Caroline La, a graduate of Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (now PCHS), has more than a decade of experience treating patients. She has worked alongside naturopathic doctors, integrative functional medical doctors and reproductive endocrinologists, and specializes in treating infertility, women's health, digestive disorders, and difficult-to-treat chronic illnesses with herbal medicine and acupuncture. Caroline is also the owner of Longevity CBD, offering products that combine CBD with other minor cannabinoids such as CBG, CBN and CBC with researched backed botanicals. For more information, visit www.longevitycbd.co.
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.