Amanda Azadian is a writer and yoga teacher living in Brooklyn, N.Y., and studying acupuncture at Pacific College of Health and Science. She earned a BS in applied health science with a minor in international relations at Wheaton College of Illinois and runs a consulting company focused on integrating the best of both Eastern and Western medicine. She mentors health care startups and has managed digital health strategy products at the American Medical Association; health care service delivery programs at Walgreens Boots Alliance,;health care solution accelerator cohorts at MATTER Health; and managed care contracts at a Federally Qualified Health Center in southside Chicago.
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.