Herbal Support Alongside Cancer Treatment

This is a supportive care service. Your oncologist, haematologist, surgeon, and specialist nurses lead your cancer treatment, and nothing I do replaces, delays, or competes with any part of it. Under the Cancer Act 1939 it would in any case be unlawful for me to advertise any offer to treat cancer, and it would be clinically indefensible besides.

What I do is narrower and, I would argue, genuinely useful: help you tolerate treatment better, address the symptoms that erode quality of life during and after it, screen everything you are taking for interactions with your cancer therapy, and give you a straight answer about the supplements you have been sent by well-meaning family.

If you are looking for someone to tell you that a herb will shrink a tumour or that you can decline chemotherapy in favour of botanical medicine, I am the wrong practitioner. I will say so at the first appointment, and I will encourage you back towards your oncology team.

Conventional cancer treatment is effective and demanding. The demands are where supportive care earns its place, and they are often the things patients tell me nobody had time to discuss:

Most patients arrive with a bag. Turmeric someone recommended, high-dose antioxidants bought online, green tea extract, mushroom powders, a multivitamin, CBD oil, and often something a relative brought back from abroad with no English label. Nobody has reviewed any of it against their chemotherapy protocol.

Some of these are harmless. Some are not. St John's wort induces cytochrome P450 enzymes and can significantly reduce plasma levels of several chemotherapy agents and targeted therapies — potentially undermining treatment. High-dose antioxidants are contentious during radiotherapy and certain chemotherapies because of their theoretical interference with treatment mechanisms. Grapefruit affects drug metabolism. Anything with oestrogenic activity is inappropriate in hormone-receptor-positive disease. Herbs affecting platelet function or bleeding time matter around surgery and in thrombocytopenia.

So a substantial part of my work in this area is subtractive: telling people what to stop, what to pause until treatment finishes, and what is fine to continue. That work costs nothing in risk and can protect the effectiveness of the treatment you are relying on.

Where I do prescribe during active treatment, prescriptions are deliberately conservative, single-purpose, and disclosed. I will provide a written summary for your oncology team and I ask that you share it. If your oncologist objects to any part of it, their view takes precedence.

The plants below have traditional and, in some cases, clinical use in the supportive contexts described above — symptom support and recovery, not cancer treatment. Their suitability depends entirely on your diagnosis, your treatment protocol, your blood counts, and your other medication. None of them should be self-prescribed during cancer treatment.

Timing matters as much as selection: several are appropriate after treatment completes but not during it.

An initial appointment is 60–75 minutes. I will ask for your diagnosis, staging where known, your treatment protocol and where you are in it, recent blood results, all prescribed medication, and everything else you are taking. I will ask what your oncology team have said, and what matters most to you right now — because that is what we prioritise.

You leave with a written plan, a clear list of what to stop or pause, and a summary you can hand to your oncology team or specialist nurse. Follow-ups are usually shorter and more frequent than in other areas of my practice, because treatment cycles change the picture quickly.

I will decline to prescribe, or defer, in several situations: where you have not yet discussed a diagnosis with your oncology team; where a herb could plausibly interfere with active treatment; where blood counts make any additional variable unwise; where you are close to surgery; and where a patient's stated aim is to avoid or delay conventional treatment. Declining in those circumstances is part of the job, not a failure of it.

Appointments are available in person at Greyabbey, Co. Down, or by video and phone, which many patients prefer during treatment when travel is tiring.

This is the area of practice where poor advice does the most harm, and where vulnerable people are most exploited. It is worth knowing who you are consulting.

I am a Member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists (MNIMH), which requires accredited clinical training to degree level, professional indemnity insurance, continuing professional development, and adherence to a code of ethics. I hold a B.Th. (Hon), a Diploma in Herbal Medicine, and an Advanced Diploma in Botanical Medicine Practice, and I teach botanical medicine at degree level with the Heartwood Foundation. My specialist clinical interests include oncology support, men's health, and psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology.

I write to consultants and specialist nurses with patient consent, and I would rather a patient's oncology team knew exactly what I had prescribed than not.