About

From a life in music to a very different kind of listening

I studied jazz and composition at college in Ireland and spent my early career playing on the Dublin and Cork jazz scenes. That eventually led to an extraordinary few years in the music industry, recording three Top 10 albums for Virgin Records, achieving multi-platinum sales and receiving a Mercury Music Prize nomination. I spent several years travelling and touring the world, sharing stages with artists including U2, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

Following this, I continued working in music, eventually moving into composing and sound design for film and television. From the outside, I was doing the thing I had always wanted to do. However, somewhere along the way, something had changed. The collaborative part of music that I had fallen in love with had gradually become long days working alone with machines, increasingly tight deadlines and shrinking budgets. The joy that had driven me from childhood was disappearing. I’m not sure I fully recognised that at the time. My body, however, had other ideas.

When everything changed

After one particularly stressful project, I went to bed one evening and woke the next morning with severe tinnitus and hyperacusis—an extreme sensitivity to sound. For someone who had built his entire life around sound, it was devastating. I couldn’t tolerate everyday noises; traffic hurt; the clatter of cutlery hurt. Sounds could leave me with a strange sensation of pressure, as though my ears were filled with cotton wool.

For six months, I couldn’t work. I saw specialists and consultants and underwent numerous hearing tests and investigations. The people I saw were kind, thorough and good at what they did, but the tests said my hearing was normal. Eventually, I was told that there wasn’t really anything more that could be done, and I would have to learn to live with it.

There is a particular kind of isolation that comes with experiencing something very real in your body while being told that nothing appears to be wrong. I had fallen through the cracks, and it was terrifying.

Four words I have never forgotten

Eventually, a friend suggested acupuncture.

It was very much a last resort. I knew almost nothing about Chinese medicine and, if I’m truthful, probably regarded much of it with a healthy dose of scepticism. However, I had run out of options and was willing to try anything. The first thing my acupuncturist did wasn’t to put a needle in me; he listened. He was the first person who asked not only what was happening to my ears, but what had happened to me. I’d been through a tremendously stressful few years. For the first time, somebody was interested in whether what was happening in my life and what was happening in my body might somehow be connected. He didn’t force an explanation onto me. He didn’t tell me it was all in my head. He just listened to the whole story and then said four words that I have never forgotten: “I can help you.” At that point, even “I’ll do my very best to help you” would have sufficed. For the first time in months, somebody was offering me hope.

The experience that changed my life

I began seeing him twice a week. During one treatment a few months later, I experienced something I can still remember vividly. Lying on the treatment table, I suddenly felt as though my ears were opening like a lotus flower—almost as though my head were opening from the inside. It sounds strange written down, but it felt extraordinary—a profound shift.

Over the following months, my sensitivity to sound disappeared, and eventually so did the tinnitus. My hearing returned completely to normal. However, something else had changed, too. I became fascinated by what had happened.

I grew up in a family of lawyers and Western medical practitioners. My own mind is practical, questioning and evidence-led—it always has been. Yet here was a system of medicine rooted in a philosophy completely alien to anything I knew, and it had produced the most profound physical and emotional change I had ever experienced. I wanted to understand it. The more I read about Chinese medicine, the more questions I had for my acupuncturist; the more I learned, the more I discovered a way of understanding the body that I hadn’t expected. Behind terminology that can initially sound unfamiliar was an extraordinarily elegant and logical way of understanding the human body: not as a collection of separate parts, but as an interconnected system, part of and constantly responding to the world around it.

A new beginning

It was actually my wife, Annette, who first gave me permission to imagine another life. “Why don’t you do something different?”, she asked me one day. It was such a simple question. Until then, music hadn’t really felt like a career I could leave. It was a core part of who I was and how I expressed myself. I’d been a musician for as long as I could remember. However, Annette gave me the freedom to consider something I hadn’t allowed myself to consider: perhaps it was okay to do something else. A few months later, in my mid-thirties, I enrolled at the International College of Oriental Medicine (ICOM) to begin a three-year Bachelor of Science degree in acupuncture.

Leaving music felt, at the time, like a painful break-up. Today I’m at peace with it.

I think of music almost like someone I once loved deeply and no longer speak to. The love hasn’t disappeared. I just needed to let it go.

The practitioner that experience made me

Looking back now, I understand this period very differently from how I saw it at the time. I don’t believe there was a simplistic explanation for what happened to me. I certainly don’t believe that my symptoms were “all in my head”. They were painfully, disablingly real. However, I do believe my body was telling me something I hadn’t yet been able to hear. I had been pushing through a life and career that was becoming less and less aligned with how I saw my future. My acupuncturist was the first healthcare practitioner who considered that the circumstances of my life might be relevant to what was happening in my body. That experience has profoundly shaped the practitioner I am today.

Above everything else, I want the people who come into my clinic to feel seen and heard: no judgement; no assumptions; just compassion, curiosity and a safe place within which we can try to understand what is happening. Of course, we start with the symptom that brought you through the door. If you’re coming to see me because you’re in pain, suffering with migraines, struggling with your digestion or trying to conceive, that matters. However, I primarily want to understand you. What was happening when this began? What makes it better or worse? What else has changed? How are you sleeping? How are you feeling? What has happened in the months or years leading up to this? Sometimes the apparently insignificant detail turns out not to be insignificant at all. That is one of the things I find so compelling about Chinese medicine. It gives us a framework for looking for relationships rather than simply looking at individual symptoms in isolation.

Western medicine is extraordinarily good at many things, and I work with it rather than against it. The consultants I saw all those years ago hadn’t failed me; they had investigated what they were trained to investigate and, fortunately, found nothing structurally wrong. However, their framework didn’t have an answer for me. Chinese medicine allowed someone to ask a different set of questions, ones that didn’t leave me feeling isolated or as though I was falling through the cracks.

More than a decade later, that remains at the heart of how I practise. I treat the person, not just the condition written on their medical history. That doesn’t mean ignoring symptoms; quite the opposite. We begin with what matters to you and work from there. However, rather than assuming that each problem exists independently, I try to understand how the pieces might fit together. This is something we do together.

I will listen. I will ask questions, and if I think something needs further medical investigation, I will tell you. I can’t promise that I can solve every problem that walks through my door; no responsible practitioner can. What I can promise is that I will take you seriously, and I will turn over every stone I reasonably can to understand what is happening and find a way to help.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I now regularly treat people experiencing tinnitus and hyperacusis. Those patients can still take me back to a difficult period of my own life. At times, that can be confronting, but I also know what it feels like to be sitting on the other side of the consultation. I know what it feels like to be frightened by what your body is doing, to have investigations that don’t provide an answer and to wonder whether this is simply how things are going to be from now on. I also know how powerful it can be when somebody finally looks at you, listens to your story and says:

“I can help you.”

I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anyone. At the time, it came to me at an enormous personal cost, but it also changed the direction of my life. It taught me to listen differently—to my patients, to the body, and ultimately to myself. It made me the practitioner I am today.