The best outcomes I’ve seen came from the best partnerships.
What it means to practice medicine as a shared inquiry
I have been practicing acupuncture and East Asian Medicine since 2001. What I have learned, more than any clinical insight or technical refinement, is that the quality of the outcome is almost always proportional to the quality of the conversation.
Not the conversation that happens out loud, though that matters too. The one that happens in the room: what your body is telling me, what you are noticing, what we are both paying attention to and adjusting toward. That is the inquiry. And when it works, it works because both people are in it.
What you bring to the room changes what is possible.
The conversation goes both ways.
Your history shapes where we start. The injury that never fully resolved. The years of pushing through fatigue. The stretch of life when sleep didn’t come and stress didn’t lift. These things leave marks that show up in how you hold tension, how you recover, how your body responds. I look for those. They tell me where the work needs to go.
But I can only see part of the picture. You are living in your body every day. You notice things between sessions that I cannot: whether the pain that was in your lower back has moved, whether the sleep that improved after two sessions has held, whether the fatigue that lifted for a week came back when work got hard. That information matters. It shapes every decision we make about what comes next.
Patients who share that openly, who come in and say this shifted, or this didn’t, or I’m not sure what changed but something did, those conversations produce the most precise treatment. Not because I work harder with engaged patients, but because I have more to work with.
What does feeling well mean to you?
That question is the most important clinical information I can have.
Not the absence of a symptom. Not a number on a lab panel. What you actually want to be able to do. How you want to feel moving through your days. What a good week looks like, what you’ve stopped expecting for yourself that you’d like back.
That answer is different for everyone. It changes over time. Someone recovering from cancer treatment has a different definition than someone managing chronic pain, or someone who is simply exhausted in a way that doesn’t show up anywhere. And it changes within the same person, as life changes around them, as seasons shift, as what matters most shifts with it.
This is the tension that comes up in the room every week, in different forms from different patients: what the body needs, what daily life demands, and what a person actually wants for themselves. Those are not always the same question. Finding where they meet is where individualized care actually begins.
Your definition of wellness is not background information. It is the starting point. It shapes what we track, what we prioritize, and what success looks like for you at this particular moment in your life. Nothing about that is fixed. Neither is the treatment.
The inquiry never really ends.
That is not a limitation. It is the point.
Three thousand years of clinical observation is a foundation worth taking seriously. I do. And I bring the same curiosity to every patient I see, to other traditions, and to the research that continues to validate and refine what the medicine has always understood.
The pursuit of a life well lived requires reflection, experimentation, and humility. So does good medicine. It is a privilege to walk alongside patients through that process: learning, adapting, rediscovering what wellness can mean at different stages of life.
I have learned as much from patients as from any text. That is not a small thing.
Your body tells its story. The first visit is where we listen together.
Sharon Sherman, MSOM, Dipl. AHM (NCBAHM), L.Ac., has practiced acupuncture and East Asian Medicine full time since 2001, and at True to Life Wellness in Freeport, Maine since 2025.