interview: Mark Davis, ND4

here is the transcript of an interview i did with mark davis, ND4: one of the bright lights in our student body...


can you tell me a little about your background and interests? what did you study in school?

i studied applied linguistics, just because language has always been fascinating to me. and i was good at it, so that's always encouraging. applied linguistics is studying the things that languages have in common; there are different branches to it, like socio-linguistics- how language shapes a population. or gender linguistics and applied linguistics about how men and women's language is different, and power hierarchies in relation to language; power hierarchies and gender studies were two big interests of mine.

have you ever heard that if you put one termite on the ground, they do this funny little dance: individual termites do this weird thing, and it doesn't make any sense. and two termites do this thing, and it still doesn't make any sense. but when you get three of them together, it's this cooperative movement that builds an arch. the arch is the basis of these huge structures that termites build, and they can't do it by themselves. and so this arch building is so natural that even when it's senseless because they're not with the others, they just do it anyways. i feel like that's what language is for us humans as well, and this is what interested me about language.

my other big interest was activism and just how to make the world a better place. when i graduated from school i spent a few years hitchhiking around the country and visiting various activist communities, working at various restaurants to make money, then going traveling again to another community. i also like infrastructure work. do you like miso soup? i like to make a cup of miso soup and have it; it's fun for me, i like to cook, i cooked at restaurants-- but even better, i like making miso. you get the soybeans, you cook them down, you mix in the spores, pack it down with sea salt, and you wait for at least 6 months to 2-3 years. and it's something that's super satisfying to me, to have the cup of miso from that. i just love doing that underlying work.

that was the kind of work i wanted to do with activism too. i saw people bring out their talents: they would go on radio shows and talk and make a big difference, or use alternative building styles, or be gardeners, or just do whatever good work they did in the world. and my passion was: "i want to support them and what they're doing". and one common theme i noticed in the communities that i visited was that a lot of them were eating horribly- they would eat dumpster dived food because it was good for the world, but it wasn't all that great for them. i thought: "i know, i'll support them through food". so i would cook for them, and i thought i would go back to school to become a nutritionist to really know how to support them through food.

what were some of these communities that you visited?

the rhizome collective in austin texas was a big one, and the freeschool community in albany, new york was another one. another community that doesn't have a name, just a bunch of activist people in san francisco doing radio work and free medical work and stuff like that. a crew in new orleans which wasn't an intentional community either but just a group of like minded people doing what they love. it was particularly at riso where i thought "i could step in here, they're doing such good work in the world, i could help them."

i looked into nutrition schools and into getting a degree in dietetics and it just didn't feel like the medicine of food to me. so i started reading, like paul pitchford's book healing with whole foods- i read that from cover to cover, and i read books by deepak chopra, andrew weil, and anne marie colbin, all these books about healing through food. i found bastyr's master's in whole foods nutrition and visited them and learned more about naturopathic medicine. that's how i decided to come on this path.

why did you go to NCNM vs. bastyr?

i had hitchhiked up to bastyr. i slept in the woods around the campus and would get up in the morning and stretch, go to their movement room, do some yoga, then i'd go sit in on classes and talk to professors. i looked at all the different schools online and sussed out all their reputations and found out that bastyr was the science school. i thought that if i was going to go into this "woo woo" profession, i should go to the science school. so i walked around, met people; the people i met seemed like they were really intensely into their studies, and very intelligent people. this is what i expected medical school to be like, so i decided to go there.

i came down to portland to visit a friend and it happened to be NCNM's "student for a day". so i decided to just go to the school and see what it was like; i came and it didn't have a beautiful organic garden, nature, or trees-- but then as soon as i came inside, the people, while they still seemed very smart and like they were studying hard, would look up and make eye contact with me more [laughs]. i remember talking to this one woman who asked me "are you going to come to this school?" and i told her, "i don't know, i might start a food cart or something else" and she told me to do that stuff first, that i would come back to the medicine when it called me at the right time. that was in 2001 and i did go do a bunch of other things, started having babies, worked in wellness departments and health food stores, and eventually came back to medicine. i definitely knew i wanted to come to NCNM because it had much more of a "physician heal thyself" atmosphere.

why did you go into natural medicine vs. conventional medicine?

i feel like i'm constitutionally aligned with it. some people just feel comfortable and happy with conventional medicine, and it's probably a good match for them. but my whole life, as long as i can remember, i haven't felt very comfortable with it. i've always gotten this vibe of "pharmaceuticals are something you should avoid", that there's probably some underlying reason not to take them. my mom's a nurse, three of her siblings are medical doctors, their dad was an MD, his dad was an MD, so it's not like it was foreign to me. (i actually have my great grandfather's medical bag which i carry now to the clinic).

did you ever have any pressure to go into the conventional field?

well, my mom would always say, "you should really think about being a doctor, it's really a great profession" and i never, ever thought it would be something i wanted to do. just because i saw my family members doing it and it seemed to involve a lot of pharmaceuticals and surgery. i thought that "that isn't something i want to happen to me, so i don't want to do it to others". not to knock pharmaceuticals, i think they're a gift and a blessing. they can help people feel better and save lives when they're appropriately used. but i've always had this feeling that the way that they are used is oftentimes to the detriment of people's health. so it wasn't ever something i considered until i thought of food as medicine, herbs as medicine, homeopathy as medicine, relationships as medicine. and then i considered medicine as a career.

what do you think is the greatest weakness of naturopathy as a profession?

i think with so many other things, its greatest weakness is one of its biggest strengths: its eclecticism and its lack of organization. like mitch stargrove says, trying to get naturopaths to agree on something is like trying to herd cats. it's a tradition that is rife with amicable disagreements. which is great! it's such a strength! well ok, you heal this guy with hydrotherapy, and i'll give him some herbs, and this person over here will fast, but we'll all agree that they can all get better; it's all about supporting the underlying vitality that a person has. at the same time, it leads to inconsistency.

chinese medicine is such a beautiful, cohesive system. of course there are amicable differences too, such as different schools of thought. but for the most part, in my limited understanding of chinese medicine, it has this beautiful coherence. and the little i've studied of ayurvedic medicine reveals this too; a beautiful internal consistency. because of our eclecticism, naturopathic medicine doesn't have that. some people graduate feeling unanchored, not knowing what to do. they have to fiddle around for a while or find great mentors, or change fields. so i think that's its main weakness.

who has been your greatest mentor at NCNM or in the field of naturopathy in general?

the first person to pop into mind is dr. john collins. he's an ND here in town, graduated 33 years ago from NCNM in the same class as dr. sandberg-lewis. i saw him for one appointment the summer before my first year. i was just struck by his intelligence and compassion, his insightfulness. i wasn't even sick-- i just needed a TB screening exam to get into the school and he was one of two or three ND's in the city certified to do it. now i'm in class with him, homeopathy VII. every week in class i'm struck again by the thoroughness and richness of his understanding of anatomy, physiology, and the inner workings of the human organism.

and the way he practices medicine is so honest and transparent, which i love. i think sometimes when people don't know an answer, they try and put up a false front and he never does that. he is always very transparent about what he knows and what he doesn't know, and what is knowable and what is not knowable. he says that 75% of his practice is straight homeopathy; he admits that "there isn't really any incontrovertible evidence out there that homeopathy works. the day that they show that homeopathy doesn't work, i'm going to stop doing it. but until then, it's what brought me the best clinical experiences so i'm just going to keep going with it." that's why i think he's great.

what is your greatest weakness?

...there are so many, it's hard to pick just one [laughs]. the first one that comes to mind is also a strength of mine: my insistence on shaping things to the way i want them to be. i feel like i have a clear vision of the world and what's good in the world. i trust that vision, and go about using my energy to shape the world to it, and feel like i've done some good in the world as a result. but then there's times when my vision hasn't been as clear as i thought it's been, or i neglect to take other people's visions into account. i start shaping things and hacking away at them, and i'm hacking away at things that shouldn't be. i say it's a weakness because in my impetuous desire to do good, i've done bad by accident.

what's been the greatest challenge of your life?

of my life? oh, easy: parenting. it is like no other experience. i have two children- asher is 4, jaia is 2. it's funny, it's like our whole conversation is like these polar opposites- parenting is also easily the biggest gift i've ever had in my life too. but i've been physically, mentally, and for sure emotionally stretched beyond my breaking point by my kids in ways that nothing else in my life has ever done. particularly emotionally: i thought i had my stuff together, that i was just about ready to cope with anything that came my way. and then i had kids, and just lost it over and over again.

what was it about the experience of having kids that was so difficult emotionally?

i think it's about not having a strict autonomy: usually i can do the best i can for a given situation, and if it's not good enough, i can just leave the situation. but you can't leave parenting, so i do as well as i can do and might end up really failing but not be able to leave. i have to stick with the failure, to the most important people in my life. i mean kids have a hard time; it's hard to be a kid. they cry, a lot- and are always being hurt, physically, emotionally, or not getting what they want or sometimes they just feel really sad. so i've struggled with not being able to help them, or even not being able to make the most compassionate decisions.

like when asher was little, he had a really hard time sleeping. he would stay up really late and the next day would be grumpy and mean-- so i decided "this is important, he's got to go to sleep!" i'd be putting him to bed, and he would say "i want to go downstairs!" and i would hold the door shut and say "you can't go downstairs! go lay down!" and he would cry and i would think i'm a bad parent. or i would turn off the lights and he would be scared of the dark, and i would be frustrated that he was scared of the dark; things that now seem like bad decisions. sometimes he would hit his little sister and i would pick him up roughly and yell at him, "you can't do that!" or say mean things, and there i am: i've just been a mean, yelling person which makes me feel torn up. that's probably the hardest part about parenting- turning into a person i don't want to be.

there's a graphic novel on the life of the buddha by osamu tezuka. there's a quote in there of the buddha (i'm not sure if it's authentic) that goes like "i will cherish beings of a bad nature and those possessed by sins and suffering as if i have found precious treasure". that sentence was such a gift to me, because being unable to cope with asher's hard times made me just feel like a failure a lot of the time, and a bad person. i don't want to go too in depth about his hard times in an interview, but he would visit really dark places when he was little. he really had a lot of fears and aggressive energy, would even hurt people; i just felt terrible that this person that i loved could cause pain to other kids, animals, and adults, whoever. i didn't have a solution, and would just be mean and rough with him, and would feel horrible about myself too!

asher would say things like "when i get bigger i will kill you, throw you out in the street and break all your bones". which would feel incredibly hurtful to me, until i got to see it in a different way- here is this very innocent, scared person saying to me, his dad: "what if someone told you he wanted to kill you, and throw you in the street, and break all your bones? how is a person supposed to react to that?" usually, my big life lesson to him would be to get mad, and to tell them not to say things like that. but i think the real right answer is that you show them that you love them, that the world is safe, and you show them compassion. and those occasional times that i can be a good person in the face of adversity like that, i realize it is a precious treasure: there are genuinely horrible things in the world. how do we react when we confront them, with fear, anger, compassion? asher's helped me to learn to confront adversity with compassion more than anything else.

how did you balance raising children and going to school?

it's affected me in some practical ways, like the fact that i'm not going to pursue a residency at the school because they're 60 hour weeks- after i graduate i'd like to spend a little more time with my family instead of a little less. when people have told me that they were thinking about having kids in school, i usually tell them to wait, if their life circumstances will allow it. because there's many times i've felt that i haven't been able to be the student i wanted to be, or the dad i wanted to be. or the partner for that matter; their mom has taken a lot of the childcare responsibility. but that being said, the way my life aligned, these two things happened at the same time. a lot of the time i do actually feel like a decent dad, and a decent student. so i guess i make it work.

you know what else-- actually, the biggest, coolest lesson that naturopathic medicine has for the world is that illness can be your teacher. in my first year, in immunology class, taking prolific notes from the sage Heather Zwickey... i started to feel a burning in my wrist, that may have been carpal tunnel or something like that. i realized if i type or write a lot i start to get that burning, so i stopped taking notes and started just listening, which has been a gift! it's been great, it's changed the way i learn a little bit. in the same way, the challenge of having kids in school has changed the way i learn and study. when i go home, i pretty much don't study, except right before a test i might review the material. but the way i learn the material is just to be in class and be very engaged: ask a lot of questions, try and be very present with the material while the professor is presenting it. i don't know that i would be quite the same way if i had the leisure of being able to go home and review the material or rewrite my notes or other study techniques.

if your grandchildren were reading a wikipedia article about you, what would you want it to say?

i really don't know if i'd want a wikipedia article written about me [laughs]. i might be getting too focused on the way the question is phrased, but thinking about that literally, the knowledge that i want my grandkids to have about me would hopefully be through my kids, and my family, and that's just an everchanging story. maybe the question you're asking is what do i want to do in the world that's notable. i have lots of plans and ideas to do notable things in the world. i have ideas for small scale economies that i think will help people interrelate better. i have ideas for how people can relate to each other in communities of health care as lay people. one of my greatest joys is taking great amounts of information and shaping it down into something more understandable. so i'd like to do that for various clumps of information.

is there anything else you'd like to say about your experience at NCNM?

my time at NCNM has been transformative in ways that i didn't anticipate. i expected to come in here and just learn a certain style of medicine. but i ended up asking myself a lot of questions about society and spirit and energy and love that i didn't expect to come up and yet have been central for me. being exposed to this community of people has been really inspirational for me in a lot of ways as well. thinking about students who were about to graduate when i came in, and students who are coming in now; there are really some amazing, amazing people who are attracted to this medicine and school for one reason or another. so it's just a joy to encounter them and to be transformed in these ways that i didn't expect.

interview: Dr. Brons, PhD, MAOM

this is the second interview in this series (see the first here), conducted with our first year physiology professor, Dr. Brons.








what is your experience with chinese medicine and naturopathy?

my introduction to naturopathy was accidental. i was just looking for a job in 1981, somebody told me that this school was looking for a teacher- i came looking for a job and they picked me right away. so i simply joined the faculty knowing nothing about naturopathy and learned it as i went. one of the reasons i've stayed with it is that i do like a lot of the ideas that they have and wanted to see them succeed, so i thought "maybe i can make a contribution of some sort". but i'm not a purist; i'm not a naturopath, at all.

as far as chinese medicine: in 1990 i went back to school at OCOM [oregon college of oriental medicine] and became an acupuncturist. i graduated in 1993, had a small practice for a few years, then gave that up because i really ended up liking teaching better- so i came back to school. but i still found that chinese medicine was a great intellectual exercise. it's true mind expansion in a way, i will always cherish it. i really enjoy that part of it. i still teach classes here in terms of point location, etc.

what mystifies you most about the human body?

what mystifies me most is the fact that it just keeps going. in the early days of complexity theory in the 1950's and 60's, one of the problems that the physicists encountered was: why were simple systems so unstable? when they were trying to build something, why would it fall apart so easily? and then the other question came up later on- why are complex systems so stable? if you buy a car with lots of parts to it, lots of moving items and electronic gadgets, you're always in the shop getting one or more of them fixed at any time because they're going to break down.

but the human doesn't do that often; you do get sick, but not that often. and you heal- you don't have to go into the shop necessarily, but you heal most of the time, getting over colds and flus and that sort of thing. your wounds heal. that in itself tells you an amazing amount about the human body- that for all its replication and for all its efforts it manages to stay stable. and its reproducibility, in a sense, is what's incredible about it. and so that's what i'm interested in- biology from a "complexity" view. i'm really a biologist at heart, not really a medical person. so i'm interested in how the machine works, the "ghost in the machine" so to speak. being here gives me the opportunity to look into that, because we don't have to do research, so i can spend my time being the scholar. and the scholarship work doesn't go into books, it goes into lectures.

do you ever have doubts or problems with particular aspects of chinese medicine or naturopathy? do you ever doubt the efficacy of it?

the efficacy- basically i understand that there are major limitations in both areas of medicine. now i don't have a lot of experience with chinese herbal medicine. i didn't go into that direction. i do take them, and i've seen that they do a good amount of work. but in china, most of the medicine they practice there is western- it tells you something there, that the old model wasn't quite enough. so i do recognize that there are limitations to the alternative medical model.

and what i've noticed is that naturopathy has morphed itself- it was at one time felt to be competing against allopathic medicine, and now it's become more adjunctive, to actually work with them rather than instead of them. knowing full well that you cannot take care of some of the heavier problems where you need a little heft. but obviously they're building a role for themselves in the world. which is admirable because it's a necessary role.

conventional medicine has basically degenerated into an outlet for drugs, and everybody sort of knows this, even the doctors know this. so it's an appropriate thing to do, it's just the evolution of medicine itself. i don't foresee that naturopathy by itself will become a "leading light" so to speak. it will basically assimilate in some way, much like the osteopaths have.

even osteopaths are kind of losing their reputation as well, of being the "body doctors". because the osteopaths call themselves the practitioners of "holistic medicine" and resent the naturopaths for using the same term. they're basically at odds, because there's a lot of common turf. and osteopaths also do regular medicine, so they feel they have the upper hand. and in many ways they do.

so it's just a natural evolution of many elements coming together to form another medicine. and i think in ten, twenty years you'll see a whole different medicine arise out of the dialectic, if you will. that's what happens when you have many different competing fronts coming from different directions. one or two will dominate and the others will assimilate in. that's basically what i think will happen, we'll see a new model and doctors practicing differently. they can only make so many drugs for so many things after a while- soon they'll say "how do we take care of people"? [laughs]

in your opinion, can naturopathy and chinese medicine be effectively integrated?

in my mind, no. because they involve such completely different mindsets. you can not work in naturopathy and use chinese medicine using the same framework of mind because chinese medicine has its own framework that is unique. and i think it's one of the most elegant and organized systems i've ever seen. they've really had a chance to work this out- they've done it for thousands of years. so they've come up with a system that is so clear and yet it is very phenomenological in the sense that it doesn't really deal with mechanisms. it's not a physiologically based medicine. it's not scientifically based at all. it's based on the more phenomenological based aspects like what you see, how do you interact with it, and you basically make divisions. binomial separations of yin and yang, blood and chi, this kind of thing. by sorting yourself out this way you can come up with a very interesting picture of what's wrong here, what's the imbalance, what can you do about it?

so i found it to be so different from western medicine... when people ask me about the dual degree, whether you can integrate the two, i tell them: keep them in separate compartments of your mind. because they're so incongruous, even though they're both very good in their own direction. they use such a dissimilar basis. chinese medicine is basically imbalance of yin and yang, if you had to boil it down to something. western medicine is still a purgative world. it's still basically "demonological"- getting rid of something in the body that you don't want, getting something out that got in, that shouldn't be there. in chinese medicine, you only use a phase of that, in generally it's balancing a process that's already there. you don't get rid of it, you simply restore the balance. it sets up a whole different paradigm of diagnosis and treatment.

do you think that NCNM students get enough basic science training to be competitive with allopaths?

yes i do. i basically model the courses i do, for example, on the other medical schools- as well as the professors of biochemistry and pharmacology, etc. we all use pretty much the same curriculum, same textbooks. it's all the same stuff. i never modeled it to be like: "i'm going to come up with this naturopathic science" some people did- they wanted to have a naturopathic science. but there's no such thing. it's just what the body is and what people know about it. that's all. so i keep it at the same level.

what are the most common stumbling blocks for students? what do successful students have in common?

the people who stumble here walked in with inappropriate expectations. they basically thought they could come into a program that was a bit easier to do than say regular medical school, or were expecting more of a user-friendly approach; a little more artistic and a little less scientific. i'm being very simplistic on this because everybody has a slightly different take on it. but it's a sense i get- that people want a more qualitative approach to medicine rather than a quantitative one. the fact is you can never get away from quantitative, you're always dealing with something in terms of amount, degree, what have you- you're always measuring something.

and they might not be used to developing skills to doing these things. they come from programs in which they're not adequately prepared. granted, it is traditional that in the old days medical schools drew people from all disciplines because they wanted the well rounded mind. because that was a time that you could practice medicine with a well rounded mind. you weren't a scientist. you weren't a physiologist. things are different today. you really do have to know your body processes. so if you were a major in greek literature, it would be a tough go. even though you might be extremely knowledgeable about wisdom, it doesn't do you any good when you're learning about the physiology of the kidney, for example. so those people have a harder time.

there are also those people who have just a native intelligence. those are the kind of people that can do anything they want. they can major in literature, or be in sales for 15 years, and they'll come into the program and they'll do great. so there's no easy formulation for estimating this. we're always up against the problem of what type of students are going to succeed here. i'm tied closely with admissions- we're constantly faced with "who are your best calls for admitting?", and there's no good formula for that. and the people who do well here do so because they're just simply capable. a lot of people have come from pre med programs and they've already tested their knowledge and skill in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. and they discover they're OK at it, and they can pass well and they figure they can do the rest.

the one thing that does pop up, though, that we have noticed over the years, is that there is a loose inverse relationship here: people who do well in basic sciences are generally not the better clinicians, and the people who aren't as good in the basic sciences make better clinicians. perhaps there's that artistic, greek literature mind, maybe that is better in the long haul- to become someone who's a more compassionate physician, who sits back and looks at you and understands you from that perspective. a more phenomenological approach in a way.

interview: dr. li hsu, ND Lic. Ac

this is the first in a series of interviews i hope to conduct with practicing ND's or acupuncturists. dr. li hsu was the doctor who introduced me to naturopathy and only after countless conversations with her was i convinced that going to naturopathy school was for me. here is the transcript from our interview today:

what was the most useful part of your naturopathic education? what was the least useful?

i think the most useful part is the exposure of all the different aspects of naturopathic medicine, because naturopathic medicine is very vast. i didn't know how vast it was until after i graduated-- it was just so many subdivisions of each major component, like for homeopathy there's some branch out of that, and even for acupuncture there's different schools of thought, and botanical medicine-- you know i mean there's just subbranches of each of these subspecialties-- it's a very vast discipline. so i think the most useful part is the exposure to all the different areas of this so that you're at least aware of them so that you can choose the one you want to pursue. i think that's the most useful part.

however, in order to find your niche, you have to be exposed to all the others that you may not be so interested in. then it becomes less useful when you don't use them all the time. but you can still have that in the back of your mind when and refer patients who you think might benefit from certain things, like for example, i learned colonics at school. when i went to school we needed to do rotations in the clinic and we needed to do everything that was offered. i think colonics will not be something that i'm interested in doing; however, i was exposed to it and i know what it is involved, and i can refer people to those specialists.

so the least useful i guess is just the time that it took to find my niche. because there's so many of them.

how much of the basic science of the 1st and 2nd year do you remember? how much do you find relevant and apply regularly?

actually i don't know if that will apply the same for everybody. because i came from a very science background-- i majored in biochem in college, so i already had all the prerequisites. however when you're doing all the biomedical sciences like anatomy, physiology, then biochemistry... i think all those are basic foundations. i don't think there's a shortcut to it. however, depending on the teacher, they can structure the class in such a way to have a great exposure and just teach the structure so that when you get into subcategories you'll be able to understand and search that out for yourself. i don't think it's necessary for people to go through the whole memorization of all the subcategories. that's my personal opinion, you know.

but for example, anatomy is crucial if you're trying to study acupuncture, because all of the point locations have to have anatomical descriptions to find the point, so you have to know your anatomy. the physiology, if you want to functional medicine or clinical nutrition, you have to understand physiology. i don't think there's any shortcut to those; it can be overwhelming, but i think those subjects are crucial in order to do good medicine. otherwise you're just doing "cookbook"-- when you come to 3rd and 4th year, you'll get a lot of protocols. like, for this condition, you do this and that. if you don't have a strong foundation in understanding physiology, then you may not know why you're giving certain things, and how to vary things when the situation becomes different. so i think it's important to have that.

if you could go back and do the ND program again, what would you do differently?

i'm not sure my answer will be valid because i've jumped around a bit; i didn't start an ND program on a clean slate like you did. i actually went to an acupuncture school and studied one year there. and then i went to another to study naturopathic medicine and acupuncture. and they had a combined program, so they allowed me to transfer credits from here to there, so i did a part time ND program at first-- i didn't take all those courses at once. and then i transferred schools again, which had a different curriculum, and at the 3rd school, the naturopathic and acupuncture departments were separate, so it was a different type of exposure.

so my first year as far as the load and curriculum was very different that what you're experiencing now, because i kind of split it in two years to do it. but i think if i were to do it again, i would have some more preparation in science. when i was in school we had a lot of people in different backgrounds, like accountants, builders... for me it was OK to take the biomedical sciences because i'm used to studying science. but i can't imagine those people who aren't used to studying science who have to just jump in and study anatomy physiology and biochemistry all of a sudden. i don't blame them for being overwhelmed. i think for people without a science background it might be good for them to split the first year in two parts to do it; otherwise they might feel overwhelmed and lose interest.

what was the most difficult part of setting up your practice?

the most difficult part of setting up your practice is to make yourself known. i mean, you're just out of school, nobody knows you-- especially if you come to a new place. i think just making yourself known and being out there and educating people, that's the hardest part. the reason why i say it's the hardest part is because it's the most time consuming. and it takes a lot of self motivation, because nobody's out there to tell you "OK, this is the deadline for your homework" or anything like that. you have to motivate yourself on a day to day basis to go out; you have to have a very strong purpose, keeping in mind why you are doing this profession. and that will motivate you to go out.

i went into this profession because i want to help people, and because it helped me i have a strong conviction that this is the right medicine for the 21st century-- i mean this was my attitude, thinking that preventative medicine is the right type of medicine for the 21st century, instead of crisis intervention. and so when you're out there putting your energy out there, educating people, then your practice will just flow. i think the hardest part is just to have that basic motivation and foundation.

and it's hard when you're not that focused, when you're just out of school-- if you haven't prepared in the 4 years a vision of where you want to be, and you're just out there all of a sudden, you'll feel lost. that was kind of the way i felt, because i came to a new place where i didn't know anyone.

what did you do to make yourself known? where were the strategies that worked for you?

well at first, just because of my immigration status, i worked for somebody else. and i was very fortunate to have worked for somebody who was willing to train me. so he sent me out. and i, by nature, i'm not the type of person who likes to go approach strangers and talk about what i do. but essentially that's what it boils down to. it's almost like, being on your purpose everywhere you go-- like if you're in a restaurant having a meal, and somebody has a heart attack or an asthma attack next to you. would you be the first person to go and get up and help that person with your natural method? or would you say, i hope there's someone who knows how to fix this. so it's that type of difference. even though you might not be able to have the full equipment to help that person- it's your motivation, your initiation, your purpose, this is the essence of the usefulness of your education.

what is the most challenging part of running your clinic?

well i'm in a good place right now. i mean, it wasn't like this at the beginning. the hardest part was to hire the right staff also. initially it was hard to get out there and have the motivation, and then after you kind of get it going, you need to find the right person to help you. if you find the right person to help you at the front desk, who has the same purpose as you, you feel like you can fly-- you just feel like you can go and conquer the world, you know what i mean? but if you have someone who is always telling you what you can't do, then that's more like a thorn in the flesh ... that you have to work with on a daily basis. so i say, finding the right person as a helper.

what do you dislike about the profession?

i think for me, it's not being able to practice fully, because massachusetts doesn't license ND's yet. i don't know how many states are licensed now, but when i graduated there were only 8 states that were licensed to practice naturopathic medicine. which basically means there's a law governing the board of naturopathic physicians. and there's a law that tells you what you can do, and what you can not do, like the scope of the practice. in massachusetts we don't have that. we are fighting to get that now, but we've been fighting for as long as i've been here.

the good news is that all of the other new england states are licensed. so we're surrounded by people who are permitting this practice, so i think it's just a matter of time. i think massachusetts has a lot of controversy and strong opponents here, so it takes a little bit of fighting to get through that. and it takes the right people to be the senate and representative of each district for the law to be passed. i think it's just a matter of time. when there's no law governing, states can be neutral. massachusetts is neutral, so you can go hang up a shingle and no one will give you trouble- but you just can't make mistakes. if a patient of yours ends up hating you and starts badmouthing you, then there's no law to protect you, that kind of thing. so massachusetts is that way right now.

how often do you examine the new research that comes out on naturopathic or chinese medicine?

i examine everything that comes through my mail [laughs]. i don't go out of my way to read more, because i have so much mail that comes. i read publications on naturopathy, acupuncture, there's integrative medicine, there's just... a lot. to tell you the truth, i don't read them all. i just skim through and see what might be pertinent in helping my current patients and pay more attention to those.

do you have to present the medicine more from a western perspective to win over patients?

you definitely have to explain to them why, everybody wants to know why they're taking certain things. and it's hard, sometimes, to explain certain things- because western medicines have specific functions, like OK, this will get rid of your cough. but if you take herbal medicine, sometimes it's not so specific in terms of its formula. saying "this will strengthen your immune system or help to boost up your adrenal glands" is much different than getting rid of the cough or helping stop a runny nose. but you have to say it in those terms for them to have some ground for grasping the function of the herb.

how often do you encounter people who are skeptical of the efficacy of naturopathy or acupuncture?

well, a lot of people have no idea what naturopathic medicine is, and sometimes they don't even care, you know. i guess it depends on what type of environment it is; like if i'm on a cold contact, outreach type of event, then it happens a lot. so what i would do is prepare some screening questions to screen for the people who are more interested in alternative medicine, so that i'll be able to explain to them what their alternatives are. usually these are the people who have health problems; those people who don't have health problems, they couldn't care less. they might be just interested in learning about the concept of it. i'm more focusing on targeting people who have health problems. so first i will ask them if they have any health concerns, and if they do, i'll ask them if they have heard of naturopathy or acupuncture, and if they express interest in that i'll go into it further.

so is it more often the case the patients are not informed rather than mis-informed by the negative literature?

i honestly don't think there's that much negative literature on naturopathic medicine. although there are some magazines that are coming out, i think there's a whole group of people trying to disprove herbal medicine and all the benefits it gives. they would say, "st. john's wort has all these side effects, doesn't really help depression, blah blah blah". i mean that might be true to some extent, that st. john's wort causes photosensitivity, and may hyperpigmentate the skin and so forth. but they put it in a tone that is overly negative.

but frankly i haven't come across too many people that will present to me that kind of negative literature. i mean there are people out there that are like that. in fact one of my patient's husband is like that. the wife is a strong believer in natural medicine. she doesn't want to take western medicine, she wants to do everything natural. she comes here and gets benefit and tries to get her husband to come. and the husband is a very high achieving scientist. and he is a strong dis-believer of acupuncture or natural medicine. but he came in anyway, just because his wife wanted him to. and i explained the whole thing to him, in one and a half hours, the whole scheme of things. in the end, he said "...i don't believe you", and then he walked away!

so, you know, he could have said that earlier, before i went through the whole nine yards in trying to win him over. but after that i changed my attitude. i'm not here to necessarily "win people over". i'm here to make it known what it is i have to offer. it is their choice, ultimately, so i can't force them to do anything- all i can do is to educate them. and i think once i've changed that attitude inside of me, i don't take things personally anymore. when he did that, i felt... offended, you know? like he did that on purpose, to hurt me, to waste all my time, etc. etc. but, if i have the attitude of: i'm here to offer you what i know, and i think this will be really helpful to you- the effect of that is that when he said "i don't believe you" and walked away, my thinking will be "that is your loss, and not mine". i educated him, and he actually has gained a piece of knowledge, that he can now process in his mind-- so it's a whole different frame of mind.

so now, i don't run into too many of those. if they're not interested, then i say, well... it is your choice. i'm just letting you know what i can offer.

can you talk a little more about how you integrate naturopathic medicine and chinese medicine? are there conditions that are better suited for either naturopathy or acupuncture?

for naturopathy, my focus is in clinical nutrition. basically supplements- vitamins, minerals, herbs. and i do use some chinese herbs and homeopathic remedies. so what i do is evaluate the person holistically, meaning taking into consideration their physical, emotional, and mental plane. and then i offer the modalities that i have on hand available to them. and then they choose what they will like, what they feel might work for them. you know, some people don't like needles, so they say i don't want acupuncture. but then there's a non needle technique i can offer, and they might say, "ok, that might be feasible for me to try". some people don't like to take pills- they're OK with acupuncture but they don't want to take any pills. even though i explain, these are not pills in the sense of medication, these are dense nutrients. so some people, comprehending that, would succumb to taking pills, but other people still don't like the concept of taking pills.

so, i let them choose. because it does take involvement on their part to take responsibility for their own health. first the education comes from letting them know that they have to take part in restoration of their own health. it's not like a "come and fix me" type of attitude. so we have to get them participating in eating well, educating them about food, educating them about exercising, and all the things that they want to incorporate into their lifestyle. and then i'm here as an educator, a helper to help them get there.

so i think the integration comes from their evaluation at the beginning- from there it's like the different choices that they're able to make.

is there any other advice you want to give to our class?

[laughs] no, i think that's pretty thorough. some of these things i don't even think about every day so it's not like i can come up with a good answer right away. but i think on the whole, that's how it is. i think you'll also find that everybody has a different journey and path and these things may not be applicable to everybody but this has been my own journey to this point and my own experience. i hope this is helpful.