The Small Business Association’s Vermont district office recently announced the Vermont Small Business Person of the Year for 2024: Dr. Kerry Boyle, a doctor of acupuncture and the owner of Integrative Acupuncture in Montpelier, Vt. She is also the founder of Chi Chi Wellness, “a chocolate company that infuses Chinese herbal medicine into organic chocolate bars.”
“We congratulate Dr. Kerry Boyle on her award,” said Darcy Carter, district director of the Vermont SBA office, in a release announcing the 2024 recipient. “Dr. Kerry sees an opportunity in every day to make her vision a reality and to make a difference in the world. Through her several businesses, she seeks to improve the health and happiness of Vermonters. She truly enjoys the challenge of building a new business and is an inspiration to others seeking entrepreneurship.”
Dr. Boyle graduated from Bastyr University with a master’s in acupuncture in 2003 and later completed a doctorate in acupuncture from Pacific College of Health and Science.
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.