My Story
How I Got Here
I worked hard as a software engineer for many years. Really hard. The kind of hard where you wake up one day and realize you've been running on empty for longer than you can remember. I was chronically fatigued and burnt out—and conventional medicine had nothing for me besides "get more sleep" and "try reducing stress."
Then I found Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Not the watered-down Western wellness version. The real thing—pattern diagnosis, herbal formulas precisely matched to my constitution, food as medicine tailored to what my body actually needed. Within weeks, I felt a vitality and life force I didn't know was possible. A rich abundance of health that I'd never experienced, even in my "healthy" years.
I became obsessed. I spent 5 years studying TCM. I read the classical texts. I worked with practitioners. I helped 250 people—friends, family, colleagues—build personalized protocols. And I saw the same thing over and over: when you get the pattern diagnosis right, the results are profound.
"I started building AI pattern diagnosis systems over three years ago—before AI was even multimodal. Before it could see images, before it could reason about complex clinical presentations. I've been iterating on this longer than almost anyone."
I worked with brilliant minds building notadoctor.ai in San Francisco. They made me a clearer thinker and a sharper engineer. When they pivoted, I knew exactly what I wanted to build.
I moved to Ubud, Bali—to find healers to learn from, to leverage the relative power of the dollar, and to go all-in on Centered Health. I am no longer living in San Francisco. Here in Ubud, I am living simply while I prove that this works.
The Problem
We've Forgotten Something
America is sick. 75% of healthcare expenditures are spent on chronic conditions. Western medicine treats these ailments like a general wages war—kill the virus, delete bad tissues, tune parameters.
But with a chronic health condition, there's often no virus, no bacteria, no genetic defect. There's no precise marker to wage war upon. And so the West is left sick.
Eastern medicine gardens the body. It does not wage war upon its enemies. These ancient forms of medicine hold richer understandings of health than the Western medical establishment perceives. Health is not just an absence of a virus or a symptom—it's harmony and prevention.
Any chronic health condition, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, never has one treatment. It could be a result of any myriad of patterns of disharmony in the body. Each pattern is treated wildly differently. Not diagnosing a pattern, or poorly diagnosing a pattern, yields ineffective TCM care.
"Most randomized controlled trials seeking to 'validate' TCM—even those performed by Chinese researchers—omit the step of pattern diagnosis. If any of these researchers had read five pages of a beginner TCM textbook, they'd realize that they're wasting tens of millions of dollars on inherently useless research."
I believe it's 1,000x more likely that the West doesn't understand how to benefit from TCM, compared to the likelihood that TCM doesn't garner deep benefit to those who seek its precise and culturally informed implementation.
Enter Pattern Differentiation with AI
I spent the past three years iterating on pattern recognition diagnostic systems using multi-modal large language models. These systems diagnose patterns very well.
We can precisely diagnose the patterns of disharmony responsible for the chronic ailments people suffer from. With an accurate pattern diagnosis, a very clear picture emerges of how to support someone to harmony and health.
"My pattern diagnosis system using Artificial Intelligence can presently do pattern diagnosis better than 95% of worldwide licensed TCM practitioners."
Healthcare in the Western world is not as effective as it could be. We have forgotten something that people in the ancient world researched and understood for thousands of years. With artificial intelligence, I can precisely and personally supply protocols for chronic health conditions that are incredibly effective for people.
My heart is broken that we've forgotten so many of these principles of ancient medicine that, when done precisely, are incredibly supportive to people.
What I Believe
Things I Hold to Be True
- There exists $1 of herbs (that can be sustainably grown) which would resonate perfectly with each human being, that if taken every single day, would yield massive returns in health, quality of life, and longevity.
- "Winging it"—taking herbs that aren't precisely catered to you—can waste money or cause harm because the herbs are not matched to your patterns of health.
- Specific food consumption and omissions are a more foundational form of medicine than herbs. If "food as medicine" is successfully implemented, zero herbal medicines would ever be needed.
- "Food as medicine" follows ancient guidelines of what someone should eat, given their patterns of disharmony and what they want to feel like. All people are different and ideal food intake is not a "one size fits all."
- Traditional Chinese Medicine is the most time-informed and useful practice of integrative medicine on earth, coming from one contiguous society that never collectively burned all of their records—this Han family dating back nearly to the time of ancient Egypt.
"I believe that the Chinese, some of the hardest working and most intelligent people on earth, probably were not hallucinating or completely full of shit as they iterated a field of medicine for 5,000 years."
My goal is that every single person in the Western world be able to receive precise, personalized protocols inspired by ancient medicine. I want them to know what it works for in clinical trials, because that inspires people. I want to inspire people to understand what health is.
Health is not just an absence of disease—it is harmonious health. And harmonious health is the bedrock of everything.
Once we're healthy, once we're at peace, then we can show up to this life to do what we ought to be doing while we are alive as human beings.
As I finish writing this, I am smiling warmly, drinking gushu sheng puerh from my trusty yixing clay pot, overlooking flora from a coworking space in Ubud, Bali. I pray so deeply that in this upcoming year, I may consciously and decisively set myself up for success, so that the work that I am carving out for my lifetime can continue to see many more lives changed, and smiles made.
— Weston Willingham
Ubud, Bali · 2026
This article was inspired by my friend Richard Ngo, when we were working out in the Panhandle in San Francisco. He said that he liked paying friends $100 to write a whitepaper and come out to the world with their "big idea." I told him I was in, and this is probably one of the most impactful things that a person has done to positively bully me into leadership. Ah, I love you San Francisco. I will come home and see you later this year!
