Dr. Linda Hao is the co-founder and president of the International Academy of Scalp Acupuncture, and a professor at the Neuro-acupuncture Institute. She has been teaching neuro-acupuncture throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia for many years. She is the co-author of the book Chinese Scalp Acupuncture and has published research articles in journals in both the U.S. and China. She received her doctoral degree in acupuncture with concentration in neuro-acupuncture, from Heilongjiang University of TCM in Harbin, China. She trained with Dr. Shunfa Jiao, the founder of Scalp Acupuncture. In her practice, Dr. Hao treats patients of all ages and from many countries with positive, rapid results for a wide range of conditions.
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.