Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes To Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of the UK charity Yes To Life, helping people with cancer to understand and access the many benefits of integrative medicine for nearly two decades.

Robin Daly
In the growth in popularity and credibility amongst complementary therapies used in cancer care, acupuncture has proved to be a leader, having much to offer and increasing evidence of its effectiveness.

Robin Daly
Beverley de Valois has been a key figure in driving this movement forward and has recently published a book to promote and underpin good practice in acupuncture in cancer care. It’s called Acupuncture and Cancer Survivorship and speaking to Beverley de Valois in West London.

Beverley de Valois
Hi, Robin. Thank you for inviting me. It’s a real privilege to speak to listeners.

Robin Daly
Great. It’s great to have you as my guest. Yours is the name I’ve heard of over the years. It’s the first time we’ve actually spoken, I believe.

Robin Daly
So you’ve got an enormous rash of experience and about working with acupuncture, working alongside mainstream medicine, researching acupuncture, supporting people with cancer and during that time acupuncture has gone from being a kind of weird alternative therapy from the far east to a respective modality for many conditions with the evidence to underpinnage the effects and I understand that even the mode of action that almost universally used to raise eyebrows is beginning to acquire a scientific basis.

Robin Daly
all that said, the idea that sticking little needles in the skin is proper medicine is still quite a stretch for many people, be they clinicians or patients and I wonder what’s your number one strategy for winning hearts and minds?

Beverley de Valois
Well, it depends who I’m talking to. So, I guess if I’m talking to medical people, then it’s really making them aware of the research that’s been done, because that is what they like. They like the evidence base.

Beverley de Valois
They’re a little bit interested in the mechanism, although it’s not always clear what the mechanism is. But as you say, there’s more and more information about that. For patients, for people with cancer, it’s about, well, really just reassuring them that acupuncture isn’t scary.

Beverley de Valois
It’s a bit unfortunate that we have to use the word needles. And particularly, I’ve worked a lot with particularly breast cancer patients who have been referred to my studies and to say they really have thought twice about having acupuncture because it involves needles.

Beverley de Valois
But once you get them in, once you get the patients in, rather than the needles in, and you introduce them to the needles, they love it, because acupuncture is actually very, very relaxing. So, the needles aren’t like needles used for other medical interventions.

Beverley de Valois
So, they’re very fine. We’re not going into a vein or deep into a muscle. So, it can be a very relaxing process. So, sometimes I demonstrate the needles to them, but usually once I get them, just giving them a sample of the treatment helps them to get used to it.

Robin Daly
Right, yeah, experience cancer. Yeah, well, I’ve had quite a bit of acupuncture over the years here and there. I can attest to what you say. It’s actually quite pleasant. OK, so you’re focusing very much on using acupuncture to support those who’ve been through cancer, to support them in making a good recovery in the longer term.

Robin Daly
So two questions really. What made you want to work with people with cancer, particularly? And why did you decide to specialise in this particular aspect, the recovery?

Beverley de Valois
Well, way back before I trained as an acupuncturist, I read a book about a woman’s cancer journey. And when I got to the last page, I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to work with cancer.

Beverley de Valois
at the time, I was either studying to be or just starting off practicing as an managed to get a place working with the Macmillan Oncology and Palliative Care team at the North Middlesex Hospital doing aromatherapy for the inpatients on the ward.

Beverley de Valois
So that was how I started. And then I was doing that one. I was training to be an acupress. And when I qualified, I was recruited by the Linda Jackson Macmillan Center, which was the Cancer Information and Support Center, allied to Mount Vernon Hospital, which is in Greater London.

Beverley de Valois
I wanted to practice acupuncture there. And there was some resistance because, as you say, back many years ago, it was kind of a weird and wonderful. Things. So I was very adamant and persistent about wanting to be able to practice acupuncture with people with cancer.

Beverley de Valois
the medical director at the time, Professor Jane Ma, said, Well, if you want to do this, then you need to do an evaluation, you need to do some research. So I was taken over by the Supportive Oncology Research team.

Beverley de Valois
we did a study on using acupuncture to manage breast cancer treatment-related heart flushes. We had good results from that. That was using kind of body acupuncture. And then we wanted to look at a way of doing acupuncture that was simpler to deliver.

Beverley de Valois
we did a study on using ear acupuncture, standardized ear acupuncture in a group setting. And that became the subject of my PhD. And when we set up those studies, at the time, the received wisdom about teroxifen or the adjuvant hormonal therapies was that after six months of taking them, the symptoms would alleviate.

Beverley de Valois
we set up the studies to recruit women who had been taking teroxifen or other adjuvant hormonal therapies for at least six months. And that is how that kind of set the seeds for how I got involved in treating people post treatment.

Beverley de Valois
because every kind of, every study we set up afterwards, we had this kind of period that we recruited people who were six months post-treatment. Move. So, that’s how I built up.

Robin Daly
Right, and the received wisdom to that not be true, of course, that the women with Tamoxifen go on suffering the symptoms as long as they keep taking it. Indeed. Yeah. Anyway, you had some success with that as well.

Beverley de Valois
Indeed, yes. we found that with, and it’s interesting, there’s now lots of studies on using acupuncture to manage breast cancer treatment related heart flushes. And they tend to come up with the same results that about eight treatments on a weekly basis will reduce the severity or the frequency by about 50%.

Beverley de Valois
I mean, these are all averages when you’re talking about, but there would be a noticeable difference for people suffering from heart flushes.

Robin Daly
Well, I see the research into acupuncture as a big win for patients because the thorny issue of the mode of action of a therapy is right out there at the front with medics like, well, we don’t understand it, therefore it must be rubbish, is pretty much the attitude. of course patients want to know whether it works or not. They may like to know the mode of action for sure in order to help them make decisions, but at the end of the day, if somebody who’s got the same side effects as they have says it’s bloody marvelous, they’ll give it a go, wouldn’t they?

Robin Daly
Especially if it’s completely safe. So, yeah, acupuncture seemed to get in the door long before the mode of action was even approached, you know, it was still, everybody knew that it actually worked even though nobody understood it, which is genius, I think is actually excellent for patients.

Robin Daly
very happy that happened and I think it’s sort of, it moves the goalposts for everybody’s therapies, you know, made, well, you know, it doesn’t, we don’t have to be able to prove how it works in order to show that it does.

Robin Daly
I was pleased by that. Yeah. Okay. So you’re clearly enormously committed to this work and investing considerable energy pushing it forward. You currently have a new book on the topic and you’re opening two specialist clinics in London, I understand.

Robin Daly
I’d like to talk about your book first. It’s called Acupuncture and Cancer Survivorship. It’s a book for practitioners. And would it be fair to say that its primary goal is to equip acupuncture who are already trained with the knowledge to safely support those recovering from cancer is to make that move from being an accurate puncher is to being one who can work with cancer safely.

Beverley de Valois
Yes, indeed. And I’m really trying to aim it. I tried to make it relevant to any type of acupuncturist, so whether they’re a physio-acupuncturist or a fully trained classical or traditional acupuncturist.

Beverley de Valois
My mission in life is really to spread awareness of cancer survivorship and the issues associated with cancer survivorship. And as I’m an acupuncturist, I want also to spread the word about how acupuncture can support people who are experiencing the consequences of cancer treatment.

Beverley de Valois
it is very much a book that’s designed to do those things, to take the trained acupuncturist, as you say, into the state of becoming an acupuncturist who can understand the issues surrounding cancer survivorship and support their patients, that knowledge.

Robin Daly
what you’re saying is that despite the fact that because it’s been around so long there are inevitably lots of different flavors of acupuncture these days, your book will be just as interesting whatever particular school of acupuncture you’re a part of.

Beverley de Valois
Yes, and I really wanted to write it from a general point of view, rather than a specific style of acupuncture. Obviously, it’s got the flavour. When I trained, I learned two different systems at the same time. I kind of grew up bilingual in acupuncture.

Beverley de Valois
But I really want to, you know, I really believe it is more generic and wider than that. But something that’s very interesting is that now that the book reviews are coming in, it’s being reviewed by professionals from other therapies who say that even though they’re acupuncturists, it’s a very good text for understanding about cancer survivorship and the issues. so it’s kind of going beyond even acupuncture.

Robin Daly
Well, I’m glad you brought that in because it’s one of the things that really struck me looking through the book is that, well, okay, yes, a lot of it is hardcore information for acupuncturists about where you stick the needle in, you know?

Robin Daly
But in amongst that, there’s a wealth of other stuff, which is much more to do with understanding the situation of the patient and how to manage them, understanding all the treatments that are going on and what they’re likely to do to the patient, what they’re likely to be suffering from.

Robin Daly
All this stuff, you know, it’s immensely detailed in that way and comprehensive. So I could imagine, yeah, any therapist reading that and learning a lot.

Beverley de Valois
I wanted to really give a clear picture of the context and what it’s like for cancer survivors. So practitioners could just slot in their practice into that kind of environment and help those people.

Robin Daly
he’s done a great job. So right at the beginning, in the introduction, you use a couple of quotes to create the context for what’s to follow. And in fact, you say the underlying philosophy of this book is encapsulated in them.

Robin Daly
one of them which stuck with me is one that reads evidence-based medicine is not cookbook medicine. External clinical evidence can inform but can never replace individual clinical expertise. So you know, in essence, evidence has to be a great thing.

Robin Daly
But I’m right with you. My view would be that both clinicians and patients have been oppressed by the tyranny of EBM in recent decades. And the quote seems to restore evidence to its proper role. What made you home in on this particular point?

Beverley de Valois
That is a quote from Professor David Sackett, who is the father of evidence-based medicine. And I think what’s really important there is the two-thirds of his definition of evidence-based medicine has been ignored.

Beverley de Valois
the focus has been on best research, best evidence-based research, which has typically been the randomized control trial. But his definition of evidence-based medicine also included clinical experience and patient preference.

Beverley de Valois
I felt that was important. I guess all of my research career, I’ve been fighting against the RCT, randomized control trial. And for various reasons. And so I liked that rotation because it was the full definition of evidence-based medicine and included the bits that are often ignored.

Robin Daly
very much so. To me, evidence-based medicine, as it’s practiced at the moment, with one third of it, is the tool of business. It’s like an exclusive club, nobody else can afford to get in. It doesn’t really work with anything other than patentable substances.

Robin Daly
it works very well for business, but it’s not good for patients, I don’t think, at all. You’re right. You’ve missed out two thirds of the picture, and very important to those as well. I mean, I’d say those three arms of the clinical relationship are all equally key.

Robin Daly
I mean, they seem all important to me, and yet, two of them are not forgotten. So yeah, it seems to be a bid your book to help clinicians to regain some autonomy and escape from what you call cookbook medicine, which must be bad for clinicians.

Robin Daly
I’m sure they don’t enjoy being at the mercy of the computer. They get all this training and everything, and then they just have to do what they’re told, it seems to me now. Otherwise, they’re not using best practice.

Robin Daly
I think that all of this has had a bad effect, particularly in the world of complementary medicine, practices like acupuncture, because the effect’s been to discourage practitioners from helping people who are in the most need, you know, people with cancer, you probably can’t equal any other condition that needs as much support as people with cancer do.

Robin Daly
And yet, the practitioner’s been frightened away, resulting in patients feeling abandoned, uncared for, and quickly they feel hopeless, which is the worst possible scenario for recovery.

Robin Daly
more power to you for putting that right at the front of your book and saying this is the right direction for medicine. Thank you. So having said all that about the evidence, you’re nonetheless, of course, an enthusiastic researcher of evidence.

Robin Daly
But for good reasons, because as I said at the beginning, there’s nothing wrong with evidence. It’s good stuff. You want it. So anyway, can you summarize what you’ve achieved in the arena of evidence?

Beverley de Valois
I’ve been more interested in clinical observation and service evaluation, and one of our big achievements that came out of, I spoke about this study, the second study that I did, which was air acupuncture in a group setting.

Beverley de Valois
On the basis of that study, the Linda Jackson Macmillan Center set up a service for breast cancer patients, and it ran for 15 years, and it was only closed down by COVID. During that time, because we were so influenced by Professor Jane Marr, who always said, always collect data and always assess things, and we connected data for all of those years, and last year we were able to publish a service evaluation using 15 years of data,

Beverley de Valois
which is a big achievement. I don’t think there’s another paper in the complementary medicine field, and I mean, that’s a very broad statement, that has got that wealth of data behind it. That is quite a big achievement, but also it’s interesting because I guess I always thought that having not done randomized control trials, I wouldn’t have any insulin.

Beverley de Valois
None of my work would be influential, but we’ve published a lot. I do a lot of dissemination through conferences, and our work, and I can’t say it’s my work because it takes a team to do research, but it’s gone around the world, and I get messages from practitioners around the world to say that our publications, our work has inspired, has helped them to set up services, or has inspired them to help their cancer patients much more effectively.

Robin Daly
Something to be proud of, yeah. Great. Do you think the notion is seeping in that RCTs of course are totally and utterly inappropriate for something that’s got no safety issues whatsoever and the long proven track record of being one of the safest interventions on the planet.

Robin Daly
Therefore, effectiveness is the only thing you’re looking for and it’s simply not warranted to have these hugely expensive trials in order to prove that this thing improves people’s lives.

Beverley de Valois
it depends where you are in the world. So there are, there are some major countries who, um, certainly don’t yet, like the States and Australia will no longer fund studies that are randomized control trials, uh, using sham interventions.

Beverley de Valois
in the UK, we seem to be very traditionally, certainly the reason that I’ve never done an RCT is because in the UK, they’ve been very stringently keen on having a sham, a controller, um, which makes it very difficult.

Beverley de Valois
something that’s really important in the UK was last year, uh, the national Institute for, um, uh, clinical health excellence, um, nice, uh, published, uh, frameworks for real world evidence. Great.

Beverley de Valois
The first official acknowledgement that evidence other than evidence to randomize control trials, uh, was valid. Um, and so this, this tied in nicely with the publication of the, of the, um, paper that I just referenced about 15 years study.

Beverley de Valois
Yeah, because that is, that is real world evidence. And I know there is a move towards understanding that, um, how something performs in clinic rather than how it performs in a, in a, a very unrealistic lab situation, if you like.

Beverley de Valois
it’s important as well. It’s just a movement towards them.

Robin Daly
Well, it is significant. I didn’t know they’d taken that step. Of course, I’ve heard about the move towards real world evidence, and there’s been some advocates for it, which I’ve been very excited about, of course.

Robin Daly
It’s a good name for it because it actually sounds better than randomised control trials. Actually, this is real world evidence, you know, and that’s what I think about it. Randomised control trials have not given us great success in many fields.

Robin Daly
It’s good for some things, but, you know, it’s not as fantastic as it’s made out to be. We quite often see randomised control trials producing blockbuster drugs that turn out to be a total nightmare just a couple of years later.

Robin Daly
it doesn’t work for whatever reason, and there’s lots of reasons. So I think real world evidence sounds very palatable. And I was thinking when you say about this study, this 15 year study within the NHS, to me, this is what the NHS should be doing for us.

Robin Daly
It should be finding out what works because the NHS has got a proper interest in finding out what works. It’s not going to be about making a ton of money. They’re going to do it because they’re going to save them money.

Robin Daly
They’ll actually find things that work. And so it must be comparatively peanuts to do your study compared to a full randomised control trial. And yet it produces some very significantly good data, I’m sure, on what actually works.

Beverley de Valois
Indeed. I think the irony is that that service was not funded by the NHS. It was funded by charitable funding.

Robin Daly
Right, that is irony indeed, yeah, but when are the government and the NHS going to pick it up and say, look, it’s time we found out what actually works here.

Robin Daly
No, all right. Anyway, so we haven’t got the time to go through your book in much detail but I wonder if you could you just summarize the scope and the intent of the book. So what what you trying to achieve for the book?

Beverley de Valois
What I wanted to do was I wanted to give, if you like, a 360-degree view of the issues of cancer survivorship and how acupuncturists role in that. For just about every topic I discuss, I talk about it from the Western medicine, the conventional medicine perspective, I then talk about it from the East Asian medicine perspective.

Beverley de Valois
I then look in depth at the research that’s being done in relationship to acupuncture. I talk about my clinical practice and what I’ve learned through the years of treating acupuncture and the clinical tips to help people.

Beverley de Valois
then a really significant aspect of the book is I really wanted to give voice to the patient experience. I want to cancer survivors to be able to have their experience communicated and their… Nearly every chapter has an extended case study at the end of it.

Beverley de Valois
Chapter 14 is dedicated, it’s a very long case study about the woman who really inspired me to write the book, and I’ll come back to that in a second. And then there’s shorter examples throughout the books that I’ve called vignettes.

Beverley de Valois
when I did those case studies, I worked with those patients, those patients gave their permission for me to write those case studies, to communicate those details. Sometimes they contributed, they wrote bits of it, but certainly they all read and approved what I wrote.

Beverley de Valois
it kind of has validity in conveying the patient voice in their experience.

Robin Daly
my feeling about the book overall, immense detail, you know, all the potential treatments, consequences. It’s kind of hard to imagine a more comprehensive book on the topic, as far as I can tell.

Robin Daly
That’s what I intended to do. Well, there you go. I think you succeeded. And I’m not an acupuncturist, but, you know, it’s very impressive. And a few things I noticed on the way. Well, one of them was about how many of the spheres of human experience acupuncture can be supported in. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Beverley de Valois
it’s always interesting when people ask me about, I was interviewed by a journalist yesterday and she said, what does acupuncture treat? And people think of very physical things, like flashes in pain and things like that.

Beverley de Valois
But it works, it’s just a very whole person treatment. And so if you are giving acupuncture to someone, you’re not just changing the physical behavior of the body, you’re not inviting the physical aspect of the body to change, but it has an effect on the mental and the emotional life as well.

Beverley de Valois
in one treatment, you can, in using one, each acupuncture point has what we call many functions. So you can use an acupuncture point, a particular one called pericardium six, which is on the wrist.

Beverley de Valois
It’s typically used for nausea and vomiting. So it’s very good when people are going through chemotherapy treatment to address nausea and vomiting. But that same point is also very good for calming, calming people.

Beverley de Valois
it’s very good for anxiety. So just in one point, you’ve got something that addresses nausea and vomiting, but it also deals with anxiety. It helps people to sleep better. It can be very elegant in that way. You don’t need to use a whole lot of points to address wider issues.

Robin Daly
Well, that is fantastic in the case of people with cancer because, of course, people with cancer are not suffering from one issue, however, are they? They have, in space, all these different things, they don’t sleep properly and they’re anxious about their next appointment.

Robin Daly
All of that’s going on with the heart flashes and the bit of pain in the joints and heaven knows what else. There’s so many issues that can come up, so things that treat multiple issues at once is genius.

Beverley de Valois
Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I discovered through all the years of my work and which is encapsulated in the book is this kind of process that you can help people in a much more long-term way. And so the model that I have is that you give people, that people have acupuncture and that reduces their symptoms so they feel better, but one of the very interesting things that acupuncturists very, very frequently hear from their patients is patients come back and say,

Beverley de Valois
I’ve got more energy. And part of that is because they feel better because they haven’t got so many symptoms. But something about acupuncture improves people’s energy. And so in one of the diagrams that I have done in the book, I call that process-enabled coping.

Beverley de Valois
People can cope better. Once their symptoms go down, they have more energy, they have a better ability to cope. It’s a big change, you’re right. And that has a wonderful knock-on effect because they start having the energy, they can be more motivated, they can start looking after themselves, they take better care of themselves, and you get this wonderful kind of long-term benefit, the improved well-being.

Beverley de Valois
this is one of the questions that certainly oncologists always ask me, well, you know, what happens when you stop having acupuncture treatment? What the heart flushes all come back or what the symptoms all come back?

Beverley de Valois
No, because it’s not like taking a medication, a medication. Yeah, it helps to, if you like, retrain the body and help the body to behave a bit differently so that it can maintain itself better.

Robin Daly
Well, it’s particularly useful to have any kind of therapy that can help with energy issues. They’re so fundamental. If you’ve got an energy issue, you don’t have the energy to get yourself better either.

Robin Daly
It’s like a vicious circle and then you just go down with it. It makes you contract, withdraw, you don’t even want to go and see a friend, whatever it is. You stop doing more and more things and your world gets smaller.

Robin Daly
it’s so fundamental to recovery is to get your energy in place, so you’re able to pursue life once more and have a future vision for your life.

Beverley de Valois
Indeed. in the research I’ve done, we’ve got countless comments about people who say, if acupuncture has helped me get my life back, now I’ve got the energy. I can go back to work. I couldn’t work, but I now can work full-time.

Beverley de Valois
it’s enabling people. It’s enabling people to live their lives.

Robin Daly
Another key message that popped out of the book at me and one that I resonate with really strongly is that something can always be done. There’s no situation that’s so entrenched, so hopeless that it warrants abandoning somebody.

Robin Daly
Maybe that’s a personal philosophy of yours that you’re putting into the book. I don’t know if it was part of your acupuncture today or what. Maybe you want to say.

Beverley de Valois
Gosh, I can’t remember where that came from, but I know that a lot of anti-survivors, they go back to their oncologists to their GP with symptoms and things, and they’re told sometimes almost brutally, you know, I’ve saved your life, you just have to live with the heart flushes now, there’s nothing that we can do about that, but you know, acupuncture can help, and even if you can’t solve the problem or cure the issue, you can make it manageable for people.

Robin Daly
I think it’s sort of hung over, you know, it’s a bit of an old school idea that, you know, you save somebody’s life, that’s good enough. And they should be grateful for having their life saved, even if their life’s not worth having once they’ve got it, because it’s so painful or so, you know, so difficult. of course, quality of life is every bit as important as staying alive. If you haven’t got any quality of life, there isn’t any point in being alive.

Robin Daly
But I think that’s beginning to sink in now, but you know, it’s taken a long time. I mean, you know, it’s like the change in attitude towards giving chemotherapy at the end of life that’s begun to happen as they realize that this is just something they do.

Robin Daly
They know it’s not going to save anybody’s life. It just makes their last month hell. And so they’ve started to advise people not to bother, which is actually compassionate to do that. I mean, chemotherapy is so unkind to human beings that you don’t want to spend your last month dealing with it. I’m glad it is finally arriving. We’ve been exploring this book. It’s clearly aimed at practitioners. Of course, in the long run, all of that will filter through to benefit patients as more practitioners start to work with those who’ve got cancer.

Robin Daly
But you’re also on a mission to educate patients about the potential of acupuncture, I believe, and to provide resources in the form of, as I mentioned, two new clinics. Do you want to tell us about that?

Beverley de Valois
my book was a colossal piece of work. It took me 13 years to write it. I mean, I wasn’t working full time on that. And when lockdown happened, I decided I was going to finish my book, take a sabbatical and finish the book. then once I finished the book, I had time and energy to do something else.

Beverley de Valois
I wanted to set up clinics where I could practice what I preached in a way. I’d gathered experience along the way doing the research studies at Mount Vernon and my own private clinic, but I wanted to take it out into the world in a much broader sense.

Beverley de Valois
I thought a good place to start would be central London, you know, around Harley Street. And so I found I haven’t set up my own clinics. My clinics are hosted because I don’t want to be managing clinics.

Beverley de Valois
I want to be in clinic and when I’m not in clinic, I want to be spreading the word about acupuncture and cancer survivorship. So I have a clinic that I’m working from in Whimple Street in central London.

Beverley de Valois
I’m there on Thursdays and that has started up. And then in January, I start more locally to where I live in Uxbridge in Greater London. And that we’re opening a second clinic there. The first clinic in Whimple Street is at the London acupuncture clinic and it can be found on the website.

Beverley de Valois
the clinic in Uxbridge is Bridge to Health in Uxbridge. And I’ll be there on Tuesdays seeing patients.

Robin Daly
Right, so anybody can consult you, Okay, very good. Well, the one thing is obvious in all the things you’ve been telling us is the enormous drive you’ve got to Make some progress in this area I mean not many people have stick at a book for 13 years and say they want some results a bit sooner Or they give up, you know up to the first couple.

Robin Daly
So what’s behind all this do you think? Why do you think you’re so driven to want to Bring the benefits if I could punch it to the world

Beverley de Valois
I don’t know, it just goes back to reading that first book about that woman’s cancer journey and just feeling that I had a vocation and then just following that through and just finding doors that opened.

Beverley de Valois
I never started off thinking that I would have become a researcher. I didn’t realize that even existed. But it’s just in trying to take acupuncture out to support people with cancer. That is what I had to do and that has built up a kind of body of work and an incredible body of work and it just needs to be communicated.

Beverley de Valois
As you can see, I’m at a stage in my life where I should probably be retiring, but this is just all coalesced at this point and it needs to go out there and I can do that now. I have the kind of networks and the structure to support that.

Robin Daly
excellent okay well maybe we can finish up by talking about a future you’re not giving up soon and retiring like you should be as you say and what are the plans what what do you want to do in fishy if you’ve got more research in the pipeline for example or we have something have the possibility of, I’m not going to do any kind of big research, but I do want to, I think we’re thinking of setting up a kind of new service at Mount Vernon. We’re looking into that, an acupuncture for a specific cancer survivorship problem, which isn’t well addressed.

Beverley de Valois
I don’t want to go into details. No, for now. It’s just being formulated at the moment. And certainly I’ll be working at my clinics and extending that work. And like I say, I attend a lot of conferences.

Beverley de Valois
I’ll be training acupuncturists and taking the message out. I’ve got a speaking calendar for next year where I’m going around Europe, spreading the word about acupuncture and cancer survivorship. So it will keep me busy.

Robin Daly
Yeah, sounds like they’re not starting on another book just yet.

Beverley de Valois
Not yet. My husband, I think, has very strong feelings of writing other books. another one it will be an easy I think the next one will be more aimed at cancer survivors themselves I think that’s what I would do

Robin Daly
it’s pretty clear your work has changed attitudes towards acupuncture in oncology. I certainly so, yeah. Yeah. And particularly because you’ve done it inside hospitals with hospital patients, that’s a key element, I think, to the whole thing.

Robin Daly
it’s not an easy nut to crack changing attitudes in oncology. I think we can agree on, can we? Indeed, yeah. It’s very hard. And but probably extremely important has been the fact you’ve been doing on the inside, not trying to sort of bang on the door and say, look, we got something that works out here.

Robin Daly
getting in the door was very important in the first place. And anyway, it’s impressive what you’ve pulled off there. But of course, there are many other things that can help patients which are still outside the door.

Robin Daly
personally, you know, I want to see proper integration in this country as soon as possible. You know, I think we’re far behind what what’s been developed in other countries, and far behind what’s possible in terms of supporting people with cancer.

Robin Daly
There’s largely still volunteer run complementary therapy units, which is no money being paid there is that there’s no real buy in from the NHS for integrated medicine yet. Any ideas on strategies to bring more change in that area?

Beverley de Valois
I don’t know because I think the NHS is really struggling at the moment. I’m not sure it’s going to be open to much more innovation from us. That sounds a bit, but on the other hand, like I say, pockets exist where things can happen.

Beverley de Valois
as I say, we’re trying to introduce a new service at Mount Vernon. And I’m trying to take it on to different terms than it being, what’s the word, seen as a complementary therapy. I want to see it as integrated.

Robin Daly
That would be so great. Well, you keep tryingto be fair, attitudes are changing, but it’s been such a slow process and it’s so far behind, you know, that it is tragic, because these are the people who need, as I say, who need the most support of people with cancer.

Robin Daly
they literally doled out some of the most difficult treatments on the planet and given no support whatsoever. It’s like, it’s inhuman. And so, you know, I really wanted to change, and attitudes are beginning to change.

Robin Daly
There’s another generation of doctors coming along who, and particularly doctors from other cultures as well, who don’t see integration as anything so wild. You know, if you come from India, where they respect traditional medicine as well, then it doesn’t feel strange to introduce these things.

Robin Daly
So, I think it is happening, but far, far too slow. So, we need to make every effort to push as hard as we can to move it along. Anyway, I really appreciate what you’ve done. I think it’s fantastic. And, you know, Acupunct actually stands out for the evidence it has and for the respect it gets as a useful tool.

Beverley de Valois
Indeed. And it’s enjoyable as well. I had a patient yesterday, a young woman with breast cancer who just got up from the table and she said, you know, I choose to have acupuncture and, you know, yes, it’s another appointment, but it’s something that I choose to do for myself. And I feel such joy when I’ve had acupuncture.

Robin Daly
Thank you very much indeed Beverly, it’s been a very inspiring and interesting chat.

Beverley de Valois
Thank you for having me, it’s a great privilege and I’m so keen to get my message out there. I’m grateful to you.

Robin Daly
Thank you.

Robin Daly
Beverley asked that I let you know that she’s offered you a generous 15% discount off her book using the code YTLBV15. This code is valid for 15% off acupuncture and cancer survivorship on the website UK.singingdragon.com only. This offer is valid until the 26th of January 2024 and it can’t be used in combination with any other offer as usual terms and conditions apply.

Robin Daly
Thanks for joining me today it’s great to know that so many of you are listening and finding the show of interest and of benefit. I plan to be here again next week with another expert guest exploring the latest developments in integrative medicine for cancer in the next Yes to Life show.