It’s hard to know where to start with Mary’s* story but I guess the beginning is as good as any. I started treating Mary in the autumn of last year. To say that Mary was a fan of acupuncture would be a lie, in fact nothing could have been further from the truth. She only attended me because her daughter badgered her into it. She made no bones about not really wanting to be there and after going through her medical history, it’s safe to say, there was a pair of us in it.

Mary is in her 60s and when I first met her she was extremely overweight. She was a chronic asthmatic and couldn’t get a full sentence out in one breath. Her heart was under a lot of pressure because of the asthma, and her weight, and because of that she had oedema (fluid retention causing swelling). She had suffered a couple of minor strokes in previous years and was on a list of medication longer than my arm. On that first day I asked her what she wanted from treatment and I’ll always remember her answer, “I want my life back”.

There are times when you are presented with a patient that you really wonder if you will be able to help them at all. In Mary’s case I knew that the scheduling of treatment was going to be vital to any sort of success. It’s a tough call to tell a patient that they need treatment twice a week for the foreseeable future when they hate acupuncture but I was straight up about this being paramount if we were going to succeed. We also discussed Mary’s weight and we agreed that she would decide how she tackled it and I would support her.

By Christmas we were making inroads and then Mary suffered a severe setback after a hospital procedure. All our good work unravelled. Mary told one of her doctor’s that she had been going for acupuncture and that she had found it really helpful. The doctor dismissed it as codswallop. Mary changed doctor and continued with acupuncture! She started to lose weight. Her new doctor supported her acupuncture treatment and Mary continued to improve.

Mary now attends me for maintenance treatment. She has lost over 4 stone in weight, she is off travelling (her greatest love) at every opportunity, she walks everywhere and her lung capacity is better than it has been in years. I can still remember the day she left me a voicemail and said, “listen to this…”, and there followed 30 seconds of pure silence before a gleeful laugh and her saying, “I’m not wheezing anymore!” Mary still hates acupuncture but as she recently said to me, “Medication alone wouldn’t have brought me to where I am now. I still hate the needles but I know that they work and do me good so I’ll never stop coming. I don’t think I’d be alive today if it wasn’t for the acupuncture. I firmly believe that.”

*Not the patient’s real name