Palliative Care for End of Life

Lisa Nicholson, L.Ac., DNBAO is a master acupuncturist, licensed in California and nationally certified. She is a skilled nutritionist and wellness coach, with a passion for helping people experiencing physical and emotional pain to reconnect with their passion for living. As a breast cancer survivor, she is uniquely aware of what breast cancer patients experience from the moment of diagnosis through the entire treatment process.

The child of a teacher and a dentist in a family chock full of physicians, psychologists, and lawyers, Lisa chose a different path. Since childhood, Lisa has been drawn to helping people overcome physical and emotional challenges to live fulfilling and rich lives. Although she was pre-med with her psychology major at SUNY Albany, she found she didn’t resonate with “conventional” medicine and instead, went on to complete a Master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling. After 8 years of working with people struggling with mental illness and addiction, she was looking for a new challenge. As a career counselor, Lisa “tried on” nearly every medical tradition, ultimately settling on Chinese Medicine because it was the one system which fully embraced her philosophy about the interconnectedness of mind and body and offered a treatment system which simultaneously addresses both

Lisa is an endurance athlete who has participated in competitive swimming, cross-country, downhill and water skiing, backpacking, rock climbing, and cycling. At age 29, a water skiing crash left her with a major injury to her back, neck, and shoulders, and threatened to disable her. But Lisa was determined to get back into her athletic pursuits. Because all of her injuries were non-surgical soft-tissue problems, conventional medicine had nothing to offer except drugs. Lisa instead turned to chiropractic and her yoga practice to gradually heal her injuries. It was during a yoga teacher training class where she had an epiphany that much of her ongoing pain was due her fear and resistance to feeling more pain. Through a meditation with a partner, she gradually and gently unlocked the spasms which had bound her back for months, guiding herself back to the movement she needed to heal. Since then, she has continued her yoga practice and taken up first rock climbing and then cycling, training over a period of years to the ultra-cycling world. Now, 100 miles is a training ride, and Lisa has successfully finished events including Race Across the West and Paris-Brest-Paris.

As a breast cancer survivor, Lisa is particularly passionate about helping other breast cancer patients to get through their treatment and restore their health and well being. She has experienced the pain of surgery, the nausea and fatigue of chemotherapy, the fear and frustration of landing in the emergency room with sepsis following one of her treatments, and the skin irritation associated with radiation therapy.  She has successfully returned to her athletic lifestyle following treatment. As someone who has participated in multi-day timed athletic events, she is intimately familiar with the experience of being alone in the dark physically exhausted and afraid, while trying to keep enough forward movement to finish the event. This makes her uniquely suited to working with people undergoing cancer treatment.

Lisa loves to travel, and especially likes to experience other cultures through their food. She is a skilled gourmet cook, and brings her fascination with all things culinary into the clinic with nutrition recommendations, recipes, and more

When she’s not in the clinic or on her bike, you can find Lisa at home in her kitchen or reading with her husband and Percy, the cat who shares her spirit of adventure and zest for fine food