Bencao House
Begin a reading$39

The house

The physicians

医师yī shī · a physician holding a licence to practise

Physicians
Four
Combined practice
105 years
Licensed in
The People’s Republic of China
Licensed in the US
No — see the disclosure below
Portraits
Real photography to come

Four physicians write the reports at Bencao House. All four are licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China, and none is licensed in the United States. Each holds a five-year university degree in Chinese medicine and between twelve and thirty-eight years at a working counter. Your report carries the name of whoever wrote it.

Hands writing case notes with a fountain pen, seen from above.
Plate 01A report is drafted by hand first, then typed. The handwriting is the argument with yourself.

Who reads your intake

One person, named, from the first question to the last line.

Your thirty answers and your photograph arrive as one file. It goes first to Zhou Yanqiu, who looks at the tongue before she reads anything else, because knowing what somebody has already told you about themselves changes what you see in a photograph. She writes two or three lines and passes it on.

Then it goes to whichever desk fits. Sleep, digestion and the long tail after an illness go to Shen Mingli. Cycles, cold and the years around menopause go to Shen Zhiwei. Anything from someone working nights, or studying, or living across three time zones a week, goes to Shen Yunzhi, who also writes the English for all four of us.

Whoever writes it, one person owns it end to end and signs it. There is no template with your name dropped into it. There is no model generating paragraphs. There are about two hours of one physician’s attention, and then a second physician reads the draft before it is sent, which is the closest thing to a check we can honestly offer at this distance.

If you want to know who wrote yours before you buy, write and ask. We will tell you, and we will tell you what they trained in and for how long. That is not a courtesy — it is something you are entitled to, and it is set out in the disclosure further down this page.

The four

Three generations of one family, and one who married in.

No portraits yet. We would rather hold an empty frame than put a stock photograph of somebody else’s face above a real person’s name.

Photograph to come

Shen Mingli

Shěn Mínglǐ

Senior physician · Second generation. Son of the founder.

He opens the room. He is at the desk by seven and takes the first eight people before most of us have arrived, because the ones who come early are usually the ones who could not sleep. He writes the fewest words of any of us and is the hardest to argue with.

My father made me weigh out roots for two years before he let me ask anyone a question. I have never resented it.

Practising
38 years · since 1988
Trained
  • Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou — five years, graduated 1988
  • Eleven years at his father’s counter before he was allowed his own desk
Licence
Licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China.
Reads for
  • Sleep that breaks at three in the morning and will not close again
  • Long-standing digestive complaints where the tests came back normal
  • Cold hands and feet that do not warm with the season
  • The long flat months after an illness has passed
Photograph to come

Shen Zhiwei

Shěn Zhīwēi

Physician · Second generation. Daughter of the founder.

She keeps the Shanghai room two days a week and comes back to Hangzhou on the evening train with a notebook full of things to check. She is the one who insists a report says what a person should stop doing before it says what they should start.

Most of what I write down is unglamorous. Warm feet. An earlier dinner. One fewer cold drink. It is also what works.

Practising
31 years · since 1995
Trained
  • Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine — five years, graduated 1995
  • Seven years in a district hospital’s Chinese medicine department, Shanghai
Licence
Licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China.
Reads for
  • Cycles: timing, cold in the lower abdomen, the days before
  • The years either side of menopause
  • Tiredness that a full night of sleep does not repair
  • People who feel the cold far more than everyone around them
Photograph to come

Zhou Yanqiu

Zhōu Yànqiū

Physician, and keeper of the cabinet · Married into the house in 2001.

She refills the hundred drawers and knows, by weight in the hand, when a supplier has changed. She built the tongue reference the rest of us use: eleven years of photographs, filed by season, so that a coating in March is compared against other Marches and not against July.

A tongue photographed at seven in the morning, before you have eaten or brushed, tells me more than an hour of questions.

Practising
24 years · since 2002
Trained
  • Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine — five years, graduated 2001
  • Two further years in herbal identification and quality, Nanjing
Licence
Licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China.
Reads for
  • Tongue photographs — she looks at every one before it is written about
  • Heaviness: after meals, in the head, in the limbs, in wet weather
  • Skin that flares in summer and settles in autumn
  • Appetite that has changed without anything else changing
Photograph to come

Shen Yunzhi

Shěn Yǔnzhī

Physician, and the English desk · Third generation. Grandson of the founder.

He is the reason this site exists in English at all. He drafts, then reads the draft aloud to whoever wrote the reading, then takes out every sentence that sounds like an advertisement. A report usually loses about a third of its length that way, and gets better.

I write in English the way my aunt speaks in the consulting room. Plainly, and without promising anything.

Practising
12 years · since 2014
Trained
  • Beijing University of Chinese Medicine — five years, graduated 2014
  • One year of medical translation before returning to the family room
Licence
Licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China.
Reads for
  • Every report written in English passes across this desk
  • People who work at night, or across time zones
  • Students, and long days spent in front of a screen
  • Readers who have been told their results are normal and are still unwell

The credential, plainly

What a Chinese licence is, and what it is not.

In China, Chinese medicine is a regulated profession with its own five-year undergraduate degree, its own national examination, and its own register. The qualification is called 执业医师 (zhíyè yīshī), a licensed practising physician, and the register is held by the provincial health commission. Ours are held in Zhejiang and Shanghai. A physician on that register works in hospitals, writes in the medical record, and is answerable to the same authority as any other doctor in the country.

That is a real credential, and it is the only one we claim. Here is what it does not do. It carries no standing in the United States, or the United Kingdom, or Australia, or anywhere else. It does not make us your doctor. It does not entitle us to look at your body from eight thousand kilometres away and tell you what is wrong with it. And it is not the reason to trust a report — the reason to trust a report is to read one and see whether it is careful.

We say this in the open because several US states protect people in our position only when the disclosure below is given in advance and in writing. Concealing where our licence comes from would be the risk. Printing it is the protection — for you first.

You can read a complete sample report before you spend anything, and what we will not do sets out the four things we refuse, whoever asks.

Before you engage us

The written disclosure.

Six sections. Who we are, what you are buying, what we do not do, the framework we work in, the fee, and your rights. It is the same text you will be asked to tick before any money is taken, held under one version number so we can always show you which wording you were given.

  1. Who is writing your report

    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.

  2. What you are buying

    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.

  3. What we do not do

    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.

  4. The framework we use

    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.

  5. Fee and delivery

    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.

  6. Your rights

    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.

Disclosure version 2026-09-08.1

This page is shown to you again, in full, and has to be ticked before any money is taken. You are not agreeing to anything by reading it here.

If something is wrong

How to complain, and who reads it.

Write to care@bencaohouse.com. It is read by Shen Zhiwei, who did not write your report, whichever report it was. You will get a reply from a person within three working days, and a decision within ten.

Tell us the date, the name on the report, and what is wrong with it. If the reading does not fit you, say where it stops fitting — that is the most useful sentence you can send us, and we will either rewrite the report or refund you in full. We do not require you to choose which before you write.

You may also complain to the consumer protection authority of your own state or country, and nothing here asks you to give that up. For anything that is not a complaint, the contact page has the ordinary address and what to put in it.

The physicians

Read a report before you decide who wrote it well.

US $39, one physician, 48 hours, and a name at the bottom of the page.

Begin a reading$39Read a sample report