About Our 501c3 education focused non-profit

The Association for Traditional Studies has worked for 30 Years  to Document, Preserve and Practice Authentic Chinese Medicine.

When China overthrew the Emperor and became a Republic in 1911, modernizing every aspect of life provided hope and promise to a beleaguered country. The West had cars, airplanes, lightbulbs, and the miracle of antibiotics. Western medicine was adopted as the country’s primary care, while the traditional arts were deemed antiquated.

By the 1980s, the communist government realized that modern medicine, despite all its accomplishments, was not providing better outcomes for many conditions, was devoid of strategies for wellness, and was creating a society reliant on pharmaceuticals. With a huge population to care for, the government needed a new solution. In 1990, the government launched an official program to revive traditional medicine, gathering the last 500 doctors from the entire country who were still practicing. The project paired each old doctor with two disciples to pass on their knowledge over a two year period funded by the government. The aim: to return traditional medicine to the educational and hospital systems. Sadly, the project failed due to Communist bureaucracy and corruption, and authentic, Chinese medicine further neared extinction.

Moving to China in 1986, Andrew Nugent-Head encountered this very problem while working for the Bill Moyer’s series Healing and the Mind. Andrew was hired to find traditional practitioners to share their perspectives on film, but Andrew found the task near impossible. As a result, Andrew founded our not for profit organization, the Association for Traditional Studies in 1992 to scour the country, identify and befriend China’s last traditional practitioners to build a trusting relationship and document their wisdom. Andrew identified three exceptionally gifted practitioners willing to share their knowledge with a foreigner:

• Professor Wang Jin-Huai (1935-2002) Shanxi, China. Professor Wang trained under a retired scholar from the Imperial court and was a remarkable Daoist scholar, practitioner, and calligrapher. Continuing his grandfathers’ lineage of Chinese medicine, Professor Wang was exceptionally skilled in using herbs and abdominal acupressure to treat serious and recalcitrant conditions.

• Dr. Xie Peiqi (1920-2003) Beijing, China. Xie was the last person fully trained in all three aspects of Yin Style Bagua: medicine, martial arts, and self-cultivation. The founder of Bagua, Dong Haichuan, is legendary in Chinese folk lore. Dr. Xie was an incredible doctor and fierce fighter.

• Professor Li Hongxiang (1924-2017) A Hui Muslim, Dr. Li was the youngest of the 500 practitioners gathered during the government’s attempt to save authentic Chinese medicine. In his later years, Dr. Li practiced at the esteemed ‘Famous Practitioner Clinic’ where he treated government officials, foreign dignitaries, and famous visiting personages like Pavarotti.

Andrew gained the trust of these doctors, organized seminars for them to reach an eager western audience and travelled with them around the world. Andrew translated to live audiences and edited video footage of the seminars into books and videos that led to one of the most extensive practice focused libraries on the Chinese arts available in English. Most importantly, Andrew helped fulfill their dream: that their knowledge would not die with them, and may be the spark that returns Chinese medicine to its rightful place as an accepted, even preferable choice of medical treatment for many conditions.

We continue the dream by practicing and teaching to others the medicine Andrew and wife JulieAnn learned in China.  Through online programs, in person training, short term clinical observation and in depth residency programs, we aim to raise the bar of medicine in the west.

For more information, visit www.traditionalstudies.org, find us on YouTube (Association for Traditional Studies), or reach out to our clinic founders Andrew and JulieAnn Nugent-Head at clinic@alternativeclinic.org.