Susan-Jane Beers is an Irish-born writer with a background in public relations and journalism. Educated in England, she worked in London until 1987 then moved to Asia. While living in Indonesia in the 1990s, she became interested in Indonesian traditional medicine when it solved a chronic ailment she had within days. This led her to embark on ten years of in-depth research into the archipelago's traditional health and beauty treatments; the result is this book. Beers also writes for regional magazines, including Artention, The Peak and B International in Hong Kong and Expat magazine in Singapore.