In modern society, we’ve come to view health as the absence of illness. And when illness inevitably comes knocking at our doors (or breaking through), that’s when we turn to medicine. Western biomedicine provides fast-acting, sometimes life-saving interventions in cases requiring emergency repair, but oftentimes exacts a toll. With limited solutions to address any condition between peak health and dire illness, we’re a society that has become overly-medicated, rife with increasingly chronic, iatrogenic (drug-induced diseases), and/or idiopathic (disease arising from unknown causes) ailments, begging the question: Has the quantity of life come at the cost of the quality of life?

Brought into the modern age, Chinese medicine integrates with Western biomedicine to synergize, ameliorate, or mitigate the effects of pharmaceuticals, surgeries, and other biomedical methods. However, Chinese medicine is more than “alternative” or “supplemental” — If we understand health as a continuum/spectrum and not just the absence of illness, Chinese medicine fleshes out this gap that Western medicine has left in the medical system. Originally, acupuncture, herbology, and adjunctive therapies (cupping, gua sha, moxibustion, Tai Ji, and Qi Gong) were used to prevent illness by attuning people to the changing seasons and aligning humans with the cyclical shifts of the universe. Organized by a holistic view of the human body, our paradigm recognizes not only the manifestations of disease but also stages of disease progression. We can provide early intervention before the illness becomes full-blown, much more challenging to reverse, or causes irreversible damage.