James Whittle, MS, LAc, is an acupuncturist and an expert in traditional Chinese medicine. James has been to China eight times and spent nearly eight months working in Chinese hospitals with some of the most respected doctors in China. He is a graduate of the internship program at The Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
He completed a four-year clinical master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture at Bastyr University in Seattle and did his undergraduate work at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
James now teaches and speaks on many issues related to contemporary medicine, acupuncture and complementary modalities of healing. Most recently, he was invited to teach cancer nurses at the annual Oncology Nursing Society in Seattle about integrating Chinese medicine with cancer care in U.S. hospitals. He specializes in pain conditions, women's health including infertility and cancer.
He may be contacted at james@blueridgeclinic.com or at www.blueridgeclinic.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.