Chase G. Waters is an acupuncturist and herbalist practicing in Santa Cruz and Palo Alto, California. He has a master’s in TCM with a specialization in Classical Chinese Medicine and is currently pursuing his doctorate in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine at FBU. In addition to being an instructor of Acupuncture at FBU, he is an Integrative Medicine resident at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif. Chase’s clinical focus is internal medicine, neuropsychology, and autoimmune disorders.
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.