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"The clinician's job isn't to create dependence. It's to build patient understanding and capacity so people can navigate the disruptions that life is going to throw at them, with or without me in the room."

— Dr. Yaron Cohen, DAOM

A science kid who took a detour through philosophy.

Yaron, thanks for doing this. Let's start at the beginning. Most people in our community know you as the digestive health guy — the constipation specialist. But that's not where you started. Take us back.

I was a science kid. Curious about everything, how the body worked, why systems behaved the way they did, what the actual mechanism was underneath the symptom. I assumed I'd be a medical doctor. That was the path. Premed at the University of Maryland.

But I majored in philosophy, which felt strange to people at the time. Friends would ask me why I was reading Aristotle when I was supposed to be memorizing the Krebs cycle. The honest answer is that philosophy taught me to think — really think. To question my assumptions, to follow an argument all the way down, to be suspicious of conclusions that arrived too easily.

It turned out to be the best clinical training I ever had. I just didn't know it yet.

So how did Chinese medicine even enter the picture? It's a pretty hard left turn from premed.

Senior year. I stumbled into a description of traditional East Asian medicine and something just clicked. Here was a system that thought about the body the way I'd been trained to think as an interconnected whole, with patterns, feedback loops, and dynamic relationships. Not a collection of organs you treat in isolation.

It was naturalistic. It was systems-based. It had been refined over thousands of years of clinical observation. And this is the part that surprised me  when I started reading more deeply, the modern research was catching up. The mechanisms were starting to be explained in language a Western-trained physiologist could recognize.

I remember thinking, "If this is real, if these patterns actually predict clinical outcomes — then why is nobody I know talking about it?" That question is what got me on the plane to California.

Yo San University and the California rigor

Yo San University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Los Angeles is one of the historically rigorous training institutions in the United States. California has long held the highest licensure standards for acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine among states in the country, and Yo San's master's program reflects that, with extensive coursework in classical theory, herbal pharmacology, and biomedicine, and a heavy clinical-internship requirement. Yaron earned his Master of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine there before bringing the medicine back east.

California training, then bringing it home.

Yo San. What was that like, day to day? People in our community sometimes ask what real Chinese medicine training actually looks like, because the reputation of the field varies wildly depending on where you are.

It was demanding. The standards were high — not just in terms of memorization, but in how seriously the medicine was taken. Faculty expected you to be able to defend a diagnosis. Why is this a pattern of liver qi stagnation and not damp-heat in the middle burner? What's your differential? What do you do if your first formula doesn't move the needle in two weeks?

That kind of clinical accountability is something I think about all the time now. Especially when I'm training students at VUIM. It's easy to learn the names of patterns. It's harder and more important to learn how to interrogate your own thinking when a patient isn't responding.

The other thing California gave me was a real love of teaching. I served as a senior intern, and I noticed that explaining the medicine to a younger student was the fastest way for me to understand it more deeply. That hasn't changed. Teaching is still how I learn.

And then you came back east. Why?

Family, and a sense that this medicine could fill some pretty enormous gaps in the healthcare system here. The East Coast has world-class hospitals, but the integrative side of the field is less developed. People are walking out of gastroenterology offices with a diagnosis of "functional constipation" and a vague suggestion to drink more water. They're being told their bowels are unfixable. That's not acceptable to me.

I opened Wise Wellness in Kensington, Maryland. Cash-pay, integrative, focused increasingly over the years on digestive health. And I started teaching at VUIM, because if I'm honest, you can only see so many patients in a week. If I want to actually move the needle on how this medicine is practiced in this country, I have to train the people who are going to be in clinic ten years from now.

— Dr. Yaron Cohen

Why constipation is a real clinical problem.

Why constipation? Of all the things you could specialize in, why this?

Because it's everywhere, and almost nobody is treating it well. Chronic constipation is one of the most common reasons people see a gastroenterologist, and the standard tools — fiber, osmotic laxatives, prokinetic drugs — work for a subset of people but leave a huge population stuck.

Meanwhile, the downstream consequences pile up. Sluggish bowels are connected to mood, sleep, hormonal balance, immune function, and inflammation. There's no organ system the gut doesn't talk to. So if you can actually move the needle on someone's bowel regularity in a sustainable way — without making them dependent on a laxative for the rest of their life — you're touching a lot of other systems at the same time.

It's also clinically interesting. East Asian medicine has been thinking carefully about bowel ecology for a very long time. There's a deep classical literature on it, and now there's a rapidly growing body of modern research on the microbiome, on enteric nervous system function, on motility patterns. Sitting in the middle of those two literatures is a fascinating place to practice.

You presented research on this at the DAOM Research Symposium and at the 3rd Scientific TCM Congress in Switzerland. What did you find?

The capstone project was a literature review of randomized controlled trials on the treatment of constipation with traditional Chinese medicine. I won't bore everyone with the methodology, but the headline is that there is a real signal there. The body of trial evidence is uneven, like it is in most areas of complementary medicine, but for several core formulas and acupuncture protocols, there are credible RCTs showing meaningful improvement in bowel frequency and symptom severity.

The challenge is that randomized trials don't tend to capture the part of the medicine I find most powerful, which is differential diagnosis. Chinese medicine doesn't treat "constipation." It treats this person's pattern of constipation — heat-driven, qi-deficient, blood-deficient, cold-stagnant. So a trial that lumps everyone with chronic constipation into one arm is going to underestimate what a careful clinician can do.

That's a methodological problem the field is starting to take seriously. It was great to present in Switzerland and see how international colleagues are thinking about it.

Tell us about Unburden — the program you're developing.

Unburden is a structured digestive health program built around what I've seen actually work in clinic over more than fifteen years. It's specifically focused on chronic constipation and bowel regularity, and it's organized around teaching the patient rather than just dosing them.

By the end of it, somebody should understand their own digestive pattern, know what their personal triggers are, know which interventions work for their pattern and which don't, and have a sustainable maintenance practice they can carry forward. That's the goal. Not "fixed forever,"  that's a fantasy. But equipped to navigate it.

Three ideas that organize his practice.

Teaching, writing, and the next generation.

You're Director of Clinical Education at VUIM. What does that role actually involve, and why does it matter to you?

It involves overseeing how students transition from the classroom to clinical work. That's the hardest part of the curriculum, and the most consequential. Anyone can pass a test. Not everyone can sit across from a real human being who is suffering and ask the right questions, listen to the answers, build a coherent diagnosis, and explain it back in language that the patient can use.

A 2025 article I co-authored in Medical Acupuncture got into some of the structural questions about how acupuncture schools currently train clinicians, and where the gaps are. We have to keep raising the standard.

Why it matters to me — honestly, this medicine is too good to be practiced badly. And the only way to ensure it's practiced well at scale is to invest in the people coming up behind us.

You're a co-author on Hidden River: The Lost Science of Gut Ecology, and you've got a new book in the works called Eat Real. What can people expect from that one?

Eat Real is a practical, diet-focused book. The basic idea is simple: most of the food people eat is so heavily processed that the body doesn't recognize it as food in the first place. Before we get into elaborate elimination diets or trendy macros, we should probably just eat actual food.

It's meant to be usable. Not aspirational, not aesthetic, not built around products somebody is selling. Just clear principles, with enough physiology behind them to explain why they matter.

Last question. If somebody in our community is reading this and dealing with chronic gut issues — what's the one thing you'd want them to walk away with?

That your symptoms are not a personal failing. They're a pattern, and patterns can be read.

If you've been told your bowels are "just like that," that your fatigue is "just stress," that your bloating is "all in your head" — please get a second opinion from someone trained to take the whole pattern seriously. East Asian medicine is one of those second opinions, and there are good clinicians out there. You are not stuck with what you've been told so far.

And if you're in a community like this one — keep learning. Knowledge is the most durable thing you can build for yourself.

Dr. Yaron Cohen, DAOM

Dr. Yaron Cohen, DAOM, MATCM, L.Ac., Dipl.OM., is an integrative digestive health clinician, educator, author, and speaker with more than 15 years of clinical experience. He is the founder of Wise Wellness in Kensington, Maryland, a cash-pay integrative practice focused on digestive health and constipation, and Director of Clinical Education at Virginia University of Integrative Medicine, where he is also a faculty member.

He earned his Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine at VUIM, his Master of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine at Yo San University in Los Angeles, and his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently licensed in Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, and Georgia, with additional licensure in progress in New Jersey and New York. He holds the Diplomate of Oriental Medicine credential through NCCAOM.

In 2025, Yaron presented his capstone research, Treatment of Constipation with Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Literature Review of Randomized Controlled Trials, at the DAOM Research Symposium and at the 3rd Scientific TCM Congress in Switzerland. He is a co-author of a 2025 article in Medical Acupuncture on clinical training in acupuncture schools, and a co-author of Hidden River: The Lost Science of Gut Ecology. His next book, Eat Real, is in development.

He is also developing Unburden, a structured digestive health program focused on chronic constipation and bowel regularity.

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