Meet Anthea
Anthea Colossio, EAMP, L.Ac.
Anthea earned her Master’s Degree in Chinese Medicine in 2006, in Austin, Texas, and has been practicing in Seattle, Washington since 2009. She is a general practitioner with a special interest in treating musculoskeletal pain and menstruation irregularities. Anthea strives to support balance in her patients’ lives so that they can then go do their good in the world.
“ . . .My love for natural medicine was planted by my grandmother and the encouragement to pursue East Asian Medicine in particular was provided by my dear friend, and his experience with his chronic health condition.
My earliest memories consist of my grandmother, a registered nurse, having mint and rose hips to snack on and brewer’s yeast on the table. She had an average sized yard in a residential neighborhood, but still raised and grew most of her family’s food and had an extensive library of books on natural health and nutrition. I loved and “ate all this up” so it was easy for me to be drawn to the natural medicine world as I grew older.
By my early twenties I knew I wanted to pursue a profession in natural medicine and at this time my best friend’s struggle with severe chronic eczema had come to a head. After years of depending on corticosteroids for symptom relief he began to go further down a conventional medical path that only worsened over time. I could see that there were huge gaps in his care and that significant aspects of his health as a whole person was being overlooked. I had just been introduced to acupuncture and East Asian Medicine at this time and in it, immediately recognized how this amazingly comprehensive medicine, and how it treats the whole person, could have filled in all of those gaps he was experiencing. It is what helped me solidify my decision to become a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist. I am so grateful for the many experiences that have led me to study and practice the medicine I do and to be able to share this with my amazing patients.”
What is Acupuncture?
A way to find balance
Try to identify when you are giving something to your body and when you are asking something of it. Even just walking down the street we are asking something of our body — to walk. And when are we giving to it? When we sleep. Or when we eat. Or de-stress (by taking that stress away, we are giving our body peace, a calm state, a restorative state). We need to do something restorative for our body, we need to support our body, when we are asking something of it (which we always are, just to different degrees depending on what we are doing in life at the time).
Acupuncture is a restorative and supportive activity. Acupuncture is giving back to your body.
A lot of the time, what we, as the patient and practitioner, are doing is we are removing obstacles from the body so it can heal itself. The body knows how to restore itself, naturally, when given the opportunity. A really good example of this is sleep. All we have to do is lay down and go to sleep and our bodies start doing all of these amazing things to restore itself — we create more antibodies to the harmful microbes around us, tissue growth and repair occurs, our mind organizes thoughts and learning of the day, and so on. Sleep is a process we need to stay alive. Acupuncture can put us into a restorative state, so our bodies can start doing what it needs to bring us back to balance and back to health.
Another way acupuncture removes obstacles is through a more localized route. It signals the body to bring more circulation (blood, lymph, nutrients) to a specific area of the body that is in need of that extra circulation. For example ,when you have physical pain or swelling, this means there is a block, stagnation or congestion in the body — either at that specific site or somewhere else in the body. Acupuncture removes the block, it gets the Qi flowing. What is Qi? It’s the energy that flows within each of our bodies.
Let’s take the example of knee pain: for this Anthea will often choose acupuncture points right at the knee, as part of the treatment. This signals the body to start getting things moving in that area and to bring needed healing elements to that area. She might also place needles elsewhere on the body in the same treatment to encourage Qi flow and circulation throughout the whole body, which will benefit and encourage flow to the knee.
A little more about the body
Here’s an excellent description of acupuncture and how the body heals itself, described by Joseph Acquah, a founding member of the clinical staff of the Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at UCSF:
“The skin is the border to your country. And when the skin gets broken, the body sends out troops. First, a blood clotting factor gets released, so you don’t bleed to death. Then there is a knitting factor that gets released to begin knitting the skin back together. Some white blood cells get sent to the area, to make sure that infection doesn’t spread into the body. There is an increase in the production of cells to form new skin, we call it a scab or scar tissue. An analgesic gets released to reduce pain and stop you from going into shock. And after a day you have a little thin scab. And after a couple of days it is thicker, and then after a week or so it goes away, and we have nice normal tissue again. This happens automatically. Sometimes we look down and there is a scab and we don’t even remember doing anything to cause it. So the body has done it without our thinking about it. This indicates that we have a system inside of us, that is always there taking care of us. All we are doing is tapping into that system, and marshaling it into action for you. We break the skin, but in some specific sites, that then marshals that system into action for you. That is acupuncture in a nutshell.”
Ready to find out how acupuncture can benefit you? Schedule your free 15-minute consultation to find out more.
— PATIENT bliss —
“I have tried many different therapies and they all failed. I had also tried three or four different acupuncturists, but I didn’t notice any change. So last year, when my doctor referred me to Anthea for acupuncture, I did not have a lot of hope. But after just two treatments my pain is gone! It felt like a miracle!”
— Nao V. in West Seattle