While taking a few days of rest in South Wales, I chanced upon a lovely gem of a garden up the road from where I'm staying. Cowbridge Physic Garden sits in the centre of Cowbridge, a pretty market town in the Vale of Glamorgan.

I've always been interested in medicinal plants, but now my interest is professional because I recently started a three-year Chinese herbal medicine programme with White Crane Academy. It's a rigorous course and turns out competent, confident Chinese herbal medicine practitioners. It's early days for me as I start learning 300+ individual herbs from the materia medica (body of collected knowledge) of Chinese herbal medicine. But I know enough to recognise the amazing therapeutic value of the dandelion (Latin name: taraxacum mongolicum; Chinese name: Pu Gong Ying). This humble plant helps reduce swellings and abscesses in the interior (e.g. tonsillitis and mastitis) and the exterior (e.g. acne and eczema). Fabulous!

A lady rang me yesterday to say that she has inoperable breast cancer and asked if acupuncture can help. I said that with the disease at such a late stage, acupuncture can certainly help but it won't be a cure.

I explained that I always recommend having acupuncture to help minimise the side effects of chemotherapy and other conventional therapy, such as nausea, vomiting, fatigue, pain, hot flushes, night sweats, and pain and numbness in the arms and legs. The nasty side effects make it hard for  many patients to continue with their therapy, and having acupuncture helps ensure they finish their course of conventional treatment.

It turns out that this lady was offered chemotherapy last year but she refused because she was afraid of the side effects. I wish she had rang me when she was first diagnosed.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs have been in the news in the UK lately, because of the shortage of some HRT products, particularly oestrogen. About one million women in the UK use HRT to cope with menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes, night sweats, insomnia, decreased libido, anxiety and poor concentration.

The good news is that Chinese medicine offers a safe and effective alternative to HRT. Systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials (which are the strongest types of research evidence) found that acupuncture is at least as effective as, and sometimes superior to, hormonal drug treatment. 

In my clinic I regularly give acupuncture treatment to women who need help for menopausal symptoms. About 30-70% of women in Western countries will experience vasomotor symptoms (related to constriction or dilatation of blood vessels) like hot flushes or night sweats. In extreme cases they might have been experiencing these for decades. The median duration for vasomotor symptoms is about four years, but in 10% of women, they last longer than 12 years. 

I see myself as walking proof of how Chinese medicine can help those transitioning through menopause, one of millions of women around the world. I manage the symptoms with regular acupuncture and Chinese medicine herbs, along with healthy food choices, regular exercise and stress reduction. And maybe more importantly, it's about appreciating this next stage in my life. Menopause doesn't have to be such a scary word. I'm older and wiser, and that brings with it confidence and serenity. 

Of course I am mindful that I am fortunate to enjoy good health. To some degree it's about luck (i.e. genetics), but there's a lot that middle-aged women can do to help ourselves.

Photo credit: yochim from Free Images

Being an acupuncturist isn't always about helping people in pain or supporting their medical condition. To my delight, it's also often about helping couples get pregnant, and then later down the line helping them have a safe delivery. 

My lovely patient (let's call her Joy) came to me in February this year because she had a recent miscarriage and needed support going through another IVF cycle. She was naturally anxious about getting pregnant again and wanted to do as much as possible to prevent another miscarriage.

I saw her in clinic from February to April, at first nourishing her body and calming the mind in preparation for IVF. Then after she became pregnant, the treatment was about "holding" the foetus to prevent miscarriage.

For the past few weeks, she returned to clinic for help preparing her body for labour. This past week, the treatment changed yet again, this time to encourage the baby to "descend" now that she is approaching the 40-week mark.

As I go through my patient notes at the end of the week, I am struck once again by the wonderful gift of Chinese medicine to help support women through their fertility journey and with their pregnancy, done in a safe and non-pharmaceutical manner. 

Last September my son moved out to be nearer his college. And that is how we found ourselves with not one but two spare rooms (we were always lucky enough to have a guest room/office space). It made sense to convert one room into a treatment room. Slowly, over the course of the winter months, we were able to empty out one room, rearranged furniture and books around the flat, and got a family friend to paint the room and strip away the old carpet.

We then found a lovely small company called Fine Finish Flooring to come and replace the old wooden floor. Lewis Hajjitofis and his team came and sorted us out. (Thank you for doing such a brilliant job!)

Then there was the not-small matter of regulatory requirements. Informing my professional body, the British Acupuncture Council, of this new practice location. Informing Barnet council that I now have a new treatment room. Arranging for insurance cover.

And finally, my new treatment space is ready. It is Covid-secure. It is my new happy place. I hope you find it a calm and peaceful space for healing and relaxing.

One of the reasons I love my job is the sheer variety of conditions that I see. And these past few weeks, I've been working with a patient with Parkinson's disease (PD).

This progressive neurological disease - characterised by tremor, muscle rigidity, slowness of movement, and impaired balance and co-ordination (think about Muhammad Ali's last public appearances) - has no cure. Medications used to control the symptoms (dopaminergic drugs that mimic the action of dopamine) stop working after a while and have severe long-term effects on the nervous system such as nausea, confusion and hallucinations.

Enter scalp acupuncture, which I learned at the Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine when I was doing my hospital placement in 2014. Up to that point, I had been learning traditional acupuncture, whose origins can be traced back to ancient China more than 2,500 years ago. Scalp acupuncture is a relatively new kid on the block, developed in China in the 1950s. It integrates traditional Chinese needling methods with Western medical knowledge of the areas on the scalp that correspond with the central nervous system's functions (such as motor activity, sensory input, vision, speech, hearing and balance).*

It just so happened that in that part of northern China where Heilongjiang is located, the incidence of strokes is the highest in China. The explanation I heard over and over was this was due to the high rates of smoking and alcohol consumption, and the high-fat diet (think foods that are mostly fried). As a result of the high number of stroke patients, the Chinese medicine hospitals became very good at rehabilitating post-stroke patients. Doctors used a combination of Western medicine drugs, Chinese medicine herbs, physical therapy, Chinese medical massage, body acupuncture, and scalp acupuncture.

(As an aside, a 2010 documentary called 9,000 Needles by an American filmmaker, Doug Dearth, chronicles his brother Devin's journey after Devin suffered a massive stroke. When he couldn't get the care he needed in the US, he travelled to a hospital in Tianjin in China, where he is treated with acupuncture.) 

There is evidence that scalp acupuncture is effective for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, although larger-scale trials are needed. However, I can say that after five acupuncture sessions, my PD patient shows better movement, less tremor, and improved energy levels and mood. PD is a cruel degenerative disease, but I believe that with scalp and body acupuncture, the quality of life of someone with PD can be greatly enhanced.


* Hao, J.J. and Hao, L.L. (2011) Chinese scalp acupuncture. Boulder, Colorado: Blue Poppy Press.

If you've always wanted to know a little bit more about how Chinese medicine came about, I invite you to watch this video of a talk that I recently gave to members of  the University of Third Age in Crouch End (north London). The challenge was how to condense 3,000 years into a 50-minute talk!

The talk covers how the ancient Chinese viewed health and disease, starting with China's mythological beginnings and then on to the most important developments throughout various dynasties. Why did the ancient Chinese place such importance on living in harmony with nature? How did the concept of Qi (pronounced "chee") or vital energy come about?  We end with the spread of Chinese medicine around the world in the 20th century.

My friend Kim told me the other day that when she went for a run, her knees started to hurt. We reckoned a lot of it had to do with the amount of sitting that we're doing during this period of lockdown.

This video will show you a simple massage that will bring blood circulating around the knee joints. I often do it after periods of intense tai chi training, after spending hours on my feet, and often with all of my weight on one leg or another. It's lovely to feel the warmth around the knees. Enjoy! 

I don't know about you but I am definitely spending way too much time staring at screens recently. The result is screen fatigue or Zoom fatigue. In this video, I will show you a simple eye massage that you can do at any time. Please note that I do not want you to poke your eye! This massage is meant to stimulate the area around your eyes, which boosts blood circulation and gently stimulates acupuncture points.

​I hope you enjoy this video!

I don't know about you, but my family and I have been in coronavirus lockdown for 25 days (first in self-isolation, then in semi-lockdown along with the rest of the UK) and I am starting to feel a niggly ache in the back. And I am hearing this a lot when I talk to friends and colleagues, who say they have stiffness or pain in joints as a result of sitting a lot.

If we were already, as a society, sitting too much before, then this is certainly the case now as movements are restricted to however many rooms you have in your living space. In the UK, we're allowed to go out once a day for exercise, shopping for essentials, medical appointments, and essential work. Assuming we sleep eight hours a day, that leaves us 14-15 hours a day potentially sitting down a lot!

One solution is to invest in a standing desk. But if you look at amazon, for example, stands desks are neither cheap nor always in stock. Yesterday a friend of mine suggested using your bog standard ironing board as an adjustable desk for a laptop.  

I like to set an alarm so that every hour, I am reminded to get up, stretch and move. Make a cup of tea! Or better yet, offer to make others cups of tea. Everyone knows that a good cuppa is all you need to make it all okay.

In terms of supported exercise, of course you have a plethora of Youtube exercise channels and yoga webinars to choose from.

However, if you fancy doing a more gentle exercise that is good for circulating and generating energy and requires no specialist equipment, do give qi gong a try. Qi gong is a system of energetic and healing exercises from ancient China that integrates principles of relaxation, movement and breathing, especially helpful during these days of self-isolation. My colleagues and I at the School of Tai Chi Chuan London are running free weekly webinars at 6pm (London time) on Tuesdays. No previous experience necessary. 

If you'd like to give qi gong a try, please email me and I will send you a link to these online gatherings.