I want to tell you something that no one in a busy hospital corridor has time to say: your body is not broken. It has never been broken. Even in illness — even in chronic, complex, difficult illness — the body is doing something purposeful. It is adapting, compensating, signalling, and in every moment it can, attempting to restore balance. The question that drives my entire clinical practice is not "what is wrong with this person?" but rather "what is the body trying to do — and how can I help it do that more effectively?"
This is what I call Innate Healing. It is not a technique or a protocol. It is a foundational orientation — a way of regarding the human body as an intelligent, self-regulating system that, given the right conditions, will move towards health. My role as a practitioner is not to impose a cure from the outside but to identify and remove the obstacles that are preventing the body's own healing processes from functioning as they are designed to.
The Ancient Principle
This philosophy is not original to me — it is, in fact, among the oldest principles in the history of medicine. Hippocrates spoke of the vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature, and insisted that the physician's primary task was to support and not interfere with nature's corrective tendency. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine (Huangdi Neijing), the foundational text of Chinese Medicine compiled over two thousand years ago, describes the ideal practitioner as one who "treats disease before it arises" — who identifies the conditions that undermine health and addresses them before pathology develops.
The concept of Zheng Qi (正气) — often translated as "upright Qi" or "righteous Qi" — is central to this understanding. Zheng Qi represents the body's overall defensive and adaptive vitality: its capacity to maintain equilibrium in the face of external stresses, infectious agents, emotional disruptions, and environmental pressures. The classic text states: "Where upright Qi is strong, pathogenic factors cannot take hold." Illness occurs, in this framework, not simply because a pathogen exists, but because the body's innate resources are insufficient to resist or resolve it.
"I do not heal anyone. I create the conditions in which the body can remember how to heal itself — and that remembering is invariably more powerful than anything I could impose."
— Dr Christine Shen
Root and Branch: The Fundamental Clinical Distinction
One of the most practically important expressions of the Innate Healing philosophy is the TCM distinction between Biao (标) — the branch, or symptom — and Ben (本) — the root, or underlying cause. Treating only the branch may provide temporary relief, but it does not restore the conditions that would allow the body's healing intelligence to function. Only root treatment does that.
Branch Treatment (Biao)
Addresses symptoms directly — pain relief, reducing inflammation, managing the acute manifestation. Necessary in emergencies and acute care, but insufficient as a long-term strategy if the root remains unresolved.
Root Treatment (Ben)
Identifies and corrects the underlying imbalance — Kidney deficiency, Liver Qi Stagnation, Spleen weakness, or Blood deficiency — that has allowed the symptom to develop. When the root is treated, the branch often resolves without being directly targeted.
In practice, the distinction is rarely absolute. Acute symptoms may require branch treatment while root treatment is initiated; a patient in severe pain cannot wait six weeks for constitutional change. But the compass always points towards root treatment as the ultimate goal. This is what differentiates integrative TCM from simply adding natural alternatives to a symptom-management approach.
What This Means in Practice
When a woman arrives at my clinic with endometriosis, she has usually been offered hormonal suppression — the contraceptive pill, Mirena, or lupron — to manage her symptoms. These are branch treatments, and they may be appropriate and necessary in certain clinical contexts. But they do not address the TCM root: typically a combination of Liver Qi Stagnation, Blood Stasis, and Kidney deficiency that has allowed the endometriotic tissue to establish and proliferate. When I treat the root — moving Qi, invigorating Blood, tonifying the Kidney system — many patients experience a reduction in pain and, over time, a reduced dependency on hormonal management.
Or consider a man with chronic fatigue who has had every blood test returned as normal. Branch thinking finds nothing to treat; root thinking asks: where is the vitality leaking? Usually it is a Kidney Jing depletion — the constitutional energy burned down through years of overwork, inadequate sleep, excessive stimulation, and insufficient recovery. Root treatment involves tonifying and consolidating Kidney Essence through targeted herbal formulas and lifestyle restructuring, and the results can be dramatic.
Cultivating the Conditions for Healing
The Innate Healing philosophy places significant responsibility on the patient — not as a burden, but as an invitation to agency. Healing is not something done to you. It is something you participate in, facilitated by a practitioner who understands the terrain and can guide the process.
This means that my consultations always extend beyond the treatment table. We discuss sleep — the premier time for restoration of Kidney Jing and consolidation of Shen. We discuss food — not as a list of restrictions but as an understanding of how different flavours and temperatures affect different organ systems. We discuss movement, emotional life, and the patterns of thought that may be sustaining a physiological imbalance. We discuss what in the patient's life is nourishing their Zheng Qi, and what is depleting it.
These conversations are not peripheral to treatment — they are treatment. Because ultimately, the most powerful intervention I can offer is helping someone understand their own body well enough to stop working against it and begin working with it. That understanding — embodied, practical, and lived — is what I mean by Innate Healing.