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Inside the British Association for Holistic Medicine & Health Care – Forty Years of Quietly Reshaping British Medicine

In Britain, a certain type of charity endures not because it grows loudly but rather because it doesn’t go away. Among them is the British Association for Holistic Medicine & Health Care, or BHMA as most of its members refer to it. It began in April 1984, when the term “holistic medicine” still caused controversy in NHS staff rooms and evoked more images of incense than of general practice. Although people’s eyebrows have dropped forty years later, the discussion that the BHMA initiated is still ongoing.

When you enter one of their conferences, the atmosphere is different from that of a typical medical gathering. There are medical herbalists, a few NHS commissioners, students holding essay drafts, general practitioners in soft jumpers, and the occasional psychotherapist. Burnout is discussed in the same way that doctors used to discuss it only in private. The Marmot review is usually brought up. Someone else brings up the garden, the weather, or a patient they can’t stop thinking about. It may seem insignificant, but it’s difficult to ignore how uncommon these areas have become.

Information	Detail
Organisation	British Association for Holistic Medicine & Health Care
Former Name	British Holistic Medical Association
Founded	April 1984
Type	Membership charity
Charity Number	289459
CPD Provider Number	17420
Headquarters	United Kingdom
Core Focus	Holistic, person-centred, sustainable healthcare
Publication	Journal of Holistic Healthcare
Activities	Conferences, networking, journal articles, student essay competitions
Membership	Open to healthcare professionals and the wider public
Tagline	Care for People, Practitioners & Planet

The charity uses language that sounds like it would be found in an annual report from a hospital trust, describing its vision as a more person-centered, sustainable, and compassionate approach to healthcare.

However, the BHMA usually takes it more literally. Their Journal of Holistic Healthcare, which has been quietly published for years, has published articles by David Zigmond comparing the 2020s NHS staff erosion to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Clare Gerada on the disintegration of medical education, and Sir Sam Everington on the Bromley by Bow Center. A wellness brand doesn’t speak like that. With a stethoscope close by, it reads more like cultural criticism.

British Association for Holistic Medicine & Health Care

According to the BHMA, holism encompasses five interconnected dimensions, starting with a whole-person approach. It seems simple until you sit through a ten-minute doctor’s appointment and see how infrequently contemporary systems permit it. Speaking with members gives the impression that they are not attempting to topple the NHS.

They are attempting to remind it of something. The number of chronic illnesses continues to rise. Waiting lists for mental health services are constantly expanding. In 1984, hardly anyone talked about the environmental cost of healthcare; today, the NHS is having a serious internal discussion about this issue. For decades, the BHMA has written about all of this, frequently before it became popular.

The Holistic Practitioner, their CPD-accredited course, appears on the website with the carefree assurance of a company that doesn’t need to promote itself. They are not very active on social media. The quiet engine is their membership, which is available to all. Perhaps this is the reason they have persisted while more ostentatious wellness endeavors have failed. They were merely a gathering spot and never attempted to be a movement.

You get the impression that the BHMA has been waiting for the rest of the room to catch up while observing the gradual shift in mainstream medicine toward social prescribing, nature-based therapy, and lifestyle medicine. It’s still unclear if contemporary healthcare can truly adapt at the rate these issues require. It is more evident that the questions posed by the BHMA in 1984 have remained relevant. If anything, their teeth have grown.

May 2, 2026

Inside the Westminster Centre for Resilience – The Quiet Lab Studying How We Survive Modern Chaos

On a gloomy London afternoon, you wouldn’t guess what goes on inside the University of Westminster’s School of Life Sciences building. With their headphones in, students congregate close to the entrance and discuss deadlines. A delivery truck stands by the curb. There is no indication in the scene that scientists a few stories above are investigating something that, to be honest, the nation appears to be lacking.

Since its founding in 2013, the Centre for Resilience has been discreetly addressing this issue for more than ten years. The scope of the work is also greater than you might anticipate. It includes everything from community well-being to cellular aging to how entire organizations crumble under duress. That range has an almost obstinately ambitious quality. The majority of academic institutions choose a lane. This one didn’t.

Information	Details
Name	Centre for Resilience (CfR)
Parent Institution	University of Westminster, School of Life Sciences
Established	2013
Location	London, United Kingdom
Director Contact	Justin Haroun — harounj@westminster.ac.uk
Core Research Areas	Aging biology, age-related diseases, community health, pathobiology and extracellular vesicles
Signature Tools	ResilienceLab 360, Hearts and Minds assessment
Clients Served	Industry, public sector, healthcare organisations
Related Body	Westminster Foundation for Democracy (separate but thematically aligned)
Reach of WFD Programmes	58 countries, 4,463 parliamentarians, 44,000+ participants in 2024–2025

Much of the engagement side is run by Justin Haroun, who has created something that doesn’t quite fit the typical research-center mold. The CfR provides senior teams in the public and private sectors with what it refers to as “bespoke resilience coaching, training, and consultancy.” It makes use of a tool called ResilienceLab 360, which is a somewhat corporate term for what is essentially an effort to determine why some teams manage to stay together when things go wrong while others do not. The answer might be more complicated than any evaluation can fully capture. However, you must begin somewhere.

Speaking with those who have worked for the center, it seems that this definition of resilience differs from the political one. The state was the primary focus of the version Keir Starmer discussed in the Guardian in April, referring to resilience as the organizing principle of his government. security of energy. reaction to a crisis. defense. The framing of the Westminster CfR begins modestly and may go deeper. The body is examined first, followed by the team, the community, and finally the system. Cells out. Not down to Whitehall.

That distinction is more important than it may seem. Because if you’ve followed British politics for any amount of time over the past 20 years—from the 2008 crash to Brexit, Covid, the Truss incident, and whatever this week has in store—you begin to see a pattern. Every shock is absorbed by the center. After that, it jumbles. After that, it patches. The recurring phrase is “sticking plaster.” Last month, a writer on Substack put it succinctly: resilience isn’t truly resilience if it depends on Westminster.

That quiet conviction appears to be the foundation of the Center for Resilience’s operations. There, scientists are examining how immune response is altered by aging. How extracellular vesicles, those tiny biological messengers, behave under stress. How students handle the demands of college life—or don’t. Westminster City Council has been working in tandem with local residents on how communities recover from extreme weather.

This kind of patient, unglamorous research has become so out of style that it’s difficult to ignore. No announcements have gone viral. There are no keynote speakers yelling about change. Just persistent investigation into issues that could eventually provide us with better explanations for why certain individuals, institutions, and societies bend without breaking and others break at the first real strain.

To be honest, it’s still unclear if the work will lead to something greater. These kinds of academic institutions frequently produce outstanding work that finds it difficult to leave the academy. However, there is a sense that the questions being asked here are precisely the ones that the rest of the nation should be asking as well, given the center’s output over the years. We simply don’t appear to have noticed it yet.

May 2, 2026

Ethionamide and the Quiet Battle Against the World’s Oldest Disease

Ethionamide has an almost unyielding quality. It was discovered in 1956 and has been on pharmacy shelves for almost 70 years. Despite the emergence and disappearance of newer, more ostentatious antibiotics, it has refused to retire. The majority of patients are unaware of it.

The majority of physicians hardly ever prescribe it unless they work in TB wards or in areas where TB still spreads like a slow tide through communities. However, ethionamide is frequently the medication that doctors, sometimes reluctantly, turn to when treatments don’t work and the conventional regimens don’t work against resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Key Information	Details
Drug Name	Ethionamide (ETA / ETH)
Drug Class	Thioamide antibiotic
Brand Name	Trecator
Discovered	1956
FDA Approval	1965
Chemical Formula	C8H10N2S
Molar Mass	166.24 g/mol
Melting Point	164–166 °C
Route of Administration	Oral (by mouth)
Typical Adult Dose	15–20 mg/kg daily (usually 500 mg to 1 g)
Half-Life	2 to 3 hours
Protein Binding	~30%
Primary Use	Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis
Mechanism	Inhibits mycolic acid synthesis (prodrug activated by ethA)
Listed On	WHO Essential Medicines List
Manufacturer	Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pfizer, 2009)
Common Side Effects	Nausea, vomiting, hepatotoxicity, neuropathy

It’s not a coincidence that they are reluctant. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has observed a patient taking ethionamide. The nausea strikes early. then throwing up. A minor but damaging detail that makes daily compliance truly challenging is the metallic, sulfurous taste that some patients report lingering for hours. Doctors frequently advise taking it with food or delaying the dosage until before bed—small changes that, in their simplicity, resemble folk medicine.

However, the adverse effects are not limited to the stomach. About 5% of patients experience liver toxicity, which typically appears within the first three months, sometimes later, and sometimes without warning. Peripheral neuropathy gradually develops. Pyridoxine is frequently administered in addition to it as a sort of biochemical buffer because reports of mood swings and even mental disorders have been made.

The fact that ethionamide is still relevant may indicate more about the state of tuberculosis treatment than it does about the medication. TB hasn’t gone away. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe, multidrug-resistant strains are quietly outpacing the medical infrastructure built to contain them. Ethionamide, structurally similar to isoniazid but activated through a different bacterial pathway, fills a gap that newer drugs haven’t fully closed. Isoniazid is still helpful even when first-line medications don’t work because its cross-resistance rate is only about 13%.

The chemistry has a more subdued backstory. Since ethionamide is a prodrug, an enzyme known as ethA must activate it inside the bacterium. The genetic switch that suppresses ethA expression, ethR, has been the subject of years of research in the hopes that blocking ethR would increase the effectiveness of ethionamide at lower dosages. The project is still in progress. Whether it will translate into a meaningful clinical benefit is still unclear, but the interest itself suggests the drug isn’t quite finished evolving.

Walking through any TB clinic in a high-burden country, you notice things. Pill blister packs were arranged by the dozen. The way nurses count out tablets, sometimes seven or eight at once, knowing patients will swallow them with reluctance. Ethionamide is often somewhere in that mix, a yellow crystalline tablet with a faint sulfide odor, prescribed not because it’s pleasant but because the alternative is worse.

Investors and pharmaceutical executives don’t talk much about ethionamide. This is not a breakthrough story or a profit story. Because the world still needs it, this workhorse medication is listed on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. That in and of itself says something. Ethionamide survives because it is practical, flawed, and essential in a sector that is fixated on innovation.

It’s difficult to ignore the irony. Despite having side effects that would probably never pass modern approval standards, a medication from the 1950s is still crucial in the fight against one of the oldest diseases in human history. Decades ago, tuberculosis was supposed to be eradicated. It wasn’t. Until then, ethionamide will continue to appear, silently performing the tasks that no one else wants to perform.

May 2, 2026