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I remember how my dad was so into herbal solutions and health food well before that stuff became popular.

We have finally started to notice that there is real curative value in local herbs and remedies. In fact, we are also becoming aware that there are little or no side effects to most natural remedies, and that they are often more effective than Western medicine.

Well, I've seen a bunch of acupuncturists and one of my sister-in-laws is an herbalist. So I know a lot about alternative medicine. I don't know a lot about the practice but I know about the world.

There are many plant medicines that are available to us that have a lot of stigma around them that I hope, in the future, our medical community can look at, because I would absolutely go to those alternatives first before I went back to Western medicine.

I'm very much interested in having people take herbs that make them feel good because if they do that, they'll have an experience, and they'll say, 'Oh, this is real.' This is something you take, and you don't have to go on faith, but you can feel the difference.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

My grandmother was this amazing woman in the Dominican Republic who used to read tea leaves and palms. She would cure people in her neighborhood by going into her garden, plucking a couple of leaves, and brewing teas.

There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called 'momie' that is certainly one of the most fascinating I've come across.

I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist.

The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.