Anne C. Crowley has been practicing acupuncture in Southern Maryland for nine years. She was a Professor of Economics and Management at the College of Southern Maryland for nine years. Prior to teaching, she was an operations and financial analyst and manager in the business world for 10 years. She holds an MBA from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Masters of Acupuncture from TAI-SOPHIA. She offers workshops and consulting on successful practice management and achieving life goals. She can be reached at www.LaPlataAcupuncture.com; anne@laplataacupuncture.com , and on Facebook: LaPlata Acupuncture and Healing Arts Fan Page; Serenity Solutions: Holistic Life Coaching Fan Page.
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.