Warren Whitfield and Jono Rudolph, alternative therapy practitioners.
Warren Whitfield and Jono Rudolph’s individual life journeys are the compelling backstories to Acu-Wellness in Ballito. Today, they’re highly experienced alternative therapy practitioners with a deep commitment to this pathway to health, writes Anne Schauffer.
Pictures by Dawn Rouse.
When you’ve experienced a trauma, you’re more compassionate towards others walking that road. You’ve walked in their shoes. It works in every corner of life – from empathy towards a new mum with post-partum depression, to leading a support group for other anxiety sufferers.
In the last few decades, alternative therapies have become far more widely accepted in South Africa. Reflexology, herbal supplements, homoeopathy, massage and acupuncture are well-entrenched modalities. There’s a clear leaning towards those therapies which treat the cause of the problem rather than its symptoms – on both the physical and metaphysical level.
Still, there are always sceptics. Ironically, Warren Whitfield was one of them.
Fourteen years ago, Warren registered at New York’s Lincoln Memorial Recovery Centre, training under the late Michael Smith who founded the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA). Michael – a GP and psychiatrist – had come across the work of Dr Wen in Hong Kong who, using only acupuncture, was highly successful in alleviating the withdrawal and cravings of drug addicts. He’d had low success, so began working with acupuncture. The success rate was phenomenal, and he was a convert.
Warren had flown halfway around the world for this course – the content of which he’d misunderstood. It took time for his scepticism to subside, but he became so invested in auricular (ears) acupuncture, that he went on to specialise and become a trainer. Today, he runs courses in South Africa: “This course is part of the third-year curriculum at Yale School of Psychiatry – they saw the efficacy of a non-verbal, drug-free method. Soon graduate schools worldwide will include this in their curriculum.”
Today, NADA has a footprint in over 40 countries, with more than 30 000 practitioners and 3 000 clinics globally.
With a less than one percent failure rate for curing addiction, the NADA five-point treatment system hasn’t altered in 40 years. Warren spent a great deal of time working in a clinic in the USA: “One thousand clients a day were coming into the clinic for acupuncture; even the legal courts were referring addicts to the programme.”
Warren was the first in South Africa to practice this five-point protocol and is an internationally certified trainer. He was the founder of the NADA SA and AcuDetox Clinics SA (Pty) Ltd. Today, he is NADA SA’s chairman.
Jono Rudolph and Warren opened Acu-Wellness in Ballito. It was their dream to open a wellness centre that offered every kind of modality under the sun, so they could offer people whatever was indicated for their specific requirements.
Jono is an Ozone specialist and an AcuDetox practitioner with over 15 years’ experience in addiction counselling. He beat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cancer using Ozone and other modalities.
The word AcuDetox is an amalgamation of acupuncture and detoxification, and these healing tools are the primary, although not exclusive, focus at Acu-Wellness. The Acu-Wellness practice is a collaboration of specialist alternative health practitioners, who, together, provide a wide range of treatments that hone in on both the physical and metaphysical.
Warren believes everything begins with detoxification: “People aren’t detoxifying correctly. The body and mind are inseparable, so if your body is toxic, so is your mind.” He described how most consults proceed: “The theory behind Chinese medicine is very simple. All diseases of the body or mind are caused by a toxin. It can be physical – alcohol, fungus, bacteria, etc – or abstract – thoughts, memories, traumas, emotions. We specialise in a ‘toxin evaluation’, where we spend an hour-and-a-half discovering the toxic event and uncovering what happened, where the ‘illness’ began. There’s always a timeline and a cause. We investigate disempowering beliefs.
“People need to be detoxified correctly and relatively slowly. We complement it with the appropriate stem cell patch.”
Warren believes there’s very little with which their alternative therapies can’t assist: “We have clients with mental illnesses, stress, anger, anxiety – and at the other end of the spectrum, those who simply want to become healthy and detox or want to resolve hormonal imbalances. I’ve eliminated a lifetime of migraines in four weeks and helped people stop smoking in one acupuncture session.
“People have become a great deal more health-conscious. They’re also more open to non-invasive, non-drug based therapies, and are more comfortable with the concept that the mind and body are linked.”
The team at AcuDetox is highly skilled, passionate about their work, focus on you, your immune system and your well-being. They are healers. *
FOR MORE INFO
- Jono Rudolph: 064 695 0258
- Warren Whitfield: 072 522 5325
- www.acuwellness.co.za