A Great Blog

2010-06-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

Greetings All,

Fantastic news for the summer!
Opening in August there will be a new Complementary Health Clinic at Pembroke House in Preston (half way between Paignton and Torquay), which is also home to Pembroke "Super-Surgery" GP Practice taking up the first and second floors. We will occupy the Top floor complete with 9 purpose built therapy rooms, reception and comfortable waiting room.
The Ground floor is host to the New Day Lewis Pharmacy which is alongside Tesco Express.

More news for the grand opening coming soon!

TTFN

Interesting Times

2010-05-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

Greeting All!
We have had to make some hard decisions of late. The end of April waived goodbye to both the Torquay and Ashburton clinics, with focus on the Totnes clinic for the time being. Thursday clinic will now be extended to 9pm which has proved extremely popular with workaholics. A second late evening may be on the cards if demand increases.
Our sights for the future are set on a new clinic, as part of a Doctors surgery in the bay area, and the possibility of having a satelite clinic in Exeter. Both of these will not be available until the end of July / early August.
I now host three radio shows on Riviera FM - two of them related to Health matters. Argentinian Tango being the third ( a little hobby of mine).
Due to the success of the Anatomy seminar I gave earlier in the year, I hope to be holding another one in Bristol sometime in the beginning of July.

TTFN

Bowen Conference 2010

2010-04-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.
Hot on the heels of the seminar last month, (which was a great success and has led to being asked to deliver another up in Bristol) This years 2 day Bowen Conference featuring some excellent speakers - among others Robert Schliep (Professor Fascial Research at Ulm University), Tom Myers (Anatomy Trains), and the 'new kid on the block' and for my money the show stealer of the whole conference Dr Lorimer Moseley (Fellow at Oxford - Pain Research). My hat goes off to the main organiser of the conference ( although it involved so many others) our very own Jihan Adem of Totnes, Devon. It must have been a logistical nightmare getting speakers in from all over the world, coupled with the flight ban the week beforehand - well done Jihan!
It is interesting to note that Fascial research which officially only began life in 2007 (although Robert Schliep wrote his first papers on the subject in the late 80's) and at that time was on the cutting edge of medical discovery, has made significant headway in such a short time - to the extent that mainstream health magazines are starting to publish articles on the subject. This coming months Men's Health magazine for example is dedicating a double page spread to fascia, and Robert Shliep's work. Which for all those body builders and fitness folk out there will really put a cat among the pigeons.
Lorimer Moseley's talk on pain and how the human body percieves it was a real eye opener, and his delivery was erudite and detailed yet extremely interesting and enjoyable. One of the key things he put forward was that Pain is entirely subjective, this is not new in itself, as there have been various experiments using hypnosis and suggestion to indicate that the level of pain inflicted can be the same but the persons perception of how much pain is felt can vary significantly. However Dr Moseley's studies indicate something far more exciting. He has found that the brain decides how much pain is felt not simply based on priority or how bad/dangerous to survival the injury may be, but also based on the body's previous experience too. Although like many things this sort of thing seems obvious, but it has far reaching consequences. This is yet another piece of research that bolster the Placebo arguement. The word placebo is often used as a negative, as in its 'just in the mind' and yet as the ancient Greeks believed millenia ago the perception of all things is the mind! Hence this Pain research proves that indeed it really is all in the mind. This is backed up of course by harvard Medical School's recent discovery that every cell in our body has receptors for hormones, this means that in theory you really can have a 'happy cell' or a 'sad cell' depending on how you think or feel. Interesting times indeed!

TTFN

Riviera FM - Regular Health Show

2010-04-06T04:45:00.000-07:00

Fame at last! I am hosting a health program every wednesday 8pm - 9pm on Riviera FM. There is a diferent guest on every week where we discuss different aspects of complimentary health; mainstream as well as some of the up and coming therapies.
To listen in just click on the link below and click 'listen'.

www.riviera.fm

If you are a qualified practitioner, have more than 3 years experience and would like to appear on the show please contact me.

TTFN

Anatomy Seminar - Ashburton on 3rd March

2010-01-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am holding a one day seminar on radical new discoveries in anatomy that I feel is both fascinating and very useful to body-workers, medical practitioners and in fact anyone who is interested in the body. Some of you may have already come across these leading edge developments and understandings of anatomy, however it is new to most of my piers and many within the medical establishment and I am moved to share it with those who may be interested.

The Seminar takes place in Ashburton on the 3rd March at Holne Park House.
The price is £60 for the day which includes lunch and refreshments.
Availability is limited.

If you wish to attend please contact me, and I will send you further details

cheers

Austin

Water of Life!

2009-02-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

A belated happy new year to you all for 2009.
Bowen Technique has gained considerable ground since I began almost 5 years ago. When I started most people on hearing of the therapy would say 'Bowen What?'. Now mainly due to Julian Baker's hard work at the European College, coupled with significant research projects both in the UK and USA, Tom Bowen's legacy is making its mark with the medical community and getting considerable press coverage.
With all this, I am continually reminded that a good percentage of patients I see would probably not have the problems they are presenting if they simply drank water 'little & often' every day.
In fact part of the process of the Bowen Technique treatment is that the patient need keep themselves correctly hydrated between sessions.
Somehow we seem to forget than we are, as humans, reckoned to be around 75% water, but we refrain from supplying it with a good source of the stuff - and NO, regardless of what anyone says, coffee does not count.
Get the basics right first, it then makes the chances of the rest getting better much quicker.

TTFN

Austin

Keeping up with the Times

2008-10-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

Finally I get to do a bit of updating. Its been a pretty hectic year, what with one thing and another. Working 6 days a week doing Bowen has had its own set of rewards and stresses. It has already been 2 months since Gill Headley made his debut seminar in the UK. Having had the amazing experience of integral disection in London earlier in the year helped enormously with understanding some of his latest findings. Yet another leap forward in anatomical understanding for me, and as it turns out a couple of eye openers for the medical world. The man really does have a rare talent for making something that is highly complex and buried in confusing terminology into an enjoyable learning experience. It was great to see practitioners from a variety of different disciplines from all over the UK attend the seminar.
Hopefully now that I can take a breath or two, and get myself a little more organised, updates should be a little more regular than twice a year. TTFN

Disection at St.George's

2008-01-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

This week I had the honour of taking part in a two day dissection of the upper body organised by Julian Baker (Head of European College Bowen Studies) at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London, under the watchful eye of Professor Ceri Davies and his highly skilled assistants.

What set this dissection apart compared to the norm, was that it was working on the physical form layer by layer. There are few people in the world that have had the privilege to witness such a dissection let alone take part.

I was one of a handful of Bowen Therapists attending this event. The purpose from my point of view was to understand more fully what it is that I am affecting when I make a Bowen move on the body. Many body workers believe that we work on muscles, to alleviate tension and bring about change. After this dissection I can say with certainty that I have spent the last 3 years working on 'Fat & Fascia', and will continue to do so for the rest of my Bowen career or until humans are built differently.

What I have learnt more than anything is that :

A) Fat (adipose tissue) & Fascia (thin tough layer surrounding practically everything) has a significant role to play in the health and general well-being of the individual. And that our attitude towards Fat as being 'BAD' is quite evidently wrong and probably dangerously stupid.

B)That anatomy books although useful to a certain point can not only be unhelpful at times, but down-right misleading at others when one begins to look at the body as a whole and the interaction supposedly separate muscles have on another area of the anatomy, only to find that there is no division of muscle at all, except the one a surgeon decided to make 500 years ago.

C)The effect immobility in a given area of the body can have on the make-up of layers on the body, which in turn can affect other aspects of the anatomy.

Understanding what I have learnt and applying in clinic will be an ongoing process. But what I can say is that the last few days have been a real eye opener on many levels, and an invaluable experience which will hopefully help me to help others more effectively.

My special thanks go to the two donors who bequeathed there physical forms for the study of medical science. This work is only possible due to their incredible generosity, together with their families who have acquiesced to these donations. I feel enormously privileged to have been granted such an opportunity to learn so much.

My thanks also go to Julian Baker whose tireless commitment to Tom Bowen's work and the Bowen Technique has enabled us to push forward the boundaries of our understanding of how the body heals, and how we can as practitioners help it along the way.

Cheers

Austin Burn-Jones ECBS MBTER

Bowen Technique Practitioner