Welcome to the Decolonizing Medicine Podcast [Transcript]

[The Decolonizing Medicine Podcast S01E01.  Original release date: May 26, 2021]

Mabuhay! You are listening to the  Decolonizing Medicine Podcast.  We will be exploring the intersection  of decolonization and healing work with Black and Brown practitioners  involved in a variety of modalities. I am your host, Jamee Pineda recording from  Piscataway territory otherwise known as Baltimore, Maryland. My ancestry is mostly Tagalog and some Chinoy, but I was raised here on Turtle Island.  I'm also a queer non-binary trans person and  a practitioner of Hilot and Chinese medicine.  During each episode I will be interviewing  different healing practitioners, but since this is our very first episode,  I've decided to tell you a little bit more about my background and also answer  some questions that I've gotten from folks in my community through social media  and also some other groups that I'm a part of.
 
So I got into healing work I think the same way a  lot of other folks have gotten into healing work and that was through work burnout, specifically  non-profit work burnout. I was working in a very toxic environment that ended up making me  really sick and the ways that I was able to get my health back on track and eventually leave that  position and make some major changes in my life was to experience community acupuncture for the  first time and this was really important to me because it was a medicine that I could financially afford at the time. I didn't have health insurance, and it was really accessible and my body was very responsive to it.  And eventually that first-hand experience as a patient brought about my own career shift from doing this more administrative nonprofit work into doing healing work for my own communities.  
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