Gut Health

Take persistent digestive symptoms to your GP first, particularly with bleeding, weight loss, or a change in bowel habit. Coeliac disease needs testing before you remove gluten, not after. That is not a formality: testing after a gluten-free month can come back falsely normal.

What brings people here is usually a diagnosis of exclusion — irritable bowel syndrome, or "nothing wrong on the tests" — where the symptoms are real and the medical options have been exhausted. For IBS specifically there is reasonable evidence that gut-directed approaches help, and the ones with the best support are dietitian-led low-FODMAP trials and gut-directed hypnotherapy. We will tell you that rather than keeping it to ourselves.

What a session involves: an hour, questions about meals and timing and the bowel in more detail than you are used to being asked, pulse and tongue, then needling with you lying down — usually points on the limbs and abdomen, and often warmth over the abdomen, which is the part people come back for. A course runs four to six weekly sessions before a proper review of whether it is helping.

One local note: Northern Beaches routines tend to involve very early starts and late dinners, and an eating window that runs from 6am to 9pm with a long gap in the middle is itself a digestive pattern. It is worth looking at before anything else. We are in Freshwater, ten streets from Balgowlah and about twenty from Manly.