Z'ev Rosenberg has lectured widely both to the public and to students of both Chinese medicine and macrobiotics over the last thirty years. He is the former president of the Acupuncture Association of Colorado (AAC), where he spearheaded a successful drive to register acupuncture practitioners in that state. He also has written several articles for professional Chinese medical journals, including Oriental Medicine, Protocol Journal of Botanical Medicine, Journal of Oriental Medicine in America, Journal of Chinese Medicine, and most recently The Lantern Journal. He presently continues to teach and chair the Herbal Medicine department at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, San Diego, and has had a private practice in Chinese medicine since 1983.
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.
For those of you unfamiliar with alpha-gal syndrome, it’s been in the news recently for causing Americans to be allergic to meat. It is an acquired allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in mammalian meat and many mammal-derived products. A new case series on auricular acupuncture is so intriguing points toward a viable treatment strategy rather than lifelong dietary restriction alone.
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.