Hello

Hello everyone, my name's Mark and I'm a philosopher. It's been three days since my last counselling session.

OK, that's the joke out of the way. Other than home educating my children, I do two things with my life to make money. I am a herbalist and I do philosophical counselling. I have a practice in Leicester in the English East Midlands. On the herbal side, I interview people about their health problems, taking a full medical history, and I then prescribe and dispense herbs and give lifestyle advice. On the philosophical side, I help people reach their own conclusions about their world views and examine them philosophically in order to expose possible problems arising from their way of seeing the world. This is a lot more helpful than it sounds. I have found that whereas people can be helped with their physical health problems through herbal remedies, there often comes a point where they get stuck, because I can help them solve their problems only so far before I reach certain, less flexible issues, such as work, family, religion, accommodation, substance abuse or body image. Until I applied Philosophy (with a capital P) to these issues, this was the point at which I had to leave people. This is no longer so. It turns out that this sort of problem can be dealt with rationally (more on that word later) and I can help people to "get over the bump" in those terms also.

More later.