Jennifer Stone is a clinician scientist educator and faculty member in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine; and serves as co-chair of the Indiana Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health. Her clinical training is in acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and she has 34 years of experience treating patients in the clinic. Jennifer also has 15 years of experience serving as editor in chief and senior editor of four international biomedical journals, and is currently the EIC of Medical Acupuncture, published by MaryAnn Liebert/SAGE.
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.