My name is Nancy. My pronouns are she/her.

I am an inquisitive family nurse practitioner from Yale University with specialty training in primary care psychiatry from UC Davis and a background in public health research from UC Berkeley. ​​I’m a provider who brings a compassionate, holistic, and body-aware lens to care. My approach is collaborative, practical, and grounded in tools that help patients build insight, practice, and regulation. 

​

Background

I chose family medicine wanting to work with undeserved women and children, prevent illness, and improve wellbeing. I realized that was not family medicine at all. I ended up working with mostly elderly patients, prescribing medications and managing mental health issues. I thought I would hate it, but I began to appreciate it as it made me more curious about disease and illness. 

​

While working primary care in an immigrant and refugee community, I started noticing that many of my patient's concerns were deeply rooted in suffering and trauma and manifesting secondarily as physical ailments, termed psychosomatic disorders. My patients were living in chronically fearful and unpleasant states and I didn't know how to support them as their anxiety, depression, and fears controlled their day-to-day behaviors. While I could convince some patients to start therapy or psychiatric medications, most were hesitant due to stigma. Unwilling to give up on my patients and trying to better understand their mental health conditions, I pursued specialty training in primary care psychiatry, which gave a robust training on cognitive disorders, medication management, and options for cognitive therapies. This gave me more confidence to address their underlying mental health issues. Even though medications did reduce many of the patients' sense of overwhelm -- I could see I was struggling to connect with their anxieties. As COVID and Asian violence escalated in Oakland, Chinatown, I too felt terrified for my life and started practicing daily meditations. Unwittingly, it allowed me to broaden my perspective and see that I was safe in the present moment. Soon, I could see my patient's anxieties in a different light. I recognized it was imperative for them to feel safe and seen in order to start exploring their inner most needs and make changes in their current life. It was a completely different way of relating that my conscious mind never knew prior. I questioned if there was another lens to health and medicine that I was also missing, thus I quit medicine and explored eastern medicine (yoga, acupuncture), my native Vietnamese medicine, as well as indigenous medicine and indigenous psychology, which all practiced harmony/balance, food as medicine, and relational elements such as duality, seasonality, and nature. It started to feel quite sacred and I knew I needed to offer a practice that could fuse the mind and body.

 

Was it integrative mental health? Was it integrative health care? Was it integrative medicine? Was it embodied care? I didn't know the right terminology or where I fit in as I started this practice. I just knew there was another way of providing medicine and actually practice mindfulness strategies to slow things down enough for patients to hone in on their experiences. ​​I work with patients to learn to be with and trust their bodies and minds to guide them to clarity, love, and peace. When they were able to regulate their nervous systems, they were better able to access their curiosity, joy, and calm and start to live a healthier life they didn't see possible without fear, avoidance, addictions, and self-loathing. I could witness their connection to themselves wholing themselves and was delighted, but there were still challenges. 

 

Many, especially those who have experienced extensive trauma and pain in their lives, have a very rigid mind and ego to protect them that needed a different approach. As I learned more about trauma in the body, indigenous psychedelic rituals, I researched psychedelic medicine, in particular, how it rewires the brain. While gabapentin is one of my favorite medications to tone down and buffer the nervous system, I learned more about ketamine, which dissociates the body and mind, enough to update their model of reality. I counseled patients: it's basically meditation x 100, as you can see down into your experience instead of being trapped in the experience. I participated in ketamine training and continued listening to patient's stories who had undergone full dose treatments and recognized that while psychedelic care could help, again, I wanted to provide a gentler psychedylic approach that would allow their nervous system additional support.

 

And here we are in 2025. I am still in awe at the transformations I've been witness to. 

I want to send gratitude to all my patients for entrusting me and for the grace of moving through life together. 

​