Last updated: 5 November 2026
This policy explains what information The 5 Realms collects about you, why we collect it, who sees it and what you can do about it. If anything is unclear, please ask us.
Who we are
The 5 Realms is run by Colin Solomon, who treats clients at our clinic in Watford, Hertfordshire. Colin is a member of the British Acupuncture Council (BAcC) and is registered with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC).
Colin is the controller of your personal information. This means he decides how it is used and is responsible for looking after it. You can contact us about anything in this policy:
- Email: createyourwellness@gmail.com
- Phone: 07951 579300
When you contact us
Our contact form asks for your name, email address, phone number, the treatment area you’re interested in and a message. When you send it, the form emails your details to us. The website itself doesn’t keep a copy. If you email or call us instead, we use your details in the same way.
We use these details to reply to you and, if you want, to arrange treatment. Your message may include information about your health. Please share only what you’re comfortable with: we go through your health properly at your consultation. Anything you tell us about your health is kept confidential and used only to answer you and plan your care.
Our newsletter
If you sign up to our newsletter, we store your email address in our website’s database and use it only to send you occasional articles. You can unsubscribe at any time by replying to any newsletter or emailing us, and we’ll delete your address. We don’t use a newsletter service at the moment. If we start using one, we’ll update this policy.
Gift voucher designer
The voucher designer on our gift voucher page works entirely in your browser. What you type stays on your device so you can print your voucher. Nothing is sent to us or saved.
Bookings, paid gift vouchers and discovery calls
We take bookings and sell gift vouchers through Fresha, and you can book a free discovery call through Calendly. When you use them, you give your details to Fresha or Calendly, and their own privacy policies apply. They pass us what we need to see you, such as your name, contact details, appointment time and anything you add to your booking. If your discovery call is a video call, it takes place on Zoom, and Zoom’s privacy policy applies to the call.
At the clinic
Before your first treatment, Colin takes a health consultation. This covers your medical history, current health, medicines, lifestyle and the reasons you’ve come to us. He then keeps notes of each treatment and how you’re getting on, along with your consent to treatment. We need this to treat you safely, and our professional bodies require us to keep these records. You don’t have to tell us anything, but we can’t treat you safely without a full health history.
We also keep a record of what you’ve paid, for our accounts.
Our legal reasons for using your information
Data protection law only lets us use your information when we have a lawful reason. Ours are:
- To provide your treatment: your contact details, bookings and records are needed to carry out the treatment you've asked for.
- Legitimate interests: answering your enquiries, improving our website, running the clinic, and keeping records in case of a complaint or claim.
- Consent: sending you our newsletter. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Legal obligation: keeping accounts, which tax law requires.
Health information is a special category of information under the law. We use it to provide health care to you, under a duty of confidentiality, which the law allows. In rare cases we may also need it to deal with a legal claim.
Who we share it with
We never sell your information or share it for anyone else’s marketing. We share it only with:
- Google, because our email is a Gmail account. Emails you send us, and our replies, are stored by Google.
- The people who build and look after our website, and our hosting provider. They can see website data, such as newsletter signups, only to run the site for us.
- PostHog, our website analytics service (see "Cookies and analytics" below).
- A prescriber, if a treatment you choose needs a prescription. Some vitamin injections and IV infusions use prescription-only medicines, so a doctor, nurse or pharmacist prescriber assesses you first and sees the health information they need to do that.
- Your GP or another health professional, only if you agree, unless there is a serious risk to your health or someone else's, or the law requires it.
- Others where necessary: the BAcC or CNHC if they are looking into a complaint, our insurer or legal advisers if there is a claim, and the police, a court or a regulator where the law requires it.
Where your information is stored
Our website and its database run on a hosting provider’s servers in Finland, and PostHog stores analytics data on servers in the EU. UK law recognises EU data protection as adequate, so your information has the same protection there as in the UK. Google may store emails outside the UK, including in the United States, and uses safeguards recognised under UK law when it does.
How long we keep it
- Clinical records: eight years after your last treatment. For a child, until their 25th birthday, or their 26th if they were 17 when treatment ended. This meets the record keeping rules of both the CNHC and the BAcC.
- Enquiries: up to 12 months after we last hear from you. If you become a client, your enquiry is kept with your clinical record.
- Newsletter signups: until you unsubscribe.
- Payment and accounts records: six years, as tax law requires.
After that, we delete or securely destroy it. We keep your information confidential and take sensible steps to keep it secure. Your clinical records are seen only by people who need them for your care.
Cookies and analytics
Our website doesn’t set any cookies for visitors. The only cookies come from WordPress, the system our website runs on, when our own team logs in to manage the site. Our fonts are loaded from our own website, not from Google or any other font service. Fresha and Calendly set their own cookies when you visit their sites.
We use PostHog to see how our website is used, so we can improve it. It’s set up without cookies: it stores nothing on your device and doesn’t remember you from one page to the next. It records which pages are visited, which website sent you to us, your browser and type of device, how quickly pages load, clicks on links and buttons, and your rough location (town or country) worked out from your IP address. PostHog doesn’t keep your IP address, builds no profile of you and doesn’t follow you to other websites. We only use these figures as statistics, and they don’t tell us who you are.
You can turn analytics off at any time with the “Turn off analytics” button on this page. Your browser then remembers your choice, and your visits are no longer counted.
Your rights
You have the right to:
- get a copy of the information we hold about you
- have it corrected if it's wrong
- have it deleted, although we must keep clinical records for the period above
- ask us to limit how we use it, or object to how we use it
- receive information you gave us in a format you can reuse
- withdraw your consent at any time, for example by unsubscribing from the newsletter
To use any of these rights, email or call us. It’s free, and we’ll reply within one month. We don’t make decisions about you by automated means.
Complaints
If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your information, please tell us first. We’ll acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and look into it properly.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator: ico.org.uk or 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this policy
We’ll update this policy if the way we use information changes, and change the date at the top.