Category: Student, Faculty, Alumni Spotlights

“When people come to us for help, they may not necessarily be their best selves, so how do we meet them where they are and do something that’s really with them, and not for them or in spite of them… that relationship is really a sacred one. I’m not doing anything for you, I’m just with you– I’ve had my own journey, and I can share with you my experience and I can share with you my experience with other people, and then together we get to figure out what works best for you.”

The “Reluctant” Healer

Before starting Acupuncture & Integrative Medicine school, Karen Villanueva was a nurse for over 20 years; she worked in the ER, ICU, prison system, and even at the ballpark. …

Disparities in Healthcare

Of the many things brought to light during the Covid pandemic, U.S. healthcare disparities are among the most disheartening. The virus has made visible the vast inequities that plague our healthcare system, as well as the many other contributing factors that manifest in poor health outcomes that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latino populations.

Racial and ethnic disparities in the healthcare setting gives rise to serious moral and ethical dilemmas – healthcare is simply not available equally to all segments of the population in the United States.

According to CDC data, Indigenous Americans have suffered the highest death rates from the pandemic with 1 out of every 390 people (total population) dying from Covid. One in 555 Black Americans have died, and 1 in 665 …

Curious about what it’s like to work in our student clinic? Use this blog as your resource!

Edgar Mojica has always wanted to heal and educate other people. With a background in education and pre-med, he realized that he wanted a medical career where he could truly connect with his patients. After visiting AIMC, he realized that a future in East Asian medicine and acupuncture could provide that. To read more about his journey, click here!

AIMC’s Japanese Foundations

Since its founding in 1990 by the Meiji School of Oriental Medicine in Japan & its alumni, AIMC has always had a close relationship with Japanese styles of acupuncture & herbal therapy. Our Board Chair, Dr. Goto, is the president of our sister college, GOTO College of Medical Arts & Sciences in Tokyo. In addition to offering Japanese acupuncture electives & clinical supervision to our Master’s students, we have a continuing education Japanese Medicine certificate program that has been forged in relationship with some of the great teachers of Japanese Medicine in the U.S. and abroad. We regularly bring Japanese teachers to the U.S. for seminars, and we hope to reschedule our

With Olympic athletes competing with cupping marks on their backs and acupuncturists being hired by major league athletic teams, there’s a surging wave of interest in Acupuncture and alternative therapy for treating sports injuries and enhancing athletic performance. We recently hosted an opportunity for our students and alums to sit down with people working in the field of Sports Medicine to share their experiences and offer a glimpse into the future of acupuncture careers on and off the athletic field.

The Event

With over 30 students and alums attending the virtual conversation, we were joined by Glenn Oberman, L.Ac., AIMC faculty member & supervisor of the UC Berkeley Sports Medicine Externship, and Tomoya Harada, DC, Chiropractor for the San Francisco 49ers and current AIMC Masters student. …

Nishanga Bliss, MS, Ph.D. L.Ac., is the author of Real Food All Year and has been a practitioner in the holistic health field for over 20 years. She is an acupuncturist, herbalist, integrative nutritionist, and professor of Chinese medicine at the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College in Berkeley, where she grows, cooks, ferments, teaches, and writes about sustainable food.

On a recent sunny spring afternoon, Nishanga met with Kimber Simpkins, a yoga instructor, positive body image teacher, and author of Full and 52 Ways to Love Your Body. The venue was Sanctuary Bistro in West Berkeley. Along with Cheryl Angelina Koehler, editor of Edible East Bay, who joined them to photograph, they enjoyed BLTs and citrus trifle as they discussed the topic of pleasure in relation …

Opioid addictions are on the rise in the United States. At one of our seminars, AIMC students learned from Dr. Itoh how trigger point acupuncture therapy can be used to combat the over-prescription culture in our country.

A class of twenty completed the Medical Qi Gong certification program led by Suzannah Stason LAc, CMQ this past summer. The program included six modules spanning over the length of a year. With the momentum of the resounding success of this graduating class, the program is being offered again, beginning with module one on September 16-17, 2017.

The practice of Medical Qi Gong is one of the original branches of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In the West, we often think of just acupuncture but when we look at Traditional Chinese medicine as a whole system, we see the many aspects that it addresses from the internal medicine that herbal formulas provides, the qi cultivation and regulation that qi gong provides and the balancing aspects of acupuncture.

Medical qi …

I have been to a few festivals, but never to one this big, and never to one occurring during a total solar eclipse. All I knew about the Symbiosis festival was from a friend—a farmer in Oregon and an SF native, who called it a mini burning man and a sanctuary of the mind. After finishing my first term of acupuncture and Chinese medicine school, I felt myself moving forward on a path leading toward complete connected-ness with the earth, life and being, and with the universe, death and knowing.

I was thinking in terms of Yin and Yang, everything was becoming Yin or Yang. So I knew seeing the eclipse in totality would be the ultimate Yin Yang experience and I needed to be there. …