Dr. Dongcheng Li, a Florida-licensed acupuncture physician, is a fifth-generation TCM practitioner who trained and studied in China from an early age, earning a medical degree in TCM and master’s degree in Chinese medicine. He came to the U.S. in 2007 and earned another master’s degree (exercise physiology at the University of Texas at Arlington, follwed by a doctoral degree in education at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Li has published nearly 10 books, and teaches acupuncture board licensing exam preparation classes in the U.S. and China.
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.