Christopher Oswald, DC, CNS, is a chiropractor, certified nutrition specialist and a graduate of Northwestern Health Sciences University. He practices in Wisconsin focusing on whole body care for those suffering from head and neck pain. In practice, he utilizes the combination of functional movement assessment and functional medicine principles to identify the underlying causes, which guides his direction for the appropriate clinical care. He is an advisory board member of Nordic Naturals and the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. He can be reached at cso@hudsonheadache.com.
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.
For those of you unfamiliar with alpha-gal syndrome, it’s been in the news recently for causing Americans to be allergic to meat. It is an acquired allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in mammalian meat and many mammal-derived products. A new case series on auricular acupuncture is so intriguing points toward a viable treatment strategy rather than lifelong dietary restriction alone.
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.