A colleague of mine used to work at an office in San Francisco’s Chinatown. There was a Chinese Medicine Hospital on the first floor of the building and people were always streaming in and out of the place. I was struck by how popular this approach to health was, but I didn’t know much about it. I was familiar with alternative medicine, but this appeared to be a functioning medical clinic built entirely on Eastern principles. I asked some friends if they were familiar with the practice. One said he’d been going to a herbalist every week in Oakland’s Chinatown to get concoctions made specifically for him. Talking to family, I was reminded that a few relatives had been using Chinese herbal remedies for years. Before the internet they’d been buying it mail order, now they were getting it from online shops.
I went online and browsed the existing Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) supplements. While there were definitely strong brands, many of the remedies were imported from other countries, with unclear provenance and testing principles. And you didn’t have to look far to find disturbing stories about adulterated ingredients, improper bottling practices, and dangerous substances. When I really dug in, I learned that even the biggest TCM brands made in the West were using foreign ingredients.
One of the great things about this country is that we have strict standards on ingredients for consumables. But it’s difficult to take the practice of TCM — which is thousands of years old — and craft solutions using ingredients from a different country than the tradition’s place of origin.
But I wanted to bring the benefits of Traditional Chinese Medicine to more people and I wanted to do it with ingredients and mixtures that I knew were safe and could be held to the highest standards.
And that’s why I decided to build Root Logic.
So we spent the last year and a half working with TCM experts to formulate a selection of remedies that reproduced the practices of TCM, but used ingredients and herbal variants grown in the US. We had to search far and wide to source these ingredients, finding the right farms and suppliers. Then we had to modify our concoctions over and over, making sure they were effective and embodied the high quality and tradition of classic TCM.
Friends of mine suffer from migraines; others take immunity supplements that are little more than sugar water. Now that we’ve launched Root Logic, I’m excited to be able to give them solutions I’ve worked with the best minds in TCM to create — and know they are 100% safe, tested and grown in the USA.
When we started getting the results from our migraine remedies, I knew we were onto something.
“I’ve had migraines for over 20 years and have been on several trials of different treatments to prevent them. This is the first thing that has ever made a difference. Most of the prescription attempts actually made my migraines worse.”
“I had a headache for 37 days when I received your product, nothing, not prescription meds or otc could make it go below an intensity of 3… I’ve been taking it for three days now and it’s been at a two….”
We could offer a solution that was safe, natural — and helped people as they struggled with often unbearable pain.
In America today we have what I call a pain industrial complex. We’ve been too fast to recommend pain killers for any ailment. The result is the opioid crisis, a society-wide affliction that doesn’t seem to be getting any better even though everyone knows about it. While I worried about the ingredients in remedies shipped from overseas, the chemicals and addictive substances put into our drugs in the US can be just as devastating as an actual poison.
The closer I get to the core teachings of TCM, the more it helps me understand our own national crises of pain treatment. My early mission of creating safe and effective TCM remedies has grown into one where I want to address pain through natural means. But unlike some who may advocate only herbal remedies, I see our solution as part of holistic treatment — eastern medicine supplemented by Western practice. Sometimes there’s just no substitution for antibiotics and laboratory medicine.
But that doesn’t mean we need to be entirely reliant on the synthetic. As we’re finding at Root Logic, we can create ways to keep people healthy and happy, minimizing their need for prescription medication. If you think you’re on the road to a chronic condition, we’re not an alternative direction; we’re an off-ramp.
And we’re something bigger: we’re a community. TCM is built by practitioners who have developed remedies over thousands of years. That body of knowledge is bigger than what’s on an ingredient list. Our team of advisors helps craft our formulas; but as we grow, we’re building something new: a community and network of TCM doctors you can trust and talk to. Sometimes you don’t need just a solution, you need an advisor. Truly holistic treatment is about taking into account the entire condition of your life and helping you talk through your situation. It’s in private development now, but very soon we’ll be reaching out to our early friends to enable chats and communications with our experts. To get a sense of what we’re doing, join our group on Facebook.
And to start the conversation, you can talk to me at any time. I’m the guy on the other end of our Website. In our Facebook support group, migraine and other chronic condition sufferers are sharing their suffering and their solutions. You don’t even have to talk about Root Logic or our remedies — we’re here to crowdsource and build a community of insight into pain prevention across the spectrum of conditions.