Women in wellness
Owner and founder of Natural Herb Remedies, Carrie Elliott, 48, shares her passion for using herbs for modern lifestyles.
ITRAINED AS A PODIATRIST and worked in the NHS treating patients who had compromised neurological or vascular systems, mainly due to diabetes mellitus, or orthopaedic leg and foot problems. Most of my work was care-based, helping to salvage feet and lower limbs, and I worked in a multidisciplinary team of vascular consultants, endocrinologists and orthopaedic surgeons.
I was always conscious that my patients were taking many different medications and, worryingly, the vast majority were oblivious to what pills they were taking daily, and why. It was this concern that led me to do my own research, as I believed big pharmaceutical companies regularly mimic natural ingredients with cheap, mass-produced, synthetic versions. When referring to pills to treat ailments, we often state that natural is “the alternative” and synthetic is called “traditional”, when actually it is the other way around! Treatments using herbs, flowers and natural ingredients go back thousands of years, long before pharmaceutical factories were mimicking those nutrients. Nature has the ability to be our front-line medicine cabinet. s
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, it became rapidly apparent that even high-risk patients in my clinics were encouraged to engage in more wellbeing practises at home, or what the NHS calls “patient concordance”. With GP surgeries undergoing availability issues, I believe there are now more people than ever who are taking responsibility for their own health outcomes, which is great.
Natural Herb Remedies (naturalherbremedies.com) grew organically from a kitchen table concept in spring 2021. I then met nutritionist Shona Wilkinson, who creates supplement formulations with wellness brands, and then went on to meet my co-founder, Susan Curtis, who served as a director and board member of an international wellness brand. As with many things in life, these meetings were all happy accidents and not engineered – agreat example of how the universe can throw together the right people at the right time.
