Mike C Matthews MB. BS, FHS, FHRS

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I was a family doctor and hypnotherapist in Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England until I retired in 2000. It is a nice place to live so I still live there with my family. I researched the use of hypnotherapy tapes in Back Pain and Migraine and the results were published in the European Society of Hypnosis Journal. Each showed a clinically significant improvement in symptoms. I was for a while the medical director of an allergy testing company (YorkTest) which I left in 2001. I am now the Chairman of Allergy UK, which is a major British national patient allergy charity, and a governor at a local secondary school (I guess that makes me the equivalent of a member of a school board of a Public High School in the United States).

 

I also run a website called Natural Cures from Shared Care (www.shared-care.com) which links health and life problems with helpful therapies and lists recommended practitioners of those therapies. We also list allergy friendly, disabled friendly and child friendly eating and sleeping establishments, tourist establishments and providers of travel services; and list towns with the emphasis on their suitability for those with mobility problems.

 

Natural Cures from Shared Care is unusual as the entries are free and access to the information is free.  As I'm retired I have a pension and my partner in crime is a full time database engineer so we only need to cover our costs.  One of my main motivations is to stop my mind from falling out of my ears in retirement and I regard running Natural Cures from Shared Care rather like a hobby. In a determined effort to get fit as I'm looking at heart surgery for a narrowed leaky valve I walk some, dig the garden and get irritated with the local feline population that use my vegetable patch as their personal toilet (any legal ideas about stopping that would be welcome - I have tried lots of things from auditory scaring devices to lion dung scented pellets).

 

I have one wife of twenty five years standing and two sons, both university graduates, one from Cambridge University (Natural Sciences) and the other from Manchester University (Modern History and Politics). They are wise lads as neither are doctors, which is a frustrating occupation area in the dying dinosaur that is the British National Health Service.  

 

One of my heroes is the much maligned Oliver Cromwell who although he disliked church ritual and practice was, it is said, not averse to a good dance in its proper place.  It will come as no surprise then that we, as a family, are Christians and regularly attend a free church whose theology is most like that of the Puritans.  Like Cromwell we also enjoy those things of this world in their place.