Prior to his acupuncture career Mark Bovey gained a MSc in Animal Breeding and worked as a geneticist for an international agri-business company. In 1983 he received his Licentiate from the College of Traditional Acupuncture in the UK, since when he has been in private practice in Oxford, where he lives. He divides his working week between practice and research: he is research manager for the British Acupuncture Council and has been the coordinator of the Acupuncture Research Resource Centre since 1998. He is the author of a number of acupuncture research articles and has been a co-investigator on studies of acupuncture use for fertility, acupuncture’s effectiveness for Parkinson’s Disease and the effects of cupping on inflammatory markers. He also teaches at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine, Reading, where he helped to develop the research module.