Gilian Neiditch Lata is a nationally licensed acupuncturist. After graduating summa cum laude with departmental honors from UCLA, she earned a master's degree in Oriental medicine from Emperor's College of Traditional Oriental Medicine. Prior to starting her practice, she interned at the UCLA Arthur Ashe Health Center in Westwood, California. During her master's program, she became pregnant and utilized the resources available through her knowledge of Oriental medicine to provide a healthy, enjoyable pregnancy and postpartum experience. Having gained firsthand knowledge of the benefits of herbal therapy and acupuncture for pregnancy, fertility, and women's issues, she chose to focus her practice in that direction. Gilian can be reached at gilian@restorativeacupuncture.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.
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.