About Cedar & Sage

I grew up watching medicine from the inside. Both of my parents were family practice physicians, and from a young age I understood what Western medicine could do — and what it couldn’t. I watched it save lives. I watched it intervene at exactly the right moments and give people back years they would have otherwise lost. I have never stopped being grateful for that.

But I also watched it fall short. Patients leaving with a prescription and no real understanding of why they were suffering. Chronic pain, fatigue, hormonal imbalance cycling through appointment after appointment without anyone looking at the whole picture — treating symptoms without real curiosity about roots.

That gap — between what medicine does brilliantly and what it leaves behind — is what set me on my path. I didn’t want to choose between conventional medicine and holistic care. I wanted to understand both deeply, and know when each was truly needed.

“I grew up watching Western medicine help just as many people as it fell short for. I knew both sides of that equation from the inside — and I knew that we could do better.”

Before I ever studied acupuncture, I spent more than 30 years as a Licensed Massage Therapist and holistic bodywork practitioner. Those years gave me something no academic programme could — a deep, felt understanding of the human body. I learned to read where tension lives and why. To sense the difference between a muscle tight from overuse and one bracing against something emotional. To notice where the body is quietly struggling before a patient has found the words to describe it.

Then I went back to school. I trained at PIHMA — the Phoenix Institute of Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture — and earned my doctoral degree, becoming a Doctor of Acupuncture (DAc), board-certified by the NCBAHM. What I bring to your treatment is thirty years of listening to bodies with my hands, combined with one of the highest academic credentials available in my field.