Dr. McCormick Templeman is an author and college professor with a background in traditional Chinese medicine. She holds an MSOM from AIMC Berkeley and a DACM from Pacific College of Health and Science. Her books have been published by multiple Penguin Random House imprints, and her short writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and CJOM (now JAIM). A graduate of Reed College, she has a PhD in English and literary studies from the University of Denver, and teaches at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va.
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.