John Weeks has worked in various writing, organizing and executive capacities in integrative health for more than 30 years. His Integrator Blog News & Reports (www.theintegratorblog.com) is widely regarded as the top leadership-oriented resource on the policy and business of integrative health. A prolific organizer, Weeks convened the Integrative Medicine Industry Leadership Summits (2000-2002); directed the National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Care (2004-2006); fund-raised the start-up and was on the founding steering committee of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium (2002-; co-founded the Academic Collaborative for Integrative Health (and directed from 2007-2015; and was on the founding board of the Academy of Integrative Medicine and Health.
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.