In my training as a traditional Eastern medicine practitioner I was taught that chewing is important for digestion and assimilation, as well as avoiding overconsumption of raw foods— these can overburden our digestion, causing stagnation, accumulation and coldness. Therefore I previously did not like smoothies that much. However, I learned about a recipe that is a cooked cruciferous vegetable smoothie designed for detoxification.

Back-to-school season is exciting—but let’s be honest, it can also be A LOT. Between shopping for supplies, packing lunches, setting earlier bedtimes, and juggling homework or sports schedules, it’s easy to feel stretched thin. Kids can feel the pressure too, which often shows up as anxious moods, stomachaches, trouble sleeping, or endless energy crashes.

Drugs, injections, surgeries-- sometimes they offer a quick fix, but often they don't. Or they just play whack-a-mole with a fundamental health imbalance that keeps coming back, again and again. It's an everyday occurrence for us acupuncturists to see patients who are at the end of the line with their treatment options. Sick and tired of being sick and tired.

The Cancer Center's Integrative Fund is now covering voucher plans for their patients to receive acupuncture at Bridge for disorders such as peripheral neuropathy, nausea, pain, fatigue, insomnia, dry mouth, loss of taste, stress and anxiety, and more.

In the 2024 study “Acupuncture for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” published in the peer-reviewed JAMA Psychiatry, researchers demonstrated that acupuncture significantly improved the symptoms of combat veterans with PTSD, far outperforming placebo "sham" acupuncture.

Acupuncture is exceptionally well-suited for the treatment of nerve entrapments like carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, thoracic outlet syndrome, piriformis syndrome, peroneal nerve entrapment, tarsal tunnel syndrome, just to name a few.

My first memory of traditional East Asian herbal medicine is from the observations of my grandparents when I was around age five. My grandmother cooked dried raw herbs in a black round cray pot which was covered with a white paper lid. I remembered the strong bitter scents while she carefully ran the cooked herbs through a linen pouch, squeezing with a wood stick, sifting the decoction into a porcelain bowl.

Patients are always asking, “What made you get into acupuncture?” The story has multiple players but chronic sinusitis was a major character. In the early 2000s I was living in Florence, Italy. Life was great, except for one stone in my shoe: chronic sinusitis.

There was once a young philosopher who traveled to Greece in search of spiritual wisdom from the orthodox monks. He would hang around the monastery in hopes of receiving spiritual guidance. One day, Father Seraphim offered him some advice: “You must learn to meditate like a mountain.”

The philosopher tried to sit and be firm but his body ached and his mind was full of thoughts.

As acupuncturists, pain from sciatic nerve irritation is one of the most common, and urgent, complaints that we see. Cases can vary from the acute entrapment-- caused by muscle spasms, misalignment, or a bulging disc-- to the very chronic and intractable. We often work with cases of sciatica that have been resistant to multiple steroid injections, medications, even surgical interventions. How can acupuncture help in these cases?

“Honey, can you please call my phone? I lost it… again…”

“You just need to pay attention to where you put things,” my husband reminded me. It wasn’t so much as an “I told you so,” and it didn’t irritate me; but that word “attention” stuck with me. The last time it stuck with me was when I was in acupuncture school and one of my mentors did an entire lecture on “attention and intention.”

Due to its robust evidence base, acupuncture is recommended by the American College of Physicians as a first-line treatment for chronic low back pain. Acupuncture is one of the best non-drug treatments for pain available-- but why?