By Lin Kai, Licensed Pharmacist (17 years in hospital pharmacy, based in China)
Growing up, I had a clear picture of what “real” medicine looked like: white coats, syringes, lab reports. Traditional Chinese Medicine? That was for grandparents. “It’s not scientific,” we were told in school. “It’s old-fashioned.” I believed them.
Then I became a pharmacist — 17 years in a hospital pharmacy, counting pills, checking interactions, very Western. And somewhere along the way, I started seeing TCM differently.
Not because I converted to anything. Because I kept meeting patients whose problems didn’t fit neatly into a lab test. Chronic fatigue. That stuck feeling in the chest. One patient told me her Qi was stuck — I rolled my eyes, then noticed she understood her own body in ways my textbooks couldn’t explain.
So I did something completely different from what I was taught: I studied TCM seriously. Not to replace Western medicine — never that. But to learn a second language of the body.
And now the part that would really shock my teachers: I write about TCM in English, for readers on the other side of the world. The concepts I was told were “unscientific” — Qi, Blood deficiency, the six Qi disorders — are exactly what Western readers find most fascinating. I published Part 3 of my series today: Qi and Blood.
Funny how that works. The thing they told me to ignore became the thing I can’t stop writing about.
What about you? What did you grow up believing that life later made you question?
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