Acupuncture

Christina De Avila eats, lives and breathes holistic health. Here’s your chance to get a glance at the inner-workings of a health guru’s life.  

For as long as I can remember, my menstrual cycle has been a source of pain, fatigue, and emotionality. While I consider this monthly process of the body to be a sacred one, the disruption that it causes due to the pain and fatigue that I experience during this time is at the point of needing to plan events and trips around my cycle, and sometimes needing to cancel events when it arrives. Needless to say, for the majority of my life, I have overall not ‘enjoyed’ my menstrual cycle, and it is something that I have come to dread and feel powerless to the effects of.

A few years back, I went through the hardest two years of my life. I was suffering from chronic stress and chronic insomnia, which in turn caused a number of other detrimental side effects including anxiety, depression, and adrenal fatigue—to name only a few.

I got to the point where I felt I had tried everything, and yet nothing was working.

The American Holistic Medical Association was founded in May, 1978, to bring together those few physicians who were open to looking at the whole person—body, mind, emotions and spirit. To some extent, this reflected the foundation emphasized by my medical school Chair of Medicine, Eugene A. Stead, Jr., whose favorite statement was “What this patient needs is a real doctor.” He never defined the meaning but demonstrated it in his teaching.  Listen to the patient!