About Vanessa and Dee

I was born in Spain and trained first as a computer scientist. That took me to Cambridge for a master’s in computer speech and langage processing, and then to London, where I spent over a decade building trading systems at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. It was a good career. It was also someone else’s problem I was solving.

I had my first acupuncture session in my thirties and spent the next ten years as a patient, fascinated by a medical system that could read my pulse and tell me things about my own body I hadn’t mentioned. When I finally retrained, it wasn’t a whim. It was ten years of watching this medicine work and wanting to understand it from the inside. I graduated from the City College of Acupuncture with a first-class Licentiate (3,600 hours of training, including a full year of supervised clinical practice), opened Covelo Acupuncture in Crouch End, and went back to CCA as a lecturer in anatomy and point location. I’m still there.

My clinical interests are in the things that aren’t straightforward: complex and chronic conditions, musculoskeletal pain, sports injuries, Dupuytren’s contracture, surgical and post-operative scars, and women’s health from fertility through to perimenopause. I use electroacupuncture and moxibustion regularly. I take on cases that haven’t responded to standard treatment elsewhere and I’m honest when something is outside my scope.

I also write and speak about AI and Chinese medicine. I’ve been a guest on the Qiological podcast (episode 407) and publish the Acubot Dispatch newsletter for practitioners. The Cambridge degree turned out to be useful after all.