The house
Contact
来信
- Address
- hello@bencaohouse.com
- Read by
- A physician, not an assistant
- Usual reply
- Within one working day
- At the latest
- Three working days
- Hours
- China Standard Time, UTC+8
One address, read by one of four physicians. Write to hello@bencaohouse.com with a question, a doubt, or a complaint, and a person answers — usually within one working day, and always within three. There is no form on this page, no chat window, and nothing that answers you automatically.
Write to us
An address, and a person at the other end of it.
General enquiries
hello@bencaohouse.comRead every working morning in Hangzhou. If it needs a physician’s answer rather than a practical one, it goes to whichever desk fits and comes back signed.
- Usual reply
- Within one working day
- At the latest
- Three working days
- Language
- English or Chinese
- Time zone
- UTC+8 · China Standard Time
What to include
Four lines that make a good answer possible.
Tell us what you want to know, in your own words, in as few or as many lines as it takes. Then, if it applies, the date of your reading and the name signed at the bottom of it, so we can put the right file in front of the right person before anyone starts typing. If you are asking before buying, say roughly what you are hoping the report will help you think about — it costs you a sentence and it saves a round trip.
Do not send us your medical records, scans, test results or photographs of anything except your tongue, and please do not send those in an ordinary email at all. We cannot read a scan usefully, we do not want to hold one, and an email inbox is the wrong place for it. Everything a reading needs is asked for inside the intake, where the answers are encrypted from the moment you send them.
If your question is really an emergency — chest pain, trouble breathing, bleeding you cannot explain, a fever that will not settle, or thoughts of harming yourself — do not write to us. Call the emergency number where you live, or go and be seen today. We answer letters in the morning, in another time zone, and that is not fast enough to be of any use to you.
What a letter can get you
Answers, yes. A short reading for free, no.
Ask us anything about the service and you will get a straight answer: what the report contains, who would write yours, what their training is, what happens to your photograph, whether we think a reading is worth your money in your particular situation. If the honest answer is that it is not, we will say so, and we have said so often enough that it is worth putting in writing here.
What we will not do is give you a small opinion about your own health in a reply. Not because we are protecting the fee — we would happily answer for nothing if it worked — but because a useful reading needs the thirty answers and the photograph together. Two sentences about your tiredness in an email would produce two sentences of guesswork back, and guesswork with a physician’s name on it is worse than silence.
We also do not answer questions about a specific illness, a test result, or medication somebody has given you. Those belong to the person who can see you and who has your records in front of them. If your letter is really one of those questions wearing a different hat, we will say so plainly and send you back to them, which is not a brush-off but the only answer that helps.
Before you write, it is worth reading the questions page, which answers twenty-four of these at length, and what we will not do, which sets out the refusals and the reasoning behind each one.
If something is wrong
The complaint route, in writing.
Set out in the written disclosure you are shown before any money is taken, and repeated here so it is findable without going looking.
Complaints
care@bencaohouse.comRead by a physician who did not write your report. Tell us the date, the name signed at the bottom, and what is wrong with it — and if the reading does not fit you, say where it stops fitting.
- First reply
- Within three working days
- Decision
- Within ten working days
- Outcome
- A rewrite or a full refund — you choose
- Refund window
- Thirty days, no reason needed
You may also complain to the consumer protection authority of your own state or country. Nothing we ask you to agree to takes that away, and nothing in the disclosure asks you to give up a right you hold where you live.
If you would rather simply be forgotten, say so in one line. We delete your intake, your photograph and your report within seven days and write back to confirm it is done. The questions page sets out what is held and for how long, and the disclosure gives the same undertaking in its formal wording.
Where we are
Hangzhou, and two days a week in Shanghai.
The clinic has been in the same street in Hangzhou since 1987, and there is a second consulting room in Shanghai two days a week. We are not publishing the street address on this page, because the rooms are for the people who come to them in person and a queue of visitors from the internet would take the mornings away from them. If you are genuinely going to be in either city, write and ask.
Everything written for readers overseas is written from those two rooms, in the gaps between the people sitting in them. You can read how the house came to do this and who the four physicians are, including where each licence is held.
Contact
Or skip the letter and send us the thirty answers.
US $39, one physician, a written reading within 48 hours.