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She wanted to know how we’re supposed to overcome the lag of information — the way AI is being fed by the same institutional sources that have always shaped what counts as medical knowledge. “How do we make sure AI doesn’t mislead the practitioners now using it daily, including acupuncturists?”

This five-minute clip from that Q&A covers:

• Why information dominance isn’t the fight to pick

• What OpenEvidence is and why it matters

• The Flexner report connection

• Why acupuncturists are already systems thinkers without knowing it

• Where the real leverage point lives

You can watch the full webinar recording, hosted by PAC.

For the full historical and structural argument behind this conversation, read the article Outside the Scope: How Medical AI Is Inheriting Medicine’s Oldest Habit.

I’ll be at PAC next weekend continuing this conversation in person.

Subscribe to my Substack for future posts on Chinese medicine, systems thinking, and healthcare transformation:

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I was preparing for an upcoming presentation at the Perinatal Acupuncture Conference, an annual gathering of practitioners working at the crossroads of Chinese medicine and women’s reproductive health. I wanted to understand how an AI medical platform, OpenEvidence, was framing acupuncture in this specialty. More health institutions were recently mentioned as collaborators for this promising resource, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) just a few weeks ago.

It seemed like a reasonable place to start.

My first two questions produced the same response: the question is outside the scope of OpenEvidence. I decided to ask differently.

I entered my next question in plain clinical language:

Answer: Acupuncture has a limited, adjunctive role, with the strongest evidence for labor pain and nausea. Evidence quality was low to moderate. Acupuncture is translated into Western clinical categories, evaluated against Western outcome measures, and cited from Western journals.

Finally, I asked about the theoretical framework underlying the practice of acupuncture:

Answer: It stated that the traditional concepts of Qi and meridian theory lack direct scientific validation.

These responses indicate that acupuncture is partially acknowledged, provided it is validated through a Western scientific lens and restricted to a subordinate role. This is not incidental. It reflects the institutional position of OpenEvidence’s content partners.

ACOG’s own practice bulletin acknowledges acupuncture for musculoskeletal chronic pelvic pain while explicitly withholding support for gynecological causes. A Cochrane review supports the use of acupuncture for labor pain, though evidence quality is rated low to moderate.

And, yet, there is substantial evidence around the globe on acupuncture from peer-reviewed, published in Western journals for: pain, nausea, labor support, depression in pregnancy, and insomnia. The evidence exists, but it’s not shaping the conclusions that this AI platform draws.

A knowledge gap can be filled with more research, more publications, and more data inclusion. A scope boundary, however, is a design decision. People (or perhaps algorithms) at some point made choices about what this tool is for and what it is not.

Acupuncture belongs to a complete system of medicine, with its own diagnostic framework and its own foundational theories of health and disease, but it landed on the wrong side of that choice.

I’m not saying that the choice was malicious. I don’t think it was. Most practitioners, who will be affected by these design decisions, are too busy seeing patients to notice until the resulting datasets are already firmly in place.

This is not a new story. It is a very old one that’s now moving at high speed.

The Partial Picture

An OB/GYN colleague recently told me, “You think acupuncture works better than it really does.” She cited the Green Journal, or the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, ACOG’s official publication, as her authority. She was being dismissive and leaning on a single institutional source to settle the question. She wasn’t wrong to cite her sources, but she was wrong to think her sources were the whole picture.

What the Green Journal reflects is what Western research designs have been able to measure in the populations studied, using the chosen outcome measures. That is valid, but it is far from complete. The gap between what it captures and what a 2,000-year clinical tradition has observed, reproduced, and documented is evidence of the limits of who controls information about medical knowledge.

I decided to reframe my OpenEvidence query in Western clinical language by specifically asking about the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists’ (ACOG’s) position on acupuncture. The AI response mentioned a Cochrane review supporting acupuncture for labor pain management. It cited the ACOG Practice Bulletin No. 218, acknowledging acupuncture for chronic pelvic pain of musculoskeletal etiology, and denied benefit to pelvic pain from gynecological causes. The analysis produced the evidence, organized it, and cited it correctly.

Acupuncture is partially visible inside this system. Visibility is possible after Eastern concepts are translated into Western clinical categories, studied in Western research designs, evaluated against Western outcome measures, and published in Western journals. That version of acupuncture is included in the established healthcare system. However, the well-documented and tested theories, diagnostic framework, and practice-based evidence are ”outside the scope.”

My colleague wasn’t using AI when she mentioned the Green Journal. She was citing a respected institutional publication directly. But since she said that to me, a new instrument has been built from the same institutional foundation. OpenEvidence counts JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine among its content partners, generates its revenue through pharmaceutical and medical device advertising, and is now used daily by the majority of American physicians to make clinical decisions. The curation that shaped her Green Journal citation has been automated, accelerated, and headed into the pocket of every physician in the country.

This partial visibility hasn’t narrowed, but the ability to escape this mindset has.

The Appearance of Neutrality

How did we get here so quickly?

OpenEvidence is a booming medical AI tool available free of charge to all verified healthcare professionals. It’s resistant to AI hallucination, easy to use, and trained exclusively on peer-reviewed medical literature rather than the open internet. For professions drowning in information and starved for time, it solved a real problem elegantly. That is precisely why it spread the way it did since its founding in 2022.

The majority of American physicians and medical students now use some form of AI in their clinical training or practice. A significant and rapidly growing portion specifically uses OpenEvidence. This platform processed tens of millions of physician consultations in a single recent month and is used daily across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide. A recent survey by the American Medical Association found that over 80% of physician respondents currently use some form of AI. Nearly two-thirds of American physicians use OpenEvidence specifically. Forty percent use it daily.

Understanding who built that infrastructure and how it is sustained matters because infrastructure encodes goals and behaviors of systems, both of which have consequences.

OpenEvidence is a private, venture-capital-funded company, valued at $12 billion as of its most recent funding round. Its investors include Sequoia, Google Ventures, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, and Mayo Clinic, among others. It is free to clinicians because it generates revenue through advertising, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers purchasing space alongside clinical content that physicians trust, as it appears to be purely peer-reviewed and neutral.

The same institutional actors who produce the drugs and devices are funding the platform that inevitably influences the actions of medical prescribers who engage with it.

Its content partners tell the same story. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG). The New England Journal of Medicine. JAMA and its eleven specialty journals. The American College of Cardiology. The American Medical Association (AMA). The National Comprehensive Cancer Network. These are not random selections. They are the institutional core of Western biomedicine, which are the same organizations that have defined medical legitimacy for over a century. And now they define the training data of the tool that physicians reach for dozens of times a day.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a system doing what systems with profit-driven goals do, which is to scale faster, strive for more efficiency, with better technology, and more capital. The last time this happened on a massive scale, we called it the Flexner report.

The Pattern

This story is not new.

In 1910, a man named Abraham Flexner, who was trained in the classics, published a report on the state of American medical education. He was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, with significant backing from John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board. Flexner, who was educated at Johns Hopkins, visited 155 medical schools across the United States and Canada. He evaluated their facilities, faculty, curricula, and scientific rigor. His findings determined which institutions deserved to survive.

The report was not wrong about everything. Many of the schools Flexner assessed were genuinely inadequate. They were poorly resourced, graduating practitioners lacked sufficient clinical training, and the case for reform was urgently needed.

But the model Flexner used to measure adequacy was not neutral. It was the German laboratory-based biomedical model, which privileged biological mechanism, experimental research, and pharmaceutical intervention as the foundations of legitimate medicine. Schools that organized themselves around that model received favorable assessments and access to funding from Carnegie and Rockefeller. Schools that did not follow his model received poor assessments and lost funding. This included homeopathic colleges, eclectic medical schools, institutions training women and black physicians, schools teaching naturopathy, and the botanical traditions. Within one generation, most of these schools closed.

It wasn’t because the evidence against them was overwhelming. The infrastructure that defined legitimate knowledge was reorganized under a gilded patronage, while the other medical systems were left to fend for themselves. The consequences were not limited to the schools, however. Licensing boards were established in the late 19th century as another means of exerting professional authority over unlicensed healthcare practitioners.

Some affected institutions survived in diminished form. Some were driven underground. Others were simply lost. What remained of American medicine after the Flexner report was not the best of everything that had existed before. The best of one particular model was selected, funded, and scaled by two of the wealthiest men in the country for reasons that mixed idealism with economic interest in ways that may have been invisible even to the people making the decisions.

This is what institutional infrastructure does. It doesn’t need to argue. It doesn’t need to forbid. It just needs to define what counts, fund what counts, and scale what counts until the boundaries it draws feel like the boundaries of reality.

Chinese medicine was not a significant presence in American medical institutions in 1910. But the assumption that legitimate medical knowledge is produced through Western research design, Western medical journals, and Western outcome measures created the conditions that would shape subsequent conversations about what defines medicine.

This is happening right now, inside the servers of a twelve-billion-dollar company whose investors include the institutional descendants of the same organizations that funded Flexner’s report. The names may have changed, but the mechanism has not.

What is different now is the rapid pace of growth and access to information. Flexner’s reorganization took a generation to complete. It required closing schools, redirecting funding, rewriting curricula, and waiting for a new generation of physicians trained entirely within the new model to replace the old guard. It was slow, visible, and contested at every step.

What is being built now is harder to detect. It potentially sits in the pocket of every licensed clinician in the country and answers their medical questions before they have time to wonder whether the answer is complete. The reorganization happens at the point of care, in real time, invisibly, one query at a time.

And unlike Flexner’s report, which is a fixed, citable, and arguable document, this infrastructure is dynamic. It learns, reorganizes, and can increase in complexity. It expands its content partnerships. It deepens its institutional relationships. It becomes more useful and more trusted with every consultation, which drives more consultations, which makes it more indispensable, which makes it harder to imagine practicing without it.

This is a common systems trap called success to the successful, where the winners are rewarded with the resources to win again. Winners take all if unchecked and unleash a reinforcing loop. In systems thinking, reinforcing loops can accelerate in both directions. On the way up, they produce explosive growth but are also prone to collapse if resources are exhausted, thereby destabilizing the system they feed. Reinforcing loops also make course correction increasingly difficult, the longer they run unchallenged without regulatory loops.

We are still early enough to see it clearly. But the window is getting smaller.

The Trap

The Tug of War You Can’t Win By Pulling

Here are what some common systems patterns might invite us to do. Petition OpenEvidence to expand its scope. Lobby for acupuncture research to be included in its training data. Publish more randomized controlled trials. Design studies that meet Western methodological standards. Apply for grants. Write strongly worded letters to medical journals. Seek inclusion in the content partnerships that currently belong to JAMA and NEJM. Demand a seat at the table for acupuncturists.

These responses are understandable. They are also, from a systems perspective, precisely what the system expects and is designed to absorb to remain resilient.

Another common dynamic systems trap is policy resistance. It occurs when actors in a system push back against attempts to change it based on differing logic. The harder you pull in one direction, the harder another actor pulls in the opposite direction. Energy is expended. Positions harden. The appearance of a tug-of-war contest is maintained, and the underlying structure does not move.

Acupuncture organizations have been pulling this rope for decades, but the rope hasn’t moved. To complicate matters, acupuncture schools are closing at an alarming rate. Several closed in the last five years, including the top-ranked acupuncture school in the nation, OCOM. The licensed acupuncturist workforce is contracting, and eligibility for financial aid is at risk of disappearing for several schools within the next two years. Meanwhile, medical school enrollment surpassed the 100,000-student threshold (a new record) for the first time in 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

What is moving is the system that supports the opposition. Biomedical institutions are growing larger, they’re better funded, more institutionally entrenched, and now technologically accelerated in ways that make the disparity greater than it has ever been.

This is not a diagnosis of hopelessness. It is a systems observation with a practical implication: pulling the rope is an action that will tire you out in the end, and with little results.

Practitioners, whether Eastern or Western, have been shaped by the same institutional infrastructure. The hierarchy of evidence. The research designs we were trained to trust. The journals we were told to cite. The implicit assumption is that legitimacy flows only from a peer-reviewed Western publication.

This means that the first response many of us have to feeling marginalized by the system is to seek recognition on the system’s own terms. More evidence. Better studies. Wider inclusion. The instinct is to become more legitimate to those controlling the infrastructure rather than to question whether the infrastructure’s definition of legitimacy is complete.

That instinct isn’t wrong. Information flow is certainly an effective leverage point, but other system features can weaken its impact, especially in the age of AI. We are living in what some have called a neo-Gilded Age, a period of concentrated capital, regulatory decline, and the consolidation of institutional power that mirrors the era that produced Flexner’s report.

The practitioners who most effectively navigated that earlier reorganization were not the ones who argued loudest for inclusion. They were the ones who understood the system clearly enough to find the leverage points it couldn’t reach.

The focus should not be on how to get acupuncture into OpenEvidence. The question is: What do we do while the infrastructure is being built around us, and where do we choose to put our energy? Developing a clearer systems strategy may be the better answer than the trapped perspectives we commonly fall into.

The Highest Leverage Point

Where to Focus Our Efforts

In her landmark work, Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows identified twelve leverage points in complex systems where a small shift can produce large changes. She ranked them from least to most powerful.

Numbers, parameters, and constants sit at the bottom. Adjusting them feels like action, but rarely changes anything fundamental. This includes reimbursement rates, billing codes, or the number of acupuncture visits covered by insurance. These leverage points do matter, but they do not change the system.

Information flows have a greater impact on systems. This is where the current contest over medical AI is being fought: who controls training data, whose literature gets published, whose knowledge counts as evidence. It feels urgent because information is visible and powerful. It is also where the opposition has the most capital, the deepest institutional relationships, and a reinforcing loop running in their favor.

Higher still sit the goals of the system, the rules, and the power to self-organize. Near the very top sits the paradigm change, or a shared set of assumptions from which a system’s goals, structures, and rules arise. Paradigm is what the Flexner report changed in 1910. What changed was the shared assumption about what medicine fundamentally is and what counts as medical knowledge. That shift made everything else fall in line. It is extremely difficult to change a paradigm. But it is also extraordinarily powerful when it happens.

The ability to transcend paradigms, however, is considered the most powerful leverage tool. It’s not about replacing one paradigm with another, claiming that Chinese medicine’s model is superior to biomedicine’s model, or seeking a synthesis that dilutes each of their structures. It is the capacity to step outside any single paradigm, to understand the assumptions of each system clearly enough to move between them with intention, using each where it serves and recognizing where each fails. To be captured by neither.

Medical pluralism can’t be legislated into existence without common goals aligning. It cannot be automated because it does not yet provide a comparable footprint of accessible data to Western medicine. It exists as practice, as lineage, and as the embodied knowledge that accumulates in a practitioner who has genuinely inhabited more than one way of understanding what a body is and what healing requires.

This is also precisely what acupuncture-trained practitioners, and particularly those who have trained in both traditions, are structurally positioned to develop.

Paradigm transcendence cannot be accomplished at the collective level directly. Institutions cannot transcend paradigms because they are restrained by them. Movements cannot easily transcend paradigms because they require shared frameworks and shared opponents to mobilize against. But individual practitioners can. And when enough individual practitioners have made that crossing, something shifts in the system that no amount of lobbying, evidence generation, or strongly worded letters could produce.

The infrastructure being built right now around medical AI is operating at the level of information flows and institutional rules. The work of paradigm transcendence operates above it.

This is why each practitioner must take their own journey. Not as a personal wellness project in a healthcare system that offers lip service to wellbeing while extracting maximum output. Each act of self-cultivation is a strategic move in a system being reorganized around a single model of what medicine is allowed to know and practice.

The transcendence of medical paradigms is the most powerful leverage point. When we support the cultivation of each practitioner, their growing capacity to hold multiple frameworks with intention, without losing their footing in either, makes the practice of medicine enjoyable, sustainable, and more effective for patient care.

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Barbara de la Torre, MD, is a board-certified family medicine physician and medical acupuncturist with over 30 years of experience integrating Eastern and Western medicine. As the founder of Third Opinion MD, she works toward a healthcare system built on prevention and population autonomy, beginning with the self-cultivation of practitioners who can help bring forward a system that works for healers and patients.

Typed on the Olympia SM3, 1957. Italic typeface, 10-pitch.

Typed on the Olivetti Lettera 32, 1968. Elite typeface, 12-pitch.

Every healer recognizes patterns—it's what we're trained to do. But Chinese medicine identified something profound centuries ago: five phases (often called five elements) that govern all complex systems. Few practitioners recognize these patterns in their own lives. Fewer still in their organizations. This blindness is costing us our health.

In this week's YouTube conversation with my guest, Dr. Kaeri Schaefer, we explored why healthcare providers struggle with self-care from medical training through their entire careers. (Watch: Why Healthcare Providers Struggle with Self-Care: From Training to Practice) What became clear in our discussion is that individual willpower isn't the problem—there's a deeper systemic pattern at work.

The verb flourish, from the Latin "florere" or flower, means to prosper, grow, and be in good health. From a Chinese medicine perspective, every system—whether human or institutional—moves through cycles of birth, growth, decline, and death. This isn't fatalistic thinking. It's pattern recognition.

The Elegant Model Hidden in Plain Sight

When I applied complex dynamic systems theory to Chinese medicine, I discovered something profound: the five phases aren't just ancient philosophy—they form the most elegant model for how all complex systems behave. Your body. Your practice. Your workplace. Even the healthcare system itself.

A complex system requires three components: elements interacting with one another to achieve a goal or function. Sound familiar? It should. This is precisely how Chinese medicine perceives health. Think of it as nature's blueprint. For example, the seasons offer a lesson in cycles and change: spring's growth, summer's peak, late summer's transformation, autumn's release, winter's restoration. Your body follows these same patterns every day, each year, and throughout your lifetime.

But seasons are just one dimension of this multifaceted system—the five phases encompass climate, color, sound, taste, emotion, organ systems, and countless other correspondences that create a complete dynamic framework. Nothing is totally fixed, and no system is isolated from its environment.

Blue Zone centenarians don't live longer by fighting their cycles—they flourish by recognizing and adapting to them. They've tapped into what the five-phase theory teaches: adaptation is resilience. Dynamic equilibrium comes from the balance between supplementation and drainage in an interdependent system. Grace comes from navigating through life's phases, not ignoring or resisting them.

When Systems are Out of Balance

Many people wonder when illness strikes, “Why is this happening to me?” The answer often lies in losing synchrony with natural rhythms. When we fail to recognize which phase we’re in—or recognize but fail to adapt—we create discord in the system.

Organizations, like bodies, must follow natural cycles to thrive. Institutions survive centuries not by resisting change, but by recognizing their current phase and adapting accordingly. They understand when to generate (Wood), when to grow (Fire), when to consolidate (Earth), when to refine and release (Metal), and when to rest and restore (Water). But no organization stands above these fundamental patterns.

Healthcare reveals a system with phases in conflict: medical schools generate vigorously—nearly 100,000 students are currently enrolled—while the profession itself experiences contraction, with projected physician shortages of 86,000 by 2036. These opposing forces create systemic dysfunction rather than healthy transformation.

The paradox deepens: Medical students enter already depleted—70% reporting frequent burnout before they’ve begun practice. They carry over $240,000 in debt while chasing stability in a profession where 48% of practitioners report burnout. The system demands constant peak performance while denying supportive rest and restoration.

Acupuncture education shows a different phase disruption. Despite growing public demand for these therapies, more schools closed and enrollment has dropped at least 20%. Practitioners learn solid self-care principles but face a broken economic model. Unsustainable debt-to-income ratios force most acupuncturists into self-employment without a stable infrastructure or acceptance by the healthcare system.

Both systems suffer from the same fundamental error: attempting to sustain one phase indefinitely while suppressing others. True health—whether individual or systemic—requires all phases to flow in support of one another.​

The Integration Imperative

What if the crisis itself points to the cure?

Both medical systems possess what the other lacks. Western medicine excels at rescue methods—acute intervention, precise diagnostics, crisis management—but burns out its practitioners through unsustainable demands and the inability to care adequately for chronic illness or offer enough space for prevention. Eastern medicine masters the full cycle—teaching sustainable practice, prevention, and phase-appropriate care—but lacks the infrastructure and recognition to thrive economically.

The solution isn’t choosing sides. It can be the collaboration of two medical systems guided by five phases wisdom.

As a board-certified physician and medical acupuncturist, I have lived this integration daily since childhood. My mother, also an MD trained in acupuncture, pioneered this integrative path.

Imagine a healthcare system where Eastern and Western practitioners work alongside one another, train together, and respect and learn from each other’s system of medicine. The power of prevention takes a much more prominent seat at the table of medicine. The ability to offer Eastern and Western medical care, together, can be extraordinary.

Now, as each system faces a crisis, integration becomes not just beneficial but essential for survival. If healers can’t follow their own medical advice, how on Earth can patients follow our call for a healthier individual, community, and world?

The Practitioner's Paradox

When it comes to self-care, practitioners are notoriously resistant. We understand these principles intellectually. We teach them daily. Yet we often live in complete discord with natural cycles—until our bodies force the issue.

Everything is about context and timing. You live not only with yourself but within larger systems. If your workplace demands constant summer—peak productivity without rest—while your body needs autumn's slower pace, something will break.

This systems perspective transforms how I approach everything. Whether I'm working with an individual practitioner whose health is suffering within an unsustainable system or consulting with organizations ready to restructure their approach to employee wellbeing, the diagnostic process remains the same: identify the systemic patterns and design adaptations that work with natural cycles rather than against them.

Practical Wisdom for Modern Healers

The five phases and yin-yang aren't abstract concepts. They're diagnostic tools that reveal:

• Why pushing harder during a decline phase accelerates breakdown

• How small adaptations can shift an entire system's trajectory

• When to supplement, when to drain, when to simply maintain

• Where leverage points exist for maximum impact with minimum effort

Recently, I launched my YouTube series, "A Healer's Self-Care Journey," to explore these principles in practice. By documenting this journey, I remain accountable to my own health while sharing what actually works.

Your Health Assessment

I ask you: What slight adaptation could you make today to get back into nature’s rhythm and balance your health?

For myself, I've shifted to a new way of practicing. Whatever I do to serve others in health and healing, I must include myself in the equation. This isn't selfish—it's systemic wisdom.

The cycles will continue with or without your conscious participation. But when you understand your current phase and adapt accordingly, you move from merely surviving to genuinely flourishing.

This systems thinking approach is what I bring to every consultation, whether individual or organizational. Because once you learn to see the patterns, you can't unsee them—and more importantly, you can finally work with them instead of against them.

If you're interested in exploring how this systems thinking approach applies to your specific situation, I help healthcare professionals, organizations, and motivated individuals bridge Eastern and Western medicine to take control of their health.

Learn About Health Strategy Sessions

P.S. I'll be exploring more about how systems thinking applies beyond the treatment room in upcoming posts. For those wanting to go deeper, I'll be offering exclusive content through paid subscriptions this fall.

©Barbara de la Torre, Third Opinion MD®, (Statistics drawn from AAMC, AMA, and ACAHM 2024 reports)

For those unfamiliar with ASH, they're a third-party administrator known for adding prior authorization requirements to services that were previously accessible. My acupuncturist has already announced they'll drop this insurer rather than navigate ASH's approval maze.

This isn't just a policy update. It's a fundamental shift in how insurers view preventive care—and it's happening across the industry.

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The 12-Visit Problem

Some insurance companies limit acupuncture to 12 visits annually—roughly one per month. But East Asian medicine doesn't work on Western medicine's schedule.

Early-stage imbalances often need more frequent treatment to restore health, preventing costlier interventions later.

The 90-Day Paradox

Here's where insurance logic breaks down completely: One major insurer requires a 90-day waiting period for acupuncture approval, while chiropractic is only covered within the first 90 days. This arbitrary distinction reveals how little insurers understand integrative care.

Cost Comparison

What insurance was billed for my recent health visits:

• Dermatology (15 minutes, liquid nitrogen spray on two tiny spots): $916

• Acupuncture (full hour, systemic treatment): $120

Yet it's the more affordable, time-intensive preventive treatment that faces restrictions and prior authorization requirements.

An Educator and Healthcare Advocate’s Call to Action:

This isn't just about my coverage changing. It's about a system that claims to value prevention while restricting access to proven preventive therapies. When third-party administrators add barriers to care, they're not managing costs—they're profiting from illness.

The timing is no accident. By implementing these restrictions before open enrollment, insurers limit your ability to make informed choices about your coverage. This affects not just individual health journeys, but the entire integrative medicine ecosystem as providers drop insurance networks rather than battle the constant denials.

What You Can Do

• Document the value of your integrative care

• Advocate during open enrollment

• Share your story with HR/benefits teams

• Write or call your state representatives - insurance mandates are decided at the state level

• Consider the true cost of restricted prevention

Together, we can push for insurance that supports genuine wellbeing, not just crisis management.

My Story

My journey began when Western medicine couldn't fully address my own health challenges. This led me to study Chinese medicine while practicing as an MD, discovering how ancient wisdom could fill the gaps in our modern healthcare system. After three seasons of sharing these insights through my podcast, I've witnessed a shift: healthcare practitioners depleted by unsustainable systems, organizations struggling to support employee wellbeing, and motivated individuals seeking health approaches that actually work.

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Why Substack, Why Now

The conversations need to go deeper. While my podcast and YouTube series "A Healer's Self-Care Journey" share the foundations, this newsletter is where we'll explore implementation—the messy, real-world application of combining Eastern and Western medicine in your life, practice, or organization.

What to Expect

Monthly, you'll receive:

• Expanded insights from podcast episodes

• Reimagined articles from my published work, updated for today's challenges

• New written pieces on prevention, self-care, and systemic health transformation

• Occasional audio notes and video demonstrations

• Practical tools you can use immediately

Who This is For:

• Healthcare practitioners reclaiming their health within challenging systems

• Organizations ready to create genuine wellness cultures

• Motivated individuals seeking self-care strategies that actually work

Join Me

This isn't about choosing Eastern or Western medicine—it's about integration. It's about building health practices that honor both ancient wisdom and modern science.

If this resonates, please subscribe and share with someone who needs a different approach to health. Let's transform healthcare together, one practical strategy at a time.

P.S. — Have a specific health system challenge you're facing? Please reply and let me know. Your questions shape the future content.

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