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About
I qualified in medicine at the University of Manchester in 1972. it was a time when new ideas were streaming into Europe: from the humanistic potential movement in California - gestalt groups, bioenergetics. psychosynthesis - and from the East - yoga, meditation and oriental medicine. swept in this I began to train in humanistic methods, Transendental Meditation and alternative medicine. After training at the Homeopathic Hospitals in Glasgow and London, I became a Member of the Faculty of Homoeopathy in 1975. Homeopathy took me into Anthroposophical Medicine, and I explored it during the three year I spent in the Camphill Aberdeen Community, living and working with children who had special needs. Rudolf Steiner's work had a huge influence on my approach to holistic medicine. at about the time I left Camphill I met a great healer whose name was Major Bruce Macmanaway. Working with him and his family in their centre in Fife I realised for the first time the extraordinary power of touch. In the late 1970s I spent some time in Holland looking into Anthroposophical family practice there, and found that it was quite possible to work creatively and effectively with natural medicine and artistic therapies inside mainstream medicine. This confirmed my decision to train as a Family Doctor. Though my ideas (and then long-haired appearance) were unconventional, I enjoyed my time retraining in Emergency Medicine, Obs and Gynae and Paediatrics, largely because my fellow trainees were psychologically minded, and our weekly learning groups reminded me of my time in humanistic psychotherapy groups. Plus, I was lucky enough to be working with an extraordinary, visionary GP, in whose practice I was trainee (a kind of apprentice Family Doctor). Dr John English was an accomplished homeopath and a keen acupuncturist who embraced autogenic training, healing and counselling, long before it was the fashion for GPs to talk about 'integration'. And so I became a Family Doctor (a GP) in one of the first NHS practices to bring conventional and complementary practitioners together. (In fact the work of the osteopath who worked there, so impressed me that I eventually trained in that approach). It was after becoming a partner in John's practice near Uxbridge in Middlesex that I met the radical medical educator Dr Patrick Pietroni and joined his ongoing doctor's professional development group. Patrick was my mentor for many years and I learned a huge amount from him: through him I became a Lecturer in the Department of General Practice at St Marys Paddington and a GP trainer. By 1988 I was a Registered Osteopath, had left Uxbridge and joined the founding team at the ground-breaking Marylebone Health Centre in Central London as Senior Research Fellow, and went on to direct the Complementary Therapies Unit there. Our work together led us into research and teaching about the integration of complementary medicine and psychotherapy into mainstream primary healthcare. This triggered our developing a Postgraduate degree course exploring the way health and social care professionals work together, which became the seed that grew into the School of Integrated Health at the University of Westminster. SIH where I am Clinical Director is the home of the UK's largest University Department of Complementary Therapies. I am also the current Chairman of the British Holistic Medical Association and I also chair the Advisory Group for the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health. |