Dr. Catherine Browne has more than 30 years of experience using natural therapies for treating pain and addiction. She holds a doctorate in acupuncture and Oriental medicine and is a board-certified acupuncturist and registered professional herbalist. She is the founder of In Harmony Wellness Clinic, where she specializes in serving U.S. veterans, and lives in Hamptonville, North Carolina. Her first book, "Natural Therapies for Overcoming Opioid Dependency: Control Pain and Recover from Addiction," released in November of 2018, can be purchased wherever books are sold, or from Amazon.
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.