Dr. Arthur Yin Fan graduated from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in China (MD, 1986; PhD,1998). His mentor was Professor Zhou Zhongying, a leading Great Master in Chinese medicine. He also has an academic lineage with Dr. Zhang Jianzhai, a leading Chinese medicine doctor in the stage 1920-1949. He was the director of neurology at NUCM, the third hospital, and a founder of the Nanjing Center for Brain Diseases.
Dr. Fan immigrated to the U.S. in 2001 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, engaged in pharmacology and toxicology research of Chinese medicine and dietary supplements. From 2002 to 2005, he worked at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine as an NIH Fellow in Chinese Medicine, engaged in research of acupuncture mechanism in inflammation and pain modulation, Chinese medicine single-herb and compound-formula, Huoluo Xiaoling Dan’s pharmacology, toxicology comparative study.
Currently, Dr. Fan practices acupuncture and Chinese medicine in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He is the director of the McLean Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine; the vice president and director of scientific research for the American TCM Association (ATCMA); associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of Integrative Medicine; and a consultant for acupuncture research at Stanford University. He received two congressional awards (2015 and 2017) as one of the leading promoters of acupuncture / TCM, including Medicare coverage.
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.