Combining nutrition with acupuncture – why it became clear that offering nutrition was an essential part of my treatment package, by Sabine Green
NCA acupuncture graduate Sabine Green shares with us how and why she made the decision to return to the NCA and study the MSc in Nutrition Science and Practice.
I first came to the NCA in 2007 to start my training as an acupuncturist. At the time, the NCA was associated with the University of Wales and we were training for a Master degree.
After graduating in 2010, I started my clinic in Stockton on Tees. I found I have a particular interest in fertility and started seeing more and more women who wanted to become pregnant. And by default, I also started to see more and more people who arrived taking a very long list of supplements I knew little about.
At the same time, I was very clear that nutrition had to be an essential part of my treatment package. I initially tried to give patients advice based on Chinese Medicine principles. But two things became apparent quite quickly:
– Before going into the details of whether people need to eat blood nourishing foods or damp clearing foods, I needed to ensure that the foundations were there. I’ve seen women coming to see me who were eating maybe 1 portion of fruits and vegetables every day and hardly any protein. I found myself more and more ‘borrowing’ information from (western) nutrition to give some guidance to my patients. Most of those things, such as ensuring that half of their plate was filled with vegetables, were basic, but they still felt out of my scope of practice.
– Women have come to see me with a long list of supplements. They usually had decided to start using DHEA, maca or inositol after reading blogs or being on forums. They were the same women who were hoping I could help them decide if those supplements were actually worth taking. As I started to do some research about them, I realised quickly that some of those were not always helpful for those women. Others could be detrimental or even dangerous (eg DHEA is actually a prescription-only medicine in the UK!). The information I found was sometimes contradictory too. I ended up wanting to know more to be able to direct those women.
All that, plus the fact that people are much more open to take supplements rather than herbs, stirred me towards doing some further training in nutrition. I started the MSc in Nutrition Science and Practice in 2018. I am now finishing my second year and will be able to start seeing nutrition patients in my own clinic soon.
The next steps will be to start a nutrition clinic alongside my acupuncture clinic. I feel that I need to gain more experience in nutrition first, but the aim is to slowly blend the two together. Telehealth has also developed exponentially with Covid and the lockdown. It has become clear that I can offer a lot to women using that medium and mixing both the nutrition principles and TCM to support women who want to get pregnant.
I have many ideas running through my head that include general guidelines on how to eat to support fertility alongside some acupressure and ear acupuncture for example. This will be some exciting times.
