About us

Our history

Chris Roworth began his medical career after recovering from a chronic spinal injury received during free fall parachuting – a recovery he owed to the integrated treatments of a Japanese doctor, Dr Masaaki Hatsumi.

In 1995, after extensive training, Dr Hatsumi awarded Chris ‘Menkyo Kaiden’ teaching rights in Japanese Integrated Medicine (Amatsu Hichibuku Goshinjutsu). That year Chris returned to the UK and began teaching Amatsu Japanese Integrated Medicine. Amatsu Medicine became registered with the BRCP Institute of Complementary Medicine and accepted by insurance companies for professional practitioner insurance.

Since 1991 Chris had been studying acupuncture with Professor Li Yi Qi, working together both in private practice and within the NHS. Acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping and scraping were included in the original Amatsu regulation and insurance, along with herbs, nutrition, emotional re-patterning, visceral treatments, cranial sacral fascia release and modern modalities such as infrared and ultrasound.

A two-year course was started, teaching the Shoden and Chuden levels, primarily around physical medicine. Most students had been patients or martial artists, and included midwives, osteopaths, a physiotherapist and hypnotherapists. Chris returned to Japan regularly for further study with Dr Hatsumi.

Today The Chestnut Centre in Stoke Poges has fully equipped teaching areas, with satellite course groups in Germany, the Czech Republic and Majorca, and webinar talks on aspects of Amatsu from Anma to visceral evaluation, sports injuries, acupuncture and nutrition. In 2020 the structure of learning Amatsu was changed so that even the first level, Shoden – Basic Anma, gives students a balancing routine that works remarkably well.

What does “Amatsu” mean?

Dr Hatsumi wrote Amatsu as 天津 – heavenly, divine. He linked Amatsu medicine to very old teachings and to the medical traditions passed down through his teacher Takamatsu Sensei, whose grandfather Toda Sensei ran a martial arts dojo with a bone-setting and natural medicine clinic. Dr Hatsumi emphasised the Gairon – the bigger picture – and the close connection between martial arts and medicine, from bone setting and acupuncture to herbs and nutrition. He also pointed students to the Ishinpō, the oldest surviving Japanese medical text, completed in 984.

“Past, Present, Future… Present is most important”Masaaki Hatsumi