Dr. Felice Chan grew up in Hong Kong, in a household where bone broth was dinner and Chinese medicine was just how life worked. Then she went to an American international school, shadowed a neuro-radiologist aunt through brain surgeries, studied neuroscience in college, and spent years doing clinical research in Boston — smoothie in hand, walking to work through a snowstorm, wondering why she was always bloated and cold.

The pivot back to traditional Chinese medicine wasn't a rejection of Western science. It was a recognition that one system was asking different questions. Not what is the symptom, but what is the root cause. Not how do we suppress it, but how do we bring the body back into balance before things escalate.

This conversation with Rachel covers a lot of ground from what cold foods actually do to your digestive fire, to what each phase of your menstrual cycle is asking of you, to why the ear might be the most underrated healing tool on your body.

In this conversation with Rachel, Dr. Felice Chan breaks down the science behind ancient healing from what your period symptoms are really telling you, to why your smoothie habit might be the problem, to the one thing she tells every patient who asks for a single tip.

Dr. Felice Chan — board-certified traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist based in Los Angeles.

She grew up in Hong Kong before studying pre-med and neuroscience in the US, then completing four to five years of graduate training in TCM before opening her clinic in Culver City.

Her practice bridges ancient Eastern healing with modern science, treating the body as an interconnected whole rather than a collection of isolated symptoms. She recently co-founded Moon Bow, a Chinese herbal skincare line, with her twin sister. You can find her clinic in Culver City, LA.

To follow her Instagram: @drfelicechan

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✦ Cold foods aren't just uncomfortable — they're working against your digestive system. Dr. Chan was direct about this: your digestive enzymes operate optimally at body temperature, around 98°F. When you put something cold in — iced matcha, a smoothie, a green juice — your body has to work overtime just to warm it up before it can absorb anything. Over time, that wears the system down. One week of warm, cooked foods, she told her patients, and the bloating dissipates, the hormones start to level out, the sleep improves. The salad isn't the virtue we've been told it is.

✦ Every emotion has a physical address in the body. This was one of the foundational texts Dr. Chan encountered when she first started studying TCM: every ailment starts from emotion. When you're anxious, the energy gets stuck in the chest. When you're in an argument, you can feel it in the throat or the diaphragm. The fascia holds what the mind hasn't processed. The body keeps the score — and Chinese medicine has a framework for where, specifically, it keeps it. The insight worth sitting with: if you can locate where it's stored, you can start to move it.

✦ Your menstrual cycle has four seasons — and your energy budget changes with each one. Dr. Chan described the weeks of the cycle like winter, spring, summer, and fall. During menstruation, all the body's energy goes to that one place — which is why you feel tired, why the workouts feel harder, why isolation doesn't mean something is wrong. Then comes the reinvigoration of the follicular phase, the social energy of ovulation, the peak of the luteal phase. She used to schedule workouts the same way every week. Now she checks in with her body first. That shift took five to seven years to land.

✦ The kidney isn't just a filter — it's where vitality lives. Rachel shared that she had kidney cancer and had one removed. Dr. Chan's response was grounded and specific: in TCM, the kidney holds what's called Jing — essence, vitality, the genetic inheritance passed down from parents. It's also central to fluid metabolism, to women's hormonal health, and to the symptoms that show up around perimenopause. Overworking shows up in the lower back, right where the kidneys are. Nourishing them means not constantly depleting them.

✦ The ear is a map of the entire body — and you can use it right now. The concept of the ear as a micro-system of the body — where every part of the physical body is reflected — is why auricular acupuncture works, and why ear seeds are trending. Dr. Chan pointed out that the vagus nerve runs through the ear, which explains the shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic that people feel when the ear is stimulated. Her simplest tip: massage your ears. "If someone asks what's one thing they can do," she said, "I tell them touch your ears."

I loved asking Dr. Felice Chan about the wellness things we see everywhere — the cold plunges, the daily electrolyte packets, the creatine and hearing her break them down through a Chinese medicine lens.

On cold plunges: in TCM, cold is generally not something you want to introduce to the body without context. If you're on your period, if you naturally run cold, the cold plunge is working against you. What she actually values is the contrast — sauna followed by cold because it's the shift between the two that moves energy and stimulates the body, not the cold alone.

On electrolyte packets: in Chinese medicine, thirst isn't just about how much water you're drinking — it's about blood deficiency. If you're constantly thirsty, your blood is depleted, and no electrolyte packet addresses that at the root. Bone broth, red meat, foods that actually nourish blood, that's the TCM answer.

On creatine: it rushes water to the muscles and in the process taxes the kidneys. What's been researched on men who are bodybuilding doesn't automatically translate to what's right for a woman's body.

The Chinese Medicine approach is not about "this is bad," but it answers the question, "does your body actually need this, and are you listening to what it's telling you?"

If this conversation opened something up for you, there's more where this came from.

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