Dr. Leon I. Hammer began a study of Chinese medicine in England from 1971-1974 with Dr. J.D. Van Buren. In 1974, he began following a Chinese master, Dr. John H. F. Shen, in New York City weekly for eight years, emphasizing what is now referred to as Shen-Hammer Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis. In 1981, he spent four months studying TCM in Beijing, China. In 2001, he helped found Dragon Rises College of Oriental Medicine (DRCOM) and recently also the COM Foundation, which owns DRCOM and promotes his contribution to the medicine called COM (Contemporary Oriental Medicine). He is also an author of eight books and over 40 articles on the subject of Chinese medicine. Learn more about his work and background at http://comfoundation.org/leonhammermd.html.
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.