You know the drill: you're at your primary care doctor's office for your annual visit. Between the waiting room and a visit that's often capped at ten or fifteen minutes, there's rarely enough time to get through everything you meant to ask — and by the time you're in the parking lot, you remember three more things. Following up isn't much easier, either. Most portals route you to a nurse, not the doctor, and it can take days to hear back.

If you're looking for something more personalized, acupuncture works differently. And there's actually a reason that it does.

Chinese medicine developed before internal medicine as we know it existed — before imaging, before bloodwork. Practitioners had only their five senses to work with: looking, listening, smelling, touching. The diagnostic theories that came out of that observation are what we still train in today. Of the five, listening is the one I lean on most — not just what a patient tells me, but how they tell it: what they linger on, what they skip past, what changes when they talk about it.

That's also why an initial visit with me runs closer to an hour than the typical fifteen minutes. I'm trained to look for patterns most intake forms don't ask about.

It's also what drew me to this medicine in the first place. The body doesn't separate the physical from the emotional, so I take both into account when meeting someone for the first time. That's the idea behind a full review of systems — sleep, digestion, cycles, stress, old injuries, none of it filed away as unrelated. The body keeps a record of everything that's happened to it, even the things you've stopped mentioning to doctors because no one seemed to want to hear them. On your first visit with me, there's no such thing as oversharing. If it's part of your story, it's part of the intake and I can’t wait to hear all about it!