Welcome
Welcome to the website of John Hamwee, Acupuncturist, Author and Zero Balancer, working in the Cotswolds.
News
Introducing "The Next Stage" - an eight-session online course for acupuncturists who have been in practice for a few years and are comfortable in their work, but who are looking for a coherent approach to the next stage of their professional development.
When
There will be four weekly sessions starting on Wednesday, September 13th, 2023. Then, to allow time to digest what has been done, there will be a break of one week, so no session on 11th October. Then four more sessions weekly until 8th November.
All sessions will be from 7.30 pm to 9.00 pm.
Cost
Payment will be in two tranches - £80 will be payable before the course starts and will cover the first two sessions. Any participant who does not want to continue with the course beyond those sessions will owe no further payment. The second tranche of £240 will cover the remaining six sessions.
Further details
My clinical background
In my early forties I went to an acupuncturist for a minor ailment, and what happened was that my life-long asthma went away - and has never come back. I asked the practitioner if this was some sort of co-incidence or error. 'No,' she replied, 'with this system of medicine, if I get the treatment right then all sorts of complaints will clear up - even those you didn't tell me about. Because the treatment will affect the whole system, and return it to health.'
She could not have said anything more calculated to catch my attention, for at that time I was a senior lecturer in Systems at the Open University and I had used exactly this kind of notion to solve problems in organisations. But it had never occurred to me that it could be used to treat the human body. So, like the academic I was, I set out to research her claim and found that Chinese Medicine had a theory of health - what it is, how it can be supported and amplified, and how it can be restored if it is lost. To my great fascination, this contrasted with out normal view of medicine, which has a focus on disease; we find out what is wrong and then set out to remove it by drugs or surgery.
That was over thirty years ago and I have been in full time practice ever since. And although I have treated many, many people for an extraordinarily wide range of conditions, and although I have taught acupuncturists and written books explaining how it all works, still, practically every day I am astonished at the power and effect of those hair-thin needles. Over two thousand years of clinical experience says that they can bring the body back to health, and I know it is true.
After a few years as an acupuncturist I came across Zero Balancing, a kind of very, very gentle osteopathy, and I qualified both as a practitioner and as a teacher. I wrote a book about it too - see the books page on this site. I use it mainly for people with muscular skeletal problems or for those who are averse to needles.