WELCOME
Welcome to Gaea’s Heart.
My name is Welwyn Wilton Katz, and I am the main herbalist at Gaea’s Heart based in London, Ontario. People call me Welwyn. You say it “Wellen”.
You can find more about me through an internet search.
On this page, though, I thought you might want to know a bit about herbs and reasons why people use them.
You have likely used herbs and spices in the kitchen.
Cooks enjoy working with these plants because they add such wonderful flavours, though they also add a great deal of nutrition.
Sometimes, though, people have accidents or get sick, and those results have nothing to do with their nutrition or lifestyle. Herbalists have studied hard to learn how herbs can be used to help with these situations.
Why might someone like you
visit an herbalist?
1. You might feel vaguely unwell, and you’ve felt that way quite a whilefor, but you don’t know whether you need a doctor.
An herbalist can advise you on this and will always refer you to a doctor if your symptoms indicate it. But there are many problems that can be relieved with herbs until you can get to a doctor or find that you do not need to.
2. You might go to an herbalist because you have been living with a serious ailment for quite a long while, and the symptoms are really getting you down. Your doctors have said that you are taking the best medications available at the safest high dose. You don’t want to stop taking them or offend anyone. Until there’s a cure, though, you’re feeling a bit desperate.
Herbs really can help with ailments like these, which include:
- Migraine headaches
- Degenerative Diseases such as Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or dozens of others with genetic links
- Complex diseases like Cancer or Fibromyalgia whose causes are too many to count
- Autoimmune Diseases such as Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriasis, and many more, where the body attacks its own tissues
- Diseases like Gout or CPPD where the body deposits debilitating crystals into joints, causing pain and inflexibility
- Intermittent diseases such as Shingles or Malaria, where the original cause can lie dormant for long years, only to attack again ferociously just when you’ve started to think you might actually be cured
- Metabolic diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes where the pancreas produces lots of insulin, but the cells will not allow the insulin to do its job
- Endless fatigue that they say is from some kind of infection that’s gone now
- Diseases that have become more intense and are now affecting new systems of your body even though you’ve done all the right things. An example is Lyme Disease, which one of my clients described like this:
It’s never finished with you.
There are no pharmaceutical silver bullets for these kinds of diseases. No cures in sight, and no drug that reduces the symptoms enough for most people. This is not just the view of herbalists. If you ask most doctors privately, they will agree. Why is this the case, when modern pharmaceuticals work wonders in emergency situations and acute medical illnesses?
The short answer is that pharmaceuticals are single compounds that are not part of nature. Humans have made them; life hasn’t. When a disease has a clear cause and fairly simple effects a single invented molecule administered to the body in the zillions can stop the cause or mitigate the effects. But when a disease is so complex that it has more than one cause and works by using the actual mechanisms of the body, no single non-biological compound can make much difference to its progress.
Herbs are not artificial. They are not one compound. In fact, just one leaf of an herb contains hundreds or thousands of compounds that are all capable of participating in living reactions. These compounds are so similar to those found in the human body that they can replace ones that cause the next steps of a complex disease. If they are also different enough to stop that next step, then that reduces the number of cells where the disease is at full throttle. This will reduce symptoms. And this is what is needed, in diseases that are never finished with you. We would love to cure them, but perhaps that is asking too much, when such diseases have commandeered the body’s own vital mechanisms for their own.
Generally, herbs are much safer than pharmaceuticals. Herbalists do careful research to see if there will be any serious interactions with the drugs you have to keep on taking. If there are interactions, the herbalist will look for different herbs. There are a few toxic herbs, but herbalists know about them and don’t need to use them, because there are many alternatives. There are almost no side-effects with herbs unlike pharmaceuticals. This is because they are not as foreign to life as the drugs. And because herbs contain so many different kinds of compounds, more than one problem will be helped by any one herb. The herbalist might give you Rosemary to help with the memory loss of dementia, but at the same time your hair will start to grow more thickly, your bad breath will go away, and if you are exposed to a respiratory virus, you will have more tools to fight it.
You can read more about the way herbs act, how they can make prescription medication work better, and the other ways herbalists use them, HERE.
3. You might have symptoms that you can’t describe easily.
Laughter has been called the best medicine, but perhaps this issue isn’t exactly a laughing matter for you. Maybe you worry that you won’t be able to express your symptoms clearly in a fifteen- or twenty-minute doctor’s appointment.
An herbalist will spend a lot of time (often several hours) listening to you and asking you questions, so that eventually your symptoms will become clear enough for you to express them to a doctor, if that’s what is needed.
4. You might be approaching an herbalist because you don’t have your own physician and you need help.
An herbalist will always encourage you to do everything possible to get your own doctor, but after years of training and after a long interview with you, it would be wrong to deny you the plant therapy that the herbalist thinks will help you.
5. You might want to learn about alternative medicine, which comprises many kinds of wellness treatments, and not just herbs.
But herbs are the original of all the alternative medicines, if we can call them that. Herbs were the only thing that helped sick people for thousands of years. After all…
6. You might just be curious about herbalism,the way a cat is about noises in the baseboard..
7. You might have come to see an herbalist at least partly because you are worried about someone else’s health and need to know whether you are right to be concerned.
This problem often arises in the original interview between the client and the herbalist. It is important enough to you that it might be contributing to your ownillness. Additionally, as a caring and experienced health professional, there may be ways in which the herbalist can advise you about how you might be able to help the other person.. Of course, she cannot make tinctures or teas for someone else without meeting them, except in very rare situations.
8. You might have begun experiencing a bunch of little health problems, a few new skin breakouts, you're not sleeping very well, sometimes you feel bloated,, that kind of thing. You don't think they rate a doctor's appointment, But you're wondering if they're all connected. Are you sicker than you think?
Most herbalists believe that whether the symptoms people have been experiencing are minor or not, I If you feel unwell, and it's been going on for a while, you likely are unwell. This doesn’t mean you have some kind of terrible disease, however. The human body is very complex and is affected chemically by hormones and emotions and overwork and too many poor lifestyle choices, to say nothing of external factors like bacteria and viruses and environmental issues. With such complex biochemistry, it doesn’t take a big problem tremendously awful disease to cause the root cause your symptoms, especially since each new symptom can cause others. The herbalist will listen carefully to your situation, and using her knowledge and experience, she will decide what part of your body is likely the area of most concern, and what the pattern of your symptoms means for the best choices of herbs to help you. Then she will provide the herbs to you in a form easy for you to take.
9. You are on a doctor’s medication, and it seems to help but you have read about its side effects and are worried, and so you’ve come to talk it over with an herbalist.
Joking aside, side effects of medication can be very serious, and an herbalist will use every tool at her disposal to help you determine if your prescription might be causing those kinds of problems for you.
10.You are wondering if all the prescription drugs you are taking are safe to take together.
This is another common question brought to herbalists. I had a sweet, elderly client once who came to me because she couldn’t sleep and was losing weight like crazy. She was taking 9 different prescription meds, one of which was for a hypothyroid condition she’d had for twenty years. I asked for a list of all her medications and their doses. It turned out that one of her later medications was interacting with her thyroid medication and pushing her over the edge into a hyperthyroid condition. That explained the symptoms she brought to me, and when we discussed it with the doctor, he was very cooperative about changing medications. She is perfectly well now.
11. You aren’t sick, but something isn't right with you these days, you get angry for no reason. Maybe you used to be able to sit through a whole movie and enjoy it but now you have to leave it to pee.Sometimes twice. You don't like to eat anymore. You are losing hair and you're not even 30! Or, maybe you are so bored at work that you aare thinking of quiting, though if you're forced to admit it, there are a lot of interesting challenges. Or, you used to be a real social animal, but now you don't even want to see your friends. Or, sometimes you buy a dozen doughnuts and eat them all in secret. Or, you used to be able to sleep till noon, but now you always seem to wake up at 3:00 AM, and you can't get back to sleep. Or, your legs hurt, Or, you seem to catch every kind of germ that's going around. Or, you started fantasizing about sex - or hating sex - or thinking about sex all the time. Or, nothing's happened to make things different, but for sure, you're not the same, and it's not right.
Instincts are a survival mechanism . It's common to change over time, but if something is fairly new in your life and makes you uneasy, it's wise to check it out. Every one of the changes I mentioned could have an origin inside your body. What if that's what's bothering you?
And so we leave the reasons to see an herbalist in the same place we came in:
because something is bothering you and you need help.