Twenty-five years in. Still learning from every patient.
What brings someone to this work, and what keeps them here
I did not come to East Asian Medicine looking for a career. I came out of curiosity, with a background in Western science and real questions about what this system actually was. What I found was a medicine with its own rigorous internal logic, one that asked different questions than my earlier education, and two thousand years of clinical observation behind the answers. That combination, intellectual coherence and deep empirical roots, is what earned my attention. Twenty-five years later it still does.
That is still what I am doing. The learning doesn’t stop. It changes shape. Early in practice you are learning the medicine. Later you are learning what the medicine reveals in each particular person. The patients teach you things no textbook covers. A presentation that seemed clear turns out to be layered. A pattern you’ve treated a hundred times shows up differently in a different body, a different season, a different life. You stay curious or you stop growing.
What twenty-five years actually looks like in the room.
It shows up in how I listen, not just what I do.
I have trained in multiple acupuncture traditions, including Saam, a 17th-century Korean system that reads the whole pattern rather than the isolated symptom. I use moxibustion when warmth is what the body needs rather than movement. I practice myofascial needling for pain and tissue restriction, and I prescribe Chinese herbal medicine when a case calls for support between sessions or something that needles alone can’t reach.
What experience gives you is not a longer list of techniques. It is pattern recognition. The ability to sit with a complex presentation and find the thread. To know when something straightforward is actually layered, and when something that looks complicated is simpler than it seems. To adjust in real time as the body responds.
That is what I bring to every session. Not certainty. Attention.
What I’ve noticed about this community.
Maine bodies carry Maine lives.
The cold arrives early and stays late. People work physically hard. Injuries get managed rather than treated. By the time someone walks through the door, what started as something minor has often been present for years.
I also notice a particular self-reliance here. People who have been managing a long time on their own, who are thoughtful about their health, and who, when they do ask for help, want to understand what is happening and why. That suits how I practice. I explain the reasoning. I tell patients what I am looking for, what I find, and what I think it means. The work is collaborative from the first visit.
Your other providers are part of this too.
I welcome that conversation.
Many patients I see are also working with a primary care provider, a specialist, a physical therapist, or an oncologist. That is not a complication. It is often exactly the right picture.
If you want your doctor to know you are receiving acupuncture or herbal medicine, I am glad to support that. I can provide a summary of your care, answer clinical questions, or simply make myself available if your provider wants to understand what we are doing and why. Integrative cancer care in particular works best when the whole care team is informed.
You do not need a referral to come in. But if your doctor sent you, or if you want to loop them in after we’ve started, that door is open. The goal is your care. Whatever supports that is welcome here.
The first visit starts with a simple question: how can I help?
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.