Carla Cassler, DAOM, LAc, is associate director AWB. She has practiced acupuncture and Chinese medicine for over 30 years, specializing in women’s health, pediatric, orthopedic and treatment for traumatic stress. Her interest in trauma treatment began in l992 when she practiced acupuncture on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, where many of her patients suffered from physical and mental health problems experienced during multiple wars and the Holocaust. In 2010 she co-founded the Bay Area Veteran’s Acupuncture Clinic (BAYVAC) which provides free weekly acupuncture treatment to veterans, military personnel and their families for pain and post-traumatic stress. She splits her time between a clinical private practice in Kensington, CA and her work with AWB where she coordinates trauma healing programs in Greece, Israel and the West Bank.
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.