Sarah Moley is a licensed acupuncturist with a Master of Science in Acupuncture from Southwest Acupuncture College; a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology SMBI (Spirituality Mind Body Institute) from Columbia University, Teacher’s College; and a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College. Sarah is also certified in Constitutional Facial Acupuncture: The Wakefield Method, FES flower essence therapy, shamanic soul-retrieval, and 200-hour YTT. In her practice, she emphasizes the intersection of the mind-body connection and TCM principles of diagnosis and treatment.
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.