

Over the last few years, GLP-1 analogue drugs have transformed obesity care. For the first time in medical history, clinicians can reliably achieve double-digit weight loss with a prescription. It is an important therapeutic breakthrough.

But every breakthrough creates new challenges.

When we look beyond the impressive weight-loss figures, a different picture begins to emerge. We can now make people lose weight, but we are far less certain about what kind of weight they are losing, how well they tolerate the treatment, and what happens when the drug is withdrawn. Lean mass loss, gastrointestinal intolerance, nutritional depletion and predictable weight regain are becoming familiar clinical dilemmas.

So perhaps the most important question is no longer How do we make people lose weight? It is How do we make weight loss biologically stable?

My presentation explores how Functional Herbal Therapy (FHT) can help solve many of the clinical challenges emerging in the GLP-1 era. Drawing on the latest research in systems biology, gut endocrinology and network pharmacology, I will present evidence-informed strategies to reduce gastrointestinal intolerance, preserve lean muscle and mitochondrial function, prevent nutritional decline, and support long-term metabolic resilience. The presentation also examines how herbs can be used alongside GLP-1 analogue drugs to optimise outcomes, after drug withdrawal to help maintain weight loss, and, in selected patients, as part of an alternative strategy to pharmacological therapy. Along the way, you will discover exciting new science on bitter taste receptors, the gut microbiome, bile acid signalling, endogenous GLP-1 regulation and the emerging role of herbs such as hops, ginger, bitters, berberine and other evidence-based phytomedicines in restoring healthy metabolic regulation.

Whether your patients are using GLP-1 analogue drugs, cannot tolerate them and want alternatives, or are seeking lasting solutions after GLP-1 treatment ends, this presentation offers a compelling new framework for metabolic medicine—one that shifts the conversation from appetite suppression to metabolic stability.

You can attend the Symposium in person or by livestream. Hope to see you there.
https://practitioner.integria.com/events/ipsym26

22/06/2026

A remarkable series of recently published papers has thrust vitamin D status and supplementation into the spotlight as a potentially important modifier of breast cancer treatment outcomes, with converging evidence linking vitamin D status to treatment response, survivorship trajectories and the severity of treatment-related toxicity.

Over the next two postings I will be outlining these important new developments.

A major emerging theme is the relationship between vitamin D and response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT). NACT refers to chemotherapy given before the main definitive treatment for a cancer, usually surgery. In breast cancer, it is commonly used to shrink the tumour prior to surgical removal.

Two randomised clinical trials published in 2025 found that vitamin D supplementation during NACT significantly increased pathological complete response (pCR) rates. In one study of 80 women with breast cancer, daily supplementation with 2,000 IU cholecalciferol increased pCR rates from 24% in the placebo group to 43% in the vitamin D group, with women achieving serum 25(OH)D levels ≥20 ng/mL (≥50 nmol/L) showing markedly higher odds of pCR (OR 3.65). Another larger randomised trial involving 227 patients used weekly 50,000 IU vitamin D3 during NACT and similarly found vitamin D supplementation independently predicted pCR (OR 2.33). Importantly, these benefits appeared strongest in biologically aggressive tumors, particularly HER2-positive and hormone receptor-negative disease.

These individual trials are reinforced by a 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis pooling all available randomised studies (n=338). The meta-analysis reported that vitamin D supplementation approximately doubled the likelihood of achieving pCR (RR 2.09) with remarkably low heterogeneity (I²=0%), suggesting a highly consistent signal across studies. Residual tumour burden was also significantly reduced. Collectively, these studies support the concept that vitamin D may enhance chemotherapy responsiveness, potentially through immunomodulatory, anti-proliferative and differentiation-promoting mechanisms mediated through the vitamin D receptor (VDR).

For more information see:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40098326/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40229998/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42061434/

07/06/2026

Oats, specifically oat baths, can be a great introduction to the power of herbal medicine. I’ve lost count now of the times I see oat baths recommended on various social media forums to help soothe chicken pox and eczema. It’s accepted as a normal thing because friends and family have used it and found it helped. The gold standard is having it backed by medical research/ clinical trials… come talk to a medical herbalist, there are loads of useful plants out there (with empirical AND clinical evidence backing their effectiveness)

Still on the theme of herbal topicals for the skin, I once had the privilege of meeting celebrity botanist the late David Bellamy in London. For many people in Britain and around the English-speaking world, he was one of the great popularisers of botany and natural history, rather like a highly exuberant botanical counterpart to Sir David Attenborough. He confided to me that as a child he had very severe eczema that was only cured by regular oatmeal baths. This had made him a quiet lifelong advocate for herbal medicine. There are now several clinical trials that attest to the benefits of the topical application of oat preparations for chronic skin disorders such as eczema.

For example, recently there was a 2025 open-label, single-arm study published that evaluated a regimen using a 1% colloidal oatmeal cream twice daily together with a gentle baby wash in 31 infants and young children (aged 3 to 72 months) with mild-to-moderate atopic dermatitis. Over 4 weeks, significant improvements were reported in eczema severity scores, pruritus, skin barrier measures, sleep and quality of life, with some benefits reportedly evident from day 1. Twenty-nine participants completed the study, and only two adverse events were reported (papular rash and contact dermatitis).

The study is clinically relevant because it assessed a practical real world skincare routine rather than a moisturiser alone, and the findings are consistent with the known barrier-supportive and antipruritic effects of colloidal oatmeal. However, the evidence strength is limited by the absence of a placebo or comparator group, the open-label design, the small sample size and the short 4-week duration. Mild paediatric eczema often improves with consistent emollient use alone, so it is impossible to determine how much benefit was specifically attributable to the oatmeal in the formulation.

There are better designed trials for colloidal oatmeal. A 2020 randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluated a 1% colloidal oatmeal cream as adjunctive therapy in 50 adults with chronic irritant hand eczema. All participants initially used fluocinolone 0.025% ointment for 2 weeks, after which the oatmeal cream or base cream was continued alone for a further 4 weeks. Both groups improved during the steroid phase, but after corticosteroid withdrawal the oatmeal group maintained improvement, whereas the control group showed substantial relapse. By week 6, mean Hand Eczema Severity Index (HECSI) scores had fallen from 68 to 24 in the oatmeal group but rebounded to 54 in controls, with similar findings for itch severity and quality-of-life scores.

This is one of the stronger colloidal oatmeal studies because it was randomised, double blind and placebo-controlled, and used validated clinical tools. The design also clinically reflects real-world steroid step-down management, making the apparent steroid-sparing effect particularly interesting.

For more information see:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41037526/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32273745/

03/05/2026

https://x.com/natalieben/status/2050490380118905063?s=46&t=mOPuv2mT7S1Nw9AbjBkwnQ

02/04/2026

https://www.herbalreality.com/herbalism/western-herbal-medicine/making-sense-of-herbal-dosing-how-much-is-enough/?fbclid=IwZnRzaAQ7hMNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeXH5q7G0nQlHzc4lJmzASp4v7UyXQ_1CsABnbaBo10lWv8Mtd9iqALMAJboE_aem_IKIfUh7zqFCydl1LP4GA1g&cookie-consent-set=true

Dosing herbal medicine requires navigating plant variability, preparation methods and individual response. Find out how to get the herbal dose right.