Abril Reck is a Family Nurse Practitioner, licensed nationally by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and is a California licensed acupuncturist. She graduated with honors with a BS in Psychology, BS in Nursing and MS of Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds a master's degree from Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing as well as a MS of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine from South Baylo University. She has completed the requirements for Doctorate of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. Abril currently see patients in her private practice with a focus on stress and burnout, functional medicine, and women's health while also continuing to practice as a nurse practitioner in urgent care medicine. She enjoys traveling, spending time with her rescue English bulldog and raising medicinal herbs in her garden.
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.
For those of you unfamiliar with alpha-gal syndrome, it’s been in the news recently for causing Americans to be allergic to meat. It is an acquired allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in mammalian meat and many mammal-derived products. A new case series on auricular acupuncture is so intriguing points toward a viable treatment strategy rather than lifelong dietary restriction alone.
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.