I didn't set out to become a teacher. I set out to become a better clinician, and it turned out the two are impossible to separate.

My path into Chinese medicine started in Hangzhou, China, where I spent a year studying Chinese language and culture and, almost by accident, fell in love with a hospital system where acupuncturists worked the same floors as Western doctors, sharing patients, sharing language, and sharing results. That collaborative model stuck with me. I came home determined to practice medicine that way, not East or West, but integrative, working together.

I earned my Master's in Traditional Chinese Medicine at Five Branches University in Santa Cruz, completed a doctoral fellowship there, and became one of the first acupuncture residents at Highland Hospital in Oakland. I opened Root & Stem Integrative Chinese Medicine soon after, now with two locations in Northern California, and I currently serve as Executive Director of the East Bay Integrative Pregnancy Project.

But the part of my work I'm most excited about didn't show up until years into practice, when I started digging into my patients' lab work, really digging in, past "normal" and "abnormal," into the optimal ranges that tell you what's actually happening in someone's body. I realized that labs weren't just a Western medicine tool sitting outside my scope. They were a language I could learn to speak fluently, and once I did, my diagnoses got sharper, my treatment plans got smarter, thats when my patients started seeing me as their primary care practitioner, the person who could connect all the dots.

That discovery changed how I practice. It also changed what I wanted to do with what I know.

Today, alongside seeing patients, I teach. I built a series of CEU courses, Functional Medicine for Your Acupuncture Practice, to teach fellow acupuncturists how to read lab work through a Chinese medicine lens: how to use it to confirm a diagnosis, catch what a pulse or tongue might miss, and fine-tune a treatment protocol when something isn't landing.

Nothing about it asks practitioners to abandon what they already know. It builds directly on it.

Watching a room of experienced acupuncturists realize they can hold a lab panel with the same confidence they hold a diagnosis is, genuinely, one of my favorite things about this work.

I specialize in Hormone Health, Perimenopause & Menopause, Liver Health and Detoxification, integrative support during chemotherapy and radiation, and Autoimmune conditions. But underneath every specialty is the same core belief: that the best care happens when practitioners, and patients, actually understand what their bodies are telling them, in every language available.