By Andrew Cutler
More than 20 years ago, Laura Mayo walked into a pharmacy in the Washington, D.C., area and asked for herbs.
The pharmacist stared at her. “They looked at me like, ‘What?’” she says.
Laura, a native of Lithuania, grew up in a society where a doctor’s first move was often to send a patient for herbal care at the pharmacy.
"When I was growing up, we used herbs a lot, some natural remedies to get better,” she says.
The blank stare Laura encountered helped trigger a journey that led her to own Family Acupuncture & Herbal Medicine in Hood River.
Laura is a licensed acupuncturist, and patients come to her for pain, headaches, digestive trouble, fatigue, fertility, stress and more.
Laura lives in Mosier and is a member-owner of Wasco Electric Cooperative.
A Different Path
Laura came to the United States in her mid-20s. She spent four years in the Washington, D.C., area working in chemical engineering. It wasn’t a good fit.
“I just wanted to do something different,” she says. “I didn’t like to sit in the office.”
Unable to find the herbal medicines she had grown up with, Laura turned to an acupuncturist. She learned martial arts in Lithuania and understood the philosophy behind Eastern medicine.
At 30, Laura told her tai chi teacher she wanted to study Chinese medicine. She worried she might be too old for such an endeavor, but her instructor told her to go for it.
In 2007, Laura moved to Portland to enroll at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. The program took four years, and she had her first child in her final year.
After graduation, Laura and her family moved to Hood River, attracted to biking and snowboarding and the notion of raising children outside of Portland. Laura opened her practice in 2012 and moved to Mosier six years ago.
Treating the Person
“What drew me to Chinese medicine was that they look at the whole person,” Laura says.
Western medicine sorts patients by symptoms, she says—digestive trouble to a gastroenterologist, headaches to a neurologist.
Laura’s approach is different.
“We look at what is the underlying cause, the root cause,” she says. “We look at the whole person.”
Two people can visit Laura with the same headache and leave with different treatments.
During an appointment, Laura checks a patient’s tongue and pulse. She asks about sleep, digestion, diet, energy, stress and medications. One patient may be depleted and need nourishing. Another individual may carry so much stress that they need to calm their nervous system first—nourishing would make it worse.
Then there are the needles—the part people fear most.
“People are scared sometimes, like, ‘Oh, I don’t like needles,’” she says.
Acupuncture needles aren’t the same as the hollow needles used for injections and blood draws. Laura says most patients don’t feel them go in. Many fall asleep. One started calling the appointments “acculand.”
“I use that word now,” she says.
Herbs follow the same logic. Laura keeps a pharmacy of single herbs in granule form and mixes a specific formula for each patient from traditional remedies thousands of years old. Patients stir the granules into hot water and drink it. Roots, stems, leaves and flowers all have uses. Each is sorted by the organ system and by whether it warms or cools.
The initial visit to Laura is mostly about talking and learning about the patient’s health—physical, mental and emotional. Patients fill out a detailed intake form, and Laura asks questions that may seem off-topic. For example, she asks someone who comes in for joint pain about their digestion.
Familiar Faces
One patient came after breaking her legs in a motorcycle accident. Her doctors could offer little beyond pain medication she didn’t want. She arrived in Laura’s office hunched over, barely walking. Six treat-ments later, she was upright and walking 30 to 90 minutes a day with her dogs.
Another individual arrived with alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne allergy to red meat.
“His body just got allergic to many things other than red meat,” Laura says.
She had never seen this allergy. She told the patient they could try to remedy his symptoms.
“I have never treated that, but let’s try it,” Laura told him.
The man still isn’t eating red meat, but he’s expanding his diet. The flare-ups have stopped, and his energy is back.
Laura has found success in other ways, such as with fertility patients who conceive within three months or patients with post-viral fatigue for whom their doctors couldn’t find relief.
She does not handle emergencies.
Anything urgent goes to the emergency room, she says.
Laura sees patients by appointment only, and most learn of her services by word of mouth, referred by other patients or their doctors. She says many people who find her online have never considered alternative medicine before and come because someone told them it might help.
Nearly two decades in the Gorge has blurred the line between patient and neighbor.
“I think almost all my patients become my friends,” Laura says. “I like the relation-ships that I form. I like seeing my people in town.”
Laura says she would like to one day bring more focus on the nervous system into her practice, including how much of what shows up in the body traces back to unreleased stress.
“If we don’t release it in some way, it just starts to break our body,” she says.
Determining the most rewarding part of her practice is easy.
“When people feel better,” she says.
Family Acupuncture & Herbal Medicine is at 506 Cascade Ave., Suite 100, Hood River. Visit hrfamilyacupuncture.com or call 541-645-0708 for more information.