I'd like to fertilize this soon-to-be-garden of health education with an article about what I do. As one season moves into the next, I look forward to cultivating it with useful and interesting information. Please enjoy, and don't hesitate to call or email with any questions, comments, or seeds of your own that you might like to scatter.
 
    Chinese Medicine found me as a result of seeking treatment for myself. A beloved education in Anthropology led me to travel and become interested in nature, medicine, and what cultures other than our own have been up to around the world. Then, I ended up with some unresolved pain that doctors couldn’t seem to diagnose or treat. It stopped me from running around, and forced me to look deeper, not only into how I was functioning, but also into other perspectives of life and healing. During a month-long self-imposed retreat on a lake in Iowa, I read about and cooked with Ayurvedic medicine. Back in San Francisco, I received Acupuncture treatments and took herbs. An interest in energy got sparked, and I took a Physics class. I realized the Chinese had been experimenting with energy systematically for longer than anyone else, and so it seemed the most natural next step was to go to Chinese Medical School. I felt at home right away, and continue to feel this life's work is exactly what I'm meant to do. It seems the medicine came along and said “you’re coming with me,” and I’m quite grateful!
   
     Since Chinese Medicine is traditionally learned through apprenticeship, I sought the guidance of mentors whenever possible. During school, I was fortunate to be introduced to one named Dr. Tom Cowan. He held some classes in his living room for a few of us, and shared his experience and perspective. At the time, I was greatly influenced by a good friend and classmate who had been cooking and eating according to Weston Price principles for many years. This all began to beautifully parallel much of the philosophical and nutritional concepts of Chinese Medicine. So when the opportunity arose to join Tom's practice at The Fourfold Healing Clinic upon finishing school, I was so excited.
    
    I continue to enjoy exploring health and healing at this unique clinic. We have been experimenting with the best way to take good care of patients, and one attempt has been to add my services to the Community Supported Healthcare Plan. Along with this, we’ve been talking about the idea of community health and what exactly that means. To me, it is the idea that illness is not an isolated incident, nor does it happen in a vacuum. Rather, it is part of a much larger context of cause and effect patterns. As we have seen in the world particularly as of late, symptoms--whether cultural, economic, or physiological--are part of a larger system. Nature provides the best teacher of such symbiosis; it is the ultimate example of community.
     
    And this is the foundation of Traditional Chinese Medicine. For thousands of years, practitioners have been looking to nature to learn how elements and systems function. Without modern distractions such as media, or the advantage of current medical tools (such as imaging or blood tests), the Chinese utilized our most powerful human tools of observation and analysis.  Acting as the first scientists in this way, they felt the pulse, looked at the tongue, and developed a sophisticated system of diagnosis, using metaphors based in nature to describe patterns of health and illness. They took hundreds of herbs over hundreds of years and noticed the specifics of their effects. They developed Acupuncture; the insertion of fine needles at various points on the body that are part of a specific point prescription to treat an organism’s carefully diagnosed imbalance. And lucky for us, they recorded most of this.
   
    As a lifetime student of this complex medicine and its wise worldview, I consistently enjoy utilizing its tools of Acupuncture and herbal medicine to help patients feel better. However, a major part of community health that I'm learning from Chinese Medicine’s Taoist roots is that the practitioner’s job has nothing to do with “bestowing health” upon a patient. Rather, I am a partner in the patient’s journey of what can be thought of as “unlearning.” Together, we peel back layers of conditioning (physical, mental, and/or emotional), to facilitate a person’s intelligence to come forward. By intelligence, I mean an innate knowing, or how the body and soul understand how to be healthy.
   
    As an example of how this works, I think of one of my teachers saying, “Give them feet,” and I’ll explain what he means. All traditional healing systems place great emphasis on digestion; help the patient digest and you improve assimilation. Many patients at our clinic have experienced this with efforts to heal the gut with GAPS, among other things. But assimilation here means much more than just digesting food and getting nutrients.  It is how life is taken in, processed, and transformed into energy. So if I can help a patient digest, assimilate life, I help to put his feet on the ground. I help him strengthen his ability to discriminate, to trust his inner logic, and to make decisions based on his natural “appetite,” rather than logic outside himself.
  
     Another story comes to mind as an example of how healing is community by nature, and its related to the idea of “nailing one foot to the ground.” We all probably have a sense of the importance of routine, particularly if we spend any time with the elderly or infants; they thrive on rhythm and regularity. I often instruct patients to start with eating the same breakfast around the same time every morning, or in some cases, just eating breakfast. This may sound simplistic, but a survey conducted at a school of Chinese Medicine illustrates the power of this concept. Essentially, Hispanic patients who ate a daily staple of beans, rice and corn were compared to more Euro-American patients who did not have a daily staple, and the Hispanic patients responded to Acupuncture and herbal medicine much more quickly and successfully.
   
    Guided by this philosophy of creating stability and facilitating trust in a person’s innate wisdom, my treatments consist of three basic elements. The first is talking with patients about their life. I listen to their experience, and encourage them to help me understand what they most need. We talk about how the little things we do every day are powerful in the long run; like drops in a bucket, what we add slowly but surely over a lifetime will determine the bucket of health we carry around. Along these lines, recommendations such as drinking bone broth, doing abdominal massage, resting in the afternoon, and abiding by the seasons are discussed. How to nourish oneself is a guiding principle. And since healing through food is a cornerstone of treatment at our clinic, I help patients understand how to do this.
   
    The second element of treatment is Acupuncture. From a Western Medical viewpoint, it essentially encourages the release of endorphins, which supports the all-important immune system. The Chinese Medical perspective can also put it simply; Acupuncture either moves that which is stuck, encourages the body to slow down hyper-functioning, fires up that which is in a pattern of hypo-function, or in most cases, a bit of each. For the patient, this means lying down and having around 3-8 needles inserted, resting (often sleeping) for 30-40 minutes, then waking feeling very relaxed. Many patients describe the post-acupuncture feeling as both calm and energized at the same time.
  
    The third element of treatment is herbal prescription. The Chinese Medical Pharmacopoeia consists of around 400 herbs, which are combined specifically for the patient’s constitution, symptoms, and how each herb compliments another. I use Spring Wind Dispensary, an herbal pharmacy where I once worked, because I trust the safety and sustainability of their products.
   
    Treatment might consist of any or all of these three elements, depending on the person. The idea is always to be assisting a patient with calibrating to the seasons (meaning rhythm of time cycles more than weather) through eating, resting, and taking herbs, so imbalance or disease will pass through, rather than becoming chronic. In some cases, regular Acupuncture helps set up people’s bodies to better accept Dr. Cowan’s treatment protocols. In others, well-timed treatments address specific pathologies such as menstrual difficulties or an injury. Some focus on the counseling aspect, and others work on a deeper level to help the body let go of past or current issues that are difficult to access mentally and/or emotionally.
 
      I’d like to share a brief glimpse into a treatment story of a mom and her daughter, because it felt to both them and me like a successful example of how this all can work. I treated an adolescent girl for acne, irregular menstrual cycle, fevers, and digestive distress. In addition to receiving Acupuncture treatments and taking herbs, she and her mother spent time talking with me about food, and learning the importance of healing the gut. After completing a course of treatment, her acne improved, fevers stopped, menstrual cycle regulated, and she is learning to adjust her eating to heal the root of the issue, her gastrointestinal tract.

    Then, her mother came in one day asking if Acupuncture might help with grief over the recent death of her brother. She didn’t want to get rid of the grief, and felt she had much support from family, therapy, and her generally healthy life. But she felt the intense presence of her deceased brother in her dreams, and many other overwhelming physical symptoms. As you can imagine, she was exhausted and unable to concentrate. She also had ongoing menopausal discomfort in the form of hot flashes and restless sleep. After the first session, she reported feeling a new and necessary distance from her brother. After another session, she felt she was able to say goodbye and let go with much more ease. Several weeks later, she was happy to report that after some dietary changes and beginning a regular Qi Gong practice, her hot flashes were not happening and she was sleeping through the night. I see both of them periodically, as health-maintenance, and to address whatever might come up.
  
      I hope my story, general explanation of Chinese Medicine, and examples have been interesting and even useful. I’d like to think I’m addressing a good question I often get, “does Acupuncture work?” My answer is that it’s not magic, its medicine. Back to the idea of what community health means, it’s just this; rather than isolating a person and her symptom, instead let’s consider a broader picture of health. In China, when someone was sick, everyone in the family would take the herbs and drink the rice porridge, even when the ill person could not. This is the spirit I hope to foster in my practice, and I welcome you to take a seat at the table.