BLOOMINGTON, Minn. - Northwestern Health Sciences University, home to the Minnesota College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, recently held a fundraising drive for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The drive, held Sep. 6-9, ended up raising more than $9,000, which will be donated to the American Red Cross.
"I'm very impressed with the students, faculty, and staff of Northwestern," said Jeff King, Northwestern's recruiter and chair of the university's community services committee, which was responsible for collecting funds during the event.
Students, faculty and staff from Northwestern all participated in the fundraiser, which generated a total of $4,624.09 in donations. The funds were then matched by Foot Levelers, Inc., a Virginia-based orthotics supplier, bringing the total raised to $9,248.18.
According to a Northwestern press release, the $4,600 in funds is the most the university has ever raised for a single cause. Previously, faculty, staff and students contributed $987 plus more than 800 hours of paid time off to the family of Marlene Nassen, the university's custodial services manager, following her death in February 2005.
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.