Diana Fried is a dedicated practitioner of emotional and trauma healing. In 2005, she founded Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB) to provide community acupuncture healing in disaster-stricken and underserved areas. Her work has taken her to locations such as the U.S., Haiti, Nepal, Mongolia, Ecuador, Israel and Palestine, and Mexico. At AWB she started the World Healing Exchange, the Community Clinic Service Program, and the Disaster Relief Program, along with training in Healing Community Trauma, through which thousands of people around the world have been trained to volunteer locally and globally to help those in need.
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.