My Journey

Although I am usually the one asking all the questions, once my patients are comfortably laying on the treatment table they ask me Why did you chose to do acupuncture? My response is, This was not my choice, this is what I was meant to do. I was in the last year of my pre-med undergrad program and preparing to go to dental school. I had worked in the dental field to gain experience but the closer graduation approached the more I felt something was not right. I began to constantly doubt this was the career I would be doing the rest of my life. I knew I loved to help people and wanted to be in the healthcare field so I could not understand my own conflicted emotions. About one month later I was involved in a motor vehicle accident in which I damaged my left shoulder. I quietly suffered with constant pain because I was too afraid to see a doctor and worried I would only be prescribed pain medication. I just recently watched two of my family members become dependent on pain medication after a physical injury and refused to go down the same path. Luckily one of my friends told me about acupuncture treatments that she was recently doing to help relieve her back pain so I decided to give it a try. Within only a couple of sessions I could feel a significant decrease in my pain, my muscle spasms had reduced and I was going back to my normal routine. I was so amazed with the medicine I couldn’t believe I had never heard about it before. I couldn’t help but wonder, what if my family members would have tried acupuncture treatments immediately after their injuries. Would the not be dependent on medication, would they have avoided a surgery, would they be out of pain by now? I thought about how different their lives would be if they knew and the thousands of people that suffer with chronic pain would be if they had acupuncture treatments. It was then that I realized my mission was to inform people about this amazing medicine. And the rest is history, after graduation I began the masters program at The American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Within the first week of attending classes, I knew without a doubt that I made the right decision and I had truly found my calling.