A few years ago, after starting school, I had a realization that I wasn’t just learning how to help people feel better – I was learning medicine. A lot of responsibility comes along with medicine: the power to heal, the risk of making a mistake and potential severity of the outcomes, the trust people put it you.

This became more of a reality this semester in our Oncology clinic. Just to clarify, we do not treat cancer with Chinese Medicine at our school, but we do treat patients with cancer. Most of them are undergoing western treatment which is benefiting them greatly. That said, chemo and radiation therapy have a lot of side-effects (fatigue and nausea to name a couple) and Chinese medicine is excellent at supporting people’s bodies and thus helping to mitigate the side effects of Western medical treatment of cancer. In our clinic at school, we have patients who are doing great, their cancer is in recession, they feel good, they are happy and lively and enjoying life, and we have patients who are dying. We’re not going to turn things around for someone who’s dying, but we can make things easier for them in the present – and that alone is powerful.

There’s something tremendously humbling about working with people who are facing the reality of death on a regular basis. There’s also something incredibly gratifying about being able give someone some relief from their pain. Those two emotions, create a special open stillness inside that encourages the presence of the divine to join in the treatment. There’s an aligning with the natural flow of things that happens, and that helps the body move back to health.

That’s what this medicine is all about – and I feel very lucky and happy and grateful that I get to be a part of it and it gets to be a part of me.