Section Editor Clinical Practice

Velia Wortman Chow was born in Mexico City of Canadian and Chinese parents and grew up in Cuba and Puerto Rico. After completing a BA in Social Anthropology at the University of Toronto, she went on to read medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London, UK. In 1978, through membership in the Society for Anglo–Chinese Understanding (SACU), she visited China as part of a delegation of students and workers, where she came into direct contact with traditional Chinese medicine and culture. Postgraduate training in pediatrics and family medicine followed in Hanover and Erlangen, Germany. After opening her private practice in 1991, she renewed her ties with Chinese medicine and began studying at the Anglo-Dutch College in the Netherlands with Ted Kaptchuk; from 1998 to the present she has taught herbal medicine and acupuncture courses at this institute. Other teaching commitments include visiting lecturer in complementary medicine at the medical schools of the University of Erlangen and Munich and guest lecturer at the TCM Klinik Steigerwald. She is founding editor of Orientations, the Journal of the Anglo-Dutch Institute of Oriental Medicine and co-author of two books: Death: Medical, Spiritual and Social Care of the Dying (Free University Press, Amsterdam) and Pocket Atlas of Acupuncture (Thieme Publishers, Stuttgart). Velia lives in Fürth, Germany and forms the Chinese medicine half of a practice for integrated medicine in Nuremberg.