"Looking for certification after only a 300-hour course is not fair to those who studied 3000 hours and sat for the exam. If acupuncturists said they wanted to take 300 hours of chiropractic courses to be certified, I don't think the chiropractors would like it. Chiropractors know anatomy very well, and (they know) how to palpate, but it's another thing to learn how to needle, to do tongue and pulse diagnosis."
- Robert Borzone, DC, LAc, Long Island, New York
"To think that a chiropractor could do 300 hours and treat back pain in the spirit of acupuncture is not acceptable. It's not a question of having a pain in your back so you put a needle where it hurts. That would only diminish acupuncture and send the wrong message to consumers about what acupuncture is."
- Kathleen Golden, president, Acupuncture Society of New York
Reference
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.