Seeing the Body Through
More Than One Clinical Lens

I had always loved movement and training, so physical therapy was close enough to pull me in. I spent years in physical rehabilitation, and I still value that work deeply. I believe in movement. I believe in exercise. I believe in what good rehabilitation can do.

But over time, I kept running into the same problem.

Two people would come in with the same diagnosis, the same MRI findings, and the same general treatment plan — but their bodies would respond completely differently. One improved quickly and moved on with their life. Another did everything “right” and still stayed in pain.

The low-back-pain patients taught me the most. Some had very little on imaging, yet their pain would not leave. Often, they were carrying something heavier than a muscle strain: grief, burnout, anxiety, exhaustion, or the weight of taking care of everyone except themselves. We could strengthen the glutes and the core all day. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it did not — because in those cases, the pain was never only about the muscles.

The frozen-shoulder patients stood out for a different reason. In my experience, a striking number of them were diabetic or pre-diabetic. I’m not claiming that explains every case — but it made me suspect that what looked like a purely mechanical shoulder problem was often tied to something more systemic. That is not something exercise alone tends to reach.

The observations were right in front of me. Physical therapy gave me excellent tools for structure and movement, but it did not always have the tools to address what I was seeing beneath the mechanics — circulation, metabolism, stress, and the internal environment of the body.

Then I read Giovanni Maciocia’s The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, and it answered questions physical therapy never could. Here was a system that looked at the body as a whole — digestion, sleep, circulation, stress, pain, and emotion connected rather than treated in isolation. That was the framework I’d been missing.

That’s the work I do now. I practice acupuncture and classical Chinese herbal medicine with a strong structural foundation. I still read the body through movement, posture, and compensation — but also through the lens of Chinese medicine: pulse, tongue, abdomen, palpation, symptom patterns, and constitutional tendencies.

My herbal training is in the Jingfang classical formula tradition under Dr. Eran Even, a direct disciple of Dr. Huang Huang, and in Kampo at the New York Kampo Institute under Nigel Dawes. In 2025, I traveled to China to study with Dr. Huang Huang and observe his practice firsthand.

I’m also certified in Soliman Auricular Allergy Treatment (SAAT) and auricular medicine, which I use for allergies, sensitivities, Alpha-Gal Syndrome, MCAS-type presentations, and complex immune cases.

You can read more about how I work on the Approach page.

I have a logic-oriented mind. I like structure. I like patterns. I like making sense of things that appear disconnected at first.

That’s why I’m drawn to complex cases — the ones that arrive as a long list of symptoms that no longer seem to belong together. Pain in one area. Sleep problems. Digestive issues. Anxiety. Allergies. Fatigue. Hormonal changes. A body that feels like it’s no longer responding normally.

That’s not a random list to me. Every one of those symptoms is a clue, and they usually point in the same direction.

My job is to organize the picture, find the pattern underneath, and turn something overwhelming into something treatable. That’s the part I love most — the untangling.

Symptoms are rarely random. The body is constantly communicating, often long before we know how to interpret what it’s saying. The work is learning how to ask better questions, how to palpate carefully, how to observe closely, and how to choose the right intervention at the right time.

This work is a partnership. Acupuncture and herbs can help the body change direction, but your body does the healing — my job is to guide it and to show you what’s working against you.

And I’ll be honest with you about that part. If you drove a Mercedes and the manual called for premium fuel, you wouldn’t pull in and fill it with the cheapest gas at the station — you’d protect a machine you value. So it’s worth asking why we expect the body to run well on junk food six days a week, a job we can’t stand, no movement, and ten hours a day in a chair.

You don’t have to be perfect — no one is. But I can’t out-treat a life that’s constantly pushing the body in the opposite direction. The people who get the best results are the ones willing to do their part. We do this together.