Anne-Marie McCully is a jack of all trades.
Formerly a tree planter and graphic designer, she’s now a practising doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.
“I have a pretty good job,” she admits with a chuckle.
“I just love to be able to teach people how to understand their body.”
McCully is the owner and sole practitioner at her practise in Lower South River. For the last 20 years, McCully has been a popular acupuncturist and herbalist within the community. So popular, in fact, that she had a 10 year-long waitlist.
“It's incredible, I've never had to advertise,” she says.
“I didn't enjoy having a waitlist, but I had to, I (couldn’t) take on too many people at once because I had to make sure I can look after them.”
Having just cleared her waitlist two years ago, McCully is taking things at an easier pace these days, but that doesn’t mean she’s slowing down.
McCully continues to see between eight to 10 patients every day, most of which come to her for body pain, digestive issues, sleep problems and hormonal imbalances.
“I do treat a lot of cancer patients, and I mean everything, from babies to the elderly. There's nothing I don't treat,” she says.
From tree planter to doctor
Originally from Quebec City, McCully moved to British Columbia where she was a tree planter, later moving into graphic design.
After getting injured in a car accident in 1995, McCully turned to acupuncture for pain relief, which led her to develop an interest in traditional Chinese medicine.
Four years later, she graduated from the International College of Traditional Chinese Medicine of Vancouver where she studied acupuncture and herbology.
After meeting her husband, originally from Nova Scotia, McCully went east and has lived in Antigonish ever since.
‘Help people get better’
McCully’s practise also includes a full herbal pharmacy, and she’s expanded her treatments to include other alternative therapies, the most popular being Pulsed Electro Magnetic Field therapy (PEMF).
PEMF is a mat McCully has patients lie on while she performs acupuncture. The mat emits electromagnetic frequency, which McCully says optimizes all 75 trillion cells in the body.
McCully says since offering PEMF to her patients, 200 patients acquired their own mats, reducing her waitlist significantly.
“I told another practitioner about this mat that I use and the response I got was, 'you're going to put me out of business.' They'd rather see people keep coming forever. My goal is to help people get better.”
Versus western medicine
While traditional Chinese medicine is intended to be used in conjunction with mainstream western medicine, McCully says western doctors often don’t appreciate the importance of Chinese medicine.
“(With) western medicine, they have no answers. They only treat symptoms,” she says.
“Chinese medicine is 5,000 years old, and the way we assess the body has not changed in 5,000 years. Some of my herbal formulas are 2,000 to 3,000 years old. That's incredible, because western medicine is not even 200 years old.”
While McCully says western medicine can result in more questions than answers, she says it’s important to work with western medicine - not against it.
“We live in a world of western medicine, so we compromise (with) western medicine. It doesn't have to be one or the other.”
‘Lucky to have her’
Michelle Keizer, a loyal patient of McCully for the last 10 years, says Antigonish is “very lucky to have her.”
“She’s amazing. I've gone there to get results, and I've gotten results, and she's also a very lovely person. So, it's just the whole package, from professionalism to her being able to give you a treatment and it actually be effective.”
A delicious next venture
True to her jack of all trades nature, McCully’s recently expanded into another business - cookies.
Just recently McCully started a cookie baking business, where she bakes and custom designs 95 per cent organic cookies.
“They're beautiful. You don't even want to eat them for sure,” she says proudly.
While McCully hopes to eventually retire to her cookie business, she says her main priority for now is to help her patients get better.
“My goal is to help people heal.”
