Positive Health Online

Living Well in Old Age

by Vicki McKenna

My father in law is now 87 and rapidly ageing. A month ago he could walk around town; two weeks ago he had a fall and since then has weakened and can hardly walk around his flat. Th...

Making Friends with Fear

by Vicki McKenna

Daoism encourages us to admit and to be honest about fear - true Daoists still retain their basic innate fear and see it as an opportunity...

Medicinal Mushrooms - Ancient Medicine in Modern Times

by James Zhou

Although mushrooms have been used in Chinese herbal medicine for thousands of years, their medicinal properties and health benefits have now been proved through clinical studies, p...

Menopause - A Chinese Approach

by Vicki McKenna

The author has been practising acupuncture since she qualified with The College of Traditional Chinese Acupuncture in 1984 and is a founding member of the Scottish Post Polio Netwo...

Menopause: Gateway to Better Health

by Vivienne Outram

The Chinese do not have a name for the Menopause. Interestingly, the ending of periods is not considered an illness in China, but instead a natural and healthy transition from one p...

Nutrition the Daoist Way

by Vicki McKenna

We are constantly bombarded with dietary advice including a vast array of often ‘faddy’ diets that guarantee weight loss, good health, an increase in energy and everlasting happines...

Pelvis to Earth Alignment

by Alexander Barrie

It is a great privilege that we Homo-sapiens have been endowed with an Osseous Foundation by the ‘Powers That Be’ in that the bony frame, the skeleton, has been given a Base (pelvis...

Seasonal Influences of Five Element Chinese Medicine

by Mike Eatough

Using a lyrical style of writing, sometimes rather like a prose poem, acupuncturist Mike Eatough describes the influence of the seasons in Five Element Chinese Medicine, a model de...

Self-Centred Or Earth-Centred?

by Vicki McKenna

The current state of the world reveals war, the climate crisis, the threatened extinction of one million animals and plants, refugees desperately seeking safe asylum, extreme pover...

Show Me Your Tongue

by Angela Hicks

This column focuses on the importance of the tongue as a diagnostic tool for signs of disease even before symptoms manifest. It is one of the few places where Chinese Medicine prac...

STAYING SUPPLE – Letting Go of Extreme Opinions

by Vicki McKenna

Several months into the first year of the Covid pandemic I was getting out of my car when a smartly dressed stranger came up to me asking for directions to a local street. Having p...

Stop Constantly Thinking and Start Consciously Living

by Vicki McKenna

Western philosophy for thousands of years has developed the belief that thinking is the foundation of existence - “I think therefore I am” according to Descartes. Thinking is certai...

The Absence of Government Regulation of Acupuncturists and Chinese Medicine Practitioners - Impacts on the Clinical Relationship.

by Bernadette Ward

This article reports on a recent study conducted by  Middlesex University, London.  It was based on unstructured interviews with a cohort of both patients and practitioners in bot...

The Chinese Energetic Method: Conscious Healing, Conscious Living

by Accem Scott, ND with co-writer Mimi Sandeen

The Chinese Energetic Method (CEM) is a form of energetic medicine that has developed from several concepts and approaches, which were originally brought together by Dr Kam Yuen in...

The Chinese View of the Elements - How their Character and Qualities Support and Maintain One Another

by Alexander Barrie

“The following essay represents a comprehensive study of the Foundation Elements mainly from the Chinese metaphysical viewpoint – its contents will require a certain amount of stud...

The Daoist Way of Life and Death

by Vicki McKenna

This time the author, an acupuncturist, draws on the Dao method when working with patients who are dying or need support coping with dying loved ones. She cites a couple of persona...

The Discomforts of Life

by Vicki McKenna

The author uses the example of her daughter having broken her leg three weeks before her wedding to explain the Daoist principles of healing.

The First Chinese Medicine Degree Programme Outside China

by Henry Lee

The watershed for complementary medicine/therapies (CMT) was in 1993 when the British Medical Association acknowledged that CMT's rise in popularity was not due to a "passing fashi...

The Holistic Treatment of an Ageing Population with Traditional Chinese Medicine

by Bernadette Ward

Bernadette Ward, Director of The Acupuncture Foundation in Ireland, describes the basic tenets of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and how TCM can be used effectively to combat t...

The Spirits of Chinese Medicine and Depression

by Tracey Goulding

According to the author, the goal of conventional medicine is to cure disease, but because it has a clear target to focus on, it sometimes overlooks the bigger picture: mainly the...