Eloise in The Evening Standard

14 MAY 2024

Madeleine Spencer

Once upon a time, it was mostly women who volunteered to have pins stuck into them on purpose in the name of being healthy. But now men are into it too, and partly thanks to royalty, thinks Eloise Coulson, one of London’s top acupuncturists, who is talking me through her client base from her white studio in central London.

“I’d say at least 50 per cent of them are now men, which definitely wasn’t the case in student clinic, unless someone’s wife or girlfriend sent them along,” Coulson says. “Maybe it’s things like the King being a real advocate of complementary medicine.”

She meets me at the Soho branch of Third Space, a fancy gym where running machines are flanked by book-lined walls, and the members walk around looking astonishingly composed and groomed while breaking a sweat during the classes taking place on the mezzanine floors.

Tucked away in Coulson’s rather more calm corner in the medical department, the acupuncture bed is winking invitingly at me, but first she is running through her consultation and I’m asking her questions about her work and life less ordinary.

Coulson starting work young, leaving Yorkshire for London to become a model at 18. “It was fun, it was typical of the Nineties, but I always took it for what it was,” she says. “At the end of the day, I was playing dress-up, not saving the world, so I just saw it as a way of travelling — but with friends and a life outside of it.”

It turns out that the groundwork for her working in acupuncture was laid long ago, starting with the desire to be a doctor while at school, and she returned to her medical leanings after deciding at 25 to ease off the globetrotting and modelling, instead studying to be an osteopath.

Two years into the five-year degree, she became pregnant with her first son and took a year off. “I think I lost my ambition at that particular moment; I just wanted to be at home with my child. They gave me a year to return to my studies, but within a year I was pregnant with our second son, so I did a psychology degree at the Open University at home. Again, I didn’t feel especially ambitious, and it wasn’t with a view to doing anything with it necessarily — I just needed to keep my brain going, and I love learning.”

Next, Coulson pursued psychology, which encompassed social, child, and cognitive varieties, before doing a masters in career counselling and coaching at Birkbeck. “But I only did that for a year, so it didn’t feel very valid to me personally,” she protests.

Acupuncture, which Coulson says is for many a port of call either as a complement to western medicine or a measure when all else has failed, seems the perfect fit, somewhere she can tie together all the various learnings. “It’s so effective but I’m passionate that it’s complementary, not alternative. I’ve studied Western medicine for years and love it, and it’s life-saving”. This is something Coulson has seen first hand. “One of our sons had open-heart surgery as a baby,” she adds.

Another component she believes is vital to being a good practitioner isn’t merely knowing how to treat but also when not to, where acupuncture leaves off and other disciplines would be better. “You’ve got to be aware of your limitations, and I think that it’s essential to know what’s beyond my remit — but I’ve noticed that if you’ve got emotional issues, there is absolutely going to be some physical manifestation of it, and vice versa.” Coulson has been married to journalist and former editor Andy Coulson for 24 years, and they have three sons together. Andy now has a consultancy firm and podcast about crisis management, and Eloise says he submits himself to the needles from time to time. While she was parenting her young family, Coulson studied her trade, now spending more time at work.

Acupuncture is all the rage just now, with stars such as Rita Ora and Gwyneth Paltrow flying the flag for facial treatments. A 2022 study showed it can significantly relieve lower back pain for pregnant women.

I’m seeing Coulson with one of those emotional problems that is causing physical symptoms, with my shoulders coiled up from running around London at breakneck — pun intended — speed, and my polycystic ovary syndrome symptoms raging as a result of stress. I’ve long been keen on acupuncture for both issues which plague me, but have experienced a variety of approaches, some less effective than others.

My benchmark of brilliance is twofold: first, I need to descend into one of those restorative acupuncture sleeps during the treatment, and, second, I must then feel less bothered by the ailments I went in with after the session. Coulson immediately identified what they refer to in Chinese medicine as a “phlegm-dampness constitution” (it sounds more grim than it is; essentially it just means that I’m prone to lung issues, puffiness, and weight gain), and duly went about inserting needles to address that, and also to relax me without wiping me out entirely.

The session easily leapfrogged into one of the most effective acupuncture treatments I’ve had, sending me into a hazy state as soon as the needles were in, and I emerged back into the vigour of town with less acute neck pain and a greater sense of being grounded. This, for a single session, is remarkable in my experience, and in Coulson’s.

“It’s cumulative. Sure, sometimes you can effect a change really quickly, but if something’s been going on for a long time, it’s much harder to shift. We can’t do one treatment and that’s it done.” I hardly needed convincing to book in again, but that really cemented it.