Claire Monod Cassidy holds a doctorate in Human Biology, and practices medical anthropology.  After teaching at two universities, she turned to teaching and doing research at an acupuncture school in Columbia Maryland, after which she herself became an acupuncturist (2000).  She served on the initial NIH committees on 'alternative' medicine in the 1990s and completed the first (and still largest) survey of how acupuncture patients experience acupuncture care (1998).  In 2002 she published an edited text Contemporary Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture.  After retiring from patient care, she began an extensive text comparing six Medicines with the goal of helping American biomedicine to solve some of its cost , equity, and portability problems--this text is in its finishing stages.  Dr. Cassidy works with a group of women on developing the science of complex adaptive systems and encouraging the use of complexity science methods in the study of non-biomedical Medicines.