Stephen's Philosophy of Working
My philosophy in work is to help people to work towards achieving their potential, physically, emotionally and in any other way that I can.
For emotional issues I like to work with the past to make the future better.
However, I prefer to work in a gentle way which allows people to work at their own pace. I use a combination of gentle counselling, specific needling and sometimes EFT to get to the root of any emotional difficulties.
On a physical level, my aim is to help people to be as healthy as they can be with minimum intervention.
I believe that the body has a huge ability to heal and change. I continue to be amazed by small miracles where just one or two treatments completely eradicate even long-term problems, such as back pain and fertility issues.
Having said that, some conditions are about management.
For example, rheumatoid arthritis isn’t going to go away, but acupuncture does help with with keeping it under control which reduces the reliance on drugs and their possible side-effects.
In some cases where there is chronic pain and drugs are not really helping, I offer my patients battlefield acupuncture. This is not traditional Chinese medicine, as such, but uses a standard protocol using ear acupuncture points and only takes 15 minutes to do.
Disease can be with us for many different reasons.
Sometimes disease is there to teach us something. Sometimes it’s there just to slow us down. But I shy away from the idea that all disease is generated from within because there are many external factors to take into account. I like to explore that with the patient so that we can either address the lesson, or change the external factors (including lifestyle). It’s not without reason that a large part of my training was learning to deal with external pathogenic factors.
I am happy for people to come and “be fixed”, but really what I aim for is that people be proactive and take responsibility for their own health with me assisting them in the process.
I like to work closely with people to find the root causes of their problems.
I think that it’s important to explain the process of what I’m trying to achieve through treatment. Once people understand where the root cause of the problems lie, it can help them to avoid that particular pitfall in the future – particularly with some (often simple) lifestyle choices.
By lifestyle, I mean diet, work habits, exercise and all the other ways we habitually operate in our daily lives. But where changes are needed or desirable, I like to work with people to make changes that they can actually achieve.
For example, to me there is no point in asking someone to utterly change what they eat. For most people this is just not possible or easily attainable and this can be very disempowering when people find themselves drifting from the diet. Instead, I prefer to find small changes which are do-able and then over time introduce further changes if necessary.
My over-riding concern is that I work with people facilitating their healing and their journey, but they are also intimately involved in the process.