Zoe was trained as a Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncturist and is a member of the British Acupuncture Council (BAcC), whose practitioner register is accredited by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA), and a member of the British Medical Acupuncture Society (BMAS). Alongside her clinical practice, she is undertaking postgraduate research in Medical Anthropology at UCL, with a particular interest in healthy ageing and how health can be maintained throughout life.
This brings her clinical work and research together around a broader question: what helps us maintain health, adaptability and function across the course of life?
Chinese medicine has a long tradition of asking this question. Classical texts such as the Huangdi Neijing place considerable emphasis on preserving health, adapting to change and maintaining balance throughout life. Her practice and research explore how these traditional ideas about health, prevention and ageing can be understood, examined and applied in contemporary healthcare.
Her clinical practice remains centred on the individual person. People may come for help with a particular symptom, but health rarely exists as a collection of isolated problems. She therefore takes time to understand the wider picture — including general health, sleep, energy, digestion, emotional wellbeing, lifestyle and the changes a person may be experiencing at that stage of life.
Traditional knowledge and contemporary evidence inform different aspects of her practice. Chinese medicine provides the theoretical framework through which she assesses and understands the individual. Where clinical evidence is available, she values it as an additional layer of assurance in the treatments she chooses and in making clinical practice more measurable, reviewable and reproducible.