Modern Medicine Doesn’t Have All the Answers

What if the medicine most trusted by millions never makes it to a pharmacy shelf? In a healthcare world dominated by pharmaceuticals and lab-verified protocols, herbal healing often gets cast aside — labeled as fringe, unscientific, or anecdotal. But in communities across the UK, traditional plant medicine is far from an outdated relic. It’s alive, well, and deeply relevant. A compelling new scoping review, “Narratives of Herbal Medicine Utilisation in the United Kingdom” by Celine Longden-Naufal and colleagues, uncovers why people continue to turn to plants for healing — and what’s blocking healthcare systems from meeting them there.

The dominant narrative is clear: modern medicine is real medicine; everything else is optional, cultural, or suspect. This binary is deeply embedded — in policy, education, and even the language we use to describe health. Clinical trials are treated as gospel. Traditional knowledge is often written off as informal, outdated, or unqualified. This narrative not only narrows our options, it ignores centuries of Wisdom (formerly referred to as ‘lived experience’) that have guided healing practices in families and communities long before white coats and waiting rooms existed.

In the UK, as the review highlights, it’s often ethnic and culturally diverse communities who continue to practice herbal medicine — not in defiance of science, but in connection to heritage, identity, and holistic care. These are people who use ginger for colds, nettle for iron, and chamomile for sleep, because that’s what their aunties and ancestors did. It’s part of their story — and part of their strength. But when they bring that story into clinical settings, they’re often met with suspicion or silence. This tension isn’t just about medicine. It’s about power, gatekeeping, and who gets to define what counts as care.

Through the Creative Women’s Association (CWA) lens, the issue runs even deeper. Women — particularly those from non-Western and migrant backgrounds — are the original keepers of botanical knowledge. From midwives and mothers to bush healers and apothecaries, women have carried this plant wisdom not through degrees, but through generations. Yet their authority is routinely dismissed because it lives outside institutional systems. Wisdom (formerly referred to as ‘lived experience’) — the embodied, hard-won knowledge gained through real-world navigation of health, trauma, and caregiving — is treated as second-tier. This erasure doesn’t just devalue the past; it undermines our future.

What if we stopped asking herbal medicine to prove itself to systems that were never designed to see its value? What if integration wasn’t about validation, but about respect? The review calls for a reframing: to stop viewing herbal healing as “alternative,” and start recognising it as part of a broader, pluralistic health ecosystem. A system where community-based knowledge and clinical science can coexist — not in conflict, but in collaboration. Where health is shaped not just in labs, but in kitchens, gardens, and story circles.

The demand is already here. People are combining acupuncture with antibiotics, turmeric with therapy, flower essences with fitness. Not because they’re uninformed, but because they’re paying attention to what works for their bodies and their lives. We don’t need to teach people to trust herbs. They already do. We need to teach our systems to trust people.