Long before modern pharmaceuticals, many cultures relied on plant medicine, intuition, and holistic approaches to support healing.
In the early 1900s, major reforms in medical education — including what became known as the Flexner Report — reshaped the entire landscape of healthcare. Funded by powerful industrial interests of the time, these reforms pushed natural and herbal traditions to the margins and prioritised a new biomedical model.
Many schools teaching traditional or nature-based practices were closed, while the emerging system focused heavily on lab-created, patented treatments.
Whatever people believe about that shift, it’s clear that a huge part of our healing heritage was sidelined in the process.
Nature was never the ‘alternative’ — for most of human history, it was the starting point.