The health guru who leads the fight against lethal party drugs
Maryonstewartimprovedthewellbeingofthousandsofwomen.thedeathofherdaughtergaveheranewmission
Tell me first about your early life. weeks and then we did get married. Then the following Sunday they all came around for tea. Although Alan wasn’t Jewish and he didn’t convert physically, our children were all brought up Jewish. We decided that we would send them to Jewish nursery and they all had barmitzvahs and bat chayils. Alan came to shul and just did what a father would do. His stomach became Jewish. My parents did actually look upon him as a wholesome son-in-law. They didn’t resent the fact that he wasn’t Jewish, so it was OK. And you had four children?
Yes, and they weren’t planned at all. Phoebe and Chesney arrived early on in my marriage. Then I had an ectopic pregnancy in 1986 which resulted in a real emergency. I only had two hours to live. I did lose a tube and they said I wouldn’t have children again. So I didn’t bother to use any contraception and then I fell pregnant with Hester. She was born in 1987. Four-anda-half years later I had another ectopic pregnancy. I was about to be taken in for a termination and they did a final scan, and the day before the operation the baby jumped into the uterus, so I ended up having a fourth child, a boy. Were you working through all this? I went back to work five months after Phoebe was born, part-time as a dental hygienist in Hove because we were in living Brighton then. By this time Alan had spent a year at the Royal Homeopathic Hospital and he wasn’t happy with the National Health Service and wanted to do something else. So he and three other doctors decided to set up something called the British Society for Nutritional Medicine. They gathered together 10,000 medical papers on nutrition and nondrugmedicine.ihadjusthadchesneybythenandwas on maternity leave, so they gave me the 10,000 papers to sort out because they didn’t think I had much to do. It was while I was doing that that I found 200 papers on premenstrual syndrome. I was so amazed that they existed. It was all a non-drug approach. I was really interested in it because I knew that a lot of women suffered with PMS and that the medical profession at that time couldn’t agree whether to give hormones or anti-depressants, and they didn’t know what the underlying cause of PMS was. Yet they were millions of women who were violent, aggressive, suicidal as a result of PMS. So I decided that I would train Alan’s nurse to help women by applying the knowledge in these medical papers. Because I read them all and I thought: “This is easy. If we just follow this, we can provide a service”. When was this?
It was 1984 when I started the advisory service. After a while a journalist came along as a patient of Alan and he happened to mention what I was doing. The journalist asked if she could write about it because by this time we had patients recommending us to relatives in other parts of the country. To help them we started to post out our questionnaire and advice sheets. We ran the postal thing for a while. The local journalists wrote about it. Then a health magazine picked it up. Then Cosmopolitan picked it up and then the News of the World. We had about four column inches in the News of the World and as a result of that 10,000 people wrote to me. Then I got invited onto breakfast television. From then on we had between 650 letters a day, and at one point, when we had big media, we had 2,232 letters in one day.
We categorised the women according to whether they were severe sufferers or moderate sufferers and so on, and we had different advice sheets that we sent out to people. At one point I had a team of 13 nurses and nutritionists working on it. It became such a huge thing. That was how the books began. We had so much