As another busy week on the farm draws to a close, and the seasons switch as seemingly as night gives way to day, it is worth remembering where we’re headed and where we’ve come from. You’ll have to forgive the nostalgia; it was brought to me in the shape of a beautifully illustrated and remarkably insightful book; Culpepper’s Herbal (1653). I have coveted a copy of this careful curation of cures for time immemorial, a bible for those of us ever-desperate to connect to our collective past. The book, an encyclopaedic epic depicting the wildflowers of Britain alongside their medicinal uses, chimes back to the pre-pharmaceutical days where ailments were unnamed and cures just as mysterious. It won’t be lost on the regular readers of this update that we are teetering dangerously close to describing Nutraceuticals!
Indeed, in Culpepper’s time, cures would have derived from flowers, roots, tubers and seeds as naturally as the sun sets in the west. Since the early 40’s however, antibiotics have displaced hundreds (probably thousands) of native plants as the cure we reach too when in ill-health; and with serious consequences. Resistance to antibiotics, according to the NHS, is becoming an international epidemic. The more we rely on antibiotics, it seems, the more we generate the necessity to discover newer antibiotics to replace the old, now defunct ones. This is not a race we want to be part of, a rat-race to the bottom when, as the American actress and one-time comedienne Lily Tomlin points out, “the winner of the rat race is still a rat”.
And so we come, at long-last, to my point. And here it is: like an awful lot of things, we did it better before the 20th century. Medical journals and experts in the field are collectively calling for a more preventative approach to healthcare, one that rejects the pop-the-pill culture of the 1900’s and returns instead to the days of Nicky Culpepper – ever the tomorrow-man that he was. Healthcare’s trajectory is now firmly on the diet and lifestyle table, with herbal and natural ingredients back on the menu. Preventative medicines derived from natural sources are the fish of the day and personalised diet plans and exercise regimes are the specials. In regards the healthcare space, Trelonk is sat firmly at the table of tomorrow.
