Gerad Kite is used to famous faces walking into his Central London acupuncture clinic. Actors Andrew Garfield, Rupert Everett and Michelle Dockery, plus Spice Girl Mel C and Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien are all clients. I also have it on good authority that he’s been treating the Prince and Princess of Wales for the past 18 months. This July, Kate revealed she’d been having acupuncture. Was it Kite administering the needles?
‘I’m bound by a confidentiality agreement,’ he says, sitting in his consulting room, with a hint of a smile. ‘What I’ll say is, the calibre of people I see tells me acupuncture really works. Western medicine looks at symptoms, we treat the mind, body and spirit as a whole.’
Kite, 64, is a master of five-element acupuncture (distinct from the more common TCM – Traditional Chinese Medicine model). In simple terms, this approach teaches that humans comprise five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water), which must be in balance for life energy ‘Qi’ (pronounced ‘chee’) to flow freely through us. His skill is in quickly diagnosing the ‘causative factor’ behind any interruption in flow and inserting needles into ‘meridians’ (the pathways that distribute Qi) where necessary. Clients pay £395 for the first 90-minute consultation and £295 for each one-hour session thereafter.
Now, Kite has written a just-published book about his 35 years of practice, called The Untapped Self. It’s full of good stories, like his female client ‘Tor’, an Oxford-educated lawyer who’s having a desperately unhappy affair with a man she calls The B*****d. To me, it sounds like she has ‘daddy issues’. But by sticking a needle into places called things like ‘Abundant Splendour’ – the spot between the knee and the ankle bone – Kite rebalances Tor’s earth element and she finds the energy to escape.
I’ve never had acupuncture, but after reading his book I try a session. Kite greets me in his clinic’s reception with a handshake and unblinking gaze. His voice is mellifluous as he asks how I am.
Minutes later, I’m in his consulting room, realising he has already drawn several important conclusions about me. A five-element master can make a diagnosis based on look, voice, odour and emotions within seconds. Without me even noticing, Kite sniffed and visually assessed me. It’s bad news.
I smell putrid. My colour is red. My voice is a groan. The emotion I emit is fear. All of this suggests an imbalance in my water element. However, it could be worse. Some people smell ‘rancid’. ‘Sometimes,’ says Kite, ‘I detect the smell of s**t.’
He asks about my health and what I most want in life. I say I’m trying to write a book but need more energy and confidence. Kite agrees. Soon my shirt, shoes and socks are off and I’m face-up on the bed. I’m fine with needles as long as I don’t look. But wait, why is he setting fire to me?
‘This is moxa,’ he says of the smoking clump of dried herbs on my chest. Also called mugwort, it’s said to have healing qualities. ‘The heating ensures the acupuncture point is fully stimulated before the needle enters, releasing energy from the depths of your being.’
It doesn’t hurt and Kite probes my left shoulder with a needle, a bit like someone testing whether a cake is done. When I report a mild throb, he pulls out the needle then dances around the bed checking energy flow at both my wrists. ‘The needle becomes an extension of me,’ he enthuses, ‘a way of communicating with the energy within.’
London-born Kite had a chaotic past. In his youth he worked in the travel industry, was unhappy in love and drank too much. He got married in his mid 20s but that soon fell apart. Miserable, he tried psychotherapy and then, after a friend suggested it, acupuncture – where he learned his fire element was out of whack. This explained why he was always either hopelessly in love or feeling rejected. By 1989, he had begun training as an acupuncturist himself.
Kite went on to make a name for himself in the mid-noughties when he helped more than 1,000 women with unexplained fertility issues. Seventy-four per cent of his clients who had 14 treatments over nine months got pregnant, 82 per cent of them carried to full term, and of the 18 per cent who miscarried, 72 per cent had babies later on (some were having IVF or other medical procedures alongside the acupuncture sessions).
‘I am not a fertility expert,’ he insists, ‘but those results illustrate the difference between Western medicine and what we do. IVF uses scans and blood tests related to gynaecology but with five-element acupuncture everything is put in balance so all systems begin to fire.’
Kite has now treated thousands more people – for fertility issues and otherwise – and has 150 clients at present, most of them ordinary folk. It’s reassuring to know that, deep down, rock stars and royals, we are all the same. ‘I treat many prominent people but sometimes, it’s the very determination that’s given them rewards in public life that causes their turmoil internally.’
Some clients are clear what they want from him. He tells me about a Hollywood actor who told Kite he wanted a girlfriend. ‘It should be easy, right?’ he says. ‘You’re a movie star but for some reason your relationships don’t work out. There comes a point where you think, “Hang on a minute, what’s going on here?” This person was evolved enough to know it was something about him that was stopping him from having a lasting relationship.’
I look up the A-list actor. He recently fell madly in love. Wow! Back on the table I’m hoping I’m a simple fix. Kite marks up my left breast with a pen, like a builder about to put up a kitchen cabinet. He’s going to put a needle in a place called ‘Spirit Burial Ground’ (the spot between your third and fourth ribs). That should make a good point for energy to enter.
I feel a slight throb. Kite does, too.
‘When a vortex of released energy travels up through the needle, I feel it. Whoosh! I know I’ve reactivated something.’
To be honest I don’t feel any reactivation, but Kite asks me lots of questions about my life. He wants me to talk so he can monitor any changes in my voice, colour, emotion and odour.
Do I smell less putrid now?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And there’s more energy in your voice.’
I want to feel better but, in truth, I don’t. Later, I dream I’m strolling through my Spirit Burial Ground and email Kite about it. He says intense dreams are due to my mind and spirit becoming less ‘dense’. My wife notices a tiny scorch mark on my chest and asks if I’ve been stubbing out cigarettes on myself. She thinks it looks sexy, so that’s a win.
Inevitably there are sceptics and the National Institute For Care And Health Excellence only recommends acupuncture for things such as migraines, an inflamed prostate or hiccups.
‘I really want to change that, which is why I’m training up more practitioners – five-element acupuncture should be accessible to all,’ Kite says. Hence his acupuncture school, Yellow Path, in East London, where you can get a session for £35 from student practitioners.
At 64, Kite looks amazing.
He cannot do acupuncture on himself, because it’s impossible to read your own Qi levels, so he sees a practitioner at his clinic. Still, in January he had major surgery after a heart scare. He’d been swimming on holiday when his aorta dilated. I don’t want to be a cynic, but… shouldn’t acupuncture have picked that up?
‘Not if it’s congenital,’ Kite replies, ‘which it might be.’
As for me, he thinks I need more sessions but his next client is waiting. I pass them in reception. I think they smell nice.
The Untapped Self by Gerad Kite and James Eden (New River Books, £16.99) is out now. To order a copy for £15.29 until 23 November, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
