Just before leaving China

This is more of a personal entry. It is not a secret that I will be leaving China in a couple of days, after having spent 17 years in Beijing and Guangzhou. I leave my job at the Sports Trauma Hospital with feelings of great accomplishment and satisfaction after putting together a fully functional spinal deformities correction department.

However, since February there has been a hostile overtake of the hospital administration, and a split between the Niu Family. As a result, I decided not to follow either of the brothers, and opted to pursue an academic and clinical position in Phoenix, AZ.

Before leaving though, I had the chance to meet with my PhD supervisor, Prof. Chen Li-guo who’s retiring soon. Prof. Chen was the person who single handedly took the TCM Department at the Jinan University in 2000, kickstarted its Medical Degree, then a few years later established its Medical Master’s and more recently the PhD program.

Chen had an amazing journey in medicine, starting out as a barefoot doctor in 1976, before enrolling at the Shandong TCM University in 1977, and obtaining his PhD in 1990, at a time when Research Degrees were still rare in China.

Prof. Chen brought a bottle of Wu Liang Ye baijiu (and gifted me 3 more), because -from previous feasts- he knows that the acidity of the Mao Tai hurts my stomach. We ate, we drunk (the entire bottle), and we discussed Ye Tian-shi’s case studies, ancient philosophy, traditional medicine, and anecdotes about Chen Keji and Deng Tie-tao.

In Beijing, I also met with my good friends and colleagues, Doctors Thomas Avery Garran and Shelley Ochs for a cup of coffee at the mall next to the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Both of them are amazing scholars and hold PhD’s from that Institution, which is one of the top places to learn Chinese medicine on the planet.

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