A New Life: Prof Tom Shanahan tells Claire O'Connell the study of Chinese medicine takes a lifetime.
When Prof Tom Shanahan climbed into a taxi in the 1960s he had little idea the journey would change the direction of his life.
His mother was with him, gravely ill because a replaced heart valve was failing.
Western medicine could no longer help her, and as a last resort Shanahan was bringing her to a practitioner of Chinese medicine.
"She was dying," he recalls. "She couldn't breathe, she could hardly walk the length of herself without having to sit down and she couldn't sleep at night. It was really awful."
Shanahan, who was an Oxbridge academic, had heard about a Chinese doctor from a friend and figured there was nothing left to lose.
"Off I went with my mother in the back of the taxi, me really worried and her hardly able to breathe. And out she came smiling, walking out as happy as Larry.
"It was miraculous. This man helped her live for an extra four years with the best health I can ever remember her in," he says. "I thought, I don't know what this Chinese medicine is, but I'm going to spend the rest of my life finding out. And 30 years down the line, that's what I'm still doing."
Shanahan had never expected to become a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. "I'm basically a philosopher," he says. "I've always been interested in whys and the reasons behind things."
His family left his native Roscommon in the 1950s. "After the war there was no work so we upped and moved over to Manchester, and I was educated in England," he says.
Part of that education was at a junior seminary, which led on to a senior seminary in Spain, although he opted out before ordination. "There's nothing like the prospect of being ordained deacon, which you can't get back out of, that concentrates your mind," he says.
The head of the seminary recognised Shanahan's flair for philosophy and encouraged him to continue his studies at Oxford and Cambridge. While he was doing a post-graduate degree, his mother became ill, and witnessing her transformation at the hands of a Chinese doctor inspired Shanahan to train for three years in the fundamentals of acupuncture at Leamington Spa.
He set up his own practice in England and continued to train in all aspects of Chinese medicine, learning from Chinese doctors and visiting China, putting in gruelling hours on the job. "We got to work with doctors of 60 or 70 years of experience for around three months, working every day, starting at seven and finishing when it was dark," he says.
When he came back to England he successfully treated a young medical doctor who had exhausted the western medical options for her condition.
"She thought this was absolutely incredible - what western medicine couldn't do Chinese medicine could, and relatively easily."
The doctor brought her mother over from Galway to be treated for a similar problem, and again the results were good.
Word soon spread in Galway and, after Shanahan visited to give a talk, the demand convinced him to set up a clinic there and then another in Dublin.
Then in 1983 he founded the Irish College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses and has brought Chinese herbal medicine and the lesser-known medical qigong to Ireland.
"When the acupuncture doesn't work or when the Chinese herbs can't be taken or are not strong enough, then the third string to your bow is medical qigong," explains Shanahan.
"Basically, the doctor uses his own energy without having to use needles or herbs, and really gets quite remarkable results."
The college also set up a professional register that provides insurance for practitioners and is bound by codes of ethics and practice, which Shanahan feels is crucial.
"We don't let anyone on the register who is going to practise anything other than Chinese medicine," he says.
"If you go along to someone who is on the register, you are going to get traditional Chinese medicine. You know exactly what you are going to get."
Shanahan currently lives in Roscommon and commutes between his Galway and Dublin clinics. He is the only professor of traditional Chinese medicine in Ireland and was recently elected deputy secretary general of the World Academic Society of Medical Qigong, which is sanctioned by the Chinese government to educate about the subject.
Yet he amiably insists he is only starting to understand the field of Chinese medicine.
"I'm honestly still only a beginner. It's a massive, massive subject," he says, recalling a conversation with of one of the oldest and most famous doctors in China.
"I said if you have been doing this for 62 years you must know a huge amount about Chinese medicine.
"He pressed his finger and thumb together so no light got through and he said: 'I know that much'.
"So after 30 years I know half of what he knows."