About
Thirty-three years, and one sentence that took years to understand
Dr. Yaron Wu spent his first twenty-three years in Chinese medicine learning through lineage, repetition and practice. It was effective — and he often did not know why.
The turning point
His teacher, Chen Yuqin (陈玉琴), told him plainly:
"The body is the best teacher."
He understood the words immediately and the meaning much later. It took a clinical bottleneck — and the decision to stop reaching for explanation first — for the sentence to become a working method rather than a nice idea.
What changed was the order of operations. Instead of arriving at a pattern and then treating it, he began examining each patient's body directly, one to one, for as long as it took: palpating, tracing, waiting, and letting the body answer before forming a theory about it. In his own account, the last ten years produced more clinical information and faster personal growth than the twenty-three years before them.
The longest and most tedious road, it turned out, was the shortest one.
The discipline the method is built on
The method that emerged is deliberately narrow in what it claims. Dr. Wu restricts his confidence to the dimension of pain and its localisation, and does not extend it to every dimension of the body. Clinical observation is kept strictly separate from mechanistic explanation.
He does not oppose modern examination or research, and does not think palpation replaces them. MRI, X-ray and laboratory testing answer questions that hands cannot. What hands answer is a different question: what this particular body is doing right now, and where to act.
What he brings to teaching
Thirty-three years of clinical practice, a decade of focused palpation work, and a habit of recording what did not work as carefully as what did.
What he deliberately withholds
Certainty he does not have. Hypotheses are labelled as hypotheses, and unresolved questions are named in the teaching material rather than smoothed over.
The book
The method is set out in full in 《循证针灸》 (Follow Your Tension), a book for practitioners. It is written for five groups of readers: professional acupuncturists and Chinese medicine clinicians; practitioners of Chinese and Western medicine who treat chronic pain; TCM students and early-career clinicians; integrative and long-term health practitioners; and readers with a serious interest in acupuncture and traditional culture.
It is neither a technical manual for acupuncturists alone, nor a popular introduction. It is one clinician's account of a complete chain — learning, observing, judging, practising, verifying and correcting.
Dr. Yaron Wu 吴亚儒
First author. Practising Chinese medicine clinician; 33 years in clinical practice. Formerly known as Wu Wenwei (吴文卫).
Jingjing Zou 邹京京
Co-author, with responsibility for the structure of the clinical record, terminology and case documentation.
Contact
For questions about the method, the book or the continuing education programme, write to [email protected].
Chinese-language readers looking for the 循证针灸 material should use the 中文 entrance, which requires an invitation code.