About Tim Sibbald
Tim is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, specializing in Acupuncture, Moxibustion, Herbal Formulas, and Tuina Massage. He has been educated in both the Western and Traditional Chinese medical systems, having earned degrees from Queen's University (B.Sc. Life Sciences) and the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (B.Med. Traditional Chinese Medicine). He is fluent in English and Mandarin, and is an accomplished teacher of martial arts, qigong, and meditation, having studied extensively with some of the world's top lineage grandmasters in the Chen style Tai Chi and Xinyi LiuHe internal systems for over 12 years.
Background
Tim's journey to health and healing (through traditional Chinese arts) has been an indirect one: growing up the son of a Western doctor and a pharmacist, his early life was spent dismissing alternative medicines as placebo. It was only after seeing first-hand the effects of the internal arts and T.C.M. treatment that he began to educate himself to their value.
Having always prided himself on being an evidence-based researcher, he realized that, not only was his prejudice against traditional medicines not founded on any clinical or experiential evidence, but in fact, the opposite was true: the sheer volume of evidence that exists in favour of T.C.M.’s efficacy was, and continues to be, overwhelming. (Clinical trials have been a focus of TCM in China for the last century: hundreds of thousands of them have been conducted, studying the effects of thousands of both individual herbs and base formulas. Pharmacology and toxicology studies for every prescribable Chinese medicine are also readily available.)
This realization, coupled with a growing sense of the inadequacies of the Western medical approach, led Tim to devote a decade of his life to the study of Chinese Medicine, including an eight year stay in the People’s Republic of China. He spent three years in Beijing (studying the Mandarin dialect) before moving to Shanghai to enrol in a five-year Mandarin-language, dual-degree medical program (in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture/Tuina). During this process, he was taught traditional Chinese herbs, formulas, acupuncture, moxibustion, and tuina therapeutic massage as well as Western medical theory and practice in internal and surgical medicine.
After completing his medical degree, he was selected to enter into a fast-tracked graduate degree program. After attending university for 12 straight years, however, he decided it was finally time to put into practice his acquired knowledge and skills and in 2011, after having studied in a half-dozen hospitals under in Shanghai, he returned to Canada and set up his current practice in downtown Toronto.
About This Website
Traditional Chinese Medicine has always been evidence-based. Those lucky enough to travel to some of the TCM libraries in mainland China have access to hundreds of thousands of volumes of research detailing thousands of years of recorded evidence in many different discipline of Chinese medicine.
This information isn’t limited to a Chinese understanding; detailed descriptions of the numerous active ingredients, concentrations, pharmacological actions, toxicities, and clinical studies of over 9000 of the most common Chinese medicines have been readily available for decades, as has information relating to anatomical and physiological evidence of acupoints and meridians, and clinical studies of acupuncture, tuina therapy, moxibustion, and many other Chinese treatment methods.
Much of this information is not yet available in the Western world. This website is designed to provide those interested with tools to further study and propagate this millennia-old tradition.