Dr. LiMing Tseng is the chair of American Society of Acupuncturists (ASA) Conference Committee. She is a licensed acupuncturist and national leader in the acupuncture profession with 25 years of experience. She has served in various leadership roles, including past founding secretary of the ASA, ASA Conference Committee chair, and co-chair of the ASA & NCCAOM Cultural Competency Task Force. LiMing is an adjunct professor at the New England School of Acupuncture at MCPHS. She is dedicated to advancing inclusive diversity, equity, and access within health care. She has presented talks at numerous conferences and webinars. When not volunteering or teaching, LiMing provides acupuncture medicine care for her patients in the small resort town of Stowe, Vt.
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.