Living Medicine aims to reskill us all in using food and herbs for our everyday healthcare, sharing knowledge across cultures.

We run workshops and courses in self care to inspire people to reclaim responsibility for their health. Our BSc medical herbalists show how we can turn healing plants and foods into safe remedies for our most common health problems. How we eat and follow our daily rhythms of activity and sleep, is key to building resilience. Our courses are tailored to the public, community groups and GP social prescribing. See video with Living Medicine's founder, Alex Laird.

Living Medicine's longterm vision, unique in Britain, is to reseed this self care knowledge across the nation and then create together:

  • a beautiful world herb/food medicine centre of excellence
  • a model for community medicinal gardens nationwide (diagram showing LM scope)

Living Medicine will pioneer a new kind of national visitor centre, its great World Garden grown with the public's help. Through a food market, cafe and more, the Centre will revive our hands-on seasonal use of healing plants. It will update and celebrate the world's plant medicine heritage, still used by the UK's diverse communities, with the teach-one, teach-all approach at its heart.

The Living Medicine Community Garden model will help root medical herbalists into their local communities as a new safe health resource to share. We will link with healing gardens around the world to share our experience and feed this into mainstream healthcare.

Our partner is SustainCare, a community interest company, with its Plant Medicine database - for self care advice, see https://ourhealth.directory. We are a network member of The College of Medicine.

Living Medicine is a registered charity (no 1135177), initially funded by an UnLtd Millennium Award and The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. We are currently focusing on community health education and creating local medicinal gardens and plots with community and NHS partners before seeking a suitable site for the prestigious national Living Medicine Centre.

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