For details please click on the link below http://www.rareapricotsociety.org/barcelona-2017.html
East of the sun (and West of the moon)
East of the sun (and West of the moon)  “Only when Art is connecting with ordinary feelings or ordinary common sense it becomes most powerful”. Ai Weiwei 艾未未 2014 BBC interview with Alan Yentob. . I got married many moons ago …. yes, it’s been that long!..so long, that it’s usually my […]
Big Bank Hank
Back when I was a teenager one song that still sticks in my mind is Rappers Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang. I particularly remember the line in it that says “ after school, I take a dip in the pool”….. It conjured up images of how great it must be to go to school […]
Help yourself
In Japan, autumn was one of my favourite seasons. I used to take a train up to the mountains to see the colour changes in the trees. It was always different every year as the vibrant colours depend on how hot and humid the summer was. If it was very hot, then there would be […]
Making ends meet (mind the gap)
An attractive thing about oriental medicine, or any art for that matter, is the beauty of creating something from nothing. Oriental medicine could easily be called “the medicine of nothing” and I believe my teacher Edward sensei once referred to it this way. For example, when I touch- needle a point or watch a cone […]
Margaret Thatcher was on to something…
Over the last couple of days I have noticed quite a lot of yellow pollen on my car. This has also coincided with a few extra visits in the clinic from those suffering from hay fever related symptoms. I have treated quite a few people who have a tendency to hay fever They have told […]
squeezing blood out of a stone
Over the Christmas period I was watching and old comedy sketch by Morecambe and Wise from the 1970s which is the one with Andre Previn . After playing the piano really badly Morecomb turns and says to Andre  “ I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”! Anyway, the […]
Out of the bag -plenty of bang for your buck!
For those of you reading this who has visited my clinic, you will be familiar with the smell of the smoke and experience of a good body (and mind) awakening moxa treatment. People who first enter my clinic sometimes comment that they think I may smoke pot between my patients! I had one Dutch fellow […]
Much ado about the art of doing (exercise)
 ( versiĂłn española estará disponible en breve ) It’s very hard to strike a happy medium with exercise. Firstly, you are in effect traumatizing your body and then need to recover. Secondly, you need to make sure that you have enough energy to exercise (to aid the recovery) and finally, why do it in […]
A Word or Two from Zhang Zongjing
Below I have translated the preface to Zhang Zhongjing’s Classic “The Treatise on Cold Damage” compiled around 220AD. I translated it a while back while in Japan during an intense period of study. It’s from Ikeda Sensei’s Japanese translation of the Sho Kan Ron ( Shang Han Lun ) Handbook which I translated with a […]