Meet Dr. Jordan Barber

Dr. Stephen Jackowicz, PhD, known in the lineage as Zhang Yuanfu (張圓福), a 19th-generation holder. He took Dr. Barber on privately across the whole of it: medicine, martial practice, cultivation, and close reading of the Daoist canon alongside the classical medical texts. Treatment technique came with it, including KyoJung, a Korean structural bodywork system he certified in through the Institute for Classical Asian Studies in 2008. Dr. Barber later studied as a student of the Dao at Parting Clouds Temple, in the line that traces back to Jian Fu Gong on Qingcheng Mountain, Sichuan.

KyoJung works from the principle that correcting the structure corrects the channels, using assisted stretching, propping, and direct hands-on work. It is the basis of the manual treatment he does alongside needling. Reading the source texts in the original, rather than through a modern textbook's summary of them, is a habit from the same years.

Andrew and JulieAnn Nugent-Head, who carry the medical half of the system. It descends from Yin Fu, a bodyguard in the Qing imperial court, through his kung fu brother Wen Peiting, a Yu Yi or imperial physician, to Dr. Xie Peiqi (1920–2003) in Beijing. Late in his life Xie handed the martial teaching to others and taught the medicine and bodywork himself. Andrew studied under him directly from 1993.

Two things came out of this. The injury work: torn tissue, nerve damage, joints and backs that have stopped moving, all of it located by palpation before anything else happens. And an internal medicine with its own method of examining a patient, one that follows the classical texts more closely than the pattern categories taught in a modern TCM program. It gives him a second way to read a case when the standard one does not fit what he is finding.

Also with Andrew and JulieAnn Nugent-Head, in Asheville. Their herbal training came out of nearly three decades in China with physicians born and educated before 1949, principally Prof. Li Hongxiang (1924–2017) of Beijing, who named Andrew his closing-door disciple, the last student a master formally accepts.

Prescribing from what each herb does on its own terms — its nature, its flavor, and the direction it moves things — with the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing as the reference point rather than a modern materia medica. Formulas get built for the patient in front of him.

Prof. Huang Huang of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, the leading modern figure in the jingfang revival, and Prof. Salustino Wong, who trained under Huang Huang from 1998 and now teaches the method in Europe. Jingfang means the classical prescriptions: the formulas recorded in the Han dynasty Shang Han Za Bing Lun and the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing.

Each of those formulas was written for a specific clinical presentation, and the study is in the reasoning underneath it. Why a formula is built the way it is, what each modification recorded in the text was answering, and how the formulas relate to each other as one coherent system. That is what makes it possible to adjust a prescription with intent instead of adding herbs to it.