Chronic health · Traditional Chinese Medicine · Patterns of imbalance · Large language models · Herbal medicine · Precise dietary recommendations
America is sick. 75% of healthcare expenditures are spent on chronic conditions. Western healthcare workers take to treating these ailments like the general of an army attends to an enemy. Kill the virus. Delete bad tissues. Tune parameters.
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 the West is left sick because of it.
Eastern medicine gardens the body, and does not wage war upon its enemies. These ancient forms of medicine hold richer understandings of health than the western medical doctor 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. A chronic health condition 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, because they believe that pattern diagnosis is subjective in nature. In doing so, most modern research on TCM has proved it "slightly effective" or ineffective. 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.
Enter pattern differentiation with AI.
I spent the past three years iterating on pattern recognition diagnostic systems using multi-modal LLMs. These systems diagnose patterns very well.
We can precisely diagnose the patterns of disharmony responsible for the chronic ailments people complain about. 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."
Things I Believe
- 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 you 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 are. 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."
I believe it's 1000x more likely that the West doesn't understand how to benefit from TCM, compared to the likelihood that TCM doesn't garner a deep benefit to those who seek its precise and culturally informed implementation.
Most people don't actually care about being healthy, and they are fine dying early and living a lackluster life. I've grown up a bit since discovering this, but it still makes me quite sad.
What I've Uncovered
I believe that I've uncovered something useful that I can provide for the world while I am alive on planet earth. I believe that I know how to bring all sick people through one very particular door, to help them understand what foods will resonate best with them, and what herbs and supplements would be wildly transformative for them to take.
I believe that 10% of my efforts in doing this will be technical. 90% of the effort here is to bring this field of medicine to the top of America's awareness using tactics of persuasion, marketing, and demonstrating proof of efficacy in the randomized clinical trials that validate healthcare culture in the West.
"In five years, the most important thing I will be leading is university randomized controlled trials, using the AI system I have built as the precise diagnostic tool that can be used to eliminate human subjectivity while still diagnosing someone with profound precision."
Where This Goes
Once I prove in RCTs that TCM works with profound efficacy for a myriad of conditions, I aim to shape the industry:
- I aim to build an industry where healthcare expenditure is spent on RCT-proven preventative medicine, and on herbal medicines that provide better, and less troublesome care than western medical alternatives.
- I aim to ensure that American policy makers understand how effective precise ancient medicine is.
- I aim to create an industry where holistic medicine practitioners earn about 2x what they presently earn. I think this is highly feasible once we can connect hard clinical outcomes to systems that these practitioners use and change lives with.
- I believe that funding these healers is a foundational step in having future generations prioritize going into integrative medicine, siphoning off a few bright graduates into the holistic space, and away from the ever popular western medical frameworks.
Generations of intelligent human beings devotedly practicing and advancing the research in the fields of integrative medicine is critical to humans flourishing in health for the next thousand years and beyond.
What I'm Doing Right Now
I started this three years ago after ChatGPT came out. I helped 250 friends and family in a beta doing a lot of hands-on work, seeing profound results, iterating. I spent the last 8 months building a functional medicine AI product, which grew me considerably as a thinker and an engineer. I worked with some of the smartest minds on planet earth building notadoctor.ai and they made me a clearer thinker. They pivoted, and I am now an advisor.
I moved to Ubud, Bali to find healers to learn from and to leverage the relative power of the dollar while I build my business. I no longer live in San Francisco. Here in Ubud, I am living cheaply while I find product market fit.
My roadmap:
- Now: Niche down to just supporting eczema clients, gain testimonials, build a marketing engine, and have people pay me money to educate them as a wellness coach on how to tackle this bothersome ailment.
- Next: Expand to other niches, or launch an all-encompassing "chronic health copilot" application, where anybody can go through an experience with an AI agent overseeing their health from the lens of Chinese medicine. This is the product I have always wanted to build.
- Then: Build an application for practitioners. Make it HIPAA compliant. Pitch it to practitioners. Help practitioners automate the boring stuff in their practices so that they can do what they do best.
Once those businesses are pumping cashflow, I can start paying for research to be done at universities, I can start talking to businesses and insurance companies about redirecting their healthcare expenditures to integrative care which is backed by great science. At that point, I might want highly aligned conscious investors to help bring this technology and impact to more people on earth.
I look forward to working with brilliant western medical researchers and practitioners to understand more about how TCM works through the lens of the modern biochemical pathways which we understand today. I hypothesize that TCM understands elements of health that can give western researchers something to learn more about, as a seed of intelligence to look into. I think that these discoveries will positively change the world.
"So yes! In a nutshell, I don't really know if blindly taking ashwagandha is good for you, or worth your money! And yes, there might be a reason why your brother is more tolerant of dairy than you are! And yes, I think that we can get rid of your acne by making a few slight precise tweaks to your diet!"
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 · January 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!