Scott's Story

Tēnā koutou katoa
Ko te Toiokawharu te maunga
Ko whanganui te awa
Nō Tāmaki Makaurau ahau
Nō Scotland ōku tupuna
Kei Tamahere ahau e noho ana
Ko Scott tōku ingoa
Ko Helen tāku wahine
Ko Noah tāku tama
Ko Nanook tāku kuri
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa

So many stories I have heard over the last 20+ years, of how people began working in the natural healthcare industry because of a health crisis they experienced. For me it was no different.

I was born with a hereditary kidney disease that had already taken a mighty toll on my family. Taking both my elder brother & two uncles to kidney failure. So in many ways my life was always going to be shaped in large part by this condition.

For 25 years I almost managed to ignore it, although certainly it did play a part in my early interest in natural health. Orthodox medicine whilst knowing I had this condition since day dot were helpless in being able to do anything to prevent it from running its course. Although over the year’s modern medicine was responsible for saving my life more than once, like so many things in life it is about balance and I realise the benefits that both systems of medicine can offer to people.

Things came to their ultimate conclusion with my kidneys failing when I was 25. Still on my OE living in Leicester, England at the time, I managed to crawl home, already on dialysis and left my life behind as an IT Technician working on Y2K projects, and began training to become a Naturopath & Medical Herbalist the following year.

Graduating from Wellpark College in 2003 saw me celebrate what had been an incredibly challenging few years. In hindsight it seemed quite incredible that I had managed to graduate at all. During those three years it had seen me receive two kidney transplants, one that had failed almost immediately and another that was hanging on by the thinnest of threads, a return to dialysis during the time between transplants and more operations, complications and months spent on hospital wards that I would care to admit to here. But I was determined, focused and finally feeling like my calling had been found. I was super passionate about the incredible knowledge I was learning and about these amazing plants that had so many wonderful things to offer us.

The 2nd transplant that was hanging on by the slimmest of margins was thanks to the herbs and other natural treatments I had employed to stabilise its function. It had not been a successful transplant, the Docs had predicted it would fail after 6 months. I did however end up receiving 6 and half years of faithful function from that kidney, that kept me off dialysis all of that time thanks in large part to those natural treatments.

After graduating I went straight to work in the industry working for a company called Health & Herbs who had a large range of herbal & nutritional products. I became their educator and trainer, retail support person, researcher and sometimes formulator. It was a great foundation for me and helped to implement the knowledge from college and to continue learning. I also began running my own clinic, on a part-time basis initially.

I had met Helen during our time at Wellpark College where she was studying Ayurvedic Medicine and we later became the first Wellpark Marriage. After our son was born we decided to move out of Auckland to live in Tauranga. I began working in an Herbal Dispensary that also had clinic rooms allowing me to continue running my clinic.

My love for the native rākau (plants) of this country has really followed me all my life. Brought up on the fringes of Waitakere Ranges I always loved the ngahere but never appreciated the incredible properties these plants have. During my studies at Wellpark while we did do some training on Rongoa Rākau our focus was more on Western herbs with some Chinese & Ayurvedic herb modules for good measure.

Once we had moved to Tauranga however I found myself working with a wonderful team of Medical Herbalists, among them was a very wise woman called Lyndel who just happened to be the wife of Rob McGowan (Pa Ropata). Many of you reading this will be familiar with Pa and know what a Taonga (treasure) he is for his tireless work on restoring and educating people around Rongoā medicine. I was lucky enough to spend time with Pa and to do his courses over our time in Tauranga, and it was here that I came up with the concept of ŌKU.

In Te Reo ŌKU is a possessive noun meaning 'ours'. I use it as a way to describe the rākau as being a collective taonga (treasure) of the ngahere (forests) for all of us to benefit from. The plants that grow here hold so many wonderful healing properties.  When I first started developing ŌKU I looked at how little these herbs were being used in products found on the market, almost all of them without exception were using herbs that were not native to this whenua, and yet there was this rich traditional medicinal use of them in Maoridom showing us how beneficial these rākau are. I set out to change this.

It was during this time that I really started to use the natives in clinical practice. A special mention here to Phil Rasmussen who formed the company Phytomed and went on to form KiwiHerb for producing an amazing Native Range of Tinctures enabling Medical Herbalists like myself to have access to these herbs in a clinical setting. It was here when i began to see firsthand the benefits that the natives were offering to my clients with a wide range of conditions. From the use of kawakawa helping with antibiotic resistant cases of boils, managing gout, reducing blood pressure to its remarkable healing qualities for eczema are but a few experiences I had with it. Then we had Houhere’s wonderful soothing and settling benefits for digestive complaints to the remarkable actions Kumarahou was having with respiratory symptoms and conditions. A lot of this experience helped ferment the 1st batch of ideas which led into 18mths of R & D developing a wide range of formulas using over 20 different native rākau. It became obvious very soon though that if I wanted to do this project, to be able to sell these products commercially we needed to work out how we were going to access supply.

Pa taught me so many things but one of the key things he would often talk about was around the importance of tikanga, honouring tradition and doing things the right way. Harvesting the Rongoā is one of those things that were very important, so right from the get go it was decided that ŌKU was going to do this correctly. We also needed to make sure that we were returning back to the whenua and not just taking from it. So with the input of Pa, he helped us plan out one of the very first projects we undertook - before we had even sold our very first product - this was to plant over 2,000 rākau made up of all the key species I had used in the first ŌKU formulas. This was a very special piece of whenua with some very special rākau held within it.

This was just the beginning though and it has been a long hīkoi (walk, journey) that is still continuing today around making sure we are still doing things the right way, still giving back and still planting. We have a policy we instigated years ago that with every product sold we contribute a portion back into trusts that actively plants or protects our native ngahere, or into our own planting projects that we are still actively involved in. Helen & I alone have planted well over 1,000 plants over the last year.

So fast forward to 2021. After more than 10 years of being back on dialysis I received my third kidney transplant in Feb 2019 and it’s a goodie. ŌKU has now been trading for 10 years, Helen and I still form the backbone and we are super excited to see all the incredible new products from companies that are beginning to tap into our incredible natives. We can still remember in the early days doing the Farmer’s Markets in Tauranga & Mt Maunganui and maybe 1 in 10 people knew what Kawakawa was and 90% of those people were Maori. Things have come a long way, still a long way to go for these rākau to get the recognition they deserve though.

Some of those formulas I had R & D’d all those years ago have managed to see the light of day (if only I had released my balm products back when we first started :) although so many of them are still waiting for their moment to shine.  Lots of fun and adventures ahead as we continue on down this path, let’s see where it take us…….

Ko te pae tawhiti whāia kia tata, ko te pae tata whakamaua kia tina!

Seek the distant horizons until they become closer, grasp onto those horizons close to you. There is your destiny.