Adjunct Visiting Professor

MA FCPP FNIMH

Simon Mills is Cambridge University graduate in medical sciences who has since 1977 been a herbal practitioner and natural therapist in England. In that time he has led the main organizations for herbal medicine in the UK (the British Herbal Medicine Association, the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy and National Institute of Medical Herbalists) and served on Government and House of Lords committees. Since 1997 he has been Secretary of ESCOP, the lead herbal scientific network in Europe, that produces defining monographs on herbal medicines for the European Medicines Agency. He has also written the standard herbal medicine textbooks, notably with Kerry Bone the two editions of Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy and the Essential Book of Herbal Safety. He has long been involved in academic work having co-founded the world’s first University centre for complementary health in Exeter (1987), the first integrated health course at a UK medical school at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter (2000) and the first masters degree programme in herbal medicine in the USA (2001). He has published in many peer-reviewed scientific journals including full clinical trials with herbal medicines, and has supervised 10 successful doctorate theses. Simon is currently Managing Director of SustainCare Community Interest Company, a non-profit social enterprise that has set up a new evidence-base and educational programme for the use of plant remedies and is integrating this with other community approaches to self care (www.sustaincare.net).  All this is now based at an innovative community centre in a beautiful medieval hall: the Hub on the Green, on the Cathedral Close in Exeter.