Lili Tom is a dual-licensed family nurse practitioner (Kaiser Permanente, Berkeley, Calif.) and acupuncturist, grounded in both allopathic and traditional Chinese medicine. Special populations include LGBTQ, survivors of trauma, and marginalized communities. Areas of interest range from medicine in austere conditions to somatic therapy, intersectionality and self-care. She received her Master or Science in Oriental Medicine (2005) and Doctorate of Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine (2023) from Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College.
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.