As you all know, the way that it works with medicine is: you get sick, you go to the physician, he/she gives you a prescription, you buy that, take it and hopefully undergo a full recovery. In a way, it has always been like that. Individuals went to the most skilled person in the village for advice on how to treat an ailment, a couple of herbs were prescribed and a donation received.

The only real difference in the course of action these days is that then, there was a far higher general awareness of the power of herbs. Nowadays, in the West at least, the medical profession and the pharmaceuticals have managed to wean us off herbs by one means or another - normally fear.

The fact is that most drugs are made from herbs or plants or from synthesized chemicals found in herbs and plants. In a way, all we have done is substituted buying for picking.

OK, I know that it is more complex than that. Drugs are often combinations that work well together and being told to take one tablet a day saves you having to worry about overdosing, but there are still often side-effects. Simply read the leaflet inside the box of your next box of pills.

Mine says: anxiety, fainting, erectile dysfunction, low blood pressure, diarrheoa and heart failure. Enchanting, isn't it? They are pills for high blood pressure (beta-blockers). I live in a small village in northern Thailand, where high blood pressure is not a problem, but I know one old lady who has it and high cholesterol and her nurse showed her which tree to pick leaves from to brew a tea. She does not take tablets, but I still do.

There is also a woman who started coming into our garden four months ago to choose purple flowers off a kind of wisteria that we grow (dork anchan). 'It is for my son's very bad cough', she said. Asthma, I think she meant.

Anyway, she plucks a handful a week and her son is fine. I had a cough at Christmas and tried it myself. I drank two cups of tea before retiring to bed and I drank the cold dregs in the morning, but my cough had already gone.

The hottest time of the year here is March - May, after which it is still hot but the monsoons come and cool it down. Last year, for the first time in my life I suffered from prickly heat in the hot snap. This year it began again, but someone suggested Aloe Vera.

'Of course', said my wife and went into the garden to cut some. She cut two small 'leaves' and I spent three days smearing the sap onto the affected areas. It had almost gone on the second day, but it vanished on the third day and has not come back in spite of the fact that it has got hotter since then.

A great deal of individuals are taking another look at traditional treatments and I am going to be one of them. The problem in our village is that my Thai is not good, only my wife speaks some English and individuals are frightened to talk of the old ways in case I think that they are backward.