A Physician Who Thinks Differently
— Because She Always Has
I was supposed to follow a straight line.
I grew up in a household of high expectations — both of my parents are psychiatrists, Filipino immigrants at that (which comes with rigors second-generation Asian immigrants all understand well)! And the path they envisioned for me was clear: become a doctor, then figure out the rest. What they didn’t anticipate was that I would take them completely at their word — and then spend the next several decades figuring out what kind of doctor I actually wanted to be.
I was academically restless from the beginning, and rigorous at the same time. Advanced a grade early, testing in the 99th percentile through high school, and yet what I loved most wasn’t the achievement — it was the complexity. The puzzle. The satisfaction of understanding something deeply rather than just performing well on it.
When I got to college, knowing medical school was ahead, I made a decision that confused nearly everyone around me: I majored in music. Not as a distraction: as a declaration. It would be my last chance, I told myself, to do something I truly loved before medicine consumed everything else. I was wrong about that — but I didn’t know it yet.
I went to Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Southern California, where I earned my MD in 2004. I remember the moment I knew primary care was my calling. I was on my surgery rotation, face to face with a patient whose diabetic foot infection had progressed to the point of possible amputation — and he had no primary physician managing the underlying disease that had brought him there. It didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t want to treat the consequence. I wanted to understand the whole person.
That instinct has guided everything since.
I completed my Internal Medicine residency at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester in 2007, then pursued a second board certification in Preventive Medicine, earning a Masters of Public Health from UMass Amherst with a concentration in Epidemiology. I spent years as an academic hospitalist, then transitioned to primary care with a large group practice in Milford — where I watched, gradually and then all at once, the thing I loved about medicine get slowly dismantled by administrative burden, volume targets, and a system that had confused efficiency with care.
In 2017 I resigned and opened Thrive Adult Primary Care. I saw it as a return to the kind of medicine I had trained for, and the kind of physician I had always intended to be.
What I practice now is Internal Medicine in its fullest sense: the meticulous, measured, exploratory work of understanding a complete human being. I bring to every patient not just my clinical training but an instinct for complexity that I have come to trust — a capacity to sense what is happening underneath the surface of a clinical picture before the evidence fully articulates it. That instinct has been right far more often than it has been wrong. And following it has sometimes meant disagreeing, quietly but firmly, with the direction the system wanted me to go.
I am also, still, a musician. My band, Mirror’s Edge, performs live across New England — and playing music again after years away reminded me that the skills I love most in medicine and in music are the same ones: listening deeply, tolerating ambiguity, knowing when to follow the established path, when creativity is warranted to take things to the next level. What I value most of all, honestly, is executing within the ensemble — finding the right players for the team, and providing space for each one to perform his or her superpowers, all to achieve the best unified result.
But my first and last loves are my sons, Jay and Caleb — who are, at this point, significantly taller than me and insufferably funny about it.
Credentials
- MD — Loma Linda University School of Medicine, 2004
- MPH, Epidemiology — UMass Amherst, 2009
- Residency in Internal Medicine — UMass Memorial Medical Center, 2007
- Residency in Preventive Medicine — UMass Memorial Medical Center, 2009
- Board Certified, Internal Medicine, 2007
- Board Certified, Preventive Medicine, 2009
Thrive Adult Primary Care 