Ruth Tongen owns Synergy Health, LLC, a private practice in Edina, Minnesota. She received her master's degree in Oriental medicine from Northwestern Health Sciences University. She is licensed as an acupuncturist by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice. Ruth also has a bachelor's of science in nursing from the University of North Dakota and has held staff, executive and consulting roles in acute care, long-term care, research, and employee health. She is also credentialed in human resources and combines her backgrounds to serve people moving through major transitions and living with chronic 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.