Photo Credit: Ravee Chen

Entrepreneur Ravee Chen uses his traditional Chinese medicine background to develop new and exciting health and wellness startups. While Chen’s parents, Dr. Diana Tong Li and Dr. Franklyn Shi Chen, were building a college dedicated to teaching traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, Ravee consulted with large corporations on their digital needs. Now, he brings the two, the traditional and the modern, together for breakthroughs in teaching, health, and medicine.

“Many people now see the efficacy of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine,” Ravee Chen explains. “It’s not something that just the hippies use, as people used to think. There are whole walks of people who work with acupuncture and functional foods.”

The functional foods, which help with health and are tasty and nutritious, are only a starting point for Chen. He is on the verge of launching a hangover cure based on functional foods and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in a jelly stick form.

“I had known about jelly for a while but never actually jumped into it until now,” Chen says. “But many people know that these jelly sticks have become really popular. Because they were fashionable in beauty as collagen sticks and sold in some of the most prominent beauty stores.”

Chen’s company does extensive testing and research, and the team discovered an interesting trend toward jelly-type health and beauty products.

“Most of the big US competitors are focused on a liquid format. But I don’t think that’s where the industry is going. I think that if you look at the kind of trends in the beauty market, everything is going more toward a convenience route,” Ravee points out. “Look at vitamins. Vitamins used to be pills, and before that, they were liquid. What is the most common form of vitamins nowadays? Gummies, right? They’re convenient, and people more easily remember to take them.”

Because of his parents’ backgrounds and doctoral degrees in traditional medicine in China, Ravee Chen started as a medical acupuncturist. He operated a mobile clinic for several years, driving to people’s homes and to hospitals and clinics. Chen took his equipment, something more seasoned practitioners wouldn’t do. However, this experience was valuable in teaching him about pain and life, and it led him to expand his interests to help more people.

“My approach is not just alleviating pain but also making sure that people enjoy life,” Ravee asserts. “I did this for my cancer patients. It’s not always about curing their cancer, but also improving quality of life, both in removing negative elements and negative stress and in improving the overall experience of life.”

Chen soon founded the Mimimil consulting firm to help small business owners with a wide range of digital needs, from accounting and tax advising to website development. However, his involvement in traditional medicine education, rooted in his family’s legacy of eight generations of practitioners, led him to take control of his parents’ Canadian College of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine in Halifax when they retired. He expanded the college and used his marketing and innovation skills to also create Eight Branches College of Eastern Medicine in Toronto.

Ravee Chen learned from his parents his whole life and accepts that he still has more to learn. However, what he brought was modern education and digital experience. “My parents grew up in a time when online learning wasn’t a thing when the only way that you learned from your teachers was when they told you to do something and kept at you until you actually learned it.”

Chen revolutionized the way acupuncture and traditional medicine are taught in Canada. His colleges became the first schools to actually have an online learning board with online lessons. His innovations were essential in tripling the student body numbers at CCATCM in Halifax.

These modernizations helped attract more students in other medical fields to TCM. While people in North America are behind people in other parts of the world, especially Asia, they’re starting to pay attention. Ravee Chen is leading the way in merging and expanding the medical ideas of the East and the West.

Written in partnership with Tom White