Who owns our health Inside the medicinal garden

Dr Vivienne Lo has created a medicinal herb spiral in central London to address issues around the use of food and herbs as medicine in everyday home remedies or as dangerous substances to be regulated. Dr Lo specialises in the history of Chinese medical practice at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. She translates and analyses excavated and recovered manuscripts from the early imperial and mediaeval period concerned with the development of self-care: therapeutic food and exercise and acupuncture and moxibustion (a traditional Chinese medicine therapy using moxa, or artemesia). The herb spiral forms part of her current project researching the history of food as medicine in China. She said: ?'I dreamed up the herb spiral to teach us what's safe and what's appropriate when we are suffering from a cold or virus so that we can deal with these kinds of complaints in an everyday way. My early work has been about self-care in ancient China and most recently the boundaries of food and medicine and it's really in that context that I'm building the spiral.' 'Food is really the basis of medicine in many different respects, certainly the kind of potencies attributed to food then became attributed to medicines. But we think the boundaries between food and medicine are obvious when in fact they're not at all.