Dr. Tara Kulikov is a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and exercise physiologist who lives and works in Truckee, Calif., where she offers medical and performance services through Acu-Energy and Kensho Well-Being. She incorporates the healing modalities of traditional medicine into her practice for a number of conditions. Dr. Kulikov loves to keep herself fit (and know her VO2 max number and heart rate zones) in order to live a long, healthy, and adventurous life; and her desire is for her patients to do the same.
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.