Patients' health in her hands

"Those are not cases of disease but of 'dis-ease'," she says, "when people are not in tune with their self or their body or their emotional state."

She cites a recent client for whom she developed a customized holistic treatment that included acupoint meridian therapy, neuromuscular release, cranial qigong theta healing, nutrition, and lifestyle changes.

"Everybody is up against time constraints," she says, "and that often means we only focus on the physical. But our mental and emotional levels are equally important," she says. "All of that makes up the person."

For many expats that come to her for treatment, she says, there is a slow but steady erosion of self-awareness after arriving in the new culture that is China.

"It's quite easy for people to get negative, depressed - overwhelmed by the foreign-ness and language barrier," she says. "Often only the spouse may be allowed to work, and then there is the process of settling children in school, and building your own personal network.

"In their home country, they were more occupied, had a better job, more friends, and almost without knowing it they start to spiral down," she says.

"You can't support that person with just medicines," she says. "It takes emotional counseling, too, to help people launch positive thought processes so they can start being creative and being passionate about life again."

Part of her role, she says, is to ask, "What would you like to do? And why haven't you done it yet?"

"Sometimes people don't really know, they haven't taken time to ask themselves," she says. "Start a business? A website? Learn something new?

"It's not all about bodywork. The mental, physical and psychological have to be in tandem. If not, we have to manipulate a shift so that they are. When you understand that you need an even flow of these energies, you understand qi and you can use it to its full potential."

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