Niloo Nikpour immigrated to the United States from Iran with her husband and daughter in 1986. She worked as a gas station attendant to finance her master’s degree in economics, eventually becoming a corporate economist for nearly 20 years. Then, after picking up a book of Tao from a bookstore and experiencing a moment of clarity, she resigned from her corporate job. She began practicing yoga and meditation, spent the next 10 years learning from Lao Tsu, Chuang Tsu, Rumi and Carl Jung as her primordial teachers, and began studying TCM and herbal medicine at Emperor’s College. Together with her daughter, Catherine, they envision opening an acupuncture and wellness center for holistic healing, where people can receive love, hope, courage, and the power to heal their body, mind, and spirit.
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.