Profile
Dr Carolyn Ee
MBBS (UWA), B.App.Science - Chinese Medicine/Human
Biology (RMIT), Grad Cert Medical Acupuncture (Monash)
Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practice
(FRACGP)
Honorary Research Fellow at University of Melbourne
General Practitioner, Acupuncturist and Chinese Herbalist
Carolyn completed her medical degree in Western
Australia in 1998. After several years of working as a junior
doctor in the public hospital system, she became disillusioned
by the focus of conventional medicine on sickness and the
lack of treatment options for many chronic and debilitating
diseases. She looked to Chinese Medicine for two reasons:
a desire to expand the diagnostic and therapeutic options
available to her patients, and a personal interest in learning
about her own culture.
She went on to spend three years studying
Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine at RMIT University,
Melbourne, at Bachelor level. One of the reasons for choosing
this course was the opportunity to spend seven months in a
Chinese Medicine hospital in China. “In China, Traditional
Chinese Medicine is regarded as mainstream, and is integrated
with Western Medicine. The RMIT degree therefore offered a
unique opportunity to observe how this is done within the
context of a teaching hospital – something unheard of
in Australia to date”, she says. Carolyn received a
scholarship to assist with her study in China, in recognition
of her academic excellence.
Despite the two disciplines having almost
diametrically opposite foundations, Carolyn found that studying
Chinese Medicine complemented her knowledge of conventional
medicine. “I started to see very early on that I was
looking at the same picture with a new angle. I would be sitting
in a lecture hearing about the clinical presentation of Kidney
Yang deficiency and thinking, I’ve seen this before!”
she says. “To me, both disciplines are truly complementary
– I can’t conceive of one without the other in
my future practice. I see my challenge as refining the art
of balancing the two – there is a right time and place
for Chinese and/or Western medicine, and this depends on the
individual situation.”
Carolyn went on to obtain her Fellowship
with the Royal Australian College of General Practice, and
completed further postgraduate training in medical acupuncture.
She has joined the Whole Health Medical Clinic and enjoys
seeing general practice patients, assessing their diet and
lifestyle, and offering acupuncture and nutritional medicine
where appropriate. She spent 2006 researching acupuncture
for pelvic and back pain in pregnancy at the University of
Melbourne.
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