Jenny Carden is on a mission to prove the power of plant medicine
Tucked away in a peaceful little cobbled courtyard in Okehampton, along with the museum and tea rooms, you can find Jenny Carden, aka the Dartmoor Herbalist.
As you go into her premises, while one end is taken up with a little shop and the other a consultation area, your eyes are immediately drawn to the shelves and shelves of jars and bottles, like an old-fashioned apothecary.
For Jenny is a medical herbalist and those jars and bottles are filled with the leaves, flowers, roots and bark of plants which – after a long, detailed consultation with a patient - she painstakingly measures, mixes and prescribes everything from teas to capsules. If some think that there is something ‘old-fashioned’ about what she does - they are very much mistaken.
For thousands of years, medicine men and women from every culture across the world have harnessed plants to soothe and heal. And as science has progressed our understanding of the human body, so it has our understanding, through research and clinical trials, of how and why certain ones work.
To learn all of this, to become a medical herbalist, requires training and practise not dissimilar to mainstream medical professionals. In fact, herbalists also study orthodox as well as plant medicine.
‘You have to be qualified'
“Firstly,” Jenny explains, “there’s a governing body, the National Institute of Medical Herbalists. Anyone can call themselves a herbalist, but not anyone can be a medical herbalist. You have to be qualified for that.
“The training is four years, very intense and very science heavy. A lot of botany and anatomy. We started out with 63 people in our cohort and only eight of us did the exam in the end.
We actually have to complete 500 hours of clinical diagnostic training, in fact a lot of the students are ex Nurses and GPs.”
‘It’s not alternative medicine’
Jenny and her colleagues are not for one moment trying to deny the marvels of modern medicine. Far from it. “We work with pharmaceutical medication, not instead of. People don’t like the ‘alternative medicine’ label."
However, herbalists take a holistic approach to illness, treating the underlying cause of disease rather than just symptoms. They are able to prescribe herbal remedies to be used alongside other medications and treatments, and in some areas many patients are referred to a herbalist by their GP for treatment.
“What do people think the ingredients for their medication comes from? A lot of oncologists are on board with herbal medicine because they know it can keep people well between treatments. Lots of cancer therapies are derived from plants like snowdrop, plus Mistletoe is used in Europe as an adjunct cancer therapy.”
‘I was in so much pain’
Jenny herself was set on a path to herbalism when struggling with her own chronic illness. After a hospitalisation followed by norovirus in 2016, Jenny found herself struggling with post-viral fatigue.
“I was so exhausted and in so much pain. Some days I couldn’t even walk down stairs without crying. When Drs can’t identify and treat a single cause you're made to feel it’s all in your head. It’s really scary. I was on the classic trifecta: codeine, omeprazole and an SSRI; and referred to a pain clinic. But nothing helped.”
Forced to take time off work – she was an admin and research assistant for a university biosciences department – to try to get better.
“I was just trying to walk a little bit more each week on Dartmoor near Dunsford. Finally, one day, I got to a meadow at the end of this path that I’d been trying to get to for months. It was full of meadowsweet. I had no idea what it was, but it smelt of medicine – some people say it smells like Germolene!
“In fact, the name ‘aspirin’ is derived from its old botanical name ‘spiraea ulmaria’ – and meadowsweet is a pain reliever. But, unlike aspirin, it’s gentle on the gut.
“I picked some, researched it and started drinking it as tea. Within six weeks I was well enough to be off my medication. It sounds a bit dark, but I think it saved my life. And gave me my vocation!
“My main aim is for people to have more control over their own health; to find out what works for them as an individual. Nature provides for everyone.”
For more information or to book a consultation go to dartmoorherbalist.co.uk
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