So this one here is a very special book that I received through Sister Pauline.
It's a 16th century medical textbook written by a professor, Tabernaemontanus and he was a
German doctor and pharmacist and I just want to demonstrate here how valuable this knowledge is.
So Tabernaemontanus wrote this book over a period of 36 years and he collated all the knowledge that
was known at this point going back to the school of Hippocrates, so this is knowledge that now is
over two and a half thousand years old and when we go to thyme and I read here all of the medicinal
effects of thyme so it's used for when people have breathing difficulties, when people are coughing,
when people have stomach upsets and then when we counter-check this information and we go
to a modern textbook, so for example we go to a Pharmacopoeia so it says that thyme
has combinative properties due to its content of volatile oils and it is an ingredient used as a
cough linctus and for the treatment of whooping cough and bronchitis and then if we go a step
further and we're looking at the actual scientific research articles and for example one that I just
pulled out is a controlled multi-centre study which checked herbal versus synthetic senolytic
drugs for acute bronchitis and the outcome of this study was they were equal but herbal medicine,
which was thyme, was trending better with no side effects. So again we have 3,000 articles
underpinning this centuries-old knowledge and that's what really excites me. And it's quite
funny when I first came to New Zealand people asked you know if I was doing that hippie stuff,
plant medicine was kind of viewed in that way and you know I've been pushing back ever since to say
no this is scientific, this is scientifically underpinned. So thyme is just a prime example
to really show how coherent the medicinal use over such a long period of time is.
My name is Sandra Clair I have a PhD in health sciences and I'm also a medical anthropologist
and most importantly I'm a medical herbalist
and of course most people will know me as a founder of Artemis here in New Zealand. So
I was very fortunate that early in my life I had the opportunity to learn with a traditional Swiss
herbalist, with Sister Pauline and she is very renowned for her work of combining traditional
medicine with more modern medicine. So she would take me into the Swiss Alps and would show me how
actually proper plant medicine is made and without that experience I doubt that I would ever have
been able to actually do plant medicine in the way I practice now and found Artemis later on.
So I came from Switzerland to New Zealand in 1995 and one of the frustrations that I had was
I didn't have access to the plant medicines that I was used to when I was working with Sister Pauline
and in Switzerland where plant medicine is part of public health care. So literally the
only way I could help my patients was actually making them medicines myself for them and so
I became an accidental entrepreneur through that you know and that's how Artemis was founded. So
we are a traditional plant medicine company and we are the leaders in New Zealand for that particular
field of expertise. So the medicines that we're making are helpful for anything that you could
experience during your life cycle; somebody is maybe prone to coughs or colds or has
rashes on their skins or somebody can't sleep or a child has terrible cough. We're making
very specific medicines that help with these common ailments that people feel unwell but don't
necessarily want to take pharmaceuticals because of the side effects that they can experience.
Healthcare is normally not part of the debate of sustainability
but we need to realise that pharmaceuticals, not only are based on petrochemicals,
they also use a lot of the petrochemicals so they have a very high carbon footprint
and as consumers as we consume these products we actually add to that carbon footprint story. So I
always say you know they are wonderful remedies when we really need it in acute situations but
many of them are highly toxic not just for the environment but also for our bodies so we need to
balance this up and use in my view pharmaceuticals only when we really really need them.
Environmental considerations were at the very, very fundamental base
of this company. So Artemis is a triple bottom line company and that means people,
planet and profit and people and planet come first and what that means is we choose our
ingredients very very carefully so they have to be organic i want really pure plant medicines,
and the lovely thing about plant medicine is in fact because we grow the medicines, they're
not made in the lab they're grown out of the earth, is we actually help to sequester carbon.
So by using plant medicines you actually contribute to a cooling of the environment.
When I was still training with Sister Pauline she taught me a product that used thyme for coughs
and colds. So at Artemis we are making a product that uses the natural environment of Central Otago
and then processes it through to a beverage that people can take for coughs and colds.
The harvesting takes place by hand so it's very very sustainable, we're not hurting the plants
so we have a very light footprint on the earth and then the techniques we use to extract these very
valuable medicinal plants, the thyme, is very low tech as well. So that we again you know are not
adding to further carbon. It's a wonderful parallel story of doing a business that is
good for people but also good for the environment. And I may need to add that you know the caring for
the environment is really a fundamental thought in traditional medicine and you go around the world
into traditional communities and everybody will understand that you know the planet is our mother,
if our planet is suffering you know if our mother is suffering we as children cannot be healthy.
So this combination of what I do in my business has to be good for people and planet,
makes total sense in terms of how we are interconnected. You
know we are not separate you know we are part of the wide web of nature.
The injuries and the deaths we see are 99.9 man caused unfortunately. The fact
that so many birds and wildlife are injured means that we're not
looking after our environment as well as we should. I would like my legacy
to be to leave the world a better place for the animals and birds in it.