It took Julie Brennan until her 30s to fulfil what was a teenage inkling but today she sees herbal tea as part of her holistic healthcare practice.

One of the first things Julie Brennan says to me about her interest in natural medicine is an admission. “I remember going to the doctor when I was a teenager and ripping up the script for antibiotics in front of them,” the naturopath recounts. Drastic perhaps, but a portent of things to come.

However, it took a surprisingly long time for Brennan to circle back to natural medicine. She first tried studying teaching, media and science before graduating with a health science degree in naturopathy, a career that has coincidentally been “a culmination of all those” as both a practising naturopath and a natural therapies teacher at Endeavour College and Torrens University.

“I provide holistic healthcare. So, not just treating people’s conditions or presentations symptomatically, actually looking at the whole person to get an understanding, and an insight, of what other factors are contributing to their state of unwellness,” she explains.

Incidentally, tea ticks many of those boxes. While Brennan’s initial introduction to tea was English breakfast (strong and milky, no sugar) – “I started drinking tea with my mum and grandma growing up; it was a real rite of passage” – her world then opened up to herbal teas.

“Once I got into my studies and really started to appreciate the value of tea as medicine, it just changed everything,” she says. “Not just from a therapeutic perspective, but from a ritualistic perspective as well, getting people to stop and make a brew – it’s a form of relaxation. There’s actually a lot of power in the teas that we use to help people and sometimes that might be all I would prescribe to someone.”

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 20 October 2023.