Celeste Homan is an associate professor in the Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine program at the Maryland University of Integrative Health (MUIH) where she received her master's degree when it was The Tai Sophia Institute. She has published several articles based on these studies and her clinical work. Celeste also holds a certificate in advanced massage and bodywork from the Baltimore School of Massage and a Master of Science in Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a candidate for her first professional doctorate in acupuncture from MUIH.
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.