Kathleen Leavy holds a Masters Degree in Oriental Medicine and has been in practice for 18 years. She has taught Oriental Medicine for 17 years. She is a co-founder of Dragon Rises College of Oriental Medicine with her teacher Dr. Leon Hammer. She teaches at Dragon Rises and supervises in the Student Clinic. Kathleen has worked for the last three years with a computer software developer testing and creating "Acupuncture Practice Management System" to solve her GMP compliance requirements. You can contact her at Kathleen.leavy@gmail.com. Visit kathleenleavy.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.