Mike Cummings
Mike has been Medical Director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society (BMAS) since 2001. This role involves running the BMAS London Teaching Clinic (LTC), developing and running BMAS courses in Western medical acupuncture, acting as an associate editor for the Medline-listed journal Acupuncture in Medicine, and representing the BMAS at academic and political meetings.
He is an Honorary Clinical Specialist at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, and enjoys a close working relationship with colleagues who, like him, believe that life is too short for drinking cheap wine.
His principal academic and clinical interests are musculoskeletal pain, and in particular, needling therapies in the treatment of myofascial pain syndromes. He has published several papers in this area as well as in the broader field of Western medical acupuncture.
He is a reviewer for Annals of Internal Medicine and many other journals and has acted as a specialist adviser to NICE.
After completing his medical degree at Leeds, and several hospital jobs in the north of England, Mike joined the Royal Air Force for a six-and-a-half-year short service commission. A substantial portion of the workload for a general duties medical officer (GDMO) in the RAF is musculoskeletal medicine. Mike came across acupuncture by accident whilst working as a GDMO. He followed his interest in musculoskeletal medicine and acupuncture on retiring from military service, and finally found himself occupied full time in the field of acupuncture (see start of the piece).
Read Mike's profile in the Leeds University Medical School Alumni magazine from 2003.
Read a description of how Mike unexpectedly got into acupuncture in Toby Murcott's book - The Whole Story from 2005.
Links, publications, downloads on this page: https://goo.gl/6XQeXv
Mike edits and writes on the BMAS Blog: https://bmas.blog/