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genetic tendencies. Indian Ayurvedic
medicine pays great attention to the
clues of body structure, voice timbre,
and vital energy levels, right down to
the color of the saliva on the tongue.
In fact, all traditional cultures have
their own ways of tracking the roots of
disease, but those ways overlap and
arrive at the same destination via
different routes. What they have in
common is their attention to detail;
watching, feeling, seeing,
remembering, and experiencing;
noticing the small alongside the large
and the whole. These diagnostic and
assessment methods are merely an
extension of everyday life.
Dr. Christopher
My Influences
As a natural healer, my aim is to empower and reeducate people within
the home, using nature in all her forms, with her foods and herbs as allies,
in order to remedy disease and rebalance the system. It is always very
exciting to find “like” spirits; I have met them in many countries,
including Britain, the United States, all over Europe, and India.These
people and places have all shaped and molded me, but I was perhaps most
greatly influenced by Dr. John Christopher, who for his time was a
pioneer of modern herbalism and helped instigate and shape the
American herbal renaissance of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Not a week
goes by without my thoughts and gratitude going out to him. I am
especially grateful that I am legally allowed to practice as a herbalist in
Britain as a direct legacy of laws passed by Henry VIII and, more recently,
through the work of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory
Agency (MHRA), the British Herbal Medicine Association (BHMA), and
the European Herbal Practitioners Association.
Life for my American teachers (herbalists) has not been so easy. Dr.
Richard Schulze, a colleague and main apprentice to Dr. Christopher, has
had to suffer the financial loss and indignity of having his herb stores
smashed, despoiled, and confiscated by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. Similarly, Dr. Christopher was thrown into jail many
times, but he still healed many thousands of people and started up clinic
after clinic— each after the last one had been shut down. In France, Spain,
Belgium, Greece, Italy, and other countries, herbalism is illegal unless you
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