Hello, I’m Charlie
Charlotte Dear, BSc (Hons), LicAc, PGDip OBGyn
Acupuncturist · BAcC & ARA Member
I’m Charlotte — Charlie to most people — an acupuncturist and the founder of Alcheme. I trained at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine in Reading, completing my degree and Licentiate in Acupuncture through an integrated training that incorporated both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Five Element acupuncture.
I’m a member of both the British Acupuncture Council and the Acupuncture Regulatory Authority, and following my degree I returned to the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine for a further year of postgraduate study in obstetrics, gynaecology and fertility (PGDip OBGyn).
But acupuncture isn't where my work with health began.
Before acupuncture...
My professional background in holistic health, beauty and skin goes back to 2011, when I retrained in Beauty Therapy and Holistic Therapies at Levels 2 and 3. I went on to work extensively with facial and body treatments before establishing my own independent skincare practice, Glow Skincare UK.
Over the years, I undertook further specialist skin training including microneedling, microdermabrasion and dermaplaning, and worked with women presenting with a wide range of skin concerns.
What interested me increasingly, though, was everything happening alongside the skin.
A conversation about breakouts or changes in the skin could become a conversation about an irregular menstrual cycle. Excess facial hair might sit alongside other symptoms associated with hormonal health. Women would talk to me about their periods, sleep, stress, energy and the other things happening in their bodies.
At that stage, my role wasn't to diagnose or treat those wider health concerns. But those conversations made me increasingly interested in the relationship between what someone could see externally and what else might be happening with their health — and I wanted the clinical training to explore that properly.
Why Chinese medicine?
My own introduction to needling came unexpectedly after a car accident. I initially received dry needling for persistent back pain following the accident. It helped with the pain, but what caught my attention was something I hadn't gone looking for: I also noticed a marked change in the anxiety and nervousness I had been experiencing since the accident.
That experience made me curious.
I started looking more seriously into acupuncture and eventually into Chinese medicine. The more I learned, the more it connected with the questions I'd already been asking through my work with women and skin: rather than looking at one symptom in isolation, what changes when you consider it as part of a much wider clinical picture?
That eventually took me to the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine in Reading, where I trained at degree level in acupuncture and Chinese medicine.
An integrated approach
My training is integrated, incorporating both Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Five Element acupuncture.
Traditional Chinese Medicine provides a detailed diagnostic framework for understanding patterns of signs and symptoms across different systems of the body. Five Element acupuncture brings an additional perspective to understanding the individual, including constitutional tendencies and the way physical and emotional aspects of health may present together.
Rather than treating these as two entirely separate approaches, my training allows me to draw on both when assessing and treating the person in front of me.
That means treatment isn't selected from a standard set of acupuncture points simply because two people share the same biomedical diagnosis. Your health history, current symptoms, tongue and pulse diagnosis, Chinese medicine pattern differentiation and wider presentation all contribute to how I formulate treatment.
Women’s health, fertility & pregnancy
Women’s health became a particular area of interest for me during my acupuncture training, building naturally on the conversations that had first made me want to understand health beyond the surface.
After completing my degree, I undertook a further year of postgraduate study at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine focused on obstetrics, gynaecology and fertility.
That additional training informs my work with women seeking acupuncture around menstrual and reproductive health, fertility and conception, assisted reproductive treatment, pregnancy and the postpartum period, as well as through changing hormonal stages of life.
It also means I bring together two areas of professional experience that might otherwise appear quite separate: women’s health and skin. For me, they have been connected for much longer than Alchemē has existed.
Bringing it together
Alcheme brings together the different strands of my professional background: holistic therapies, skin, acupuncture, Chinese medicine and specialist postgraduate study in women’s health.
Acupuncture and Chinese medicine form the foundation of my clinical practice. My earlier experience in skin continues through Facial Enhancement Acupuncture and microneedling, while my work in reproductive and women’s health is supported by the additional training I chose to undertake after my degree.
Whatever brings you through the door, the principles behind how I work remain the same: take a thorough history, understand the presentation, formulate treatment carefully and review what happens next.
I won't promise that acupuncture can fix everything, and I won't try to make every concern fit within my scope. Where something needs medical investigation, another practitioner or a different form of care, I'll tell you.
