Hi - I'm the founder of Deepest Health. When I'm not writing here, you can find me reaching out to the Chinese Medicine community across the web and in my own backyard. I currently teach Chinese herbs at my alma mater, the National College of Natural Medicine. Additionally, I'm the founder of Watershed Community Wellness, a thriving local clinic in Southeast Portland in Oregon. No matter where I'm working, you'll find my focus on the Classical approach to Chinese medicine laced throughout everything I do.
I found it extremely difficult to learn the acupuncture points and channels despite the expert instruction I received from Jim Cleaver, LAc. When I reach a difficult point in learning a subject, I have a simple strategy I use to break through the wall. I find a way to engage all of my senses, including [...]
Continue reading...It’s sometimes hard for me to sit down and study my single herbs. At NCNM we learn single herbs for a year, dabbling in combinations during our last term of that series and finally progressing to formulas, the holy grail of herbal education. So this summer as I work hard to drill everything I learned [...]
Continue reading...To come into a deep understanding of the emotional aspects of Chinese medicine, you have to start with the basics. In this article, I would like to demonstrate my understanding of the emotions as they are described in Chinese medical theory to provide some basis for further discussions on the topic. There are a few [...]
Continue reading...After yesterday’s introductory post about Chinese dietary therapy and lifestyle counseling as one of the profession’s available modalities, I got to thinking about the difficulty of lifestyle counseling. It is undoubtedly an important part of our medicine – it’s in the Classics! The Neijing began this proud tradition in Chinese medicine when discussing the way [...]
Continue reading...One of my professors, whom I admire very much, has a bit of a reputation at school for denigrating the focus of many Chinese medicine students and practitioners on emotional causes of disease. What I think I understand him to mean is that the involvement of emotions in the average patient is overemphasized in some [...]
Continue reading...The herb this week is an oddity. It isn’t found in many formulas, and I have never seen it used in the school clinic medicinary. Why review it? I did a paper on it last year because it’s something I see around me frequently here in Oregon and I always wondered whether it was medicinal. [...]
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