“You do not grow up in the United States as a young kid thinking ‘I am going to practice Chinese medicine.’ However, I did a lot of martial arts when I was a kid and had exposure to some wonderful healers and Tai Chi teachers. I was steeped in an East Asian way of looking at the body.
After college, I became a massage therapist and got into yoga and yoga philosophy. I felt like I had hit a really good first career where I was taking a whole-body approach to healing. After six years of doing that, I felt like I was just doing external medicine with the musculoskeletal body. As deep as you can go with that, I was not able to treat pretty sick people. I tried to figure out if there was a way that I could be a clinician and also operate from the traditional East Asian worldview.
I have been practicing Chinese medicine for 12 years and I am psyched for every day I get to spend in the clinic. In this practice, you cannot understand how to treat clinically unless you understand the philosophy. Any person of any age, with any condition, from any walk of life, could come into my clinic, and I could make a reasonable diagnosis and treatment plan for them. They say that when you are a seasoned traditional East Asian medicine physician, the patient walks in and you diagnose their condition as either Yin or Yang, excess or deficiency.
I think my inspiration is whatever it is that lights me up at any given time. A few years ago, I got interested in photography and last fall I started a business where I have been doing family portraiture. Being able to capture someone’s soul through a portrait seems like an extremely complicated and interesting project.
A few years ago, I did a program called Leadership Upper Valley through Vital Communities. Once a month for a year, you get together as a group and spend a whole day learning about different aspects of the Upper Valley. We had days on government, healthcare, education, and food, for example. I could see myself living anywhere and affiliating with lots of different groups, but wow, I am proud to live in the Upper Valley.”
Britton Mann, Etna, NH
