Time is our most precious resource. It is the one thing we can never get back. I believe life is meant to be lived fully, not just endured, and that every moment matters. When chronic pain steals your time, your energy, and your ability to enjoy the simple pleasures that make life meaningful, it robs you of your greatest wealth.

That's why I spend time to create those articles on this website: to give you the explanation most appointments never have time for..

My Journey

I trained as a maxillofacial surgeon in France, reconstructing faces after trauma and cancer. Precise, technical work that taught me how to look at the body in detail. Then life pulled us in a different direction.

Over the past decade, my husband, our son, and our rescue cat have moved between countries and continents, driven by curiosity more than comfort. Medical rotations in Senegal and Indonesia. Surgical training in Canada. When we settled in Halifax permanently, I made a decision that surprised a lot of people: I walked away from surgery and retrained completely in family medicine.

I don’t regret it for a second.

Family medicine showed me something surgery never could: what happens to people between the acute moments. The years of appointments. The treatments that don’t work. The patients who show up exhausted and half-convinced nobody will ever really help them.

That’s what led me to chronic pain management. And that’s where I’ve stayed.

Today I practice pain medicine at the QEII Hospital in Halifax and teach as an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University. My surgical background gives me a deep understanding of the body’s anatomy. But it’s the years in family medicine that taught me how to actually listen.

My approach to medicine and chronic pain

Chronic pain is not just a physical problem. It changes your relationships, your sense of who you are, your ability to do the things that make life worth living. I’ve seen this enough times to know that treating the pain without addressing the rest of it isn’t really treating anything.

My approach combines interventional procedures and medication management with the kind of honest, unhurried conversation most people have never had with a doctor about their pain. I work with TMJ pain, headaches, fibromyalgia, and other complex chronic conditions. But more than any diagnosis, I work with people who have been stuck for a long time and need someone to help them find a way forward.

Not a cure. A way forward. There’s a difference, and I think you already know that.

How I choose to live

I run (three half-marathons, one full marathon, still processing that last one), lift weights, grow things, and genuinely need 8 hours of sleep or I’m useless. Our family hikes, plays board games, and doesn’t own a TV. We’re bilingual, which is partly practical and partly because the research on bilingualism and brain health is genuinely compelling. I take courses every year and read constantly. I ask my patients to embrace change, so I figure I should too.

If you’ve spent years feeling like the medical system doesn’t quite understand what you’re going through, I built this site for you. Not to replace your care team, but to give you something most appointments don’t have time for: a real explanation of what’s happening, and what you can actually do about it.

If there’s a topic you want me to cover, use the form below. I read every message.