Yi-Ching Lee, MD 李宜靜
also written as Yi-Jing Lee
Physician of Chinese and Western Medicine, Taiwan
I am licensed in both Chinese and Western medicine in Taiwan, with more than ten years of clinical practice. I founded Yun Jiu TCM Clinic in Kaohsiung, and I write and teach under the name Yuanshengyan（原生顏）.
My work begins at the face and asks a question about the body: why do two people of the same age grow older differently, and what does that difference tell us about how much capacity for repair each of them still has?
What I work on
Facial aging is my clinical entry point. It is not the whole of what I study.
People come to me because they look tired, or older than they feel. Chinese medicine has never examined only one thing at a time, so I find myself asking a wider question: is this age alone, or are sleep, nutrition, stress, illness and the shape of someone’s daily life also part of what I am looking at?
Over ten years I have observed that people with more physiological reserve tend to be more stable in appearance, and to recover more predictably after treatment. This is a clinical observation. It is not a demonstrated causal relationship. But it has produced the question I am still working on: after similar treatment, why do the degree of improvement, the speed of recovery and the duration of effect differ so much between individuals?
I use the term repair capacity（修復力） for this. It describes the body’s ability to recover, adjust and remain stable across different ages, loads and living conditions. It is a working concept for organising clinical questions and for talking with patients. It is not a validated physiological mechanism, and it is not yet something I can measure.
What I mean by natural anti-aging
Not doing nothing, and not refusing medicine or aesthetic treatment.
It is an order of judgement: understand what is happening before deciding whether to intervene; find the real problem before choosing a method that is necessary, appropriate, efficient and sustainable.
Sometimes the better option is to do less, to do it later, to do something else, or not to do it this year. When a problem is better handled by another discipline, I say so, rather than reaching for the tool I happen to be good at.
What I object to is not treatment. It is treatment stacked on top of treatment without anyone first asking what the actual problem is — and appearance anxiety being manufactured first, so that more procedures can be sold as the answer.
How I handle evidence
Everything I say publicly is sorted onto the same ladder:
| Established knowledge | Published literature, cited |
| Verifiable fact | Training, licensure, years in practice |
| Clinical observation | What I have seen, with its scope stated |
| Working hypothesis | What I am testing, and expect to be wrong about sometimes |
| Future direction | What I intend, not what I have done |
I keep the cases that did not improve, and the ones that did not behave the way I predicted. A body of work that records only its successes accumulates a large survivorship sample rather than usable knowledge.
If the evidence eventually does not support the classifications I currently use, I will revise them or set them aside. A framework exists to make clinical judgement more efficient. If it has no predictive value, preserving it intact serves no one.
What I am not claiming
- Not scientifically established. I am turning clinical observation into systematic records, working toward something that can be tested.
- Not a mature or reproducible system. It is a developing clinical framework.
- No success rates, no “years younger”, no guaranteed duration. Without a study design and statistics behind them, those numbers should not be stated.
- Not the first, not the only, not an authority in this field.
- No institutional endorsement. My roles in professional societies are facts about my background. They are not endorsements of my methods.
Credentials
- Licensed physician of Chinese medicine and of Western medicine, Taiwan — Ministry of Health and Welfare
- Founder and Director, Yun Jiu TCM Clinic, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
- Director — Taiwan Facial Acupuncture Society
- Senior Teaching Assistant — Taiwan Facial Acupuncture Society
- Director, 8th term — Taiwan Association of Chinese Medicine Pediatrics
Clinical experience: more than ten years in practice, with facial acupuncture as a primary clinical focus for close to ten of them.
In the press
- The Icons, London — 30 September 2026. A Natural Approach to Ageing Begins with Understanding the Body: Yuan Sheng Yan Founder Dr Yi-Jing Lee on Building the Conditions for Recovery Before Choosing an Intervention. Published in English, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.
- AlleyPin — 11 September 2026. An interview on using AI to handle online patient enquiries at the clinic, in Chinese: article and video.
A running list is kept on the press page (in Chinese).
What I am working on
Most facial rejuvenation frameworks in use today are built on non-Asian, or female-dominant, datasets. The question I am working on is this: how might the dominant aging pattern of an Asian patient guide the planning of facial acupuncture — and how do those patterns differ again between Asian men and women?
That question has been written up as a narrative review, currently in peer discussion. The framework it proposes is explicitly hypothesis-generating: a clinically derived way of organising the question, which needs validation in stratified prospective studies before it can be called anything more than that.
Where a conversation would be useful
I am less interested in being introduced as an expert than in comparing notes. A few questions I would genuinely like to discuss:
- Clinicians and educators — How do you decide? Not what you do, but what makes you choose one layer, one tool, or no treatment at all. I currently teach this to physicians in Taiwan, and I have not yet found many places to compare it across languages.
- Practitioners treating Asian faces outside Asia — Most teaching material in English is built on Caucasian facial structure. If you treat Asian patients, what have you had to work out on your own? I would like to know what you found.
- Colleagues in other specialties — I have been asking dentists, ENT surgeons and structural therapists the questions I cannot answer from inside Chinese medicine, and publishing their answers under their own names. I am always looking for the next question worth asking.
- Publishers and media — My first book, in traditional Chinese, is in preparation.
I am not looking for patients through this page.
