Acupuncture for Fertility, Pregnancy, Women’s Health and Wellness in Oakland, CA

Dragon Boat Festival is not just joong (zongzi) and dragon boats. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it marks one of the most significant turning points of the year.
The festival falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, right at the height of early summer. In TCM this period was historically considered dangerous: peak yang energy, rising heat, and the start of summer dampness, conditions believed to bring out pestilence and illness. Many of the festival's oldest traditions exist to protect against exactly this.

Ai Ye, mugwort, is hung on doors during the festival. It is warming and is the same herb burned in moxibustion, meant to protect the home from damp, heat laden air. Chang Pu, calamus root, is often hung alongside it, aromatic and used to resolve dampness. Together they represent a very old, very practical seasonal health practice.

Even joong fits the pattern. Glutinous rice is warming and tonifies Spleen qi but can be heavy to digest, especially with rich fillings. The bamboo leaves wrapped around it are traditionally considered cooling, balancing the richness inside.

Enjoy your joong. If you tend to run damp or have sluggish digestion, pair it with something warming like ginger tea and avoid eating it on an empty stomach.

📍 City Pulse Acupuncture | Oakland CA
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Growing up Cantonese, Dragon Boat Festival meant one thing in our house: joong. You might know it as zongzi.

Joong and zongzi are sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves and steamed for hours, eaten during Dragon Boat Festival in honor of Qu Yuan, a poet and statesman from over two thousand years ago. Legend says villagers threw rice into the river to keep fish from eating his body after he drowned himself in protest. Joong are the descendants of that rice.

The version I grew up with was savory: glutinous rice, mung bean, lap cheong, and salted egg yolk, sometimes with pork belly, all wrapped tightly in bamboo leaves and steamed until everything melts together. The salted egg yolk is the part everyone fights over.

Every ingredient has a clinical story. Glutinous rice tonifies Spleen qi. Mung bean clears heat and resolves dampness. Salted egg yolk nourishes yin. Lap cheong warms the channels. The bamboo leaves are cooling, balancing the richness of everything inside. Food as medicine was never separate from how we ate growing up. It was just dinner.

Happy Dragon Boat Festival. Do you call it joong or zongzi? I would love to hear about your family's version.

📍 City Pulse Acupuncture | Oakland, CA
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#dragonboatfestival #joong #zongzi #cantonese #chineseamerican

Ten days studying TCM in Hangzhou, China 🇨🇳
 
Ginseng with one of the world’s foremost experts. Facial acupuncture and scalp therapy. West Lake, the tea plantations, and a palace dinner straight out of the Tang Dynasty. Clinics, lectures, and meals that were quietly doing more clinical work than most supplements.
 
50 CEUs and a lot to bring home to Oakland.

I also want to take a moment to thank @yina.co for organizing this retreat. It gave me something I did not know I needed: a spark to fall back in love with this medicine all over again again, and the inspiration to start creating content that actually reflects why I do this work.

The China 🇨🇳 series is officially complete, but I want to know what you want to see next. Drop a number in the comments:
1. Fertility and IVF support
2. Women’s health and hormones
3. Postpartum care
4. Chinese heritage, culture, and food
5. TCM seasonal living
6. Behind the scenes of my practice
 
Until next time.
 
📍City Pulse Acupuncture | Oakland CA
 
#TCM #chinesemedicine #hangzhou #china acupuncture

Come with me to the TCM Museum at Zhejiang University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Hangzhou, China.
 
The lobby has a giant meridian model with every pathway illuminated. Seeing the entire system lit up at once makes something that is usually abstract suddenly feel real.
 
The museum traces thousands of years of Chinese medical history, including case after case of classical texts that form the foundation of everything still practiced today. One section covers President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, which is largely what triggered the acupuncture movement in the United States. A piece of history worth knowing if you have ever wondered how this medicine made its way West.
 
Another display documented the Hangzhou medical team sent to Wuhan during COVID-19 in 2020. The plaque recorded a 100 percent Chinese medicine treatment rate, and a 98.28 percent improvement rate when Chinese and Western medicine were used together.
 
Thousands of years of history. Still being written.

📍 City Pulse Acupuncture | Oakland CA
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#TCM #chinesemedicine #hangzhou #acupuncture meridians

Ginseng. One of the most powerful tonic herbs in Traditional Chinese Medicine and one of the most misused in the Western supplement market.

During my training in Hangzhou I studied with Dr. Fang, China's preeminent ginseng expert. His full practitioner course runs 100,000 RMB, roughly $14,000 USD. We were only his second cohort of American students. What he taught us in a single afternoon changed how I think about this herb entirely.

The most important thing to understand about ginseng: wild ginseng grows 0.3 grams per year. Cultivated ginseng grows 0.8 grams per year. Most people reach for the larger piece. Dr. Fang says do the opposite. Smaller means slower growth, more concentrated active compounds, and higher clinical value.
Swipe through for the full breakdown of what ginseng actually is, the different types, what it treats, how to evaluate quality, and how to use it properly.

📍 City Pulse Acupuncture | Oakland CA
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#ginseng #renshen #TCM #chinesemedicine #hangzhou