Dr. Viviane Renard has been in the health care field for over 25 years professionally. As a young child in 4th grade, she had to collect wild herbs and study their medical properties for a school assignment. Her interest and passion for herbs was sparked and she has been studying herbs and nutrition ever since.
Viviane started out as a midwife and health care teacher in the jungles in Belize in 1986 and then worked with Doctors Without Borders in Africa in 1987 in refugee camps. In 1988 started the pre requisites in nursing and in 1992 she graduated from New Mexico State University with an Associates degree in Nursing and worked in several different branches of nursing in Southwestern New Mexico and Albuquerque. In 1997 she worked as a nurse with a nun in her health project for the poor in the barrios, outside Quito Ecuador to complete her community health course for her Bachelors degree. In 1997 she graduated from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing.
While working as a nurse, Viviane began schooling and training in Oriental medicine in 2001 and graduated in 2005 from the Southwest College of Acupuncture (SWAC) in Albuquerque . National Board Certified 2005
State Board Certified 2006
She has always practiced a healthy lifestyle of good nutrition and exercise and have found "if you try to put diesel in a gasoline car you will have problems."
Lifestyle is the key to good health!
Her passion for life and her work includes but not limited the outdoors, hiking, bicycling, camping, travel, looking for and collecting rocks, photography, gardening (flowers, herbs, plants), landscaping, culinary and healing arts, music, quietness and studying-gathering new information, and languages.
In 2002, went for a week on a 103 year old boat through the Amazon and brought school and medical supplies to the different indigenous villages and a Leprosy hospital that was run by a Canadian sister. This trip enriched Dr. Renard’s life so much, she said “it was the trip of her life”.
Since 2008 Dr. Renard has been a member of Acupuncturist Without Borders, She attended training for Trauma and PTSD relief, to help people who have been traumatized by a natural event or Servicemen returning from combat find some relief from their symptoms. http://www.acuwithoutborders.org/
Dr. Renard's world travels and her curiosity of other culture's cuisines and medicines along with her medical background compliment her practice of Oriental Medicine.