Ellen Goldsmith, a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist, is the author of Nutritional Healing With Chinese Medicine: + 175 Recipes for Optimal Health. Ellen was co-founder of Pearl Natural Health, a naturopathic, acupuncture and Chinese medicine clinic in Portland, Ore. She is on the faculty of the National University of Natural Medicine's College of Classical Chinese Medicine and the Nutrition Program; and the faculty of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, teaching Chinese dietetics. She maintains a private practice in Chinese medicine, lectures widely and lives in Portland.
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.