Richard Whelan ~ Medical Herbalist

Women are wonderful. Each is unique; each has her own beauty, grace, at the same time each woman is deeply interwoven with her family, her friends, with Nature herself.

Women carry the extraordinary responsibility of being the ones to bear and nurture new life and this means that they are committed to a powerful biological cycle.

The intricate dance of hormones from one cycle of the moon to the next demonstrates the complexity of a women’s biology, her own life with its numerous stages of growth from infant to wise woman show an even greater pattern, one with even more complex detail.

You who are a woman reading this, only need to think of yourself or any of your female friends and family to see the reality of this. These multi-layered, sometimes contradictory complexities, these many layers of being, are usually hidden in plain sight. They seem unremarkable because they are not so often remarked on, but looking at this with open eyes, there is truly a wonder, and a mystery.

But now let’s return to medicine and the world of ‘health’ because this world, as we know it, has been very much designed and developed by men. And men do not sit comfortably with mysterious complexity. I am not suggesting we are stupid, but we are straight-forward. We are confident that everything has ‘cause and effect’. If there is a problem we believe we can work out why it is there and in the process we will therefore know what to do to fix it or at the very least we will be able to explain it away.

Consequent to this, if you look up any of the common problems that relate to women, you will see a whole world of reasons, and answers, being given. The biological, chemical, psychological, spiritual meaning of it all has been explored in such incredible detail that it would seem that all must be understood and that the ‘mystery’ I am talking about was merely the ignorance of an earlier, less enlightened age.

I am speaking from some experience here; I have truly lived in that world of ‘explanations’ for everything. I have read innumerable confidently written books, articles, journals and studies on the subject of women and their health. Likewise I have attended many confidently presented seminars and conferences where the main theme was one or another of the health problems that commonly affect women. You can believe me when I say there is no shortage of people who say they have the answers when it comes to women’s health…

It is time for me to explain why it is so important to me to make this point clear. I am not really speaking to the woman who is at the beginning of her health journey. When things initially go wrong we all of us look for the simple reasons and answers and there will be many happy occasions where a new problem soon self-resolves or is able to be easily helped. You should know that I am emphatically not anti-science and not at all against the learning and use of medical knowledge. You should also know that the women who I am usually talking with in my practice, and the women who I imagine I am talking to here, do not have problems that have gone away by themselves, and in the majority of cases they have not gotten better with the solutions that have been offered by conventional medicine (in fact many of the women I see have not gotten better with various diagnoses and treatments from other natural therapists or the Internet as well)

I see a great danger in the path of ‘reductionism’ for such people. Whereby in seeing one part of the pattern we convince ourselves that we have understood the whole picture, when we really haven’t at all. I have seen time and again how a woman is given a label, a diagnosis, to explain why she is ill and then it is as if all real thinking stops at that point.

She is no longer able to be looked at as a complex, multi-faceted human being, all of that recedes into a blurry background and it is only the ‘disease’ that remains in focus.

As tempting as it may be to go down this well-trodden path, it very often does not lead to a good place in the long term. An old aphorism says ‘what you resist, persists’. This is hard to grasp with a Western mind that is accustomed to having the answers but there is a deep wisdom from the old ways that speaks of how fighting against your enemy only makes it stronger. When we label, separate and so alienate a part of our body that we have decided is faulty we run a very real risk of deepening, rather than healing, the imbalance.

I am not advocating inertia, far from it, but there is a world of difference to working with the intelligence of your body compared to that of fighting against disease. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this way of thinking translates into the practice of medicine.

When you see the signs, obvious or subtle, of what’s wrong you don’t fall into the terrible trap of thinking that you have therefore unravelled the whole mystery when all you have done is just picked up one of its strands. A woman might have mildly underactive thyroid issues, anaemia, relationship stresses, blood sugar imbalances, lack of sunlight, chemical overload and a sluggish liver all at the same time! This kind of complexity is common; it is not at all unusual.
I have met so many women who have been diagnosed with ‘something’ and then proceeded to go through many months of expensive and difficult treatments without any lasting benefits just because no-one wanted to be wrong. When we think we are right about something it becomes terribly hard for us to admit that we are wrong. I wish I could say this just related to the male ego but it can affect everyone. We have an uncanny knack, once we form an opinion about something or someone, to take in information that supports our point of view and to simply ignore anything that doesn’t!

Practicing with an ‘open’ mind means that when you do form an opinion you are always ready to modify it or even just let it go. Far from freezing you into immobility this kind of open-ness has the effect of freeing you up to really look. It lets you forget what you think is important and to see and hear what actually matters.

I began full time practice in 1989 and the majority of the people who have come to see me since that time have been women.

My practice is entirely based on word of mouth referrals so I have had to get a lot of good results over the years but I can truthfully say that this has never been due to one kind of ‘protocol’ working better than another. Each woman is really a sample of one and each woman has her own unique journey for her health and her growth as a human being. That said, many different kinds of women’s problems have been part of the motivation to seek help and you will see that I am more than willing to share the kinds of things that I have seen consistently help in various other articles on the web-site.

I particularly want to direct your attention to the herbs themselves. Whilst the ‘reasons and answers’ may be unendingly variable there is a great consistency in Nature without which I would personally have achieved nothing. The herbs that I have used for thousands of women over the years I’ve been in practice have been remarkably allies. It can be a complex and sometimes lengthy process to work out which herbs can help the most but I have not yet met the woman who could not get some benefit from these old friends to humanity.

I warmly encourage you to explore the world of herbal medicines if you are not there already. These amazing plants have their own complex characters too, and somehow they form a relationship with us in our times of need that help support a shift that never would have happened without their help. There are many more but I will just point out a few favourites, the ones I tend to use the most for you, wonderful women.