Holistically Speaking
Hello, I’m Liz Garen. And this is Brendan Kelly. We’re co on owners of Jade mountain wellness in Burlington Vermont. We offer classical Chinese medicine, five-element acupuncture, and customized Eastern and Western herbal formulas. I was an occupational therapist for 18 years prior to becoming an acupuncturist. And Brendan’s was…
I was a Western herbalist for about 12 years before getting into Chinese medicine.
We treat people with all conditions at our clinic of all ages from toddlers to seniors.
And we aspire to treat the whole person to treat the body, the mind, the emotions in the spirit Chinese medicine really excels at treating the whole person and not only treating particular diagnoses, treating disease, but also preventing disease. And perhaps most importantly, in promoting wellbeing. For us, it’s not enough just to aspire, to have symptoms go away. We’re trying to prevent those symptoms and other symptoms from coming back, as well as promoting long-lasting long-term health within the people that we work with.
When you come in for your initial evaluation you can expect that we’ll customize and individualize all our treatments and herbal formulas for you. We, because of our five-element background, which is part of classical Chinese medicine, we look at people deeply to see actually what constitutional type they are, and this can help the depth of the treatments that you’ll receive.
We don’t practice TCM or traditional Chinese medicine. That’s not part of our practice. What we’ve studied is the older, more classical parts of Chinese medicine. Both acupuncture and herbal medicine. Another thing is that we receive ongoing education from a Daoist priest in New York City. So we are very engaged in continuing our knowledge and our skills as practitioners.
Yeah, as Liz said, we spend several hundred hours a year of classroom time studying different aspects of Chinese medicine and the older classical aspects, which is what we’re most familiar with and what we incorporate mostly into our clinical experience. Its strength is treating the whole person and its strength is recognizing that the body, the mind, the emotions, and even the spirit are all interconnected.
Western medicine is starting to talk about these interconnections, for example, between the body and the mind, but literally for several thousand years, that interconnection inter of the different aspects of who we are, has been the basis of Chinese medicine. And that allows us potentially to treat multiple conditions, multiple diagnoses, simultaneously physical, mental, emotional condition simultaneously because it’s all the same person.
And Chinese medicine, the older aspects of Chinese medicine really excels at treating what it calls the root causes or the root issues of the different conditions. Rather than just treating individual branches, treating individual symptoms. We’re trying to treat the individual symptoms by understanding where they come from, what the root causes are.