Misha Ruth Cohen, OMD, LAc, has practiced Asian traditional medicine for 25 years. She is the director of Chicken Soup Chinese Medicine; Research and Education Chair for Quan Yin Healing Arts Center; and a research specialist at the UC San Francisco Institute for Health and Aging. Dr. Cohen has lectured throughout the world and is a respected expert in chronic diseases and Chinese medicine. She has spent the past 19 years researching and developing comprehensive programs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, HCV, cancer and related disorders. She is the co-author, along with Dr. Robert Gish, of the Hepatitis C Help Book, published by St. Martin's.
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.