Teaching and Clinical staff

The Teaching staff are all fully qualified and insured TCM practitioners. Most were trained at the Irish College of TCM. This means that they have first-hand awareness of the demands and challenges facing their students.
The College encourages their different teaching styles and approaches to the material. Each brings their own varied clinical experience to the classroom for the benefit of the students.

Such variety makes the teaching interesting and dynamic. However, the main excellence of the teachers lies in their whole-hearted commitment to enabling their students to become the best Acupuncture TCM practitioners that they can possibly be. They do so by offering encouragement, advice, help and support to students. All students groups are intentionally small enough to benefit from this.

All Clinical Supervisors, who provide training and supervision in the third (clinical) year have their own busy and successful Acupuncture TCM Clinics. Additionally, and in order to become Clinical Supervisors, they undertook a number of years in training with the Clinical Director to widen their range of clinical experience and expertise.

Many of the Teaching Staff and Clinical Supervisors are not only Acupuncture TCM specialists but are also qualified in Chinese Herbal Medicine and Medical Qigong.

The most senior College staff, who set up the college in the 1980s, are fully qualified teachers. They received Postgraduate Certificates in Education from Cambridge University after completing their first degrees and before changing career into Chinese Medicine. These senior staff members have decades of experience teaching adult students in Ireland and beyond.

The Clinical Director is an established practitioner of TCM running a busy clinic in Dublin, who has undertaken training in China on many occasions and has spent time in China working in large city hospitals with some of the most experienced and famous Chinese teachers in the whole of the People’s Republic of China.

Staff are also assisted from time to time, by relatively recently qualified Acupuncturists who are keen to share their experience of Point Location practice, and other aspects of college life, with new students.

All the Medical Qigong programmes run by the College are under the auspices of the late Professor Xia Shuangquan who was the Honorary President of our Medical Qigong Department. In addition to being a renowned Master of Medical Qigong he also held the post of Professor of Medical Qigong at GUCM, Guangzhou, China – one of the leading Chinese Medicine Universities in China.

All Staff have their own interests and specialisms within the broad field of TCM and are committed to providing a conducive learning environment for their students.

Specialist Qigong Staff

Since 2006 the Medical Qigong Programmes have been overseen by Professor Song Xinhong, the current head of the Department at GUCM and ICTCM.

The Medical Qigong teaching staff have been personally taught Medical Qigong by both Professor Xia Shuangquan and Professor Song Xinhong. They regularly attend and contribute papers to Medical Qigong and Qigong Conferences around the world and have committee roles within WASMQ and other international Qigong bodies.

These staff also teach, time permitting, the Open Workshops in Health-promoting Qigong.

The Director

The founder and Director, Thomas J Shanahan, is a native of Roosky, County Roscommon. With nearly 40 years of clinical practice, Professor Shanahan is one of the most qualified and experienced TCM practitioners in Europe.

Having studied Acupuncture and TCM in Europe and China and qualified as an Acupuncturist in the early 1980s he set up as a clinical practitioner in Ireland and the UK and, at one stage of his career was running 3 clinical practices. As he was unable to meet the demand for well-trained practitioners on his own, he decided to set up the ICTCM in 1983, in his home country, and opened the first Acupuncture TCM College in Ireland.

He went on to enhance his own range of TCM specialisms and is fully qualified as a practitioner of both Chinese Herbal Medicine and Medical Qigong – both of which branches of TCM he was later happy to introduce into the ICTCM curriculum.

In January 2004 he was appointed as a Consulting Professor of TCM with the International Department of Guangzhou University of TCM. He is the first Irishman to be appointed to such a post, in recognition of his years of experience in, and commitment to, Chinese Medicine.

He brings his appreciation of Chinese Medicine and commitment to preserving the treasures of this ancient and effective medical tradition to his Clinical practice in Dublin, to his teaching and Clinical Director roles within the College and to providing specialist seminars for staff and graduates.

Details of Tom’s background and experience are in the Director’s Profile.

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