Meet Your Practitioner

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Eternally the curious student, I am passionate about helping patients reconnect with health and happiness. 

In practice since 1992, I am a Licensed Acupuncturist and primary health care provider in California. Nationally, I am double Board-Certified in Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs and a Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner.

My education in natural healing began with learning massage. It impressed upon me the art of connecting with the human spirit, and bodies, in a soothing and deeply relaxing way.

My interests grew into becoming a clinically trained herbalist. I was fortunate to study with world renown herbalists while being a resident apprentice and gardener at a local herb farm.

My quest to be a licensed physician that practiced herbal medicine lead me to Chinese herbs and acupuncture. I moved back to my ancestral homelands of New Mexico and completed my master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine.

In 1997, I interned in a major hospital in Chengdu, China, a city of four million people.  I saw first hand how traditional and Western medicine can work together. Doctors there did not separate alternative and conventional medicine, they simply used what worked best in each scenario. I was blown away by what I learned by working in the gynecology and acupuncture departments there.

Becoming a Doctor of Oriental Medicine in 1998 opened up a whole new world of continuing education. The next decades became my opportunity to study with the greats of Functional Medicine and learn how to weave those skills into my traditional medicine practices. 

I became mastery certified in functional blood chemistry analysis. I studied everything having to do with functional endocrinology, and women's health. I completed Western and Eastern fertility programs with ABORM certified teachers. I sought the wisdom of digestive and dietary specialists.

Studying and revisiting these subjects through the years fascinates me. I am still as curious as ever to learn all I can about being human, natural health, and healing. Medicine is dynamic that way, we are always learning more. 

Hope you will join me on this journey.