Viewers of Channel 4's new series of the competition Child Genius, which began on Sunday, have been mesmerised by the unusual world of nine-year-old Aliyah. Aliyah, who lives in Hove, is one of 20 extremely bright children the programme is following as they compete to be named the cleverest of them all.

As the programme on Sunday showed, she is coached by her mother Shoshana and stepfather Sasha, self-confessed geniuses, who have devised a strict study schedule and a diet that includes a lot of vegetables juices to increase her learning potential.

But viewers will also have spotted a segment in the programme in which Aliyah, who has an IQ of 135, was seen in a treatment room where huge brown boots were put on her feet.

She was in the practice room of The Wave Clinic, the clinic of Hove's hidden secret, senior energy practitioner Vonnie Bucknall.

The felt boots apply a gentle vacuum pressure (removing any air) to stimulate energy points as part of a unique therapy called Energy Alignment Method, which treats the physical and emotional needs of a patient and the body as a whole.

"On the soles of the feet are thousands of nerve endings," explains Vonnie. "When you have the boots on for some time, your feet change colour and you can see what is going on in the body. For example, if the colour is red, it indicates acidity, white indicates long-term congestion, and mauve shows problems that currently exist, such as infections." In tandem with the boots treatment, the next step is to apply vacuum pads to hands, feet and legs in a sequence that, working in the same way as acupuncture, “rebalances internal energy through the meridian pathways”, or the paths along which life energy flows, according to traditional Chinese medicine. These ‘paths’ carry oxygen, energy, electricity, vitamins and hormones.

While she declines to disclose details of Aliyah's treatment due to patient confidentiality, Vonnie, who has ‘a natural gift for healing’, does say her unique 'body rebalancing' treatment always begins with a body MOT. She concentrates on what she calls the "priorities of priorities" principle, that is, finding the cause of the problem rather than treating the symptoms.

"What happens in your head can affect the body," she says. "I identify the triggers for stress and address them, because I believe that in many cases stress and anxiety trigger dis-ease."

Vonnie will identify food intolerances simply by lightly placing the fingers of one of her hands on certain muscles and with her other hand touching a series of vials labelled wheat, grapes, mushrooms, avocado, and so on. She also carries out facial observation.

"The eyes tell you about the kidneys, the lips about your gut function, and the three lines across the forehead are waterworks, nervous system and diet," she says. "What you put in your body is so important, far more than people realise. It's like putting diesel in a car that should have unleaded fuel." While Vonnie stresses she is not a doctor and cannot make diagnoses, she has 26 years' experience in clinic and is certified by the British Register of Complementary Practitioners, being recognised as the Best Complementary Practitioner 2012 by the Institute for Complementary and Natural Medicine. Her route to complementary medicine was not conventional. In the 1980s, she had been working in a high-powered corporate job in London when she had to undergo open heart surgery, and it was afterwards, when she had sought a therapy to complement conventional medicine, that she discovered energy alignment method (EAM).

It greatly helped her recovery, and she gave up her job and went to South Africa to focus further on EAM and then back to the UK to study other therapies and advanced anatomy and physiology.

Later, she trained under the late Alan Sales, an innovative pioneer of kinesiology and cyber kinetics, the study of the movement of muscles, and consolidated her EAM knowledge working with Carol Bosiger, the founder of the Bosiger EAM, a health programme that works on the principle that physical, mental or emotional imbalances are caused by reduced energy flow in the body. During her treatment of her many clients, she maintains an emotional distance from them, a necessity when she is dealing with someone, for example, who is unable to have children or who is suffering from anorexia or bulimia. “I follow my own advice to patients, which is to focus on dealing with the now, rather than worrying about the past or what may happen in the future,” says Vonnie. She met Aliyah's parents, both doctors in psychology, locally and Shoshana asked her to treat Aliyah after going to her for treatment herself. The programme makers spent four hours at Vonnie's clinic filming, and she will appear in future episodes during the series, which is broadcast at 9pm on Sundays. To find out more about Vonnie Bucknall and The Wave Clinic, phone 07952 314156 or visit vonniebucknall.co.uk