Western healthcare has failed women. Now, they’re turning to Chinese medicine to fill the gap

When I visited Malaysia and Singapore as a child, I was always curious about the many Chinese herbalist shops we’d pass on busy shopping streets. They looked like they were from another universe. As I peered through the windows, there were glass canisters full of mysterious ingredients: goji berry, bird’s nests, pearl dust, tiger bones, gazelle antlers.

We never went inside. My parents—who were trained as a nurse and a biochemist respectively—brushed aside Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as unscientific at best, and dangerous at worst. So I grew up skeptical of these practices. I rolled my eyes when people suggested taking ginseng tea to boost my energy. I stayed clear of acupuncture and cupping.

My family’s perspective wasn’t uncommon. For centuries, those immersed in Western medicine have treated TCM with suspicion, mockery, and sometimes hostility. We’ve seen this play out in the Western media over the past decade. The Smithsonian Magazine reported that TCM’s use of pangolin scales is driving the creature towards extinction. The Economist argued that TCM dangerously peddles “unproven remedies.” When the World Health Organization began officially evaluating TCM practices, top science journals and magazines—Scientific American and Nature—called this a “bad idea.”

Still, some Americans are intrigued by the promises of Chinese medicine. Kim Kardashian gushes about her Chinese herbalist and Gwyneth Paltrow promotes acupuncture and Chinese herbal remedies. Now, interest in TCM is trickling down into the mainstream, particularly among women and people of color who feel that the Western medical establishment has failed them in some way.

There are now several startups, including Qi Health and Nooci, that are trying to make TCM more widespread. One of the most established is Elix, a five-year-old startup that wants to make TCM herbal formulas more accessible and widespread.

Lulu Ge, who incubated the company at Wharton Business School, is on a mission to prove that TCM is effective at tackling many women’s health problems including premenstrual syndrome, fibroids, endometriosis, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. “We’ve talked to thousands of women who say they feel like their doctors aren’t taking their concerns seriously,” Ge says. “But Chinese doctors have been treating these issues for centuries with herbal formulas.”

Ge is trying to create a more systematic approach to TCM, standardizing treatment, sourcing ingredients in such a way that the formulas are consistent, and conducting clinical studies to prove their effectiveness. This appears to be a winning strategy. Elix has had 60,000 subscribers since launching in 2020. More than 90% of women who try the formulation come back.

Given how much resistance there still is to TCM, Elix has an uphill battle ahead to achieve more mainstream adoption. But Ge, and other TCM advocates, believe there is more openness than ever before. “If we could combine and integrate Western and Chinese approaches, we could really achieve a Golden Age of medicine,” says Elizabeth Fine, dean of clinical education at Emperor’s College of Traditional Oriental Medicine, and an Elix adviser. “Our studies are finding than when you introduce Chinese medicine into Western therapies, you get a much stronger effect.”

Chinese Medicine and Marginalized Americans

Before Paltrow and Kardashian, members of the Black Panther Party and Puerto Rican activist group, the Young Lords, embraced Chinese medicine.

Back in the early 1970s, when heroin was ravaging Black and brown neighborhoods in New York, the prevailing way to treat addiction was to use another drug, methadone. But several Black doctors learned from Chinese communities that acupuncture could be a viable, drug-free alternative. So these groups opened an acupuncture clinic in Bronx called the Lincoln Detox Center. (At the time, acupuncture was illegal in several states in the U.S.; the government worked to shut the Bronx clinic down and succeeded in 1978.)

The relationship between Chinese medicine and other people of color goes back to the mid-1800s, when Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. to work on the railways during the Gold Rush. They brought herbs, ointments, and teas in case they got sick because few other forms of healthcare were available to them. Over time, Chinese doctors set up shops in Chinatown and would treat American patients as well. Minority groups, who could not afford to go to Western doctors, were particularly open to these doctors.

Ge sees Elix as part of this tradition. More than half of Elix’s customers are women of color. This makes sense to her, given that these communities have had more exposure to TCM than their white counterparts. On top of this, there is a lot of research showing that Black women experience discrimination in the healthcare system. “In our one-on-one sessions with customers, we’ve had many women of color tell us they’ve felt marginalized or gaslit by doctors in the healthcare system,” she says.

But more broadly, many women’s health problems have not been studied as thoroughly. There are many reasons for this, according to experts. For centuries, women were not included in clinical studies, since the male body was considered normative. And even today, women are underrepresented in medical research. As a result, conditions like premenstrual syndrome and polycystic ovarian syndrome remain poorly understood.

How Chinese Medicine Sees The Body

In some ways, the principles of Chinese medicine are particularly suited to tackling women’s health conditions, which are often associated with hormonal shifts.

According to Ge, the Chinese approach takes a much more holistic view of the body. It is interested in how the systems work over the course of a day, a month, and the year. If a patient feels unwell, the first step is to see how their body is out of balance, then figuring out how to balance it again. As a result, Chinese doctors are generally attuned to how a woman’s body changes over her menstrual cycle. If a woman feels more fatigued before her period or experiences a migraine, they have a keen sense of how their hormones are fluctuating and have herbal remedies designed to mitigate the shifts.

This contrasts with Western medicine, where doctors tend to be very specialized, which can make it hard to treat syndromes related to the menstrual cycle. I’ve seen this firsthand with my menstrual migraines. Since my gynecologist doesn’t specialize in headaches, she referred me to a neurologist. My neurologist prescribes me the latest migraine treatments, but he is not trying to treat the underlying hormonal shifts that are causing the migraine in the first place.

Mark Shrime, a Harvard Medical School professor and the editor the BMJ Global Health journal, says specialization is one of the strengths of Western medicine, which has allowed us to understand the human body in great depth. And, ultimately, when the healthcare system is working as it should, he says doctors should be thinking about how to treat the patient holistically. “It’s a generalization to say that allopathic medicine [i.e. Western medicine] is irreparably siloed or doesn’t think holistically,” Shrime says. “Western doctors are trained to look beyond a particular symptom. But Chinese medicine partitioners tend to be generalists, which influences how they treat patients.”

When it comes to their menstrual cycles, women face a wide range of symptoms, including cramps, headaches, depression and anxiety, bloating, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal problems, sleep disturbances, and many more. TCM has developed a way of organizing these symptoms into patterns, and has identified particular herbs that can counter these issues.

When building Elix, Ge worked with TCM practitioners to categorize patterns and match them with specific formulas known to bring relief. It has also built a supply chain to source the herbs from trustworthy suppliers. Each batch of formulations is tested for both quality and consistency. “One issue with traditional medicine is that it was hard to ensure the quality of the herbs,” says Fine. “If you weren’t getting results, you couldn’t tell if it was quackery, or if the quality of the herbs just wasn’t good.”

Elix customers take an in-depth survey about their menstrual cycle, which covers everything from period symptoms to chronic condition like fibroids. Using an algorithm, Elix will match these symptoms to a particular pattern and prescribe a formula. “Our goal is to standardize this approach to medicine by identifying common patterns and provide the right formulations for each,” Ge says. “My biggest goal is to bring some clinical rigor to TCM, and to do so, we need to have some standardization and repeatability in place.”

The Translation Problem

Ge believes that her brand has grown thanks to the efficacy of the formulas. Many customers provide feedback and reviews saying that Elix has relieved their symptoms. In some cases, women have reported that their PCOS has gone away completely.

Elix continues to grow, particularly among those who are frustrated with the healthcare system and are inclined toward experimenting with Chinese medicine. But to scale, Elix must go beyond these early adopters and tap into mainstream consumers who are less familiar with, or even skeptical of, TCM.

One way Ge is doing this is by translating the principles of TCM into language that is more familiar to those immersed in Western medicine. Chinese medicine is based on the concept of qi, which refers to the universal life force, and balancing the ying and yang energies in the body. Many people recoil at this language. But Ge says that ying and yang maps neatly into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. And when Chinese medicine describes being “out of balance,” this often maps onto the concept of experiencing inflammation of some kind. “We’re trying to explain these concepts from a Western medicine perspective, so that they don’t feel so foreign and weird to people,” says Ge.

Jonathan Leary, founder of the Remedy Place wellness clubs, has been open to incorporating treatments from other medical traditions into his clubs, including acupuncture. He agrees with Ge that translating these approaches into language that consumers will understand is key to to their success. “One of my priorities is to bring alternative medicine mainstream,” Leary says. “When we communicate about it in a way that is relatable and scientific, people have quickly adapted.”

Winning Over Skeptics With Clinical Studies

But Ge is also trying to provide evidence that her formulations work in a way that is understandable to Western doctors. This isn’t easy, partly because the format of clinical trials is about isolating a particular pharmaceutical compound, giving it to patients, and seeing how well it does against a placebo. The goal is to see the same result among a large proportion of those within the trial. In contrast, Chinese medicine recognizes that each patient is unique and formulations must be tailored to the individual’s symptoms.

Still, Elix is now conducting several independent clinical studies to see how the herbal formulations affect hormone-related symptoms. It recently released the results of a study around PCOS, a condition which affects between 6% and 13% of reproductive-aged women, and results in irregular periods, weight gain, and infertility. There is a lack of medical research into PCOS, and as result, there are no FDA-approved drugs to treat it. The results of the Elix study found that 89.3% of participants who used Elix’s formulas were able to regulate their cycle, and 71.4% found that it had improved their PCOS symptoms.

There’s a long way to go before TCM is widely accepted in America. But Elix reveals a possible path by which more people are able to learn more about the Chinese approach to medicine, and access treatments that might help them. And now, it seems Western medicine is beginning to open up to these approaches.

“I would never recommend Chinese medicine as an alternative to going to your doctor,” says Shrime. “But I think there’s a greater acceptance of these treatments to complement allopathic medicine. There’s a recognition that some of these herbs do make you feel better, so if they don’t interact with another drug, I wouldn’t say no to a patient who wanted to try them.”