Two people. One is a professor of Chinese medicine; the other builds the instrument and the climate record behind it. Neither of us is licensed in the United States.
Over thirty years in Chinese medicine. Named a ming lao zhong yi (名老中医) by the city of Chengdu — a designation given to senior practitioners of Chinese medicine.
He decides what the questionnaire asks and what the seasonal readings say. Where the classical texts and the modern national standard pull in different directions, the call is his.
MBA, Sichuan University. Over twenty years researching hospital management.
He builds the English edition of the questionnaire, the climate pipeline behind the city pages, and this site. He is not a clinician and does not decide clinical content.
China’s national standard for constitution classification was written for, and validated on, Chinese populations. Two of the three blood-stasis items in its short form ask a person to judge their own complexion — a dull or darkened face with brown patches, and lips that run dark.
In a Nashville trial cohort of 191 adults aged 40–85, blood stasis scored 22.6% among the non-obese participants and 11.2% among the obese, set against a 1.4% figure from a separate Chinese study. That comparison runs across two studies, not within one, and the cohort was recruited for colorectal-cancer risk, not from the general population.
Our reading is that the gap is mostly the questions rather than the people: ask a white adult of sixty whether they get brown spots, and you are asking about sun damage. That is a hypothesis, not a finding. We used to replace those items. We do not any more: the questions and the scoring thresholds are the standard’s own, used as written, because that is the only footing on which the standard’s own validation work carries over at all. What we do instead is say so at the point it matters — when the assessment returns blood stasis, the result page names the two questions that rest on judging your own skin, and sets out what points towards the pattern and what usually turns out to be something else.
We would rather be corrected than agreed with, and the people best placed to correct us are practitioners who see these patients every week: [email protected]
We do not treat, diagnose, or see patients in the United States. The assessment is educational.
What we do record, to see whether the site works for the people using it: which pages are opened, how far people get in the questionnaire, which links and buttons are pressed, the site that sent you, whether you are on a phone or a computer, and your country and city as worked out by our hosting provider from the connection. Each browser tab gets a random number that disappears when the tab is closed and is replaced each day, so we can tell one visit's pages from another's; it is not tied to your name, your email or any later visit. These records are kept for three months.
Visitors in the European Union are asked first, and none of this is recorded unless they agree. Separately, every visit adds to a plain page count: which kind of page, the site’s language, and whether the visit looks like a bot, with no number and nothing that identifies anyone. They can switch recording off, or back on, with the link at the bottom of every page. That choice is kept in this browser's local storage, not in a cookie. Each tab also keeps a short note of whether it is being viewed from the European Union, so we do not have to check again on every page; the note is only a yes or no and holds nothing that identifies you and disappears when the tab is closed.
Confirming an email address lets us send you the report, and unlocks saving it as a PDF. We send a six-digit code and you type it back on the page. We keep the address and the date you confirmed it. The code is kept only as a fingerprint, stops working after fifteen minutes, and is deleted the moment it is used. Alongside these we keep short-lived counters, so that this cannot be used to send people junk mail: how many codes an address has had today, and a one-way fingerprint of the connection a request came from — never the connection itself. Those expire within a day. Copies of the emails we send (codes, reports, plan links) stay in our mailbox so we can help if you write to us about them. Write to [email protected] and we will delete your address and those copies.
Creem takes the payment as the merchant of record and keeps your name, email, billing address and card details under its own privacy policy; we never see your card. We get whether the payment went through and your email address, and we keep a small record for your order: the order number, how many times the plan has been opened, its start date, and whether our email went out. Your body type and city are not in that record. They are written into the link to your plan, so it opens on any of your devices, and into the one email that carries that link, which goes out through our email provider. The full details are in our privacy and consumer health data policy.
May we record how you use this site? We log which pages you open, how far you get in the questionnaire and which buttons you press, along with your country and city. Never your answers. Saying no changes nothing else on the site.
You can switch this off at any time with the link at the bottom of every page. What we record