Bio
Alzada Magdalena M.S., L.Ac. has been interested in health and healing since she was a child. Her first exposure to Oriental Medicine came at age 6 in Japan and Hong Kong, and her first glimpses of native healing practices and tropical diseases were in Australia and Africa. A child of tropical biologists who were frequently on safari, she traveled extensively in Africa, South and Central America, Europe and the Orient, living in game parks and rural villages while they collected the insects that parasitize ants and termites
Formal education:
1997-2001 MS in Oriental Medicine, Meiji College, Berkeley, CA
1984-85 Graduate studies, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA
1978-81 BA Cultural Anthropology with minors in Art History and Studio Art.
University of California, Davis, CA
1976-78 Undergraduate studies Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
She has studied native healing practices since she was fourteen. Her fascination with plant and herbs took shape in the markets of Peru and Guatemala, and in personal experience with being dosed with remedies in the Amazon.
Her interest in native medicines and healing led her to start a transformative bodywork practice called The Healing Arts, in Davis Ca, in 1992. She studied Medical Chi Gong with Master Yue Shi, who recognized her as a Chi Gong Master in 1995, and asked her to begin teaching. She has practiced and taught Chi Gong ever since. Among her teachers, she has studied Western Shamanism with Dr Pamela Eakins, Medical Chi Gong with Master Yue Shi and Suzanne Friedman, and Native American healing with Marta Talavera and Cenora Gordon.
Wanting a more formal education in medicine, she went to Meiji College in San Francisco and Berkeley. (Meiji University, in Japan, is the largest acupuncture and traditional medicine college in the world, and sponsored Meiji College in the US.) She became a licensed acupuncturist in California in 2002. Her practice moved to a remodeled bungalow in downtown Davis.
In 2011, with both of her children in college in Oregon, she and her husband Ellis moved to Bend. She split her time between her new Oregon practice and her California practice, spending one week of the month in Davis. In 2016 she and Ellis discovered Prineville and fell in love with the people, the culture and the land. They moved, bought a house and rented an office in Prineville. Since then she has bought a small building of her own in which to practice.
In 2018 she closed down the California commute and renamed her practice Prineville Acupuncture and Healing Center. Alzada has a passion for seeing her patients improve in health, outlook and function. Her education, interests and travels give her a wide range of healing tools from many cultures, and enable her to address healing on multiple levels.