My story
The athlete.
The patient.
The practitioner.
What brought me to herbal medicine was not a linear journey. Seven years of being dismissed, a body I no longer recognised, a career taken from me, and eventually, the stubborn conviction that another way had to exist.
After years of feeling unheard, reduced to symptoms and moving from specialist to specialist, I realised that if I did not take responsibility for my wellbeing, no one else could do it for me. Discovering holistic medicine was empowering. For the first time in years, I felt in control of my health, my body, my mind. That is what brought me here.
It takes courage to choose a form of medicine that works with time rather than against it, that treats the person rather than the symptom, that asks more questions than it answers. I chose it anyway. I would choose it again.
This is that story. And it is the reason I understand my clients the way I do.
"I was not living. I was surviving. Until I stopped waiting for someone else to give me permission to heal."
01 · The beginning · And the end
I was at the top of my sport when my body turned against me.
I was a synchronised swimmer training at elite level, with a place on the national team roster in my sights. I was strong and disciplined and I knew my body the way athletes do: its limits, its signals, its particular language and needs.
Then my periods started. And from the very first cycle, the pain was debilitating. Heavy, incessant, impossible to train through. Within months I was on hormonal suppressants. Then combinations of medications. Then injections. Then painkillers that grew progressively more powerful until, years later, a daily preventative dose of strong medication had become my normal — just to be able to function.
At training, I was fainting. My nose bled without warning. My injuries multiplied. My performance and my dream fell apart in front of me while I was still fighting with everything I had to hold them together.
I began to dissociate from my body. Not as a choice, but as survival. I separated myself from the thing that was failing me just to get through each day. I was not living. I was surviving.
Until the doctors revoked my right to train. It was too dangerous for my health. My athletic career was over.
As an athlete, I used to know my limits and my strength both physical and mental. But everything was falling apart, and I couldn't recognise who I was anymore.
02 · Dismissed · Diagnosed
Seven years. Dozens of specialists. Zero answers.
I had exhausted every test available. I had seen dozens of specialists, none of whom could diagnose what was wrong. What they could do, and did, repeatedly, was suggest that the problem was me.
"Nothing is wrong with your body, it's all in your head. You are not as strong as you would like to think. You should stop putting pressure on yourself to be the perfect athlete. You clearly don't have the mental or physical capacity for it."
This is what medical gaslighting looks like. You can be as well supported by the people who love you as anyone could be. But when the same message is delivered again and again by people with the credentials to know how the human body works, you start to believe them.
I started to believe I was weak. That I was imagining it. That I had somehow brought this on myself.
After years of wandering, I finally had a word for my suffering: endometriosis, alongside PMOS, chronic fatigue, and a metabolism in total exhaustion. The relief of a diagnosis was real. I was not inventing my pain. But the answer that followed was devastating: there is no cure.
More experimental hormonal treatments followed. Surgery to remove adhesions and unhealthy tissue. Another round of hormonal therapy to put me in menopausal state. Increasingly potent pain medication up to a daily dose of codeine just to go by. And still... constant pain, no resolution, no path forward.
I had enough.
03 · Plant medicine · Holistic health
A pandemic. A decision. An experiment that changed everything.
I was certain an alternative existed. I was equally certain that no one else was going to find it for me. So I made the decision that changed everything: I took my health into my own hands.
The pandemic gave me the one resource I had never had enough of: time. I began researching. About my condition, the human body, and a more holistic way of helping the body heal. I found a short online herbal medicine discovery course. Cautiously, reluctantly almost, I began to experiment on myself after deciding I was done with conventional medication.
It was slow. It was exhausting. There were countless trials and errors. But for the first time in years, something was actually working. Not dramatically, not overnight, but undeniably, I was getting better.
For the first time in years, I felt in control of my health, my body, my mind. That is what discovering plant medicine gave me back.
And then my family became my first clients. My mother's arthritis flare-ups. My sister's anxiety and sleep. My father's recurring throat weakness. My grandmothers, one navigating breast cancer support, the other chronic inflammation. I made formulations for each of them, adapted each one to the person rather than the condition, adjusted when something wasn't landing, watched what happened when I got it right.
I will be honest: some of those early blends were rather dreadful. But they are all well and very much alive, so I consider that a success.
What I learned in those months — quiet, experimental, rooted in love and necessity — was the beginning of everything that followed. That was when I knew I needed to train properly.
04 · Learning · Clinic practice
What had started as personal necessity became a calling.
I enrolled in a full clinical training in naturopathy and herbal medicine — a degree-level programme spanning Western herbalism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Ayurveda. Six months of that training I spent in an external TCM dispensary, on my own initiative, deepening my understanding of Chinese herbal medicine and its application to the conditions I had lived through myself.
Five hundred hours in student clinic. Clients navigating endometriosis, PMOS, chronic fatigue, cancer, metabolic illness, stress-driven conditions. I recognised their stories immediately. Not because I had read about them, but because I had lived them.
I also hold a diploma in Indian Head Massage and bring the French phytotherapy tradition into everything I do: a relationship with plant medicine woven into my culture in a way that has always felt like coming home.
I learned this long before I learned it in clinic.
05 · Resilience · Homecoming
I was raised beneath the branches of a Magnolia tree in my family garden.
It was more than a tree to me. It was my shelter. That tall, steady guardian felt eternal.
Until one day a storm brought it down.
I was devastated. But every day afterwards, I watered the soil where it once stood. Adults told me it would not come back. But I kept watering. Stubbornness, and perhaps an unshakeable faith in renewal, has always been part of me.
And one day, a tiny shoot emerged. Today, it greets me whenever I return home.
Years later, Magnolia found its way back to me in clinic. I would spend hours working with magnolia bark and buds — handling them, feeling them, learning their properties, their place in Chinese medicine. A week after the clinic finished, I emptied my bag and a bud rolled out onto the table. I had carried it home without knowing. I picked it up and kept it. And I knew.
Magnolia became the subject of my clinical dissertation. The dissertation earned me a distinction, and the honour of delivering the valedictory address at my graduation. I could not have imagined any of that on the day I stood in the garden, watering soil that looked, to everyone else, like nothing.
It reminded me that resilience is not dramatic. It is patience. It is care. It grows beneath the surface long before anyone sees it. That is what the magnolia taught me. And it is what I carry into every consultation.
06 · My practice · My commitment
My practice is built around the people I understand most deeply.
People navigating hormonal issues, chronic fatigue, metabolic disruptions, complex illnesses that conventional medicine so often minimises or mismanages.
And active people — athletes, high-performers, the chronically busy — who feel their vitality slipping, who are facing injuries and recovery issues and are looking for a different kind of support.
I offer consultations online and in person, in English and in French, to clients in the UK and internationally. Every consultation draws on Western herbalism, naturopathy, and cross-traditional plant medicine. Every protocol is personalised, not prescriptive.
This journey still shapes every consultation I offer: the same diagnosis in five different people requires five different approaches. My mother and my grandmother both lived with chronic pain. But their bodies, their histories, their rhythms were entirely different. The formula that helped one would not have helped the other.
If any part of this story sounds like yours, I would love to hear from you.
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