200628 Yes to Life – Help from herbs

Robin Daly: Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show for the last five years, during which time I’ve talked to an enormous range of people involved in integrative medicine for cancer: practitioners, doctors, oncologists actually working with people who have cancer, researchers pushing the frontiers of our knowledge of cancer and cancer treatments, people with their own extraordinary tale to tell that can throw light on the broader experience of cancer and activists working to push forward the agenda for integrative medicine for cancer.

Today, I’m speaking to a medical herbalist who has long experienced supporting people through cancer treatment. Over the years I’ve only occasionally had medical herbalists on the show, but when I have the interview has always been popular as herbs are of interest to a lot of people, and certainly seem to have a lot to offer.

I’m speaking to Hannah Charman over the internet. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Hannah Charman: Thank you very much for having me.

Robin Daly: People understand the potential of traditional herbal medicine to help people with cancer throughout their treatment. They tend to be very passionate about advocating for their use for this purpose. But lots of others have absolutely no idea – they might actually think is a ridiculous notion that some simple herbs could play an important role in helping someone with something as serious as cancer.

I wonder if you’d like to start out with an elevator pitch on behalf of herbs. This is your opportunity. You’re in the lift, and you’ve got this influential senior oncologist in there with you. He’s prepared to listen. You’ve got 30 seconds and in lift with him. What are you going to say?

Hannah Charman: Wow, no pressure then! I think the first point I would make is that a lot of people realise that certain mainstream drugs are derived from herbs. We’ve got things like aspirin and digoxin that we use in heart failure, and that does actually include some chemotherapeutic drugs as well that we use to treat cancer.

For example, there’s vincristine, which is used to treat certain leukaemias and childhood cancers. There’s taxol, which is used to treat breast cancer sometimes. And there’s mistletoe injections called iscador, which are used in some areas to treat prostate cancer. I don’t think we can have it both ways.

We can’t say herbs are completely hopeless in cancer treatment and yet make chemotherapy drugs from herbs. In China now, because they’ve had this long tradition of using mainstream medicine and traditional Chinese medicine including herbs next door to each other. It is now considered negligent in China for a patient to be prescribed mainstream treatments for cancer without being prescribed herbs alongside.

Robin Daly: How about that! Things could be so different than the other side of the planet can’t they. That’s your pitch so let’s hope he was listening and took note. Like many of the guests who appear on this show your interest in and your study of natural or lifestyle medicines – in your case herbs – came about as a result of your own health issues. Would you tell us about this?

Hannah Charman: When I was very young, I wanted to be a vet and that’s all I wanted to do; I wasn’t interested in any other career at all. I worked very hard at school and then every evening of the week, I had a different hobby to go to and something else at weekends. I was always on the go and quite happy, very active, very into my school work and learning. Then one day when I was 14 my dad picked me up from school in the car and we stopped at the shops on the way home. He asked me if I would get out and go to the shop and I couldn’t get out of the car. It turned out I had chronic fatigue syndrome, but it literally come on in the space of five minutes.

It became apparent fairly early on that the doctors weren’t interested in or able to help me. I was left for a few weeks to see if I get better on my own and I obviously didn’t. My mum and dad very kindly took me to see various other alternative practitioners because there wasn’t really any other option.

I got taken to a homeopathic doctor in London and he sat down and listened to me very carefully. He took me very seriously. He gave me some medicine and a lot of supplements and I started to get better. Then I got to see various other practitioners, and slowly over the course of two years, I got better and better.

At the end of that I went on a Reiki course with my dad. I spend a week learning Reiki and that saw off the last of it. During that Reiki course, I learnt a lot about the mind-body connection, which I think we’re going to talk about a bit later on. I decided after that experience that that was along the lines of what I wanted to do. I was off the idea of being a vet.

It just so happened that there was a degree course in Western herbal medicine setting up at the time and I managed to get onto that one.

Robin Daly: Interesting. Did you ever find out what caused this very sudden onset of chronic fatigue?

Hannah Charman: On some level, I think it sounds odd, but it was meant to be. My life changed course dramatically as a result of that and not just mine, but my family as well.

My dad left his job in the police. He’d been a policeman in London for 25 years. He left that job, retrained as a hypnotherapist because he was so impressed with the hypnotherapy that I’d had and he decided to retrain. My mum as well, she left her job as a teacher and they set up a hypnotherapy practice between them.

It was very successful for a number of years. We can still see how my life and my family’s life today tracks back to my experience of being ill when I was 14. The other way of looking at it was I was just burnt out. I was just overdoing it even at the age of 14. It can happen and it can happen frighteningly fast. People don’t realise how quickly they can go from being perfectly or seemingly perfectly healthy to being really quite poorly.

Robin Daly: Wow. A clearly shocking story, with silver linings there though.

Hannah Charman: Absolutely.

Robin Daly: I think everyone’s got to be aware that herbal medicines are the traditional form of healing with a story that goes right back as long as human beings have been trying to make themselves well.

Can you give us some sort of potted history of how we got to where we are now with our knowledge of the properties of herbs?

Hannah Charman: I’ll do my best! As long as there have been people and plants living together, there will be some tradition of those two working in synergy and people using plants for medicine.

We can trace it back thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used herbs and likely way before that. The way we’ve learned about herbs is through using them and then passing that tradition down through stories and through the generations. Also we used to watch animals and watch which herbs they would go and eat when they were ill.

Particularly the nomadic people – when they moved to a new area, they will watch the animals in that area and look at which plants they were eating and why they were eating them. Then they would deduce from that which herbs they could use.

Then we had what we were called the wise women – they were also known as midwives. A midwife would see you through birth and death and everything in between. They had a very strong knowledge of herbs, which was likely passed down through generations, through their family. Unfortunately in the middle ages, there was a kind of Holocaust-scale culling of the wise women because they were mistaken for witches.

All that knowledge pretty much disappeared. Likewise any books, anything they had written down with very few exceptions disappeared with it. I don’t think we’ve ever really recovered from that over here in the West sadly. If you look at other parts of the world where they’ve had an unbroken tradition for thousands of years, it’s a much stronger way of working there than it is here.

Herbalism as it is now is a happy blend of what’s left of that tradition and science. I like to think I’ve got a foot in each camp, but herbalists by their nature are a very diverse bunch. You have some herbalists at the more traditional, folk end of the scale and some who are more at the very medical, scientific end of the scale. There’s room for everyone.

But I love seeing science confirm what we know through our tradition and that happens quite often.

Robin Daly: This is a recent development that science has turned its attention to looking at these things. As you pointed out, they’ve been very interested in looking at them from the point of view of producing drugs, but they have also started to look at them for their own properties more recently.

This is certainly, as you say, confirming some of the reasons these things work. But is it actually uncovering new information we didn’t know?

Hannah Charman: It is actually, so a good example is recently with coronavirus. There were some studies done over in Asia looking at gingko biloba, which is the last herb any of us would have thought of for coronavirus, but they obviously had been hit by it much sooner than we had over here. They found out about what can happen with the blood and how it makes tiny little blood clots, which can make someone very seriously ill. They’ve worked out that Gingko was a really good herb for treating those blood clots. That is the last herb we would ever thought about over here in the west for treating people with coronavirus. But that’s a good example of how it can happen.

More often than not, the science confirms what we already know and explains how herbs work. But every now and again, it does throw up a little gem like this, where it gives us new ways of using herbs. Unfortunately, herbal medicine gets 0.1 per cent of the global research budget, which is tiny, because herbs can’t be patented. There’s no financial gain in most cases to be made from finding out about the medicinal properties of herbs, which is a shame.

But despite that there is more science out there supporting the use of herbs than you might expect. You can have a trawl through something like the PubMed website when you have a moment, you’ll find quite a lot of good research there.

Robin Daly: It’s the story of all natural medicines unfortunately. They didn’t fit into the for-profit model that is the basis of health care.

You already mentioned about unbroken traditions in herbal medicine elsewhere and it is a rather different picture over in the east like Ayurveda in India or in China.

How does herbal medicine here relate to that?

Hannah Charman: What they all have in common is that they’re trying to treat the patient instead of the illness. They’re looking at whole person and not just the physical aspects of what’s going on, but the psychological aspects, the emotional aspects, and often the spiritual side of things as well.

That’s what ties it all together. But that’s probably where the similarity ends because the traditions and the systems that they use for understanding what’s going on are worlds apart from what we have here in the west. In Ayurveda, they have the three dosha system where they will put your constitution into one of the three doshas.

In China they have the five-element system where they’re looking at how the epigenetics of a person is influencing their illness. Over here our tradition is derived from the middle East. It came across Europe via ancient Greece and ended up here in Western Europe.

That was very much based around astrology and looking at energetics. There were, there were four humours that we used to use. The Ayurveda had three doshas and the Chinese have five elements and we had the four humours and that’s how we understood the constitution of the person and which herbs would be suitable for them.

Now we don’t use that as much. Some herbal medicine colleges teach that in quite a lot of detail but I certainly wasn’t taught that. I had to teach myself since I qualified. It’s very difficult to fully understand your craft if you don’t have an energetic tradition of some kind to hang it on.

I’ve had a little look at traditional Chinese medicine, and I can’t even begin to get my head around it. It’s like talking two completely different languages. There are a few herbalists who are bilingual and can do a bit of Chinese and a bit of Western, but it doesn’t make sense to me so I stick fairly and squarely in the Western tradition over here.

Robin Daly: The basis on which the prescribing is happening is very different, obviously. That’s why, when you say different languages, what you really mean is that the criteria for decision making is very different.

Hannah Charman: Yes. The framework that they use is very different in Asia to the one we have over here.

Robin Daly: Given that, is there any crossover in the actual herbs that he used?

Hannah Charman: There is now because the world’s a very small place, so I’ve got lots of herbs in my dispensary here that I would find within a mile or two of my house, but I’ve also got a few from North America, quite a few from Asia, even one or two from Australia. Surprisingly, I don’t have many from Africa.

We were having this discussion the other day and we don’t seem to have many African herbs in our dispensaries and we’re not quite sure why that is. It’s something to look at.

Herbs are like everything else, they come and go in fashion. There are a lot of herbs that we would have used here 25 to 30 years ago when I was training that have gone out of popularity now. So I’m on a mission to revive those little bits.

Robin Daly: Okay, it’s interesting – in a way there’s this wealth of knowledge around the planet and an immense number of potentially useful herbs out there, but it’s a little bit siloed. Probably herbal medicine is pretty big in Africa but you don’t use any. The potential is great if you really bring it together.

Hannah Charman: I don’t know why Africa seems to have been left out. There’s a distinct lack of herbs from there, but we’ll let go on a mission to bring some over and start learning about them.

Robin Daly: A little point I’d like to clarify – you described yourself as a medical herbalist, and I believe this a particular title indicates a particular program and training.

Do you want to just make clear what the difference between a herbalist and a medical herbalist is?

Hannah Charman: A medical herbalist in the true sense of the word has some kind of formal medical training, usually to degree level or equivalent. I trained for four years at Middlesex University. During that time, I learned about a lot of the same things that a trainee doctor would learn, but I also learned my herbal materia medica and therapeutics, and we did 200 hours of clinical training at a dedicated clinic, which was in the grounds of Whittington Hospital in North London.

That’s the true definition of a medical herbalist. A herbalist can train by doing an online course or a one day workshop and still call themselves a herbalist. It’s worth bearing in mind that even ‘medical herbalist’ is not a protected title. You could go and set up a herbal medicine practice, call yourself medical herbalist, and you wouldn’t be breaking any laws at all, which is a shame.

It’s a long and complicated story. Basically we campaigned for about 25 years to be state regulated and have a protected title in the same way that doctors, midwives, physiotherapists, nurses and so on would have. Back in 2011 and the government finally agreed that we could have that as of April 2012. We were very excited. We waited for April 2012 to come, and it came and nothing. There was no word. There was no communication. There was nothing, no sign of it at all.

We chased it and the government came back to us and said that they were not going to go ahead and regulate us because our safety record was so good that they couldn’t justify the cost.

We remain unregulated. What I would say is if you’re thinking of going to work with a medical herbalist, make sure you vet them thoroughly because I have heard one or two horror stories, not from properly trained medical herbalists, but people who thought they were working with someone qualified and they weren’t, and they ended up in serious trouble.

It doesn’t happen often, but you need to be very thorough with your checks, if you’re thinking of working with a medical herbalist.

Robin Daly: This is interesting. So what do people check for, and particularly if there’s somebody with cancer, what are they looking for?

Hannah Charman: What I would suggest is that they check out that person’s training and ask to see their degree certificate. They should ask about any ongoing training they’ve done since they qualified.

Also, I would recommend that they choose someone who is the member of a governing body, because if there’s ever any cause for complaint, that governing body will be able to help you. I belong to the National Institute of Medical Herbalists, which is the largest and oldest of the governing bodies of western medical herbalists.

They have very strict entry criteria. They have strict CPD criteria. We have a code of ethics that we have to abide by. We have to have insurance and if there’s ever any complaint, the council deal with it. So you’ve got some extra security there if you find someone who’s member of a governing body.

But also don’t take their word for it. Go onto that governing body’s website and do a search on their name to make sure that they are still a valid member, because you just don’t know with people. They might say they’re a member and they’re not, or they’ve let their membership lapse, and then you don’t have that extra protection.

Robin Daly: So even if there isn’t government recognition, there is self-regulation, which is effective.

Hannah Charman: Yes!

Robin Daly: That’s great. So we now need to talk about cancer. This is a show about cancer and you are somebody who likes to help people with cancer.

As with many approaches that can be integrated into a program of treatment, I’m guessing that herbal medicine has a role to play in supporting wellbeing and recovery generally, but also in managing the challenges of the many side effects of conventional treatments. Would you start out by telling us what herbal medicine has to offer in the realm of overall health and wellbeing and supporting recovery?

Hannah Charman: I think first of all, we need to distinguish the difference between going to Holland & Barrett, picking something off the shelf that you read somewhere on a website might help you with your cancer and working with a medical herbalist. With the herbalist, it’s not just about the herbs that you’re taking. It’s the whole package. It’s the moral support you’re getting. It’s the guidance on your diet and the lifestyle. It’s the advocacy, because we do a lot of that as well now. If you need someone to fight your corner for any reason, then we take on that role too.

Certainly my role has changed, not just in terms of supporting people with cancer, but in general since I qualified, because the charities are under so much pressure that they can’t always provide the services that they’d like to. The NHS is in a similar position – doctors have much less time now. They can’t offer the care to the level that they want to either. Unfortunately the people who suffer the patients. My role has now got much bigger because I’m starting to fill in those gaps.

In terms of what we can do specifically. We don’t influence a patient’s decision either way. By the time they come to a medical herbalist, they usually are on some kind of treatment path with regards to the cancer. Our role is to support them, whatever decision they make with regards to that.

Usually people will be on something like chemotherapy or having surgery. In which case we can use the herbs to, support them through that process and make it more bearable for them. Because as you know, it can take quite a big toll on people, not just physically, but emotionally it’s very difficult as well.

Particularly when people don’t feel able to speak openly in front of their family. If their family are not coping with the situation very well, then they have that way of offloading to a medical herbalist without any fear of being judged or anything like that.

We work on all levels. I would say that herbal medicine ideally would need to be used in a wider context. There’s no point, for example, taking herbs if your diet is terrible and you’re up all night because you’re not going to sleep. It needs to be part of a bigger thing.

But yes, there’s lots of different ways. All the medicine is tailored to the person. What we’re doing is looking at you as a whole person, and then working with you in terms of what your priorities are. Let’s just say, for example, your stress levels are absolutely through the roof. Well, that’s not a good thing on any level, is it? Because you’re not going to be sleeping properly. You’re probably not going to be eating properly. You’re pumping out tons of stress hormones. You might be eating loads of sugar, which is in turn going to feed your cancer and if we can just start to bring those stress levels down, that is already making you a more difficult place for cancer to live. It’s really a question of tailoring the medicine to the person.

Robin Daly: In terms of the ways in which you can support wellbeing, that’s one you’ve described there – helping people with stress levels. Obviously as you said, you want to see this as part of a broader package, not just herbal medicines on their own and amongst a horrendous lifestyle, but let’s say that the person is prepared to look more broadly. What would be the specific areas in which herbs are particularly useful with other kinds of problems such as stress?

Hannah Charman: I don’t know many cancer patients who aren’t totally stressed out by this situation. And so we can use herbs called adaptogens, which help the body out of its stress response, regardless of what’s going on.

Stress will impact different people in different ways. Some people, for example, might get migraines with stress. Some people might get digestive problems. Some people find their skin breaks out. We look at how the stress is affecting that person and what we can do to buffer that.

Adaptogens have a general effect on the whole body. You can give someone an adaptogen and they’ll usually come back and say “I feel better but I can’t quite put my finger on how.” That was because it’s working on the whole body at the same time. Adaptogens like goji berry, for example, will take you out of your stress response, reduce stress hormones down, but also work on your liver at the same time.

Goji berry is very useful for increasing white blood cell count when someone’s going through rounds of chemotherapy, because often that will reduce the white blood cell count. If it reduces to a point where it becomes dangerous for them to continue on their chemotherapy, then they have to stop it. There’s one example of where we can use a herb to keep the white blood cell count where it should be in order for them to continue their treatment through to the final cycle.

Robin Daly: But with other benefits as well so it has a broad effect?

Hannah Charman: Absolutely. And then with adaptogens, we often use them alongside a different class of herb, which we call nervines.

Nervines have a more direct effect upon the nervous system. You might’ve heard about, for example, St. John’s wort. It’s probably not my first choice, in cancer because of the concerns over interfering with other drugs, but that that’s one example of one that you might’ve heard of.

Other nervines we have would include things like valerian, rose, camomile. A lot of nervines are ones you can get very easily in the shops or in your local cafe. They work hand in hand with the nervines.

Then we can give you other herbs, which make you a more difficult place for cancer to live is probably the easiest way of putting it.

Robin Daly: What would you mean by that?

Hannah Charman: Herbs that can influence the immune system in a way that makes it easier for the immune system to recognise and kick out any cancer cells. There is a lot of science around this. If you want to go and do a search on something like PubMed, you’ll find that there’s a lot of good research around this.

The allium family: onions and garlic and chives and leeks, that’s one example where they’ve been shown to make it harder for cancer to reproduce in various different ways. You wouldn’t think that just eating more onions in your diet or garlic is going to make a big difference, but there’s the science there to support that.

Another one is medicinal mushrooms. They’ve been used in Asia for well over 2000 years and we’re only just now starting to cotton onto them in western herbal medicine. In the last five years or so, they’ve become much more popular amongst western medical herbalists. They contain a specific kind of polysaccharide called beta glucans, and you also get beta glucans in oats as well. They are what we call immunomodulators – they change the way the immune system works in a way that makes it easier for them to recognise cancer cells and destroy them. There’s lots of different options with herbal medicine.

Robin Daly: There are, yes. It’s interesting that you don’t necessarily think of mushroom products as being within the remit of a herbalist, but they are now of course, and I think mushrooms are extraordinary things.

Things come and go in fashion, like you said. As far as I’m concerned the case for mushrooms was there when I started Yes to Life 15 years ago and it’s still there more strongly than ever. There’s so many benefits to people with cancer that can come from medicinal mushrooms. They should not be ignored.

Hannah Charman: No, it shouldn’t. I’ve had a patient recently who was quite elderly and he had bladder cancer. He had other health issues which meant his surgery had to be delayed. He was having the herbs for those other health issues and we were giving him medicinal mushrooms. The oncologists that he was working with were quite surprised to find that all the time he was having it, the cancer didn’t shrink, but it didn’t grow either. They were expecting it to have grown significantly by the time he got into surgery. He was obviously very pleased with that.

Obviously at the moment people are unable to get certain kinds of cancer treatment. I’ve got another gentleman who had the news that he may have prostate cancer right before lockdown so that put a stop to any further investigations in hospital. He’s just been left on his own at home with no family and no friends to support him, wondering whether or not he’s got prostate cancer, which is an awful situation to be in. But we’ve got him on the mushrooms and we’ve got him on other herbs as well because there’s always something you can do with herbal medicine. That’s what I love about it most. You’re never helpless and hopeless regardless of what your situation is. There’s always something you can do. He feels a lot better as well for knowing that he’s doing something proactive to help himself.

Robin Daly: Absolutely. I must say, when it comes to mushrooms, and this is obviously true of other things as well, the way you described the accusations of negligence if you didn’t use these things alongside conventional treatment, I feel exactly that way about it. I think in this country, we are negligent to overlook these cheap, effective natural products.

Hannah Charman: Yeah, I would agree. I think there are a handful of enlightened oncologists out there who are willing to work alongside medical herbalists. There are medical herbalists who treat cancer as their primary thing, usually because they’ve been through a cancer journey themselves. They specialise in treating one thing, or they have a special interest in another and they tend to strike up a very strong relationship with a local oncologist and find it much easier to work with them than non-specialist herbalists.

There are a few out there who are cottoning on to this now. I think doctors in general are becoming more open to herbal medicine. I’ve certainly noticed a big change in the last few years and I get a lot of patients too, so there is hope.

There’s a lot of doctors retraining to be medical herbalists. Our president at the moment is a former GP. Things are changing, thankfully.

Robin Daly: I was glad to hear reports of that. Can we have a look at the ways in which herbs can help manage the side effects of common conventional treatments like chemotherapy radio therapy, hormone therapy? These are treatments that lot of people are having that create a lot of problems.

Hannah Charman: Obviously the first priority for us as medical herbalists is not to do any harm and not to give anything that’s likely to interfere with that treatment. As far as chemotherapy goes, it’s so powerful that there’s very little, in fact, I can’t really think of any herbs that are going to come anywhere close to touching the chemotherapy.

We still have to bear in mind that if God forbid the chemotherapy treatment were to fail and there was going to be someone to blame for that, we wouldn’t want to be in the firing line. It’s a horrible way to have to think but unfortunately this is the world we live in these days.

We always have that in the back of our minds as well. It’s a question of supporting the person through that treatment. As an example, I’ve got a friend at the moment whose three-year-old daughter is in hospital having treatment for leukaemia. The main problem that she was most distressed by was that the chemo was getting a really sore bottom. I saw the photo and it was raw – I’ve never seen anything like it. So I gave some cream for that and within days she was much more comfortable and it was healing up really nicely. It’s a really small thing, but it makes a really big difference, not just to that little girl, but to her family as well because they didn’t have the distress of having to see her in all of that pain and feeling not able to do anything about it.

We also look at other things we can do as well, besides the herbal treatment, with fasting. I don’t know whether you know about the role of fasting with chemotherapy – in North America, they realised quite a while back that outcomes of chemotherapy treatment were often much better if the patient fasted either side of their dose. There’s various different ways in which that works, but this is not mainstream advice in the NHS. You won’t ever find a cancer patient being told by their nurse or their oncologist to fast either side of the treatment, but people seem to tolerate chemo much better very often and it works much more effectively when they fast.

That is not a particularly easy process. It’s not pleasant and it’s not a very easy thing to do. That person will often need quite a bit of moral support and guidance on exactly how to do it. There are options there and like I said before, we can do things like protect the liver and kidneys and other internal organs against damage from chemotherapy. It’s really question of looking at the individual drug, looking at the effect it’s going to have on the body and the likely side effects and then we tailor the medicine accordingly.

There are actually some herbs that will potentiate chemotherapy and make it work better as well. In terms of radiation therapy it depends on how it’s affecting the person, but for radiation we can use things topically. Things like aloe vera gel are very useful on the skin for radiation burn. There are also herbs that we can give which are very potent in antioxidants that will also help that person to cope with their radiotherapy. Hormone therapy is a bit of a minefield, so there are certain herbs that we wouldn’t be able to use with that.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding around herbs. This is another problem that I’ve encountered recently: I had an elderly gentleman who had prostate cancer that was being treated with hormones and at the same time he had diverticulitis. The diverticulitis was so bad that it was actually much more dangerous for him than the cancer was at the point he came to see me. One of the best herbs for diverticulitis is Mexican wild yam, dioscorea. I did a lot of work on this and I checked and checked and checked again to make sure that it was safe to give him. I asked everyone I could think of, we all agreed that it was safe. The problem was that Mexican wild yam is used to make HRT. It contains a thing called diosgenin which is used to make progesterone creams.

It has to be done in a lab because the human body can’t do it itself. There’s no way that human body can make progesterone from this herb. It has to be done in a lab. Nonetheless, his wife read off the bottle what the contents of the bottle were, got onto Google, realised that Mexican wild yam is used to make HRT, spoke to the oncology nurse and the oncology nurse told him to stop taking his herbs straight away.

We come up against these kinds of problems quite often. You have to do a bit of negotiating and a bit of educating sometimes.

Robin Daly: And how about helping with kind of some of the very general things that a lot of people suffer from, like fatigue with cancer treatments.

Hannah Charman: Yes, we can help with that. We look into why that person has fatigue. Often it is the side effect of the treatment itself, but also are they stressing out to the point where they’re not sleeping at night. If we can just nail the sleep aspect of it, that alone goes quite a long way towards helping. It’s a question of looking deeply at what exactly is going on and what we can do about it. We have lots of options.

Robin Daly: How about things like neuropathy? A lot of people suffer from nerve damage in their fingers and toes from chemotherapy.

Hannah Charman: We can give herbs internally for that, but we can also use topical herbs. Things like oils and creams that you rub on that will start to work on the neuropathy.

What we can do is try and get the medicine as close to where it’s needed as possible. If someone has got, for example, cervical cancer, we could use pessaries. We could use suppositories for prostate cancer. We can use inhalations for lung cancer. Generally, there’s a way of getting the medicine at very close to where it needs to be.

Robin Daly: Something that’s a bit physical in the way that people suffering from lymphedema, it’s because they’ve had some lymph nodes removed. They’ve gone, obviously you can’t change that, but can you do anything to help the situation?

Hannah Charman: Lymphatic drainage massage would usually be part of their treatment anyway from the hospital, but we can use herbs. I would be thinking of something cleavers, which is a common herb that we see in the spring all over the UK. That is a brilliant lymphatic herb and I’ve never known anything like it for reducing the water retention that you get when your lymphatics are under pressure.

Robin Daly: It does sound like there’s something on hand for a lot of the things that people suffer from. You mentioned at the beginning about being passionate about the part of the mind and the world of feelings in recovering your health and wellbeing. I’d agree with you there, we are at Yes to Life as well, but would you explain why you think this is the case and expand a bit more on the ways in which you would seek to address this?

Hannah Charman: I was first introduced to this idea back when I was 16 and I did that Reiki course. My Reiki master was Australian and she’d flown all over the world, training herself as a Reiki master. It took her seven years to train. Her knowledge was phenomenal. She always maintained that there’s much more to illness than the physical. There’s always the psycho-emotional aspect to it as well. She said that every illness and injury is triggered by the subconscious mind, which kept an open mind on to begin with.

Then I thought about my own situation. I realised that I pushed myself far too hard and when I looked into why it was because I was looking for approval from parents that they were never able to give because they had their own issues. Once you realise that and let it go, I lost the need for the chronic fatigue syndrome. I lost the need to push myself that hard to the point where my body had to put its own brakes on. I’ve never had it back since. I’ve still remained very active and very ambitious and very hard working, but I’ve lost that need to put a stop on myself when I push things too far.

What we find very often with the types of person who get cancer is that they tend to be what she would call a very nice person. By that I mean they tend to put other people’s needs above their own. If they’re annoyed or upset, they tend not to vocalise that they will internalise it. They tend to have a problem with boundaries so they get put upon unwittingly by people around them. They don’t like to say no.

My Reiki master always used to say that there was often some suppressed anger there. If you’re not emotionally literate, you’re not vocalising your anger or dealing with it physically, it will literally eat away at you in the form of cancer. And the more I’ve worked with people over the years – I’ve been a medical herbalist now for 21 years – I’m absolutely convinced that this is the case.

I had a cancer patient a few years back who’s the same age as me and very sadly she’d had multiple bereavements a few years before, so she’d lost four close members of her family. I listened to her story: she’d never smoked, she was not a drinker, she ate very well. She did look after herself on the physical level, but in metaphysical terms as I was taught it, the lungs are where we hold onto grief. So I thought there’s an obvious connection there between the multiple bereavements and the grief and the cancer. But I didn’t mention this to her and she sat in the appointment with me and she said, “I feel like I’ve been grieving my whole life.”

We talked about it some more and she was so bereft by what had happened that she actually said to me that she didn’t want to be alive anymore. She wanted to go and join these people who had gone before her, which sounds really morbid but you’ve got to look at this in the wider context. I think most people in her situation would feel the same and that is actually what happened in the end. We did our best and we looked at other ways of looking at it, but the decision was made that it was time for her to go.

I had similar myself last year; I had an abnormal smear test result, but it was as abnormal as abnormal could be without it actually being cancer. It was enough to give me a bit of a wake up call and it was a total shock because that’s never happened before. I eat pretty well. I’m pretty happy. I have no major things going on in my life. But I went into hospital to have this procedure done and it was shocking. It was very widespread damage. You could see from the way the doctors and the nurses were looking at each other that it wasn’t good.

I came home and I had a think about what had driven me to that point where I’d almost given myself cancer. The cervix is to do with childbearing, intimate relationships and close family. So I thought that’s the first place to start looking and realised that my son was born nearly six years ago and he was born with a genetic condition called PKU, which as genetic conditions go it’s probably about the best one to have. But from my point of view, it means that we have to control his diet very, very strictly. It’s all managed by diet which most of has fallen to me to do because I’m his mum. It takes about an extra 20 hours a week to deal with.

It’s 20 hours a week that I couldn’t spend working or spending with the family or doing any of the other stuff that I’d like to be doing. I don’t begrudge him this at all, it’s just how things are. But what we haven’t done is dealt with it properly.

Other PKU families we knew with children of a similar age, as soon as they realised that the situation was not going to be going away they did things like they moved house or they extended their kitchen. They did whatever they needed to do to make life easier for themselves. For various reasons, we didn’t do that.

This had gone on for five years and we didn’t have a dishwasher – which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is a big deal when you’re doing all this extra catering and then washing up on top. We just didn’t see each other. I didn’t see my partner. We didn’t really have any relationship anymore because one or other of us was constantly cooking or washing up.

My son was getting bigger and he was eating more so we needed to order more food. We couldn’t store it. It was piling up on the kitchen floor and for various reasons I began to hate and resent where I was living. I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel and I think it was just that frustration that led me to that situation.

Within six months we moved house. We’re now in a house twice the size of the old one in exactly the kind of place that we’ve always wanted to live and we’re really happy. I think sometimes you have to do something drastic, particularly if you find yourself in that sort of situation and you’ve got to do a lot of soul searching to try and figure out what the message is. For me that was it. You’ve always got to look it on that level, because I think if you don’t get the message, you’re risking it happening again, and you don’t want to go there.

Robin Daly: What an interesting story! Thank you.

We’re about out of time. I wanted to finish up today in the spirit that we began: many in the arena of integrative medicine for cancer, including us at Yes to Life, advise building a team to support you through cancer. I’m going to give you another 30 second opportunity in the lift, but this time you’re going to be with someone who’s recently been diagnosed with cancer, and I’d like to know what you’d have to say to them to convince them to get a herbalist as a key player in their team.

Hannah Charman: I think the main thing is that if you work with a herbalist, you feel much more in control of your situation. It’s much more empowering – as well as giving you the herbs that will help you to deal with whatever your chosen treatment is, it can help you to make your body a harder place for cancer to live.

You’ve got the control over whether you need help with your sleep or your stress, or any of your other individual symptoms. You’ve got that moral support as well, where you’ve got someone there who is always looking out for you. Who you can talk to at anytime and you’re not going to be judged. You’re not going to have any trouble. You can offload onto a medical herbalist in a way that you can’t offload onto your family, or even sometimes your doctor.

There is no way I would consider going along the cancer journey without a herbalist in my corner. Most of the herbalists I know, if they’ve had cancer themselves, have gone down the mainstream route and had the chemo or the surgery or whatever they had to do, but I’ve never come across a single herbalist who hasn’t used herbs because it’s a total no brainer.

You’ve got to integrate other stuff in.

Robin Daly: Certainly from everything you’ve said today, they do sound like a huge resource. There seems to be something for everything in the bag. It’s been fantastic to talk to you. Thanks so much, Hannah. It’s been really interesting and I hope our listeners enjoyed that as well.

Hannah Charman: Thank you very much for having me!

Robin Daly: Hannah’s elevator pitch certainly makes a convincing case for considering a medical herbalist as a contender for your team to help you through cancer. I want to encourage you to take a look at the new searchable radio show page on the Yes to Life website. If you go to yestolife.org.uk and scroll down the homepage, there you can click the link to the Yes to Life show page, which you’ll find has the current show and most of the past five years worth of shows listed. It also allows you to search by subject, for example, ‘cannabis’; by guest, for example, ‘Professor Robert Thomas’; or simply by using a keyword, such as ‘prostate’ to quickly find the topics or people that you are interested in.

This feature makes the enormous wealth of information in the back catalogue hugely more accessible. Thanks for joining me on the show today. Please make a note to listen to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio again, next week. Goodbye.

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Maria Mellor