I like to think I started alternative medicine. Or at least, I was instrumental and practically vital in getting things started here in New Zealand. Like all good things that start in New Zealand, it made the jump to Australia (they copy everything good that we do…there wouldn’t even BE an Australia if the people in New Zealand weren’t making a nation first!) and the rest is history.

It was a terrible time, finishing World War II. The economy was in tatters, the people were demoralised and for some reason, margarine was undergoing a major shortage. There were a lot of shortages then, of course, but we felt margarine the keenest. In the midst of that lingering despair, I thought I’d start giving dry needle courses in Auckland, where I lived at the time. I had met a young Albajerian gentleman during the war, and being a little girl with no concept of strangers, I invited him to stay with us. Mother actually let him stay, because he was unable to return to his homeland and he was so polite. Anyway, he was a dry needling expert, hence why he’d been travelling to New Zealand and giving courses.

Obviously he must’ve heard that we were at the forefront of innovation, but with the war on, he found himself quite out of a job and a long way from home. He told me such stories of where he grew up, and being a little girl who hadn’t seen much of the world, I was enthralled. He began to teach me the ways of dry needling, which in his culture was thought to bring relief from pain AND worries of the spirit. Jury is still out on that second one, but I can say that I learned to dry needle just fine. I later started touring Australia. Dry needling was barely started then, and since I had been entrusted with the sacred techniques of another land, it wasn’t long before it exploded in popularity.

So yep, all me! And alternative medicine followed. All of it.

-Mabel