Dr Ian Rubenstein is a north London GP with a difference – he’s a medium and makes no secret of it with his colleagues and patients. He studied medicine at Nottingham University, qualifying in 1978, and is also a medical acupuncturist and bereavement counsellor.
Since 1984 he has practised medicine at the Eagle House Surgery in Enfield. Sue Farrow put it to him that it might be an unusually open-minded surgery...
“Well, yes,” says Ian, “because I‘m there! The philosophy is that we each have our own particular interests and we encourage each other to pursue them. I’m into musculo–skeletal medicine and I do some acupuncture in the surgery, but we don’t charge for it. My partner does dermatology and another colleague does diabetes, so we do all sorts of stuff, we try to cover all our bases.
“I’m also interested in psychological things. I did a lot of hypnosis when I was younger, long before I went to medical school. The power of the mind always interested me. Funnily enough, when I went to medical school they didn’t actually teach us hypnosis but I started using it when I was doing my GP training scheme. I was doing gynaecology at the time and we had a woman with a problem after an operation.