Dr. Edward Chiu has been teaching acupuncture case report writing for over 10 years at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. After earning his Master in Acupuncture from the New England School of Acupuncture and his DAOM from OCOM, he spent time pursuing traditional acupuncture apprenticeships in Taiwan and has also been involved in acupuncture research studies in the U.S. at both Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Arizona. He recently authored a textbook titled Writing Acupuncture Case Reports: Theory and Practice, on the importance of writing case reports and with instructions on how to write one for publication.
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.