I was born in Dublin in 1959 and grew up in a cramped and quite damp terraced house without central heating. I was a quite sickly child and missed a lot of school due to illness. Sinus problems were at the heart of many of my bouts of ill health.

My father started his own business when I was 11 and this did well, leading to us being able to improve our living conditions and ultimately to move to a larger and more comfortable house. This led to greatly improved health and much better school attendance.

After getting a decent Leaving Certificate I went on to study Science at UCD and qualified in Computer Science. After starting as a programmer I moved through the ranks and ended up managing business projects locally and overseas. My work was quite stressful and despite my apparent success I never really enjoyed it or felt it was making much of a difference to the world.

In 2007 I became quite ill. I had every test going, saw Doctors and Specialists, and spent a lot of time and money trying to get better, to no avail. Nobody really appeared to know what was wrong with me. With a family to support I had to keep going, so despite feeling poorly most days I had to go to work.

While on the way to catch my train home one day  I decided to go into a Chinese Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine walk-in practice on Dublin’s Henry Street. The therapist fairly quickly assessed that I was very run down and that my immune system was weak due to the toll of stress over many years.

He prescribed a number of Acupuncture sessions and put me on 3 different Chinese Herbal medicine tonics. The herbs were in small capsule format and I had to take 30 of each of these per day! It all sounded a bit weird but I went along with it as nothing else had worked and I really had nothing to lose.

Over a period of about 4 months things improved dramatically and I could feel myself getting stronger and life getting easier. I woke up feeling better every day and I stopped getting the recurrent colds and infections that were plaguing me. I was a complete convert to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)!

A few years later I came into some money. My first instinct was to use it to treat myself or my family but as I thought about it more I realised that I could do better than that. As fate would have it, I picked up a magazine from health food store in Dublin and a major international college were promoting an open evening for their courses, which included Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine.

I attended the open evening at the College of Naturopathic Medicine (CNM) and, while quite intimated at the thought of a 4 year program with lots of weekend having to be forsaken for classes and clinics, I signed up. Four years later I was qualified and ready to embark on a new career helping others to heal and attain wellness through the wonders of TCM.