Why I Do What I Do
For the first part of my life I trusted the medical system completely. When something went wrong with my body I believed that the people in white coats had the answers, and that they would listen, and that they would explain.
I was nineteen when that ended.
I had a pelvic infection that would not clear. Months of antibiotics had done nothing and I was in daily pain, I was restricting my life in every way they told me to, and still not improving. I went to see the doctor everyone said was the best in the area; what she told me was that this was so far gone I would always be in pain, and that if I wanted it to stop I would need to have surgery, be sterilized, or get pregnant immediately.
I was a teenager. Those were the two options I was given, delivered without hesitation and without any curiosity about the rest of me.
Something in me refused. I traveled two hundred miles to find an old-timer who had helped people nobody else could help, and he put me on bed rest for two months with stronger antibiotics, and the infection cleared. What I got in return was a gut that no longer worked properly, skin that reacted to everything, an immune system that had lost its bearings, and a nervous system that stayed on alert for years afterward. Healing the infection came at a cost, and I lived with that cost for a long time before I understood what had happened.
What I did understand, immediately and permanently, was that there had to be another way to approach a body in trouble.
What I Went Looking For
I started with my hands. I taught yoga and practiced Trager bodywork from 1983 to 1986, which is where I learned that a body will tell you a great deal if you slow down enough to feel it. Then I went to graduate schools and became licensed as a chiropractic physician in 1990 and as an acupuncturist in 1991.
Two licenses was not the plan. It became the plan once I realized that the body’s musculoskeletal structure and the acupuncture energetic system are two excellent, but different, ways to read what is going right and what is going wrong. A person should not have to drive to two offices to have both.
Everything I have trained in since has been because there was a patient I could not help with what I already knew, or from something happening in my own body.
In my forties I had a concussion that got worse rather than better. It reached the point where I could not speak in long sentences and I was in constant pain, and the excellent musculoskeletal and nutritional support I had received didn’t change it. I studied functional neurology rehabilitation and neuroinflammation for four hundred postdoctoral hours, including a hundred hours on migraine.
When I was forty five my parents died suddenly, three weeks apart. What followed was a dark night of the soul, and it taught me something I had suspected in the clinic for years, which is that grief and trauma do not stay in the mind and emotions. They move into the tissue and the nervous system and the immune response. That was what sent me toward energy medicine, somatic practice, and eventually a full year of professional training in the biology of trauma.
Learning functional medicine was essential since I knew there were ways that the body was designed to work. Standard lab testing often missed subtle changes in function, until they became so bad that they were a pathology. I wanted to help the body heal in the way it needed most. As I learned, I began to address the gut and the skin and the autoimmune problems I had been managing since I was young. Lab work that looks at how a system is functioning, rather than only at whether it has failed, was the thing that finally explained my own body to me.
How I Practice Now
I have been in practice since 1990, and I’ve cared for some people for decades. In a small town, people share what works.
The women who find me have usually been somewhere else first, or twice, or more. They were told their labs were normal and this is what fifty looks like. Or they went to a practitioner who took them seriously and then sent them home with a shopping bag of supplements and no explanation of how any of it connected. They arrive worn down and half convinced they are making too much of it.
They are not making too much of it. Symptoms that scatter across digestion and sleep and skin and mood tend to scatter because several systems are under strain at once, and my job is to find the pattern underneath and work out which thing has to settle first.
What I do in a visit depends entirely on the person in front of me. It might be gentle hands-on work, or acupuncture and herbs, or lab testing, or nervous system work, or a long conversation about what your life is actually asking of your body right now. What does not change is that I explain what I am seeing and why, in language you can use, because the goal is not for you to depend on me indefinitely. The goal is for you to end up with an owner’s manual for your own body, since nobody handed any of us one.
I am also, for whatever it is worth, an Ivy League educated science nerd. I want to see the research and I want to see your labs, and I also believe your body carries information that no lab is going to show me. I want to help you bridge the gap between external information and internal knowing.
Credentials and Training
Licensure
- Doctor of Chiropractic, Oregon, since 1990
- Licensed Acupuncturist, Oregon, since 1991
Education
- Cornell University, B.S. Anatomy and Physiology
- Western States Chiropractic College, D.C., 1990
- Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, M.Ac., 1991
Postdoctoral and Advanced Training
- Functional Neurology Rehabilitation, including 100 hours in migraine
- The Biology of Trauma, One Year Professional Training
- Root Cause Dermatology, Certified Practitioner
- Kalish Institute of Functional Medicine, Certified Practitioner
- Functional Medicine Academy, Certified Practitioner
- Emotional Freedom Technique, Certificate
- Healing from the Body Level Up, Certificate
- Integrative Alchemy, Certified Life Coach
- Craniosacral Technique
- Matrix Repatterning
- Non-force chiropractic technique (Koren Specific Technique)
- Brimhall 6 Steps to Healing
- Electroacupuncture Medicine
- EXSTORE Orthopedic Medicine and Electroacupuncture
- Harmonize Chinese Herbology
- Endometriosis Certificate, Integrative Women’s Health Institute (in process)
- Certified Metabolism and Nutrition Specialist, Metabolism School (in process)
Contact Us
If any of this sounds like where you are, the next step is a Find Your Way Call. It is free, it takes about twenty minutes. Both of us can find out whether my approach fits what you are dealing with. If it does not, I will tell you so and point you toward something that might.
You can reach out either by calling or by filling out the form below.
Reach Out to Me
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Care Available To
People located in Oregon.
Salem
Thrive Wellness Building
880 Commercial St SE
Same parking lot as State Farm
Aurora
Through Sept 30: 21398 Highway 99E
From Oct 1: Aurora Family Health Building, 21498 Highway 99E, between the White Rabbit and Granny Fi’s