Doctor Ronan Gleeson interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

He smokes!  Doctor Ronan Gleeson, -who dispenses herbs from his Cork clinic to cure all kinds of ailments, including smoking- has confessed that he himself hasn’t yet quit.  And he’s asthmatic.  But he’s not ashamed.  He’s human, even if he is a doctor.
That’s terrible, though, I say.
“She’s going home, she’s disappointed!” he roars.  And as we sit in his consulting room, he rocks back and forth in his chair, eyeing me in a cheeky way.   I’m not going home, I say, but I’m shocked.  Dave, my stepfather has tried Ronan’s herbal cure for smoking and has found it highly effective.  He hasn’t quit completely, but the cigarettes taste disgusting when he tries to smoke one.
Surely you should be setting an example, I tell Ronan.
‘Ah, no.  Besides the smoking thing isn’t my department.  That’s my business partner.”
Roni his partner, who runs the shop brings in gardenia flowers macerated in coconut oil for me to try. 
“You can use it everywhere”, she says.  “It feels gorgeous.  And it’s totally natural.”
Dr Gleeson, from Bishopstown, has been a family doctor for twenty three years.  Being an asthma sufferer, he got interested in herbs while investigating possible alternatives to the conventional treatments. 
“There are a few things that I discovered for asthma, herbally speaking.  But Ma Huang was the best one. I sourced it in China with great difficulty.  I still use an inhaler, but only if I am too busy or too lazy to boil up the herbs.  The herbs work very well when I use them!”
He opened a herbal practice in Bishopstown, ten years ago and when that was successful, he opened a herbal dispensary and clinic in Mac Curtain Street, which is also hugely popular. I put it to him that most doctors wouldn’t take herbal medicine so seriously.
“  It’s always been me against the world.  My team are Leeds United, that will tell you!  But God put the herbs into the ground for us to use, not for us to be piddling on, or spraying with herbicides or walking on with Wellington boots, He put them there for us to take out of the ground, wash with cold water and eat. Herbs have various chemical factories inside them, they might have something for a cough or something for arthritis or something for a headache.  Many herbs have a combination and can be used for lots of things.  A great example of that would be Black Cohosh, the woman’s herb.  That has been used by the Native Americans for thousands of years for all sorts of women’s complaints-period pain, childbirth, menopause.  And the reason for that is simple, it contains a plant oestrogen and a pain-killer.  Everything you need.”
The pharmaceutical companies must be impressed with him, I suggest, if he can come along and say we don’t need medicines, we can just take herbs and boil them.
 “They don’t like me very much.  Somebody told me recently that I was going to end up dead! But the tide is turning, people are wising up.  Every day, my practice is growing.”
Why is that?
“Irish people are very well educated and voracious readers.  Because it’s always raining, there’s nothing else to do!”
I agree with him, naturally. I was reading an article the other day, I say, about how toxic the products are, that we generally put on our skin and hair.  This is something Ronan takes seriously.
“Yes, especially the stuff that kids use.  They drown themselves in Lynx, which is full of poison.  I see my own kids doing it, it’s crazy.  The skin is a sponge, everything you put onto it goes into the system, it’s as simple as that.  But teenagers want to smell right and look right and that’s all there is to it.”
I suggest that most people aren’t aware of the dangers.
“I’ve been telling them about it for years. I say something and everyone else wakes up to it three or four years later and says Oh he was right!  It’s only common sense though.” 
So how dangerous is it, putting all this stuff on ourselves?
“Very dangerous, you only have to read the labels. Toxic chemicals nuke your liver.  They aren’t going to put these chemicals in their mouths, but they think it’s okay to be putting it on their skin.  But a poison is a poison, no matter how you absorb it.”
What does it do to you?
“It can shrink your liver or make you more prone to liver cancer, or other kinds of cancer.  Affect your blood system, lymph nodes, cause anaemia.  Affect your kidneys, your brain, your heart, your ovaries.  Poisons affect everything.”
  What about just putting on weight and being tired?
“Any poison is going to cause lethargy.  But of course, so can depression. People come in and say ‘What’s wrong with me?”  And I say, hold on, let me find out something about you, first! Based on my diagnosis, I will decide how to treat a person, with conventional medicines, with herbs, or what.  I like to give people a choice.” 
            So far, his patients are responding enthusiastically to the herbs.
“Most of the conditions that people come with, I will be able to find a remedy for.  That’s why God made the herbs!  He wasn’t playing games.”
I approached Ronan initially because I had been laid up with a sore throat and a high temperature and sneezing, an upper respiratory tract infection, he said.  He prescribed Ma Huang, which I had to simmer twice a day, inhaling the steam and then drinking the water.  It tasted much nicer than I had expected and within twenty four hours I was up and about, feeling much better.  I was impressed.  When I had consulted him I had felt really bad, so bad I wasn’t at all sure that herbs would make a difference.  I met another woman at a dinner party a few days later who had had exactly the same experience.  She had thought Ronan quite unorthodox in his approach, because he hadn’t even examined her, but the Ma Huang had worked wonders.  The Ma Huang, he says, has been a roaring success.
“Ma Huang is the oldest known remedy for coughs and colds and flu in the world, it’s been used for thousands of years by the Chinese.  And it is marvellous stuff.  It reduces wheezing and unblocks your nose, immediately.  I get people to inhale the steam because herbs contain volatile oils which appear in water vapour and in the oil are the active agents.  It’s marvellously simple, most remedies are very obvious and very simple.” 
Doctor Gleeson is now making some remedies himself.
“I decided some time ago that I would make a female version of Viagra.  Why should the boys have all the fun?  So I make something that I call femagro.  It’s nicknamed the Pink Panther around Cork.”
Does it work?
“Of course it works!  It’s very effective.  It contains an aphrodisiac from the Cameroon called Johimbe and I mix it with some other things.  I don’t want to give away my recipe!  But female sensuality is a very complex issue.  There is a term called Female Sexual Dysfunction, which I don’t like because it implies that there is something wrong with women if they don’t want to have sex.  And that can depend on so many things-age, time of the month, how she feels about herself, whether she’s tired or not, lonely, hungry, depressed, whatever.  I’m also making a sensual massage oil called aphro-scent, which works very well.”
The two girls from the dispensary come in and tell me that they have both tried femagra and found it to be effective.  Very effective.  They giggle.  W e discuss the possibility of Ronan having his own TV channel, in America and decide that he should begin by going on the Late Late and testing it on Pat Kenny and volunteers from the audience.  The aphrodisiac works just as well on men as it does on women, he assures me.  And gives me a bottle of pink capsules to take away with me.  He currently has over four hundred patients taking femagro, he says, and the results are very impressive.  I promise to put it to the test, I say, as soon as possible.
Dr Ronan Gleeson can be contacted on 021 455 0666
femagro is available from www.femagro.com