Kenjiro Shiraishi is a licensed acupuncturist and moxibustion practitioner, and the director of Tanashi Kitaguchi Acupuncture and Moxa Clinic in Tokyo, Japan. As an independent researcher, his work focuses on patient safety in acupuncture practice, clinical decision-making, medical referral and care coordination, and the responsible use of artificial intelligence in clinical communication and research. His recent peer-reviewed case report in Patient Safety described an escalation pathway for identifying and responding to possible hypertension in a solo acupuncture clinic. Contact: kenjiroushiraishi@hotmail.co.jp.
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.
For those of you unfamiliar with alpha-gal syndrome, it’s been in the news recently for causing Americans to be allergic to meat. It is an acquired allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in mammalian meat and many mammal-derived products. A new case series on auricular acupuncture is so intriguing points toward a viable treatment strategy rather than lifelong dietary restriction alone.
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.