How I Became an Acupuncturist
Hello! I am so glad you are here.
A question I get asked a lot is how the heck did I get into acupuncture and Chinese medicine? The short answer: I experienced it’s healing potential during my own health crisis. Read on for the more in-depth story.
Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be in the medical field. My dad is a surgeon so I grew up seeing him treat patients and I always thought it was the coolest thing. I’ve never been squimish when it comes to gross things so I thought I would make a good doctor. My first ever introduction to acupuncture was in high school when I got to shadow an acupuncturist through a job shadowing program my school had. I thought it was like magic. Someone came in for ankle issues and she treated the wrist. I was so confused but it seemed to work! Around the same time I was discovering my love for yoga and fascination with Asian culture and belief systems.
Still though, when I got to college in Boulder, CO I decided to start their pre-med track. Freshman year, second semester, I started to have migraines 3-4 times per week and it was starting to go into months of dealing with this. Now, I have always had migraines. Since age 5 my mom says. So it was nothing new to me but the frequency was alarming.
I never had this many all at once and they weren’t stopping. Still to this day I don’t know what caused it. Maybe the stress of starting college in a new state, the high elevation, drinking (alcohol and coffee) for the first time, who knows. I saw a doctor and was put on sumatriptin which kind of helped but made me super nauseous. This type of medication only reduces the pain when a migraine comes on but it doesn’t do anything to reduce the frequency. So I was still getting migraines like crazy and now feeling even more nauseous than I already did. Eventually I was put on an anti-nausea medication as well. This just wasn’t working for me. It was trying to put a small bandaid on a broken nervous system.
I remembered that miracle medicine I saw in high school and thought I would give acupuncture a shot. I went in for my first treatment and actually felt some relief, from both the headache pain and the nausea. They didn’t go away over night but after a dedicated period of treatment (probably a month or two, I can’t exactly remember) they slowed down. I was down to one or two a month!
After this experience, and learning more about preventative medicine as opposed to curative medicine (which is most of western medicine), I was convinced that this was what I was supposed to do instead of following in my father’s foot steps. And he was supportive of this believe it or not! He talked with me about the pressures of being a doctor and knew that I wanted to be a mom and have my own family one day. He knew how demanding school and the job would be and told me to either be a nurse practitioner or something other than a surgeon because he knows how much he missed of my sister and I growing up. I so appreciated this honest perspective.
Still in medicine,
just another aspect of it that is more fitting to who I am and what I believe in.
As an acupuncturist, I have so many more options than needing to work in a hospital. I could work for myself, start my own practice, or work in another practice. I could work at a spa or a fitness center, an integrative clinic or a community practice. I could have as much (or as little) control as I wanted. I could set myself up to live the life I dreamed. So here we are! Starting my own practice! Still in medicine, just another aspect of it that is more fitting to who I am and what I believe in.
Now I get to spend quality time with my patients, really get to know them. I get to work with herbs and food and use the natural world as medicine. I get to help the body heal on its own because it has the amazing power to do so. I get to work with the whole person, mind, body, and spirit. I get to heal the root cause so people don’t have to come back to me instead of just putting a bandaid on the problem. And I am so grateful to the Lord that he has led me here.
I am excited to begin!