Olivia Shaw Acupuncture and Chinese medicine, London and Surrey

05/12/2024

A great piece on ITV Central about the importance of seeing a well trained acupuncturist who has completed over 3000 hours of training. Courses in the UK which are accredited by the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board involve a minimum 3,600 hours training, of which a minimum of 400 hours must be spent in a clinical setting. Well done to my colleagues at the British Acupuncture Council for raising awareness of this issue.

https://www.itv.com/news/central/2024-12-04/acupuncturists-warn-of-a-rise-in-short-courses-putting-patients-at-risk?fbclid=IwY2xjawG-bvBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbamJOBunocr5Dph5BUwRyZv6RJ5RdHgTVqEuAZ1vOejTW218ja_wT2x1w_aem_DG7VMx9mRhZzajOyb3Hfxg

Warwick acupuncturist Rachel Genner is urging people to check a practitioner's qualifications before agreeing to treatment after a painful experience. | ITV News Central

25/12/2023

Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy 2024 to everyone

10/01/2023

Alex Jacobs, President of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine will be presenting an online talk on 24 January, "Supercharge your Health with Food and Herbs in the Spring".

The ancient Chinese mapped out the effects of the seasons on the human body in minute detail and in this talk you will learn how to utilise food and herbs to supercharge your own health with delicious recipes.

The talk is part of the Herbal Alliance's public webinar series.

Join Herbal Alliance for the next public webinar: Supercharge your Health with Food and Herbs in the Spring, according to Chinese Medicine.

23/12/2022

Wishing everyone a joyful and restful Christmas and a very happy 2023. With love from Olivia.

07/12/2022

I have just completed the online component of my Emergency First Aid at Work refresher Course and have my face to face course on Friday. We have to renew our skills every three years. I highly recommend it and if you have never done a first aid course, make it a resolution for the new year and sign up! We may not have the presence of mind to remember everything in an emergency situation, but those skills could save a life.

29/11/2022

Join Herbal Alliance for a new and exciting series of public webinars about health, herbal medicine and wellbeing.

29/11/2022

The Herbal Alliance is running an interesting series of public webinars. The next one is on Tuesday 6 December from 6.30-7.30pm (GMT) on "Inflammation, the source of chronic disease: how to treat it with herbs and natural healing". Tickets are £8.50. The Herbal Alliance is a community of herbal organisations and herbalists with a shared aim of promoting and supporting herbal medicine and herbalists.

Join Herbal Alliance for a new and exciting series of public webinars about health, herbal medicine and wellbeing.

29/11/2022

This is interesting. A Bill has been introduced into Parliament which would give employees the right to take paid time off work to attend fertility appointments. Some employers already have schemes in place, but this would enshrine that right in legislation. We will have to see how it progresses.

If passed into law, the Bill would give employees a statutory right to take time off work to attend fertility treatment clinic appointments.

23/06/2022

For all the pregnant women out there, here is some very sound advice from Sara Wickham on induction of labour. She outlines five questions to ask if you are offered an induction and what you can learn from the answers you are given.

https://www.sarawickham.com/articles-2/five-questions-to-ask-if-youre-offered-induction-of-labour/

12/05/2022

Beautifully articulated! By switching our focus we don't need to deny the less comfortable aspects of our lives, but we can gaze at something else.

The tendency for most of us each day is to focus on life’s problems. More often than not, we find ourselves lamenting the prickly patch of our long-term relationship rather than stopping to appreciate its strengths; the moments of incredible boredom at work seem to outweigh the interesting aspects. We’re wired with what’s called negativity bias — an evolutionary instinct to look out for threats so that we can escape them unharmed.

But we can learn to work with negativity bias. That doesn’t mean that I think that we can all just flip the gratitude switch on. For better or worse, that’s not how life works — and in fact, gratitude is definitely not automatic for me. To this day, even speaking as someone who encourages the practice, I have found myself thinking at times that gratitude can seem like a glorified form of denial, a way of papering over problems by posting inspirational quotes to social media, by labeling everything in life “a blessing.”

But each time that dismissive instinct kicks in, I encourage myself to remember that being grateful doesn’t mean I have to keep a gratitude jar that counts my blessings. It just means I can reset my thoughts, just like in meditation, and choose instead to gently settle my attention on something positive. We don’t erase the pain — it’s still there — but we can broaden our perspective by opening to our pain and also opening to things other than the suffering we feel.

Image by The New Happy

05/05/2022

Chinese herbs being used in Hong Kong as part of strategy for dealing with Covid

17/03/2022

A small, but very significant, change. https://inews.co.uk/news/chronic-uti-infections-nhs-finally-recognises-debilitating-condition-exists-campaign-1512368

'It seems like such a tiny thing, but it's made such a difference,' campaigners say