Part III of MAHA Influenced Healthcare: Parity for Holistic Medicine is Necessary
At the heart of a true MAHA integration is a simple truth: whole-patient care must be founded in a truly holistic systems medicine, administered by those trained to see the patient through a whole-person diagnostic model. Traditional Chinese Medicine has developed such a system over thousands of years of continuous practice, evidenced by the generations of doctors who have handed down their clinical insights to dozens of subsequent generations. This represents the lived experience of billions of people. The TCM living tradition continues today and as current research studies have substantiated, the results are not merely anecdotal or empirical. In modern times, we have both sides of proof of the equation, in the form of our patients and in published research. So, when will the Department of Health and Human Services regulated medicine in America shift to give parity to this more than worthy partner in the care of the public? After the ever-sprawling Covid mess unwinds, the need couldn’t be more obvious.
True integrative medicine is not bolting a single tool onto a Western framework, as is flimsily done in some hospital and clinical settings with tightly modified acupuncture treatment or its poor cousin dry needling. Delivering authentic TCM whole-person care requires a deep understanding of pattern differentiation, herbal synergies, nutritional biochemistry, energetic balance with long-term prevention and treatment strategies.
The vision that I am presenting is a ‘modern’ next iteration of TCM that is at parity with allopathic methods. A parallel track that is an “And, Both” method of care. This includes offering functional medicine since it is based upon TCM differential diagnosis principles. Those eastern and western systems of natural medicine integrate powerfully. I have practiced both together for twenty-two years with better outcomes for my patients because of the breadth of what I can offer people. I call this combined practice: East-West Functional Medicine.
Western medicine has become overspecialized, siloed, and administratively parsed by the insurance companies to the point where the doctor/patient relationship is practically negated. That situation has left patients confused, frustrated, and most importantly, not getting the care they need to HEAL. The most common patient concerns that I hear are that they feel managed for profits instead of given a path to actually recover from their ailments. Of course, let’s not discount the fact that conventional medicine excels at acute crises, surgery, sophisticated diagnostics, and organ-specific interventions — but it too often fragments the patient’s health into sub-specialty parts to apply pill stacks, steroids, and/or antibiotics without clear answers for the patient’s resolution of the underlying problems. The holistic half of my proposed model offers those missing solutions, BUT it requires providers specifically trained in care systems focused on treating the interconnected whole person.
My 22 years of clinical practice combine acupuncture, herbal medicine, orthomolecular nutrition (targeted supplements), detailed lab interpretation, moxibustion, cupping, and full TCM differential diagnosis systems thinking of the interconnected whole person. My approach is not fragmented symptom management. It is a root-cause, systems-based focus of care that has the restoration of balance across body, mind, and spirit as the GOAL, not a tagline. Patients also receive self-advocacy coaching, realistic expectations about the conventional system, and seamless referrals when needed.
The result is an authentic “And, Both” model that empowers proactive healing, which keeps people healthier and more engaged in their own contributions to better outcomes. The outcome is fewer sick days, a more robust sense of wellbeing, faster injury recovery, and typically, avoidance of more expensive and invasive procedures. This approach could arguably reduce overall system expenditures because of that holism.
Compare this depth of patient-focused care to the truncated and sanitized versions cherry-picking by other professions that creates a narrow, decontextualized technique stripped of TCM’s comprehensive framework and leaves full delivery of a complete system of medicine wanting. This is precisely why licensed TCM providers are uniquely qualified to guide the preventive, root-cause lane in a MAHA-aligned system.
In this final piece of this three-part series on a MAHA-influenced healthcare landscape, I move from vision to action. Parts One and Two outlined the urgent need to elevate licensed holistic professions—acupuncturists, TCM practitioners, functional nutrition experts—and create parallel yet collaborative lanes alongside conventional medicine. The good news? This isn’t utopian. A working model has operated successfully in China for decades, grounded in both modern policy and ancient wisdom. We can adapt these lessons today.
China’s successful integration of their ancient medicine and modern interventions proves the model currently works when comprehensively trained TCM professionals operate at the top of their scope alongside Western colleagues. A modern American version is a straight-line change to parity in the health insurance industry. Patients should also realize rewards for proactive prevention habits and modality utilization. Not only does this approach encourage more accountability but will arguably reduce chronic disease burden and deliver the whole-patient focus patients desperately need. In China, there is a tri-part integration that is not theoretical. National policy since the 1950s but was treated as medicine for the poor. Mao insisted on “scientific” medicine to make China “modern”. TCM was always the purview of the royal and ministerial classes. The families and houses would pay a retainer to the doctor until the patient fell ill. The payments would resume upon the patient’s recovery. In the last thirty years the PRC government has mandated equal importance for TCM and Western medicine. The patient pays one third of the cost, the employer pays one third, and the government pays a third.
Today, over 95% of Chinese public hospitals offer TCM services. Primary care clinics are required to deliver acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, and herbal protocols. The nationalized insurance covers both systems seamlessly. Patients routinely receive a multifocal approach with Western diagnostics and acute care alongside TCM’s preventive, systems-based therapies for pain and chronic conditions. The result? A full-chain service model that runs parallel and manages chronic disease, supports rehabilitation, and eases the pressure on any one segment of the healthcare delivery system. These are the outcomes MAHA purports to seek through its Whole-Person-Health and prevention philosophy pillars. The MAHA coalition should be setting their sights much higher than pressing medical schools to offer more courses in nutrition. Lest we forget that TCM principles rest upon proper nutrition as a basis for healing. We are already doing what the administration is trying to shoehorn into a resistant system.
The proof is in the pudding. This is how the institutional structure of TCM embedded in a country of over a billion people works out: Over 95% of public hospitals and adjunct clinics in China have offered TCM services by 2023, which is up from 72% in 2015. This is the breakdown:
– Dedicated TCM hospitals (historically >2,600, with ongoing national-level key hospital construction—14 already elevated, 138 planned).
– TCM departments or clinics in 89% of grade-two general hospitals and 62.8% of maternity and children’s hospitals.
– Combined TCM-Western medicine hospitals and collaborative projects specifically for major/intractable chronic diseases (150 new projects launched under 2025 guidelines running through 2027).
Just this year in 2026 a Primary Care Expansion was added to new national guidelines issued by the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, National Health Commission, and Disease Control Administration of the PRC, which requires township health centers and community clinics to provide at least 6 categories and 10 types of TCM techniques (acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, massage, herbal medicine, etc.). TCM is explicitly positioned for chronic disease management (hypertension, diabetes, COPD, cardio-pulmonary, cancer, etc.) through a complete chain of services modeled after TCM’s centuries old traditional scope to include prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, alongside allopathic care.
Where the rubber meets the road: patient volume. TCM institutions delivered an estimated 1.28 billion diagnoses and treatments in 2023 alone. Approximately 80% of the Chinese population uses preventive TCM therapies (herbal medicine preparations, TuiNa, GuaSha, Acupuncture), with over 1.1 billion outpatient TCM visits annually. It is an economical, convenient, and effective system of medicine that could potentially save the health insurance industry billions. TCM is widely utilized in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand as well. Its utilization grows in the West as well, in spite of it mostly offered as an out-of-pocket expense. People would not continue to use it across so much time and so many cultures unless it continued to consistently produce meaningful results for their health and healing.
My entreaty to Secretary Kennedy and MAHA policymakers: Elevate the professions with the deepest, most relevant training to provide patients true access to actual experts in the systems-based medicine space. The data from China, the ancient retainer wisdom, and the lived success of practices like mine all point in the same direction: comprehensive, whole-patient leadership by qualified holistic professionals is not optional — it is the missing half of effective integrated medicine. Standard western medicine is excellent at acute and trauma care but chronic illness is not well addressed.
TCM is effective at encouraging healing of injury, pain, many internal medicine conditions, and acute issues such as colds, flu, and allergies. Chronic illness, fertility support, and many types of emotional imbalance are all treated successfully without drugs. Secretary Kennedy, help millions of people gain access to this valuable form of medicine in this country by opening a pathway to parity for TCM providers like you did recently for the chiropractors with your Chiropractic Hub proposal. How do we accomplish this “And, Both” system for Americans?
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