Marie’s Practice style: Whilst embracing the traditional values of Chinese medicine, Marie’s practice style is also pragmatic. Marie enjoys keeping up to date with Chinese and Western medical research, and encourage patients to integrate modalities where appropriate. Overall, Marie’s approach to all patients is to view presenting complaints and make a diagnosis through a purely Chinese medicine lens. Chinese Medicine is an entirely self-sufficient system, and does not need any outside influence (i.e. western medicine tests to make a correct diagnosis).

For the past seven years, Marie has been re-training and focusing on a particular style of Chinese herbal medicine based on pulse diagnosis. Classical Chinese medicine refers to the practice of the original or founding principals, formulas found in the Han Dynasty Era of texts in Chinese medicine. These include the Huang Di Nei Jing, Dao De Jing, Shang Han Lun and Jin Gui Yao Lue.

Differences in Classical Chinese Medicine to "TCM" (traditional Chinese medicine) are huge but some obvious differences are:
CLASSICAL CHINES MEDICINE Generally uses:
- less herbs and thus more focused on a specific task compared to TCM. (i.e 6 -8 herbs typical prescription vs 12-24 herbs / prescription. Some TCM hospital doctors write formulas with 50+ herbs per day to be taken!

- uses the principal of treating the yang before the yin - i.e. we treat things in a specific order, allowing the patients body do do one thing before moving onto another part of the treatment strategy.

- More use of warmer herbs than in TCM
- Less use of cooler and cold herbs
- The herbal formulas generally taste better than TCM ones. This is due largely to the lack of cold-purgative type herbs which have a much stronger flavour and often bitter flavour. Many Classical herbal formulas use ginger, liquorice, cinnamon and dates which are all generally palatable flavours.
- Classical Chinese medicine is also free of communist influences in medicine. The Han dynasty was well over 2000 years ago.

Marie can design treatment based on one, or a combination of these three branches of Chinese Medicine – Chinese Herbal Medicine, Acupuncture and Chinese Diet Therapy.

Marie sees many patients, especially throughout her podcast /Youtube channel, that are keen to use Chinese medicine but have not had the results they desire with TCM style of Chinese medicine in their journey thus far. For some, Classical Chinese medicine is seen as a 'second opinion' within the Chinese Medicine fields. Marie will endeavour to inform patients, to the best of her experience, the length and frequency of treatments required to reach the desired result. This may assist new patients in determining the appropriateness of Chinese medicine in your situation, budget and expectation.

Your questions are always welcome, no matter how trival you may think they are. Patients should feel free at Metro Health to have a confidential and autonomous conversation about your health, treatment and anything related to your health concerns/ future wellness.