My name is Christopher Scipio. I am a Registered Herbalist (RH, AHG), Holistic Viral Specialist, and the most experienced practitioner in the holistic management of herpes. I have been supporting people living with herpes through holistic education, personalised protocols, and ongoing coaching for 23 years. I have lived and thrived with herpes personally for 36 years.

I was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and I come from ten generations of African-Caribbean herbalists and bush doctors. My grandmother was an herbalist and spiritual healer — quite a character. She wore a white turban and used a crystal ball. She put herself and others into trances and communicated with the spirit world. She would go into the rain forests of Trinidad to wildcraft plants for her bush baths, teas and medicines, and everything she made she made in her kitchen or in the backyard. Some of my earliest and most powerful memories are of watching sick people who the doctors had sent away to die get healed by her.

My family immigrated to Canada when I was a boy. We lived in the ghettoes of Toronto. My mother struggled to raise four of us on a waitress’ salary, but she was strong and resilient and strict, and she kept us insulated from most of the horrors of poverty through the church. I learned about love in the church — not the love you see on TV and in the movies, but a bigger love, a deeper love. That understanding has stayed with me through everything.

I contracted herpes in my mid-twenties, in the context of a monogamous relationship. The doctors told me there was nothing they could do, that I would have this for life, and that my sex life would never be the same. Then they sent me home. I couldn’t discuss it with anyone in my conservative West Indian family, even though we were otherwise close. I had no one to talk to. Strange, fatalistic fantasies went through my mind all day long, day after day. I felt dirty in a way I had never experienced before. I felt cursed.

And this was me — from a family of ten generations of herbalists. I had that lineage in my blood, and I was still completely lost.

I spent years and money I didn’t have trying everything I could find — lysine, essential oils, herbal capsules, topical remedies, everything hyped by internet influencers — and none of it worked. At the height of my desperation I tried Valtrex. It gave me intense migraine headaches from the first pill and I was unable to finish the bottle. I felt like I was completely lost in the wilderness, and everything I was reading seemed to contradict itself all the time.

What changed everything for me was watching people use holistic practices to manage serious health conditions. I had friends who were facing difficult prognoses, yet they were finding real improvements in their quality of life through diet, meditation, targeted supplements, and by fundamentally changing their relationship with their bodies. If that kind of deep commitment to holistic healing could do so much for them, I knew it could help me manage a virus that, for the vast majority of people who carry it, is not a serious medical condition — but that can take your peace, your confidence, and your sense of self if you let it.

I threw away my Zovirax cream. I threw away my lysine. I turned to my memory of my grandmother’s work with herbs and I began developing my own holistic protocol. It took me a year and a half, but I was able to stop my own recurring outbreaks by changing my diet, meditating, taking targeted supplements, and making simple herbal formulas. These helped greatly, but I think the most important thing I did was start making peace with the virus itself — I stopped being at war with my own body and started to reject the notion that I was dirtied or compromised by having herpes.

My protocol is not a cure — there is no natural cure or pharmaceutical cure for herpes. What it is, is a structured, holistic way of managing herpes that addresses the whole person: immune-supportive habits, diet and lifestyle fundamentals, stress regulation, safer-sex practices, guidance around communication and stigma, and the deep emotional and spiritual work that most approaches to herpes never touch.

I have made two trips to China to deepen my knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine and have been working with Chinese herbs for 32 years, incorporating them into my practice alongside the Caribbean and Western herbal traditions I grew up with. The most important thing my grandmother taught me is that in healing, everything is part of the equation — who the healer is, how the remedies are made, where the materials come from. I already live in an impersonal, automated, mass-produced culture, and my approach to herbal medicine will not be that. I don’t believe in impersonal medicine. I don’t believe in gimmicks or miracle cures or shortcuts. I don’t get my knowledge from second or third hand sources — I get to experience every day what works and doesn’t work for people managing their herpes holistically. Some people may believe their grandparents were wrong. I am not one of them.

In 2006 I wrote Making Peace With Herpes because nothing like it existed — no book that addressed the whole person, body, mind, spirit, sexuality, self-worth, not just the virus. It was the first holistic herpes guide ever written. I wrote it to help myself as much as anyone else, and it became the foundation of everything I do in my practice.

The 20th Anniversary Edition is a complete rewrite. My understanding of healing has deepened considerably since 2006, and the world has not gotten any more honest about this virus. Twenty more years of clinical experience are in this edition — what works, what doesn’t, and what I know to be true after sitting with thousands of people in the hardest moments of their lives.

I currently divide my time between Canada and the Caribbean, working with Caribbean botanicals — sourcing plants and refining formulas — alongside my clinical practice with Western, Chinese and Amazonian herbs to help people from around the world. 

I am at peace with the virus and the virus is at peace with me. I am not ashamed of or at war with any part of my body. I have been living and thriving with herpes for thirty-six years, and that peace — and the path I took to get there — is what my work is about.