Before this, she wrote for a living
Dana spent her career as a journalist, with work in the New York Times, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and Washingtonian. She expected to do it for life, and covered the Olympics along the way, which is why athletes tend to find her a straightforward person to explain a training calendar to.
What changed it
In her late forties she started getting symptoms she now treats in other people: fatigue out of proportion to the exercise that caused it, joint aches, insomnia, anxiety, and brain fog bad enough that a single paragraph could take hours.
Eighteen months of specialists, a research study and various medications produced two autoimmune diagnoses and not much else. A rheumatologist told her she would get brief remissions and would otherwise have to gut it out.
Her primary care physician suggested acupuncture. At the intake, the acupuncturist rested three fingers on her wrist and asked whether she got a lot of urinary tract infections. She did. Nobody had connected that to anything before.
Three months of twice-weekly treatment and some changes to how she ate, and she had her energy and her head back. She enrolled in acupuncture school not long after.
Our bodies are wise and are always sending us signals. What if we listened to, rather than ignored, these signals?
Training and practice
- Master’s degree in Acupuncture, completed in February 2018.
- Licensed acupuncturist, Dipl. Ac., licensed in Maryland, having passed three national board examinations.
- Four years in a multi-practitioner clinic in Crofton, Maryland before opening The Zen Point as a solo practice in Bethesda in 2022.
- Three years of study with the ElectroAcupuncture Institute, including training at mastermind level.
- Trained in the Balance Method and in the ear and scalp micro-maps, which is why she can treat a painful area without needling into it.
- Also practices Acutonics tuning fork therapy, facial acupuncture and motorized microneedling.
She speaks on healthy aging and on the science behind electroacupuncture.
How she works
The Zen Point is a solo practice. Dana does her own intakes, her own treatments, her own scheduling and her own email. Nobody hands you off to an associate, and the person you speak to before you book is the person who treats you.
That is also the reason she will tell you when something is not hers to treat. A practice this size does not survive on patients who paid for eight sessions that did nothing.
She made me feel so welcome and cared for from the moment I walked in. Her calming presence and genuine kindness really stand out. I left feeling peaceful and refreshed. I’ll definitely be back.