Dr. Clayton Shiu earned a Bachelor of Science in Human Physiology from Boston University and a Master of Science in Traditional Oriental Medicine from Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. He received his PhD in Acupuncture and Moxibustion from the Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and completed his residency at the First Teaching Hospital of Tianjin, a highly regarded teaching facility and the largest stroke rehabilitation acupuncture and moxibustion center in China. He founded The Shiu Clinic in 2019 in New York City, where he currently practices TCM and nanopuncture. He holds faculty positions at the Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences and the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, teaching stroke rehabilitation courses for their doctoral programs.
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.