John Ratcliffe was born in Melbourne in 1962. He began his studies in traditional Chinese medicine in the early 1980s, graduating in 1988, before spending six years in the Australian army’s Commando regiment and then leaving to resume his career in Chinese medicine. He opened his first clinic, which he ran for 11 years, in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond, and went on to become one of Victoria’s first fully qualified Chinese medical practitioners.
Ratcliffe left Melbourne for Afghanistan in 2005 on a three-week private-security assignment that morphed into a five-year journey into hell. After returning home in 2010, he found it difficult to hold down a regular job, and was homeless for a short while. In 2013, he left Australia once again to apply his operational experience and medical knowledge in third-world countries.
