Dr. Yen Nien (Jason) Hou is a pharmacist, TCM herbalist, and coordinator of the herb information center at the Integrative Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He holds a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from The State University of New York (SUNY), School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; and completed a Postgraduate Year 1 community pharmacy residency, both in Buffalo, N.Y. He received a Master of Science degree from the New York College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
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.