All people have an important place in our society. Their lives have a purpose whether they ever figure out exactly what that purpose is or not. Some may call it fate, some may say it is intuition, and still others may say it is a genetic predisposition or environmental/societal influence, but I believe my purpose is to understand individuals holistically and help them achieve vibrant health. The process of assisted healing should be a systematic art rather than a "fight" against a disease or one's own body, and Oriental Medicine is indeed a systematic art rather than a vector for violence.

All people (and animals and plants) are unique. Artists realize this, as do geneticists, optometrists, dentists, teachers, parents, and many others. While Oriental Medicine addresses this uniqueness, Western biomedicine does not. When I was eight years old, I had trouble seeing the blackboard at school, and my optometrist determined a treatment for me based on the condition of my eyes at that point in time, rather than on the condition of a monkey's eyes or the eyes of a 150 pound white male. But when I had difficulty breathing on smog-filled, humid summer evenings, my Western biomedical doctor talked to me for fewer than five minutes without touching me, and wrote me a prescription for a one-size-fits-all bronchiodilator which caused heart palpitations. When people ask me why I want to learn and someday practice Oriental Medicine instead of Western biomedicine, I sometimes ask them why they think I would even consider practicing anything that treats people like parts on an assembly line and that originally worked under the assumption that women are actually men with a few different parts. With Oriental Medicine, herbs are not the sum of their parts and neither are people. This perspective is in accordance with my personal philosophy.

My undergraduate training in sociology and anthropology has given me a bias towards disciplines that encompass multiple paradigms. I have learned to find underlying patterns, which are hidden to the untrained observer, using multiple theories such as functionalism, conflict, symbolic interactionism, feminism, or postmodernism to aid in finding solutions to societal problems. Likewise, the multiple theories of Oriental Medicine, such as Eight Principles, Qi, Blood, and Body Fluids, Zang-Fu, Five Phases, Six Divisions, Triple Heater, and Four Levels are all useful tools for systematically uncovering otherwise hidden patterns in order to solve problems, though on the level of the individual and his/her interaction with our environment.

Achieving a Masters of Science degree in Oriental Medicine will allow me to pursue my dream of working in an integrative medical setting, perhaps alongside an Ayurvedic specialist, a Western biomedical doctor, a massage therapist, a yoga instructor, a physical trainer, and a gene therapist. I am highly interested in Functional Medicine, or the treatment of low-grade health disturbances before they explode into troublesome disorders that require drastic modes of treatment. In addition, I want to work to bridge the separation between health and fitness, and stop defining sedentary patients as "healthy" simply because of an absence of disease. I plan to become involved in the political aspect of promoting Oriental Medicine while as a grad student and beyond. Although a doctoral degree is not yet required for licensure, I am interested in furthering my education to attain the highest degree possible in order to ensure the best quality of treatment for my patients. Finally, in order to popularize Oriental Medicine among the general public, I hope to be a writer with the caliber of readership comparable to the Western biomedical doctors Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil.