Acupuncture and Oriental medicine practitioners and students, as well as providers representing various other health care disciplines, flocked to San Diego's Catamaran Resort Hotel to attend the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM) Annual Symposium in November. The symposium, the 20th such event organized by the college, featured a wide array of distinguished speakers covering topics such as how to create healing environments; understanding the heart/kidney axis; clinical strategies for resolving blood stagnation; treating zang-fu syndrome; tuina for diabetes; preventing HPV-related cancers with Chinese medicine; and integrating TCM with conventional Western medicine.
Attendees had the opportunity to earn up to 57 continuing education units approved by the NCCAOM, the California Acupuncture Board and the state of Florida. In addition to the full schedule of courses conducted during the symposium, Dr. Giovanni Maciocia and Yoshito Mukaino each held two-day post-symposium workshops.
The symposium also featured a multi-level exhibit hall that provided attendees access to the latest AOM supplies, practice-management tools and techniques from more than 70 vendors, including:
Look for a complete symposium wrap-up and details regarding the 2009 symposium on the PCOM Web site (www.pacificcollege.edu) as they become available.
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.