Alfie Vente is a Registered Massage Therapist in Ontario, who graduated from Sutherland-Chan School and Teaching Clinic. He has been in practice for 11 years and has currently two practice locations. He also taught for 5 years at the Canadian College of Massage and Hydrotherapy as a Massage therapy instructor. He is a therapist at Physiomed's , Flagship clinic and also works at Spine and Sport in Downtown Toronto. He currently is studying in the 1900 hour Acupuncture program at the Shiatsu School of Canada, SSC Acupuncture Institute. With his background he has a unique perspective on industry, education and clinical issues and thus enjoys writing about these particular subjects. You can find more information about himself on his blog at http://alfievrmt.blogspot.com/. You could also email him at alfie.ventermt@gmail.com.
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.