gratitude:
a word of thanks to
everyone
who in one way or another
helped me to get here
to do what i love.
Oso, the best dog ever,
handsome neighborhood sentry
Jessicat/Venus Lightcatcher, very cute cat
about me: I’ve been a licensed acupuncturist since 1996. 23 years -- wow! But the dream to get here started long before then.
Learning about the natural healing arts started as a hobby, and was my adolescent way of staying out of the offices of doctors who weren’t helping my sore throats and swollen glands with the antibiotics. I started with self-prescribed high dosages of Vitamin C while entering middle school (back then it was called junior high). Since then, I’ve been studying natural healing, including bodywork, herbs, foods, nutrition systems, and people in general.
When James Reston, the NY Times reporter who was covering Nixon’s visit to China, had an emergency appendectomy in China, the post-surgery pain treatment was done with acupuncture, and he was impressed by the immediate pain relief. It made the front page of the Times the next day, July 26, 1971 (“Now let me tell you about my appendectomy in Peking”), and when I learned about it the next day, I decided I wanted to do that. I was fifteen, and there were no colleges for acupuncture in the U.S., and at the time, I didn’t have it in me to go abroad — or even down to Manhattan’s Chinatown, barely an hour from my home -- on a voyage of discovery to find one. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d forgotten that wish/goal.
Thus I spent years during that period studying my passion and interest: herbs, foods, “qi” (life force energy), fundamental ways to address and reverse imbalances that become illness, and the causes of those imbalances. I put all of that in each treatment I do now.
Because there were no acupuncture schools when I decided to become an acupuncturist, my path meandered. Though it took twenty years for me to get to acupuncture school from the time I first heard the word “acupuncture", I got there with much experience about natural healing in many cultures, and the mental/emotional/physical connection that can lead to imbalances we call illness, and much more. I’d spent five years in Latin America (hablo español) including Peace Corps in Costa Rica, and seven years at New York Newsday, where I won six awards for excellence in journalism.
In 1991, the first opening on my acupuncture path was facilitated entirely by Dr. Michael Smith, of Lincoln Recovery Center in the Bronx, NY. I spent 15 months volunteering there, first learning the auricular acu-detox protocol (see acu-detox page on my website) for treating the spirit and body, then as an apprentice to the herbalist, before leaving New York by train (an excellent trip I enthusiastically recommend to anyone with such an inclination, by the way), to move to Oakland, Ca.
The day after my arrival to Oakland, I entered a Master’s program to become an acupuncturist, at the Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences. In 1995, I completed my Master of Science in Traditional Chinese Medicine. In 1996 I passed the state licensing exam to practice acupuncture in California, as well as the NCCAOM exams for national certification in acupuncture and Chinese herbalism.
During these almost-five! decades through many contexts, I have learned to recognize factors in people’s daily lives that can cause or contribute to disturbances of physical or emotional well-being. I recognize that most imbalances that lead to a chronic problem are “repetitive strain injuries”: too much of anything, even something good, can cause an imbalance. I like to familiarize (read: empower) my patients with their conditions, including causative factors so, if they want, they can change their condition and avoid recurrences. Because of the diagnostic system we learned in acupuncture college, we are usually able to narrow down the causes of a condition and reverse the condition while supporting the body’s healthy balance to prevent or reduce future imbalances, be they physical or emotional, recent or chronic. I’ve treated a vast array of conditions during the 23 years I’ve been practicing acupuncture, and each success is a thrill for me.
Of course I love it when people come back for more treatment, but I like it better when they come back for support to stay healthy, because they made the changes necessary to reverse the condition they came in for.
That’s what being a healer means to me.
julie
...y cariño y gratitud a
– José Aponte –
my first and still best acupuncture teacher
me.
this photo is an argument for a tripod!