Hello and welcome to Flowing Qi TCM! This is a divulgation site for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in all aspects. Here you will find articles regarding theory, tips, guides, trends, and recent scientific discoveries about Acupuncture, Moxibustion, Qi Gong, Herbal therapy, and Dietary education, all in one place. This blog is intended to be your go-to site for when you need to clear doubts and find solutions using Traditional Chinese Medicine.

In today’s day and age sadly, Traditional Chinese Medicine keeps being treated as a fringe science (if considered a science at all) by most institutions. However, once you dig deeper you find that the efficacy and wonders of Traditional Chinese Medicine are overwhelming. It is after all the most ancient uninterrupted medical system we have in the world.

So, why are not more and more people using Chinese Medicine to heal themselves?
Simply put: lack of resources.

There is a disturbing and saddening lack of knowledge about the science behind Traditional Chinese Medicine in the population making it look like an outdated folk/shamanic way of healing. The average person sees TCM as merely pain management or a new age ‘wellness practice’. Nothing could be further from the truth. That added to the reluctance of the institutions to give its rightful place to TCM and accept the evidence provided by thousands and thousands of TCM practitioners worldwide has led to many people missing out on potential alternatives and treatments for their conditions.

This is where Flowing Qi comes forward. To make Traditional Chinese Medicine accessible to the general public in a way that can be easily understood. Taking it out of the shroud of darkness and mysticism that surrounds it and bringing it to more and more people.

Meet the Promoter

Hi! I’m Mat Gonzalez, a medical Doctor from Cuba, a Chinese Medicine geek, and a future Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor. I started this blog because I want to make the evidence and resources regarding Traditional Chinese Medicine more accessible to everyone.
Throughout my life as a TCM geek, I have noticed that the main reason people don’t trust or believe Chinese Medicine can help them is due to a lack of access to resources. I can attest to that because it affected me too.
I am now a hardcore defender of Traditional Chinese Medicine. However, it wasn’t always the case.

My Story

I grew up watching the classics of martial arts movies. I saw everything from Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Donnie Yen to lesser-known Chinese martial arts movies. As any kid growing up watching martial arts movies and documentaries, I also wanted to learn Kung Fu or Karate, anything that would make me be like them.
I eventually enrolled myself in Karate lessons which helped me to stand up to bullies and toughen myself.
As I kept learning and diving more and more into the world of martial arts, I discovered that there was more to martial arts than just kicking and punching. There was a whole world of theory and principles. I have always loved learning new things, and finding out about those topics made me obsessed with learning everything there was to know about martial arts. One of those topics was Chinese Medicine.
It was there where something clicked inside me. Chinese Medicine felt so amazing: healing people using needles, having a thorough understanding and mastery of herbal medicine, being able to diagnose people by looking at their tongue, and a few other things. I knew then what was going to be my purpose.

I decided to learn Chinese Medicine.

I was always interested in the human body, so deciding to go to medical school was a no-brainer. I got into medical school, and to my amazement, there was a specialty that included Chinese Medicine. Everything just felt right.
Although, my life took a hard blow.

Medical School

One thing you don’t notice in medical school unless you pay attention is the reluctance of the doctors to accept Traditional Chinese Medicine as a valid medical practice (even though Cuba is fairly welcoming about it because there are countless stories of people who got their problems solved by a TCM doctor). Maybe professional jealousy, or ego, I thought.
Then I started to listen to the claims of the critics: ‘’There is no evidence it works’’, ‘’It is Placebo and nothing more’’, ‘’The research is always of poor quality or biased’’. I gotta say they got the best of me and led me to quit pursuing TCM as my specialty.
It seemed the rumors were true. Anywhere I looked I got the same answer: there is no good evidence for Chinese Medicine, and Chinese Medicine is not valid. I felt awful for quite a while.

However, there was still the burning desire to learn Traditional Chinese Medicine, I knew deep inside me that Chinese Medicine was effective. So I decided to attend the TCM courses given by the Confucius Institute.

It was the first time I heard a professor speak so confidently about what TCM can achieve, and not just the common pain management, no. I’m talking about the deep physiological effects on the body by the action of needles.

The Realization

I started questioning:
If it were a pseudoscience, then why do the health authorities validate it? If there was no speck of evidence it would be of no use to try and use it, right?
How could it be pseudoscience if I had used it many times with amazing results? Placebo and luck cannot be always the answer.
What if there were evidence for Chinese Medicine’s claims?

That question took me down a rabbit hole.
As I kept reading books, articles, and studies about the evidence for Traditional Chinese Medicine, I couldn’t help but wonder why this information was little to no disclosed.
Then I realized: it was the lack of knowledge and resources the reason I lost my motivation to pursue the specialty of Chinese Medicine. There is a wealth of knowledge that sadly never gets out of its niche audience and to the broader public.

My Mision

I took it upon myself to share my findings in the hopes that more and more people will have access to it and see Chinese Medicine as a valid, useful, and possible treatment method.
That’s my mission with this blog:
• To help people understand Chinese medicine taking it out of the so-called pseudoscientific realm.
• To share the amazing stories and evidence for its effectiveness from all around the world.
• Explaining the terms of Chinese medicine while dipping my toes in uncharted territory analyzing different traditions and thoughts, bringing them to light in hopes that someday a group of crazy scientists can investigate it.
• To make accessible for everyone the different options so you don’t have to settle with conventional pill-based treatments.
• Divulgating the findings in traditional Chinese medicine that haven’t gotten much attention from the media and academia.
If this resonates with you then,

Welcome to Flowing Qi!