How a little royal help made acupuncture all the rage

WELLNESS Sticking pins in yourself is in vogue. Eloise Coulson tells Madeleine Spencer about life as a model turned acupuncturist - and why it works

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ONCE upon a time, it was mostly women who volunteered to have pins stuck into them on purpose in the name of being healthy. But now men are into it too, and partly thanks to royalty, thinks Eloise Coulson, one of London's top acupuncturists, who is talking me through her client base from her white studio in central London.

"I'd say at least 50 per cent of them are now men, which definitely wasn't the case in student clinic, unless someone's wife or girlfriend sent them along," Coulson says. "Maybe it's things like the King being a real advocate of complementary medicine." She meets me at the Soho branch of Third Space, a fancy gym where running machines are flanked by booklined walls, and the members walk around looking astonishingly composed and groomed while breaking a sweat during the classes taking place on the mezzanine floors.

Tucked away in Coulson's rather more calm corner in the medical department, the acupuncture bed is winking invitingly at me, but first she is running through her consultation and I'm asking her questions about her work and life less ordinary.

Coulson starting work young, leaving Yorkshire for London to become a model at 18. "It was fun, it was typical of the Nineties, but I always took it for what it was," she says. "At the end of the day, I was playing dress-up, not saving the world, so I just saw it as a way of travelling - but with friends and a life outside of it." It turns out that the groundwork for her working in acupuncture was laid long ago, starting with the desire to be a doctor while at school, and she returned to her medical leanings after deciding at 25 to ease off the globetrotting and modelling, instead studying to be an osteopath.