Adele Reising

The beginnings

When still an undergraduate in the Pre-med track at Indiana University, Adele met a Chinese medical doctor. She had already been looking for something she could devote her life to: a form of medicine that worked with the body rather than against it, and that offered a practical way to help with other people’s pain. Chinese medicine was entirely new to her. She was intrigued enough to begin studying privately with him almost immediately, without any clear sense at the time of where that decision might lead.

She completed her degree in 1992 and continued from there. The path eventually took her to Beijing, to a master’s degree and faculty position, to classical Chinese, and to a clinical practice in New York that has now been running for more than twenty-five years. She still regards that first conversation in Indiana as the beginning of all of it.

Training

Adele received her Master’s in Traditional Oriental Medicine from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine — now Pacific College of Health and Science — in 1997. That same year, she was nationally board certified by the NCCAOM in both acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. She has been licensed in New York State since 1998.

She later returned to Pacific College as faculty, beginning as an instructor in 1999 and serving as Chair of the Herbal Medicine department from 2000 to 2004. During those years, she was teaching herbal medicine to other practitioners while building her own clinical practice around it.

Beijing

In the autumn of 1998, Adele went to China for clinical training and spent the following years returning for further study.

Her hospital internships ran from September 1998 through January 1999 and were divided between two institutions. At Xi Yuan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, she worked in the gynecology outpatient department and on the inpatient paralysis and stroke ward. At the University of Physical Education, she trained in orthopedics and sports medicine.

Those two strands — women’s health on one side, pain and musculoskeletal medicine on the other — remain two of the central pillars of the practice nearly thirty years later.

Clinical training in China offers a kind of education that is difficult to reproduce elsewhere. The patient volume is extraordinary, supervision is close, and the range of cases is broad and immediate. It gives a practitioner exposure, in a relatively short period, to conditions and clinical patterns that might otherwise take years to encounter in private practice.

Adele later returned for language study. In 2001 and 2002, she attended the Inter-University Chinese Language Program at Qing Hua University on a Blakemore Foundation grant. Her coursework included readings in Ming dynasty medical texts. She then undertook advanced study at the University of Chinese Medicine in Beijing, where the medical classics were studied in Chinese. In 2010, she completed a further clinical internship at Dong Eui Hospital in Busan, Korea.

Reading the texts in the original

Adele reads classical Chinese, the language of the medical canon, and this is central to the way she understands the tradition.

The foundational texts of Chinese medicine have been translated into English many times and with varying degrees of precision. Much can turn on the interpretation of a single character, phrase, or technical term. Being able to return to the original text allows a practitioner to engage directly with the source rather than relying entirely on another person’s translation or interpretation. It is the difference between working from the tradition itself and working from a summary of it.

Adele pursued that study formally. She spent two years with the SoMun Society of Korea studying the Huang Di Nei Jing in classical Chinese, including translation work, with Dr Wan Duk-Huang. She also completed Jeffrey Yuen’s Advanced Herbal Program and Advanced Classical Acupuncture Program. Jeffrey Yuen is the 88th-generation Taoist priest of the Jade Purity School under whom Tammy and Connie have also studied.

That shared training matters in practice. It means the practitioners here work from a common clinical language and can discuss a case without having to translate between fundamentally different systems. A patient moving between practitioners is therefore not beginning again from the beginning.

The practice

Adele opened Adele Reising Acupuncture in New York in May 1999 and has directed the practice ever since.

What she has built is a practice that treats Chinese medicine seriously and places it firmly within the wider medical context of a patient’s care. We read your laboratory results. We ask what medications you take and prescribe with those medications in mind. We coordinate with physicians, obstetricians, rheumatologists, reproductive endocrinologists, and other specialists where that is useful.

Herbal medicine remains one of Adele’s particular areas of expertise. Formulas are written for the individual patient, revised as the clinical picture changes, and dispensed through the practice’s own pharmacy. They are prescribed by someone board certified in Chinese herbal medicine who also spent four years chairing a herbal medicine department.

Herbal medicine is among the most demanding parts of Chinese medicine to practice well, and relatively few practitioners pursue it to this depth. It requires a working knowledge not only of individual herbs and classical formulas, but of how those formulas need to change over time as the patient changes.

How she works

Thoroughly. A first visit lasts ninety minutes, and a substantial part of it is conversation. Adele asks not only about the complaint that brought you in, but also about sleep, digestion, energy, temperature, stress, medications, and — where relevant — the menstrual cycle in detail.

The purpose is to build a picture of the whole person rather than isolate one symptom from everything surrounding it. That larger pattern is what shapes the diagnosis and, in turn, the treatment.

Patients who are accustomed to being asked about one problem at a time sometimes find this surprising at first and then rather relieving. It is also why two people arriving with the same diagnosis or symptom may leave with very different treatments, and why Adele does not work from fixed protocols.

Teaching, speaking, and the press

Adele has taught since 1999 and has run private seminars in gynecology, herbal medicine, and orthopedics since 2000. She has lectured at Yale, at the Beijing Center, and for organizations in the United States and abroad.

Credentials

• Licensed Acupuncturist, New York State, 1998
• NCCAOM board certified, Traditional Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture, 1997
• M.S., Traditional Oriental Medicine, Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, 1997
• B.A., Indiana University, 1992
• Chair, Herbal Medicine Department, Pacific College, 2000–2004; instructor from 1999
• Clinical internships: Xi Yuan Hospital of TCM and University of Physical Education, Beijing, 1998–99; Dong Eui Hospital, Busan, 2010
• Advanced study of the Huang Di Nei Jing in classical Chinese with Dr Wan Duk-Huang, SoMun Society of Korea
• Jeffrey Yuen Advanced Herbal Program and Advanced Classical Acupuncture Program
• Blakemore Foundation grant recipient, 2001–2002
• Wakefield Facial Rejuvenation Advanced Course, 2014
• Founder and Director, Adele Reising Acupuncture, since 1999