Soma Glick has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese herbology for more than 20 years. She has been a professor at SWAC in Boulder since 1998 and started teaching weekend workshops on Treating Children with Oriental Medicine in 2003. She offered this course both in the U.S. and abroad, and also developed an intensive course training practitioners in pediatric and women's health and offering a free clinic to poor and disadvantaged women and children, while she lived on the island of Bali from 2005 to 2013. She has now relocated to Boulder, Colo., where she continues training students and practitioners and keeps a busy private practice. Visit http://somadevi.com/.
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.
Research supports the effectiveness of selecting the distal acupuncture points for the treatment of microtrauma and for relieving pain, particularly in cases of chronic shoulder pain. But to make the treatment results long-lasting, clinical experience and research suggest that instead of treating the most painful structure first, we identify the inhibited driver, restore reliable recruitment, confirm it with immediate re-testing, and only then address the painful area as a branch of a deeper pattern.
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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.