Doctors and their medicines are vital when your health is threatened, and you usually need to put yourselves in their hands when you cannot manage your health yourself.
However family doctors also agree that many common conditions are not treated well by prescriptions. If serious illnesses has been ruled out and you are still tired, have backache, headaches or other aches and pains, have frequent coughs and colds, are not eating well or have digestive upsets, cannot sleep well, have stress-related anxieties, menstrual or menopausal symptoms, among other common symptoms, there are many things you can do for yourself.
There are also other measures you can take alongside your prescriptions to help manage long term illnesses like diabetes, arthritis, heart and circulatory disease at home. There is a lot of health care that anyone can do.
he self care approaches most likely to be adopted are those in which the user is able to do or prepare the treatments at home, and buys products and services that make sense.
The question is: where do you turn for good advice you can trust?
Natural Choices provides FREE independent and expert guidance -
- to self care approaches that can really help
- to remedies that you can rely on
Natural Choices is a hard-nosed review and simple TOOLKIT for everyday use.
Each condition is published as leaflets suitable for seminar handouts and personalised to practitioner and other local uses. More extensive versions willl also be posted online as well. In each leaflet there are 4 elements:
- Know your symptom: what the condition is, how to understand what it is telling you, and where to go for expert medical advice
- Things you can do at home to help this condition: this section summarises the findings in the College of Medicine Self Care Library (see below)
- Natural things you can buy to help with this condition: as well as the Self Care Library summary there is a list of specific herbal medicines available; these formally licensed and supplied as medicines for this condition, with unique quality guarantees and full information leaflets.
- Where to go for advice to improve your condition: everyone is different and sometimes it is helpful to have someone work out your own solutions rather than rely on stock answers. This section gives specific advice about when to see your doctor and then focuses on the approaches complementary practitioners may bring to this condition. There follows a local contact point for free drop-in sessions to find out more.
Natural Choices links to the following sources of evidence
- Self Care Information Library - from the COLLEGE of MEDICINE
User-friendly reviews of what has been shown to work in self care, by leading doctors and other experts in this area and with clear rating scales. For each condition there is an assessment of simple things you can do for yourself, like diet and exercises, things you can buy, or therapies or classes you can attend.
Plants provide the most accessible home medicines, many with enough confirmed activity to be useful while also being relatively safe. This is a comprehensive and convenient user guide to the best available evidence on the potential benefits and risks of herbal medicines created with the world's leading expertise over 20 years.
- Other reliable links
To complement all the information above there will be links to other trustworthy sources of medical information, such as NHSChoices so that each personal search can be as well grounded as possible.
Mock up of Natural Choices display poster
and in position in the Hub on the Green
