Convergence: Three Ways of Seeing One Body
Where Chinese, Systems, and Network Medicine Meet
In Brief
Three ways of systems thinking speak different languages but describe the same truth: Chinese Medicine sees “qi deficiency with stagnation,” Systems Medicine identifies “allostatic load,” Network Medicine maps “disrupted connectivity”—all pointing to systemic imbalance requiring systemic healing.
Chinese medicine: Alice’s symptoms reflect organ network disharmony—liver, spleen, and kidney systems failing to coordinate, requiring restoration of smooth qi flow and fundamental reserves.
Systems medicine: Alice shows profound allostatic load from cancer treatment creating cascading disruptions—chronic inflammation, gut dysbiosis, mitochondrial damage, stress system hypervigilance.
Network medicine: Alice’s symptoms cluster as expressions of disrupted biological networks—neuroinflammatory, gut-brain-immune, and neuroendocrine-immune networks all requiring “rewiring” of healthy connectivity.
Integration creates a semi-permeable membrane allowing insights to flow between traditions while preserving their distinctiveness—scientific precision serving pattern recognition, pattern recognition serving the whole person.
Alice needs practitioners who see her symptoms not as separate problems but as expressions of systemic disruption—whether called qi stagnation, allostatic load, or network perturbation matters less than recognizing the need for whole-system support.
Three Languages, One Body: When Different Traditions Converge
Alice sits in her car after her latest palliative care appointment, staring at the updated prescription slip for gabapentin. The visit had followed the familiar script: neuropathy symptoms discussed, pain levels assessed on the 1-10 scale, medication dose adjusted upward to manage the burning in her hands and feet. Competent care for a specific complaint, but she can’t shake the growing sense that something fundamental is still being missed.
As we explored in our previous post, Alice’s experience reveals the limitations of whack-a-mole medicine. Her fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, sleep problems, and digestive issues aren’t separate problems requiring separate solutions—they’re expressions of systemic disruption that requires systemic thinking.
But what does systems thinking actually look like in practice? Different healing traditions have developed sophisticated ways of understanding complex illness, each with its own language, methods, and insights. In our minds, three approaches stand out for their ability to see Alice’s situation whole: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Systems Medicine, and Network Medicine.
At first glance, these three approaches seem to speak very different languages—one talks about qi and organ networks, another focuses on biomarkers and allostatic load, the third maps molecular interactions and connectivity patterns. Yet when we look closely at Alice’s case through each lens, something remarkable emerges: they’re not rivals describing different realities, but three dialects describing the same truth about what has happened to her body.
Making the Wall Permeable
In an earlier essay, we described the invisible wall that divides Western biomedicine from traditional systems like Chinese medicine. Alice’s story shows how damaging that wall can be: ten specialists, ten fragments of truth, no whole picture.
What we discover when we examine these three approaches is that convergence offers a path forward—not by erasing differences or forcing false equivalences, but by creating what we might call a semi-permeable membrane between them. Information and insight flow between traditions without collapsing into sameness. Molecules and forests. Data and narratives. Networks and lived experience. Integration, not isolation, becomes the norm.
Chinese medicine is, in many ways, a sophisticated form of systems and network medicine—it has always operated under principles remarkably similar to what we now call network science, but expresses these insights through different language and methods. The goal isn’t to prove one approach superior to another, but to leverage whatever approach most resonates with a patient and provides the clearest path forward. This often requires drawing from the language and insights of multiple systems, recognizing their substantial overlaps while honoring their unique contributions.
The Chinese Medicine Lens: Reading the Pattern
A practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine would sit across from Alice and listen, observe, smell, and feel—not just to her current symptoms, but also to the sound of her voice, the words she uses, how she carries herself, the smell of her breath, the color of her complexion, the look of her tongue and eyes, the warmth of her abdomen, hands, and feet, and the feel of her pulses. What emerges is not a list of disease diagnoses, but of patterns—patterns of function, dysfunction, and disharmony in Alice’s life force.
Life force is yang qi; it is the foundational fire of being alive*.* When the life force becomes low, patterns develop related to cold, including slow circulation, metabolism, digestion, energy, healing, and fertility. It is the root issue in this case - the profound fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest. Her clouded and slow mind. Digestive sensitivity that appeared after treatment. Cold hands and feet. Morning joint stiffness that gradually loosens. Her vital energy, once robust enough to maintain smooth function across all systems, has been depleted by the intensity of chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy.
These patterns extend beyond the present post-treatment Alice, as they developed over time. In the Chinese medicine framework, her body first fell out of balance potentially years ago, creating conditions for cancer to develop. The tumor then disrupted her system. Finally, the treatment itself created further disruption. This kind of complexity goes beyond localized issues in a single organ or a combination of organs. The particular combination of symptoms suggests disharmony in entire organ systems—especially the liver, spleen, and kidney systems.
Alice’s Symptoms and Chinese Medicine Pattern
Primary Pattern: Spleen and Kidney Yang Deficiency with Liver Qi Stagnation and Dampness
Spleen Qi/Yang Deficiency:
Profound fatigue unrelieved by rest
Brain fog, difficulty concentrating
Weight gain (30 pounds)
Muscle mass loss
Digestive sensitivity to foods (bloating, discomfort)
Loose stools (implied by digestive issues)
Cold sensitivity requiring extra layers
Dampness accumulation (weight, foggy thinking, oral thrush/plaques)
Kidney Yang Deficiency:
Bone-deep exhaustion
Temperature dysregulation (extreme cold sensitivity)
Premature aging (”aged a decade in months”)
Inability to recover vitality
Loss of constitutional reserves
Liver Qi Stagnation (with Heat):
Anxiety (first time in her life)
Racing mind at bedtime
Body aches and pains
Mood disturbance
Autoimmune flares (hepatitis, lichen planus)
Skin lesions (raised red spots)
Oral lichen planus (white plaques)
Feeling “stuck” between cure and healing
Blood Deficiency/Stagnation:
Neuropathy (numbness, tingling, burning in hands and feet)
Dropping platelet counts
Hair loss
Damp-Heat:
Elevated liver enzymes
Prediabetes/rising blood sugar
Elevated blood pressure
Skin lesions
Thrush that didn’t respond to treatment
Inflammatory markers occasionally trending upward
Secondary Patterns:
Heart involvement (requiring cardiac monitoring, medications)
Yin deficiency (restless, unrestorative sleep; racing mind)
Environmental hypersensitivity (weather changes, perfumes, temperature)
From this perspective, Alice’s constellation of symptoms isn’t mysterious. It’s the predictable result of a system whose fundamental energy has been depleted faster than it can be replenished, creating bottlenecks that cascade through multiple networks. The treatment depleted yang qi while creating toxic heat, leaving her cold and exhausted but also inflamed. The body can’t transform and transport properly (spleen), lacks deep reserves (kidney), and has blockages preventing smooth flow (liver).
The path forward isn’t about suppressing individual symptoms, but about restoring flow and rebuilding reserves. This might involve acupuncture to help qi circulate more smoothly, herbal formulas designed to simultaneously nourish deficiency and clear stagnation, and lifestyle practices that work with natural rhythms rather than against them.
The goal is to coach Alice’s system to return to harmony and maintain its own balance, which will treat all of her symptoms simultaneously. In Chinese medicine, there is no true separation between systems or between mind and body. We organize the body into systems to make sense of it, but every treatment impacts all systems.
Whether this framework describes something real about the body or simply offers a valuable metaphor for organizing treatment remains an open question. What is not in question is its persistence: while Chinese medicine may seem outdated or overly simplistic to a casual observer, its ability to comprehend bodily complexity and make subtle corrections to restore order remains one of its most powerful aspects—which is why it continues to be practiced across the globe, not just in its places of origin. Over 170 WHO member states now report on the use of traditional and complementary medicine, acupuncture is practiced in more than 100 countries, and in many industrialized nations, 40-70% of the population have used such modalities. The global Traditional Chinese Medicine market, now worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is projected to grow at 7-8% annually in coming years. When one begins to examine Chinese medicine, its sophistication and nuance quickly become clear.
The Systems Medicine Lens: Mapping the Load
A physician trained in systems medicine would approach Alice’s case with a different set of tools, but arrives at remarkably similar insights. Looking beyond her “normal” lab ranges, they might order more sophisticated testing: inflammatory cytokine panels, cortisol rhythm analysis, comprehensive micronutrient assessment, gut microbiome analysis, and advanced cardiac and autonomic testing.
What they’re likely to find is a body under profound allostatic load—the accumulated wear and tear of a system that has been pushed far beyond its adaptive capacity. Alice’s cancer treatment represented an unprecedented challenge: her immune system was chemically suppressed while simultaneously being asked to mount an inflammatory response against cancer cells. Her detoxification pathways were overwhelmed by processing high-dose chemotherapy. Her stress response system was chronically activated by the physical and emotional demands of fighting for her life.
Each individual challenge might have been manageable. But their accumulation created a cascade of biological disruptions that persist long after the treatment ended. Her gut microbiome, decimated by chemotherapy, struggles to produce the neurotransmitters and immune modulators that support stable mood and energy. Her mitochondria, damaged by oxidative stress, can’t produce energy efficiently, leading to the profound fatigue that rest doesn’t restore. Her stress response system, exhausted from months of hypervigilance, alternates between anxious activation and depleted shutdown.
Her thyroid failure, liver inflammation, and autoimmune symptoms aren’t separate diseases—they’re different expressions of a system-wide inflammatory state that her body can no longer regulate effectively. Even her “normal” lab values tell a story of a body working heroically to maintain the appearance of function while burning through its deepest reserves.
The systems medicine approach focuses on reducing the load while rebuilding capacity. This might involve targeted nutritional support to help her cells produce energy more efficiently, interventions to restore her gut microbiome and reduce systemic inflammation, carefully timed light exposure and activity to help reset her circadian rhythms, and stress management techniques to help her nervous system learn to down-regulate.
The Network Medicine Lens: Tracing the Connections
Network medicine would frame her Alice’s situation in terms of disrupted connectivity. Recent advances in network science have revealed that health and disease don’t arise from isolated problems in single organs, but from perturbations in the intricate webs of communication that coordinate biological function.
Alice’s post-cancer syndrome isn’t a collection of separate symptoms—it’s what network scientists would recognize as a disease module, a cluster of disrupted connections that affects multiple biological networks simultaneously. Her symptoms cluster together because they arise from disruptions in overlapping networks that normally coordinate immune function, energy production, stress response, and tissue repair.
The neuroinflammatory network that connects her immune system, brain, and nervous system has become chronically activated, explaining why her fatigue, brain fog, mood changes, and sleep problems all seem interconnected. The gut-brain-immune axis that usually maintains the delicate balance between immune surveillance and tolerance has been disrupted, creating both digestive sensitivity and systemic inflammation. The neuroendocrine-immune network that coordinates her stress response, hormone production, and immune function is stuck in patterns of dysregulation that reinforce each other.
What makes network medicine particularly insightful is its recognition that these aren’t design flaws—they’re features of biological systems that usually promote resilience. The same networks that allow rapid, coordinated responses to acute threats can become problematic when they remain chronically activated. Alice’s various symptoms aren’t evidence of multiple system failures, but of a few key networks that have lost their ability to return to baseline.
From this perspective, healing requires network rewiring—interventions that can help her biological networks remember how to coordinate effectively. This might involve treatments that work at multiple network nodes simultaneously, rather than targeting individual symptoms. Like rebooting a complex computer system, the goal is to help her networks reset to healthier patterns of connectivity and communication.
Three Voices, One Story
What emerges when we listen to all three perspectives is not contradiction, but harmony—like hearing the same musical theme played in different keys. Where Chinese medicine describes qi deficiency, systems medicine sees loss of adaptive capacity, and network medicine maps disrupted energy-producing networks. Where Chinese medicine identifies stagnation, systems medicine detects inflammatory burden and sluggish detoxification, and network medicine reveals blocked information flow between networks. Where Chinese medicine recognizes organ network disharmony, systems medicine measures multi-system allostatic load, and network medicine traces cascade failures across biological modules.
Each framework uses its own vocabulary, but they’re describing the same phenomenon: a living system that has lost its capacity for dynamic balance and needs support to remember how to coordinate its own healing.
More importantly, each approach offers insights that the others might miss:
Chinese medicine provides sophisticated pattern recognition honed over centuries of clinical observation. It can detect imbalances years before they show up in conventional testing and offers a nuanced understanding of how different aspects of health influence each other over time.
Systems medicine grounds healing in measurable biological processes and provides tools for tracking progress objectively. It can identify specific biochemical disruptions and design targeted interventions to address root causes rather than just managing symptoms.
Network medicine reveals why seemingly disparate symptoms cluster together and why treating them individually often fails. It suggests intervention strategies that can shift multiple aspects of health simultaneously by targeting key network hubs and connections.
Alice’s Convergent Diagnosis
When we weave these three perspectives together, Alice’s situation becomes not a medical mystery but a coherent story of disrupted integration seeking restoration:
Her fatigue reflects qi deficiency (Chinese medicine), mitochondrial dysfunction and adrenal exhaustion (systems medicine), and disrupted energy-production networks (network medicine)—all pointing toward the same reality: her cells can’t produce energy efficiently anymore.
Her brain fog suggests spirit not being properly anchored by blood (Chinese medicine), neuroinflammation and impaired neurotransmitter production (systems medicine), and dysfunction in brain-gut-immune communication networks (network medicine)—convergent evidence that her nervous system isn’t getting the support it needs to function clearly.
Her digestive issues indicate spleen qi deficiency and dampness (Chinese medicine), gut dysbiosis and intestinal permeability (systems medicine), and disruption of the gut-brain axis (network medicine)—three ways of describing how her body’s ability to transform nutrients into usable energy has been compromised.
Her autoimmune symptoms reflect aspects of liver qi stagnation and heat (Chinese medicine), chronic inflammation and loss of immune tolerance (systems medicine), and perturbations in immune regulatory networks (network medicine)—all pointing to a system that has lost the ability to distinguish self from non-self and respond appropriately to genuine threats.
Rather than competing explanations, these become complementary maps of the same territory. The question isn’t which tradition is “right”—it’s how to weave their insights together in service of Alice’s healing.
The Integration Challenge
This convergence is promising, but it also presents challenges. Each framing has developed its own methods, its own standards of evidence, its own ways of validating what works. Chinese medicine relies on centuries of clinical observation and pattern recognition. Systems medicine demands randomized controlled trials and biomarker validation (or, increasingly, N-of-1 experimentation informed by individualized data). Network medicine seeks mathematical rigor and computational confirmation.
The temptation is to try to merge these approaches into one seamless narrative, but their differences matter. Chinese medicine’s strength lies in its intuitive, holistic pattern recognition, but it can seem unmeasurable to Western-trained clinicians. Systems medicine grounds itself in biological mechanisms and measurable outcomes, but risks drowning in data points without seeing the whole person. Network medicine provides mathematical elegance and reveals hidden connections, but can become so abstract that it loses sight of lived human experience.
What Alice needs is not theoretical syncretism—forcing these approaches to become something they’re not—but practical integration that honors the strengths of each while acknowledging their limitations.
Integration in Practice
For Alice, integration might look like a coordinated care approach where practitioners trained in different traditions work together, each bringing their systems-informed perspective to a shared understanding of her healing process:
Her integrative physician draws on network medicine insights to understand why Alice’s symptoms cluster—recognizing that her neuroinflammatory networks, gut-brain-immune axis, and stress-response systems are all disrupted. Using advanced lab testing to identify specific nutritional deficiencies, gut microbiome imbalances, and inflammatory markers, they design interventions that can address multiple network nodes simultaneously rather than targeting isolated pathways. Their treatments might include targeted nutrients that support both mitochondrial function and neurotransmitter production, recognizing these as interconnected network functions.
Her Chinese medicine practitioner already thinks in network terms through the lens of yin yang balance, zang-fu organ networks and qi circulation patterns. They use pulse, tongue, and facial diagnosis with pattern recognition to identify which organ networks are most disrupted and how they’re affecting each other. Their acupuncture point combinations and herbal formulas are selected not just for individual symptoms, but for their ability to restore communication and balance across multiple organ networks simultaneously—essentially “rewiring” healthy patterns of qi flow and organ network coordination.
The key is coordination between these approaches. Alice’s pulse qualities inform her physician’s understanding of which biological networks need support. Her lab results help her acupuncturist understand the biochemical underpinnings of the patterns they’re seeing. Both practitioners recognize that Alice’s emotional and mental health are inseparable from her physical symptoms—not because they need a separate therapist, but because both traditions understand the body-mind as an integrated network.
Rather than working in isolation, this coordinated approach allows each practitioner to contribute their unique lens while reinforcing a unified treatment strategy. When the integrative physician prescribes nutrients to support Alice’s mitochondrial function, they understand how this might enhance the effects of her acupuncturist’s kidney network treatments. When the acupuncturist works to smooth liver qi stagnation, they coordinate with dietary and lifestyle recommendations that support the same systemic patterns through different mechanisms.
Beyond Alice: A New Medical Grammar
What Alice’s story reveals extends far beyond her individual case. The convergence of these three approaches suggests the emergence of a new medical grammar—a shared vocabulary for understanding complex, chronic illness that transcends the boundaries between traditional and modern medicine.
This grammar doesn’t require practitioners to abandon their training or adopt foreign theoretical frameworks. A cardiologist doesn’t need to “believe” in qi to recognize that acupuncture might help their patient’s autonomic nervous system regulate more effectively. A Chinese medicine practitioner doesn’t need to become a biochemist to appreciate that herbal formulas might work through measurable anti-inflammatory pathways. A network researcher doesn’t need to abandon computational rigor to acknowledge that traditional diagnostic methods might be detecting network perturbations that their models haven’t yet mapped.
What it does require is intellectual humility—the recognition that no single approach has all the answers, and that the complexity of human health may require multiple complementary ways of understanding and intervention.
This humility extends to how we understand the frameworks themselves. As the British statistician George Box famously observed, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Box’s insight reminds us that any framework—whether it describes qi networks, allostatic load, or biological connectivity—is ultimately a simplification of reality. No model can capture every detail of a complex system like the human body, and we may never achieve perfect understanding of everything that influences health and illness.
But this limitation doesn’t diminish the value of good models. What we can do is develop the most robust frameworks possible—ones that optimize our ability to adapt, learn, and respond effectively to the complexity we encounter. The goal is not perfection but utility: creating maps that help us navigate the territory of health and healing more skillfully, even as we remain humble about the inevitable gaps in our understanding.
Preparing for a Framework
The convergence of these three perspectives creates both opportunity and challenge. Alice can see that her various symptoms make sense as expressions of systemic disruption, but understanding the problem is different from knowing how to address it practically.
Chinese medicine offers herbal formulas and acupuncture protocols, systems medicine suggests targeted nutritional and lifestyle interventions, and network medicine points toward approaches that can shift multiple network nodes simultaneously. But Alice needs more than a menu of options—she needs a framework that can help her and her practitioners coordinate these different approaches in a way that serves her healing.
This framework, like any useful model, will be imperfect. It cannot capture every nuance of Alice’s unique situation or predict every aspect of her healing journey. But it can provide a practical structure for organizing insights from different traditions, prioritizing interventions, and adapting care as her needs evolve. What matters is not that the framework is flawless, but that it is robust enough to guide real-world decision-making while remaining flexible enough to evolve as we learn more.
This is where we turn to the work of Dr. John Shen, a master clinician from the Chinese medicine tradition who proposed a simple and elegant framework that can be read through Chinese medicine’s eyes, through the integrative lens of systems medicine, and through the connectivity maps of network science. Each tradition fits, and each enriches the others.
In our next exploration, we’ll dive into this framework—not as the final answer, but as a practical map for navigating the territory between illness and health. A way to organize the insights from different traditions into a coherent approach that can guide real healing in the real world.
The convergence of these three approaches points toward new possibilities for understanding complex illness. We now have multiple ways of recognizing how symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, and sleep problems connect through biological systems—whether we call them qi networks, allostatic load, or network perturbations matters less than recognizing the need for systemic approaches.
The question is no longer whether these symptoms are “real” or connected—clearly they are. The question is how to work with the body as the integrated system it truly is, honoring both its complexity and its inherent wisdom for healing. That’s the territory we’ll explore as we turn to a practical framework that can help organize these insights into actionable approaches for real-world healing.