Rosemary McCarthy, RN, BS is the Associate Director of the Health and Wellness Center at Farmingdale State College. Ms. McCarthy has been employed at Farmingdale since 2001, initially in the role of per diem nurse. In 2003 she was appointed to a regular Nurse I position and in 2011, due to increasing responsibilities, was upgraded to Nurse 2. As responsibilities continued to increase, Ms. McCarthy was promoted to Assistant Director in 2012, and then upgraded to Associate Director in 2015.
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.