The boundary
有所不为
We write one document and we sell nothing else. No needles. No herbs sent across a border. Nothing a pharmacy would fill. No naming of an illness and no ruling one out. And never a substitute for a clinician licensed where you live. This page sets out each of those limits and the reasoning behind it.
Five limits
This is the page we would want to read first if we were the ones buying. It exists because a family that has run a clinic since 1987 knows what a consulting room does, and knows precisely how much of that a document cannot carry. None of what follows is reluctant. Each limit is the reason the thing we do sell can be honest.
Educational and general wellness information from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine. That sentence is not a shield bolted on afterwards; it is a description of the product, and everything below explains what it rules out.
A person must decline to do certain things; only then can they do anything worth doing.
Needling is done in a room, by a person who can see your skin and your reaction, under a licence issued where you are standing. It is the one part of this tradition that is unambiguously a physical act on another human being. Nothing we send you involves one, and nothing we write should be read as instructions for one. The two points in a report are pressed with your own thumb.
Not as a package, not as a formula for you to order elsewhere, not as a list with quantities. The whole of what a report suggests you swallow is food, sold as food, in an ordinary shop near you. Our reasons for drawing this line where we do are further down the page, and they are not only legal ones.
No amounts, no schedules, no substance names attached to a quantity. If you already take something from your own doctor, we will not tell you to stop it, start it, or change how much of it you take. That conversation belongs to whoever wrote it and to you, and we say so in the report itself.
A Chinese-medicine pattern is a description of how a whole person is currently running. It is not the same kind of statement as a name from a Western clinic, and the two do not translate into each other. So a report will never tell you what you have, and — more importantly — it can never tell you what you do not have. A calm report is not a clean bill of health, and we would rather say that plainly than let it be inferred.
Everything we send is educational and general wellness information written from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine. If you are unwell, the person who can examine you is worth more than any document written four thousand miles away, and we will keep saying so on every page where it is relevant.
Licensure
A licence is not a certificate of skill. It is a geographic permission: a named authority in a named place agrees to hold a named person to a standard, and to take that permission away. The physicians of this house hold Chinese licences in Chinese medicine, issued by the provincial health authority, renewed on a schedule, and carrying a number that is printed on every report we send. Those licences mean a great deal in Hangzhou. They mean nothing at all in Ohio, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What most jurisdictions in the United States regulate is a short list of acts, not a body of knowledge. Acupuncture licensing turns on piercing the skin with a needle. The unlicensed practice of medicine turns on naming an illness in a particular person, and on directing what they should take for it. Notice that all three of those are things we have already declined to do, and that we declined them by designing the product that way rather than by adding a paragraph at the bottom.
Several states have written down, in statute, where the line sits for people who work outside a licence. California added Health and Safety Code section 2053.5 in 2002, requiring unlicensed practitioners to hand over a plain written disclosure of their training and the nature of their services, and forbidding them from naming an illness or telling anyone to stop what a licensed clinician has told them to do. Minnesota did something similar in chapter 146A, and Rhode Island followed with its own version. We are not in any of those states, and we hold ourselves to their standard anyway, because it is a good standard and because it is written in plain language rather than in the language of marketing.
Our own disclosure is on the disclosure page, in full, in one screen, with a version number and a date. It says the same things this page says. If the two ever disagree, the disclosure is the one that governs.
Herbs
This is the refusal we are asked about most, usually by people who assume it is a customs problem. Customs is the least of it.
Identity. One English name, and often one Chinese name, can cover several different plants. In Brussels between 1990 and 1992, a weight-loss regimen at a single clinic included a Chinese herb whose supply had been substituted: 防己 (fáng jǐ, Stephania tetrandra) was replaced by 广防己 (guǎng fáng jǐ, Aristolochia fangchi), which contains aristolochic acid. More than a hundred women went on to develop kidney failure. The report in The Lancet in 1993 is the reason aristolochic acid is now banned in most of the world, and it is the reason nobody in this family will send a plant across a border to a person they have never met. The mistake was not in the tradition. It was in the supply chain, and a supply chain is exactly what a parcel is.
Interaction. We cannot see your bathroom cabinet. Chinese herbs interact with what is already in it — blood thinners and sedatives most of all — and the person who needs to weigh that up is the one who wrote what is in there.
Adjustment. A Chinese formula is not a fixed product. It is revised every week or two by a physician who is looking at the person, changing what is in it and how much, subtracting as often as adding. Post one to a stranger and you have frozen the one thing that was meant to move.
So a report suggests food, sold as food, in a shop near you. That is a smaller promise, and it is one we can keep at four thousand miles.
The photograph
This is why a report says what it saw before it says what it thinks, and why the two are set in different parts. If you disagree with the description, the conclusion built on it is worth less, and you should tell us.
The referral list
This list is printed on the first page of every report, and we read every intake against it before we read it for anything else. When we find something on it we stop, write back within about two hours, and refund in full.
Refunding a sale in order to send somebody to a clinic they have been putting off is not a cost of doing this well. It is the clearest evidence that we know what we are for. Roughly one intake in twenty comes back this way, and we would rather that number rose than fell.
What remains
Quite a lot, as it turns out. A pattern named in Chinese and in English, and explained in ordinary language. A description of what your own answers look like when they are set beside one another. A shape for a day: when to eat, what temperature, when to walk, when to sleep. Three foods to add and two to ease off, all of them sold as food. Two points you can reach with your own thumb. Where you are in the year, and what to change when the season turns. And, in writing, the parts we are least sure about and what would settle them.
That is a real thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here will imply there is a further stage, a follow-up product, or a package waiting behind it. There is one document, it costs thirty-nine dollars once, and this page is the list of what it is not.
Questions
No, and we would rather say it in the first line than the last. They hold Chinese licences to practise Traditional Chinese Medicine, issued by the provincial health authority and renewed on a schedule. Those licences are real, and they are real in China. They confer nothing where you live, which is exactly why what we sell is a written document and not care.
Three reasons, and only one of them is paperwork. Identity: the same English name covers different plants, and substitutions have caused serious harm. Interaction: we cannot see what is already in your bathroom cabinet. Adjustment: a Chinese formula is meant to be revised every week or two by someone watching the person in front of them, which nobody can do by email.
It shows what it shows: the colour of the body, the thickness, colour and wetness of the coating, the shape, the edges, cracks, and the tip. That is genuinely useful and it is genuinely limited. It is one frame, on one morning, through one camera. It cannot see anything structural, it cannot stand in for an examination, and a calm-looking tongue is not a clean bill of health.
We stop, we write to you within about two hours, and we refund the full thirty-nine dollars. There is nothing to appeal and nothing to negotiate. You are welcome to come back after you have seen someone in person, and a good number of people do.
Still here
Thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a written report in English within forty-eight hours. You can read a complete sample first.