Descendants of A Family Lineage of Physicians

WEI LI: "At 12-years-old, I started my apprenticeship in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) under my late father, Shi Yuwen, who was both a certified Doctor of TCM and a licensed medical physician since 1950 in the Anqing province. He himself had trained in traditional Chinese medicine under his uncle. I followed a regimented reading curriculum of classic TCM texts, including Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor's Canon on Internal Medicine"), Shang Han Lun ("Treatise on Cold Damage"), and Wen Bing Lun ("Treatise on Warm Diseases"). I shadowed him in the clinic every day, and then every evening I practiced analyzing his patients' pathologies and memory-retrieval of all that I had learned about TCM theory, acupuncture meridians, and Chinese herbology. By age 17, I was seeing my own patients.

After practicing independently for four years, I wanted to expand my medical expertise by pursuing an education in Western medicine, much like my father had done upon receiving training in Western medicine years after studying TCM under his uncle. For this ambition, I enrolled in the top medical school of my province, Anhui Medical University, and graduated magna cum laude with my MD degree. Then I completed my postgraduate training and specialization in nephrology. In the same year that I completed my postgraduate program, my research papers earning both 1st and 3rd places in the annual provincial competition of Anhui.

Today, I have been a practitioner of TCM for over 50 years between my experience in both China and the United States. I also taught at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) for 12 years from 1992 to 2004, before retiring from teaching to focus on patient care. In 2003, I published my textbook entitled, Diseases of the Kidney and Bladder: Diagnosis and Treatment with Chinese Medicine (first published under the title of Clinical Nephrology in Chinese Medicine). It is the first complete textbook and clinical reference published in English on the diagnosis and treatment of kidney and bladder diseases in TCM, reviewed below."

BEN LEE: "I grew up nuturing a keen interest in medicine from both Western and traditional Chinese perspectives, and under the guidance of my mother, Wei, I settled on pursuing my training in both disciplines in order to develop a dualistic foundation like both she and my grandfather had acquired. Thus after finishing college, I began by seeking out my Western medical training in Osteopathic medicine at Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine (MSUCOM), and graduated in 2019 with my DO degree. In the next year, I started my training in Chinese medicine at the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR, which also gave me the opportunity to shadow my mother in her clinic at the same time as my formal education. I graduated in 2024 with my MAcCHM degree, and subsequently joined my mother's clinic as a fellow practitioner who shares her integrative understanding of Western and Chinese medicine, as I continue to receive and internalize all of the knowledge and expertise that she had inherited from her ancestors and also refined over her extensive career spanning several decades."