Jennifer is a Chinese Medicine Practitioner with a background in other energy healing such as Shamanism. Most importantly, she is inspired every day - as her passions for problem solving, poetry, and empathy are called upon as she heals and keeps her patients healthy and holistically in balance.
Video transcribed:
Hi, I’m Jennifer Jacoby. I’m a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese Medicine Practitioner, and I Do What I Love.
What does a chinese medicine practitioner do?
I work with acupuncture and Chinese herbology for healthcare and well-being. I’m a general practitioner. I treat people of all ages both men and women, from young ones up to older ones. I see just about everything I am a general practitioner, so I treat whatever walks in the door.
Everyday is a beautiful day in this profession. Every day, I get to see people come in and making a choice to shift to change, to empower themselves to recognize that they can recreate their life in some way, shape, or form. That is, just in and of itself, a great gift and a beautiful thing to witness. And, of course, each time someone comes in an says, “ah! I slept through the night” or “my back doesn’t hurt anymore” or “you know, I’ve really been calm, peaceful and focused for this last week” - whatever it is that we’ve been working on - to hear them come in and say “yeah, it’s better,and I’m feeling better” - is a beautiful day, right?
What personal interests do you have? Do they tie into your work?
I love puzzles. I love to do puzzles...and I always have, from a very young age - whether they are crosswords, whether they’re picture puzzles, and that has stuck with me - that’s always been with me. Also, I love language. As I said, I’m really a poet at heart. I write poetry. I’ve studied many languages. I speak several languages. And when I was growing up, my family moved quite a bit - in the United States as well as outside of the United States, and so I actually had the opportunity to learn about seeing people who looked different on the outside and then starting to recognized that we’re really all the same. But looking back, one of the gifts that I realized that has brought to me is the ability to look through very different perspectives, and look at things...take one object and consider it from...through this viewpoint or this lens, and then move over here and look at it through this viewpoint and this lens - because I’ve been exposed to so many different, um, cultures; even within the United States. And I always loved that. I always loved meeting new people - I still do. I love to travel. And that is something that is a great skill in Chinese medicine, is being able to see a patient who comes in and look at them as the whole, but then also look at them through their own lens.
Why did you decide to make a career out of this?
A friend of mine became very ill. She had a very lethal form of cancer and her Western care was taking some toll on her, I mean it was helping her, obviously, but it was also really debilitating her. And so she sought out a Chinese medicine practitioner for additional care. And I watched take these formulas of these Chinese herbs - this was a new concept to me at the time - and she had some acupuncture as well, and I watched her get better. And I watched her survive her cancer. And she’s still alive this day. And she even says that it’s the Chinese medicine that kept her alive. So that was the first moment, kind of in my active consciousness, that I went “Wow! What is this stuff? I want to learn more about this.”
Do you have any particularly memorable patient stories?
I had another woman who came to see me, she was having difficulty getting pregnant and, in the past, she had had several miscarriages. So she was not only having difficulty getting pregnant, but staying pregnant. And so we worked together for awhile to prepare her to get pregnant, and then she did get pregnant, and then we made sure that she stayed pregnant - that she carried the child to term. And I helped a little bit with the delivery as well. And I remember, after she had delivered..it was her first time that she came back in to see me and she stood there with her baby - her new baby - in her arms and she just cried. She didn’t have to say anything and I started crying too. To see that moment of completion for her - that moment of grace. This is what she had been needing, striving for, wanting so desperately and to see that come to completion for her and to see the peace that brought her and joy that that brought her was really pretty powerful.
I’m Jennifer Jacoby. I’m a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese Medicine Practitioner. I Do What I Love...and I Love What I Do.