Practitioner disclosure

Most sites keep a document like this in the footer. We put it in front of the payment, because the law that protects a practice like ours protects it only when the disclosure comes first.

California Health and Safety Code §2053.5, enacted as Senate Bill 577 in 2002, allows someone who is not licensed in California to offer complementary care, so long as they do not perform the acts the Medical Practice Act reserves and so long as the client is handed a written disclosure before anything begins. Minnesota Chapter 146A, in force since 2001, does the same and adds a Client Bill of Rights. Rhode Island, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona and a dozen other states have their own versions of the same idea.

The statutes differ in their details. What they all ask for is the same five things: who you are, what you are qualified to do, what the service is and what theory it rests on, what it costs, and where to complain. This page is those five things, written out once, in the order they ask for them.

We are not claiming that any particular one of those statutes governs this site. We do not know where you live. We took the union of what they ask for and wrote it down, because a disclosure worth making in Sacramento is worth making to everyone.

Bencao House is a team of physicians licensed to practice Traditional Chinese Medicine in the People’s Republic of China. Each report is written by a named member of that team, and the name, licensing authority and years of practice of that person appear on your report.

We are not licensed by any state of the United States, and we are not medical doctors in the United States.

Every report is written by one named physician. Their name, their licensing authority and their years in practice appear at the top of the report you receive, not in a footnote.

Each of them holds the Physician Qualification Certificate 执业医师资格证书 issued under the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Medical Practitioners, in the Traditional Chinese Medicine category. That certificate follows a five-year first degree at a Chinese university of Chinese medicine, a year of supervised rotation in a teaching hospital, and a national written and practical examination. Registration is renewed on a two-year cycle and is checkable against the National Health Commission’s public register.

The house has been a working clinic since 1987. The two senior physicians have each practised for more than thirty years; the youngest member of the team has practised for nine. Between them they have read something over sixty thousand intakes in person, in Chinese, long before any of this was written in English.

None of that is a licence to practise anywhere outside China, and we do not offer it as one. It is the education, training and experience the disclosure statutes ask us to state, stated plainly.

You are buying an educational written report that describes your intake answers from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine, together with general wellness suggestions: everyday food choices drawn from the Chinese “food and medicine share the same origin” (药食同源) tradition, acupressure points you can press yourself, and suggestions about sleep, warmth and daily rhythm.

It is educational and general wellness information. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a licensed healthcare provider in your country.

We do not identify, name or rule out any disease.

We do not provide, recommend, ship or sell any herbal formula, and we do not tell you to start, stop or change any medication.

We do not perform acupuncture, dry needling or any procedure involving the skin.

We never tell you to delay or avoid seeing a licensed healthcare provider.

Traditional Chinese Medicine reads the body as a set of patterns — relative warmth and cold, dryness and damp, movement and stagnation — observed through questions, the tongue, and daily habits. It is a two-thousand-year-old observational tradition, not a biomedical model, and its categories do not map onto Western disease names.

People find it useful mainly as a second vocabulary for describing how they feel, especially when their existing tests have come back normal.

Chinese medicine is a two-thousand-year-old observational tradition with an unusually large written record. It is not a biomedical science, and its categories have not been evaluated by any regulator in the United States, the United Kingdom or the European Union.

That is worth saying twice. No United States authority has reviewed the framework we use, endorsed anything we write, or certified that a pattern such as damp accumulation 湿阻 corresponds to anything measurable. The categories are descriptive. They come from a long habit of watching how people feel and how they change, written down and argued over since the Huangdi Neijing 黄帝内经, c. 200 BCE, set them out across its two parts of eighty-one chapters each.

We think it is worth having, for a narrow and honest reason: it gives you a second vocabulary for describing your own body. Vocabulary is very often the thing that is missing when the tests come back normal and nobody can say anything more.

If you would rather read the framework itself than our summary of it, the canon is where it is written down, and what we will not do is the shorter version of the clause above.

One report is US $39, charged once. There is no subscription and no automatic renewal.

Your report is delivered by email within 48 hours of payment. If we cannot complete your report, we refund you in full.

You may ask, at any time, who wrote your report and what their qualifications are.

You may stop using this service at any time, and you may ask us to delete the information you gave us.

You may complain to us at care@bencaohouse.com, and you may also complain to the consumer protection authority of your own state.

Write to care@bencaohouse.com and put the word complaint in the subject line. A person reads that address. It does not route into a queue.

We acknowledge within two working days and answer properly within ten. If the complaint is about the report itself, you may ask for a second reading by a different physician at no charge, or a refund under the refund policy, and you do not have to choose between them in advance.

If we do not put it right, escalate. You do not need our permission.

• United States. The consumer protection division of your state Attorney General’s office takes complaints about any business selling to residents of that state. The Federal Trade Commission takes them at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
• United Kingdom. Citizens Advice passes consumer complaints to Trading Standards. Complaints about how we handle your information go to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
• European Economic Area. Your national consumer authority, or the European Consumer Centre for your country, and your national data protection authority for anything about your information.
• Anywhere else. Your national consumer body. If you cannot find it, write to us and we will look it up with you.

We would rather you told us first. We would much rather you told someone than nobody.

This document is versioned. The version stamp at the top of the page is the same string we store beside your consent record, together with a SHA-256 hash of the full text as it stood on the day you agreed to it.

That does two things. If we change the document, the change is visible from outside: the version moves and the old hash stops matching. And if you ever want to know what you actually agreed to, we can produce that exact text rather than today’s.

Your agreement to this disclosure is recorded separately from your agreement to the terms of service and separately again from your consent to us handling health information. Three tick boxes, none of them ticked for you, because bundling them would make all three worthless.

Material changes are emailed to anyone who has bought a report in the previous twelve months, at least fourteen days before they take effect. Minor corrections — a dead link, a clearer sentence — are made without notice and do not move the version.