CCPR: your three-in-one route to rude health!

Date Published: 31-Jan-2013

The world can live quite happily without another annoying acronym, but CCPR has now become a way of life to me. When dealing with something as unpredictable, individual and vital as my health, I’ve found the best results come from a blend of Conventional and Complementary medicines, alongside Personal Responsibility.

CCPR evolved as the result of my efforts over the last few years to cure the inflammation in my knee while trying to understand what was causing explosive bowel movements and pain in my abdomen.

Conventional medicine started off magnificently when an MRI scan identified a torn meniscus in my knee. Off to the hospital for a quick arthroscopy, back home that night and eight weeks later I was walking without pain.

Full marks to conventional medicine. For years, each time I’d taken a step, the torn meniscus had trapped itself inside the moving parts of my knee. More debilitating than the sharp pain was the way it sapped my confidence. When each step forward hurts, life seems such a struggle.

However, after an ultrasound scan and two colonoscopies, all conventional medicine had come up with vis à vis my gut was that I have IBS, which is conventional medicine’s way of saying “we don’t really have a clue”!

Repeatedly I was told by doctors to eat more roughage and drink more water, but as I explained at the clinic, I eat vast quantities of fresh fruit and vegetables and am accompanied all my waking hours by a glass of water, that is drained and refilled regularly. I also love walking and exercising, so I just didn’t fit their IBS model.

Deaf to my protestations, they handed me yet another box of Fybogel sachets and sent me on my way.

Unsatisfied and unwell, I went to see the very excellent James O’Sullivan of Active Health at the Smiling Body Clinic. Alongside his colleague Eunice, James is a gem of a man. A calming wise soul and an incredibly skilled practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a session with James is a happy blend of mental and physical therapy, after which you leave feeling optimistic and on the mend.

I first encountered him years ago when my back was in spasm. He insisted I told him about my dreams, listened attentively, and then cured me with a single session of Tuina, Chinese Medical Acupressure.

Having studied Chinese herbs, Acupuncture, Tuina, Qi Gong, and Tai Qi under the legendary Hung Shui Chen, James gained extensive clinical experience whilst studying at many Chinese teaching hospitals, including the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.

More than anybody, James inspired CCPR, always insisting that both conventional and complementary medicines were essential ingredients of healthy living, while his own philosophy states: “Everybody has the right to better health, movement, freedom, and well-being and each one of us has the ability to learn and practice the techniques necessary to sustain this aspiration.”

After each session of acupuncture, my knee improved, and his advice to visualise my inflamed gut cooling down really helped. I’d just lie in bed for 10 minutes at each end of the day, concentrating on my Qi, my life force, whizzing around my body, from top to toe, and then I’d visualise my hot angry gut cooling down, easing, calming, and yes, it worked. Within minutes I felt the pain ease.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.