By Chris Ravesi & Shaun French | Como Health Group, Beaumaris
In more than four decades of clinical practice, one of the most consistent observations I have made is this: the patients who achieve the most complete and lasting recovery are rarely those whose health concerns fit neatly into a single clinical category.
The person with chronic lower back pain who also has poor sleep, digestive irregularity, and persistent low mood. The woman with hormonal imbalance whose gut health, stress load, and energy are all compromised simultaneously. The man in his fifties whose fatigue, joint pain, and cognitive fog suggest something systemic that no single modality has been able to fully resolve.
These are the patients who have most often been underserved by the conventional model of separate referrals to separate practitioners — each treating their own piece of the picture without a unified view of the whole.
It is precisely this gap that the integrated acupuncture and naturopathy model at Como Health Group is designed to address.
Why Integration Matters
Acupuncture and naturopathy are not simply two separate tools that happen to be available at the same clinic. When delivered by a dual-qualified practitioner within a single consultation, they become genuinely complementary systems — each informing and amplifying the other in ways that are not possible when the disciplines are delivered separately.
Acupuncture works primarily through the nervous system, circulatory system, and neuroendocrine pathways — regulating pain, reducing inflammation, modulating stress responses, and restoring physiological balance at a systemic level. It is particularly powerful for addressing the structural, neurological, and energetic drivers of a patient’s presentation.
Naturopathy works through nutrition, herbal medicine, functional assessment, and targeted biochemical intervention — identifying and correcting the underlying nutritional deficiencies, hormonal dysregulation, gut dysfunction, and environmental factors that are sustaining a patient’s chronic health pattern. It is particularly powerful for addressing the biochemical and metabolic terrain in which disease develops.
Together, they address both the physiological expression of a health condition and the biochemical environment maintaining it — a combination that is significantly more powerful than either discipline alone, and that reflects how complex health conditions actually work in the body.
Integrated Acupuncture & Naturopathy Appointments at Como Health Group
At Como Health Group, integrated acupuncture and naturopathy appointments represent the culmination of more than four decades of clinical development. Chris Ravesi — registered acupuncturist and naturopathic physician with 40 years of experience in the Beaumaris community, including advanced training in anti-ageing medicine (USA) and biological medicine (Germany) — has long practised the integration of both disciplines in his clinical work, recognising early in his career that patients with complex or multi-system conditions consistently achieved better outcomes when acupuncture and naturopathic interventions were applied within the same treatment framework.
Shaun French now brings this same integrated approach to his consultations at Como Health Group. Shaun holds both a Master of Applied Science (Acupuncture) from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Health Science (Naturopathy) — one of very few practitioners in Australia qualified to the highest clinical level in both disciplines simultaneously. This means patients can receive a combined acupuncture and naturopathic consultation in a single appointment, with a unified treatment plan addressing structural, physiological, and biochemical health drivers together.
For patients managing complex, chronic, or multi-system conditions, this integrated approach delivers a depth of assessment and treatment breadth that is simply not available from a single-discipline practitioner. It is one of the most significant clinical advantages Como Health Group offers — and one that patients who have previously seen separate acupuncturists and naturopaths consistently describe as transformatively different from divided care.
What Does an Integrated Appointment Actually Look Like?
A patient who books an integrated appointment at Como Health Group will receive, within a single consultation:
A comprehensive health history and assessment that draws on both TCM diagnostic methodology — including tongue and pulse diagnosis, five element theory, and meridian assessment — and naturopathic functional assessment covering gut health, hormonal patterns, nutritional status, sleep quality, stress load, and environmental factors.
An acupuncture treatment tailored to the specific TCM diagnosis and biomedical picture identified during the assessment, which may be enhanced with electro-acupuncture, cupping, or laser acupuncture where clinically appropriate.
A naturopathic prescription addressing the biochemical and systemic drivers identified — which may include targeted nutritional supplementation, individualised herbal medicine, dietary recommendations, and referral for functional testing such as live blood analysis, comprehensive stool analysis, or salivary hormone profiling.
A single, unified treatment plan — not two separate sets of recommendations from two separate practitioners — that integrates both approaches into one coherent clinical strategy for the patient’s health.
This is not simply convenience. The integration of both disciplines within a single consultation allows the practitioner to make real-time clinical connections between a patient’s structural presentation, their systemic health patterns, and their biochemical terrain — connections that are often invisible when the same patient is seen by separate practitioners on separate occasions.
Who Benefits Most from Integrated Appointments?
While any patient can benefit from the integrated model, it is particularly valuable for those presenting with:
Complex or multi-system conditions — where symptoms span multiple body systems and no single practitioner has been able to identify a unifying cause or provide lasting relief.
Chronic pain with systemic drivers — where musculoskeletal or neurological pain is accompanied by gut dysfunction, inflammatory markers, hormonal imbalance, or nutritional deficiencies that are sustaining the pain pattern.
Post-viral syndromes and Long COVID — which frequently involve overlapping immune dysfunction, nervous system dysregulation, gut microbiome disruption, and hormonal impact that genuinely requires both disciplines to address comprehensively.
Hormonal conditions with physical manifestation — such as endometriosis, PCOS, perimenopause, or thyroid dysfunction, where the hormonal imbalance has structural and energetic consequences that acupuncture is uniquely positioned to address alongside naturopathic hormone regulation.
Mould-related illness and environmental health — a complex area requiring both the detoxification and terrain-restoration support of naturopathic medicine and the nervous system and immune regulation of acupuncture.
Patients who have tried both acupuncture and naturopathy separately without achieving the outcome they were looking for — and who have found that the integration of both in a unified consultation produces a qualitatively different clinical experience.
A Note on Clinical Rarity — Why This Matters
It is worth being explicit about how uncommon this level of dual qualification actually is in Australian clinical practice.
While many natural health clinics offer both acupuncture and naturopathy as services — delivered by separate practitioners — the ability to deliver both within a single appointment, from a single practitioner qualified at the highest clinical level in both disciplines, is genuinely rare. The postgraduate training required to achieve AHPRA registration as an acupuncturist and university qualification as a naturopath represents a significant investment of time, clinical hours, and academic rigour that very few practitioners undertake.
At Como Health Group, this rare clinical capability is now offered as a standard appointment option — not a specialty referral or an additional cost, but a fundamental feature of the integrated care available at our Beaumaris clinic.
For patients who have been navigating the fragmented landscape of separate practitioners, separate opinions, and separate treatment plans, this represents a genuinely different approach to their care.
Forty Years of Integration — A Personal Reflection
When I established Como Health Group in Beaumaris in 1990, it was with the conviction that acupuncture and naturopathy belonged together — that the human body could not be genuinely understood or effectively treated as a collection of separate systems, each requiring a different specialist.
That conviction has been reinforced by four decades of clinical observation. The patients who have achieved the most profound and lasting changes in their health are almost always those whose care addressed multiple dimensions of their health simultaneously — structural and biochemical, energetic and nutritional, systemic and environmental.
The integrated appointment model that Shaun and I now offer at Como Health Group is the formal expression of that conviction. It is not a marketing concept. It is a clinical philosophy that has shaped this practice since its founding — and that we believe represents a genuinely better model of natural healthcare for patients whose health is too complex, too interconnected, and too important to be divided.
Natural Science at Work
Chris Ravesi
Founder, Como Health Group
Registered Acupuncturist & Naturopathic Physician
Beaumaris, 2026
