Chinatown's Alternative Medicine

New York City’s Chinatown has perhaps the largest collection of restaurants, exotic merchandise, and food stalls in the city — along with a thriving community of Chinese and Chinese-Americans, all living and working in this densely populated neighborhood.Over the past year, however, I have been going to Chinatown for completely different reasons than the great food and shopping: to experience the healing power of a traditional Chinese doctor.After routine ear surgery a couple of years ago, I was left feeling dizzy and unable to sit up straight — let alone concentrate on work. All my doctor could tell me was that these symptoms were normal and that they would vanish after a week or so.Yet week after week passed by, and I only felt worse. My ear doctor agreed that it was unusual and prescribed stronger medicine, which only made me feel dizzier and weaker. After two more months, I’d grown so impatient with the pattern of pain and pills that I shared my frustrations with friends.Traditional MedicineOne friend suggested seeing a traditional Chinese doctor, Dr. Peter Yuan, in Chinatown, mentioning that he had cured a very serious health problem for her.With nothing to lose, I ventured out one afternoon to find Dr. Yuan on Mott Street. The trip from the Upper West Side to this part of Chinatown takes almost one hour, and finding his tiny practice hidden within a large office building completely occupied by Chinese businesses was a challenge in itself.The first thing I noticed when Dr. Yuan opened the door was his almost wrinkle-free face looking calmly at me, and I wondered how old he was. Though too shy to ask, I suspect that Dr. Yuan is an age at which traditional European and American doctors are forced to retire. Not him though. And what’s more impressive is that he opens his practice at 3 p.m. every day of the week, including weekends.Traditional Chinese medicine is considered “alternative” in the Western world, though it is common practice in China and more than 40 percent of the Chinese population is treated in this way. The concepts are based on a tradition of more than 2,000 years of use, and they include various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and dietary therapy.Dr. Yuan's diagnosis consisted mainly of taking my pulse and inspecting my tongue — apparently he was tracing symptoms to the underlying “disharmony pattern” in my body. He then asked me to lie down on a small bench without any further explanation of what was going to happen. For the first time in my life, my body was quickly — and very accurately — pinched with acupuncture needles. I spent a good one and a half hours like this, but time flew by miraculously fast and I quickly fell asleep.But while his patients rest, Dr. Yuan does not.Based on the results of his diagnoses (which he rarely shares with his patients), Dr. Yuan will roll custom-made pills made out of a wide array of herbs and traditional Chinese medicines, which are stored in large boxes in his tiny office.While Dr. Yuan worked on my medicine, something close to a miracle happened inside my body: As soon as all the needles were set, I felt my head clearing up as though a blockage had been cleared.When I told Dr. Yuan how much better I felt after the first session, he only smiled and said that if I had come earlier, I probably wouldn’t have needed the surgery in the first place. I learned later that the Chinese often visit their doctors regularly to prevent diseases before they can occur. Though I wasn’t convinced about being able to avoid surgery (which had, after all, recovered my hearing loss), I really felt that his method had worked. He sent me home with his pills and terrible-tasting tea to drink twice a day and asked me to come back the next week. We were finished.Back out on busy Mott Street, I suddenly remembered a trip to Bali and a visit to a traditional Chinese doctor I took many years ago. For months I had a bad cough that none of the prescribed antibiotics could heal. In a Balinese village, a traditional doctor had taken me to her garden, where she picked several leaves from different plants that she crushed them into a paste, which she then asked me to eat. She’d even given me a cup of tea that tasted just as bad as the one from Dr. Yuan. Back then the cough had vanished the same day, and I suddenly realized that I never had a cough that required medicine after that.Since my first visit, Dr. Yuan has become my go-to doctor in New York. We’ve started to talk more, and I’ve discovered that he learned everything he knows from his father and grandfather. In fact, generations of doctors in his family have all passed down their knowledge to the next generation.But now Dr. Yuan is struggling to make ends meet after reforms of the U.S. insurance system left traditional Chinese healing no longer covered. While acupuncture is considered a valid medical treatment by U.S. insurance companies, most traditional Chinese medicines, with their emphasis on diet and holistic healing, are classed in the U.S. as “dietary supplements” — and so not, crucially, medicine. This philosophical difference between Western and Chinese medicine poses the biggest threat to the success of Chinese doctors in New York. Both the doctors and U.S. medical insurers see their treatments as dietary; however, for the doctors, this is a bonus, while for the insurers, this is the entire basis for refusing coverage.With the cost of bringing a new FDA-approved drug to the U.S. market just short of $1 billion, there seems no hope, for now, that most Chinese medicines will be approved for U.S. insurance coverage. The individual approach, with pills made fresh for a specific patient's needs, seems at odds with the Western “one-size-fits-all” standard — the very standard that allows a drug to be approved for public use under an insurance scheme.The problem is made worse by the lack of a unified governing body to regulate Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese doctors. Dr. Yuan’s generations of knowledge stand him in good stead, but with no official accreditation or U.S. government-recognized training in the medical field, he is unlikely to be considered a genuine doctor under the current U.S. system. Again, in essence, it is a cultural and philosophical clash. While Western doctors are trained and licensed in recognized and officiated institutions, Chinese healers gain knowledge through tradition, experience, and local knowledge — not something that can objectively taught. There are no figures for the number of traditional Chinese doctors in New York City.But the good news: Even though your health insurance might not cover a visit to a Chinese doctor, it usually only costs a fraction of a visit to a traditional doctor.Finding a traditional Chinese doctor in the middle of the busiest part of Manhattan has helped me to realize that there’s still so much more to discover within the many ethnic neighborhoods in New York. Its inhabitants have knowledge and power that can forever change our own horizons. And Dr. Yuan has helped to change not only my health, but also the health of many friends who make sure to stop by when they’re in town.Dr. Peter Yuan2 Mott Street # 806New York, New York212-571-1405