About this website:
Holistic Health & hEDS (HH & hEDS) is an ongoing project that centers the hypermobile experience.
There is no one model in terms of lived experience. Each and every one of us is unique. Best practices, standards of care, and evidence-based allopathic approaches enjoy a certain degree of consensus. But there is no one way to create health and wellbeing.
Holistic philosophy and practices mean different things to different people. We can all agree that mindful, knowledgeable, and cumulative steps bring us ever closer to our own individual versions of what it means to be healthy and well.
All of this into consideration, then…
HH & hEDS aims to provide information, inspiration, and support for anyone who is hypermobile, wherever they find themselves on the spectrum. Are you undiagnosed but seeking information? Have you been told that you fit in the box labeled hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD)? Or are you living with diagnosed hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome? If none of the above applies to you, then…are you a healthcare provider who wants to expand your horizons for the benefit of your patients?
HH & hEDS is for all of us.
A message from Dr. Bruno:
I am a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in the state of Texas and, as a hypermobile person myself, I didn’t know that my flexible party tricks and joint-related odd injuries were unusual until I started treating patients in student clinic. I attracted people with chronic pain and exceedingly disjointed frameworks and, as someone who loves to study, I knew that I wanted to learn more. Before I knew it, a decade had passed, I had built a practice that supports hypermobility and EDS, and, over the course of two long years, I wrote my first book, Chinese Medicine and the Management of hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome: A Practitioner’s Guide. With this website, I hope to provide a valuable resource for hypermobile people and their healthcare partners.
Before finding a vocation in Chinese medicine I was a Spanish professor. My scholarly focus was national trauma (civil war, dictatorship, genocide, and torture) and how profound collective suffering filters through literature and art. In my dissertation, I investigated the use of fantasy, fantastic, and magical realism in Spanish, Italian, Latin American, and US Latinx short fiction to address these themes. My subsequent record of peer-reviewed publications in Spanish and comparative literature reflects my love of these traditions. To this day, I remain quite partial to fairy tales, myth, fantasy, and the fantastic. I certainly make great use of my academic background and its affinity to the approaches of a medical historian.
I still believe wholeheartedly in the power of story to effect change and to create healing both on the cultural and on the individual levels.
My undergraduate work was a double major: Comparative Literature (Spanish/Italian) and Italian. I always say that I ended up completing a comp lit education the long way because, though the BA is my only official degree in that discipline, I ended up with two humanities MA degrees (Italian and Spanish, respectively), a PhD with two minors (Art History and Italian), a third MA (MAcOM, or Master of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine), plus a number of certifications along the way. These include credentials as a certified personal trainer, a hatha yoga instructor, a health coach, and a Reiki master. In the field of Chinese medicine, I am also an AOBTA-CP, which is a fancy way of saying that I am credentialed to provide tui na, or Chinese-style bodywork therapy, to patients.
At heart, I remain a comparatist. In the humanities, my home base was Spain and southern Italy. In holistic health, it’s Chinese medicine. But by understanding a range of cultures and languages and practices, and by comparing, I build knowledge and expand awareness. With a complicated disorder like hEDS, it is a matter of becoming and remaining as multilingual and multicultural as can be. Doing so helps me to help you, if you are an especially complicated case, to navigate and critically think about strategy and approach. This background informed my book. My breadth and depth of experience provides the foundation for this website.
By providing thoughtful and thought-provoking content I hope to engage with existing paradigms for hypermobile health and, if I’m successful, to create some change, too.
My clinic remains the same. Two Hearts Wellness was my brainchild during my program in Chinese medicine and my work with holistic health across a spectrum continues there. But HH & hEDS is specifically and only for hypermobile and Ehlers Danlos wellbeing.
HH & hEDS is for you, whether you are a patient or a practitioner. Every individual is unique and the more tools we have, the better we do.
This is an ongoing project, so stay tuned…
Yours truly,
Dr. Bruno
For appointments, either in-person or virtual, please book via Two Hearts Wellness online, here:
Holistic Health and hEDS 