Traditional Chinese medicine is everywhere.
“Chinese medicine is individualized—that’s the part TikTok can’t really capture.”
Good morning or afternoon everyone, depending on if you’re still in bed. I picked up a copy of Strangers last night at Community Bookstore and finished half of it before falling asleep.
Today’s newsletter includes: The rising interest in traditional Chinese medicine, New York City school kids are using peptides, Produce Pete died, and another bestselling newsletter on Substack is moving to Ghost.
Browsing and posting roles on the Feed Me Job Board is free. Hiring teams at The RealReal, Cassandra Grey and Jess Graves, and The New York Times all use it.
Of the hundreds of 2026 predictions in the Feed Me chat at the start of the month, the one I’ve consistently heard about the most is the rising interest in Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM.
TCM is a system of diagnosis and treatment that has been practiced in China for thousands of years, to do with balancing the flow of energy (qi) in the body. It includes acupuncture, cupping, herbal medicine, Gua sha, food therapy, reflexology and other modalities. This sudden wave of cultural interest in TCM — from outside communities that have long practiced it — can be partially explained by America’s broader surge in health consciousness and curiosity around alternative medicine. This interest has also been fueled by TikTok creators like sherryxiiruii, a self-proclaimed “chinese baddie drinking hot water” who has racked up millions of views on her videos.
I’ve dabbled in acupuncture before. Back in February of 2024, I wrote about seeing a Chinese medicine doctor in Los Angeles who, upon putting his hands on my body, told me I needed to kill my boss. When I told him that I was my boss, he laughed. I’ve been curious about the practice since.
And I’m not alone. On January 6th, Courtney Wittich (the writer behind bathing-focused newsletter S.P.A. ) posted a note that read “everyone will become a traditional Chinese medicine expert in 2026.” Wittich told me that a return to more “ancient” practices was inevitable, and that she sees parallels between TCM and the world of bathing. Lily Sperry, from popular wellness newsletter Health Gossip, has also touched on TCM in her writing. She says she attributes it to “1. a broader interest in finding natural alternatives to injectables, peptides, etc (where bone broth = ‘nature’s Botox’), 2. a natural pushback to the bio-hacky, hyper-optimization culture that we’ve been steeped in for the past few years, and 3. especially for women, a renewed interest in cyclical living (one of TCM’s core principles).”
A popular TikTok meme has people filming themselves doing TCM-coded things, like drinking hot water before bed along with the caption “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” These remarks can veer into tastelessness; Giggly Squad’s Paige DeSorbo joked on a recent episode that she was “diagnosed as Chinese,” and there has been some online criticism of white wellness creators for latching onto these practices in superficial ways and recommending them as if they discovered them for the first time.
I spoke to herbalist Fang Lian who works at Lin Sister, an herb shop and Chinese Medicine practice that has been open in New York’s Chinatown since 1986. Lian said they’ve recently been inundated with new traffic. “The store has seen a significant rise in customers,” he told me over email. “We started capping the amount of consultations we can do with one herbalist to 35-40 a day.” They currently have a notification on their website that reads, “Each day, we may have to turn away walk-in patients as early as 11am, due to high volume. Wait times may be as long as 5 hours.”