About

Where this comes from

TCM Care Pal is the English side of a Chinese product called 就在这儿 — Jiù zài zhèr, "right here". The Chinese version has a practising physician on one side and a seasonal-timing engine on the other: a person for warmth and responsibility, an engine for scale and consistency. Families use it to keep meals, sleep, movement and mood in step with the season.

What we noticed is that Chinese medicine loses almost all of its practical value the moment it leaves Chinese. Abroad it arrives as either a wellness aesthetic — jade, bamboo, vague "balance" — or as clinic jargon nobody can act on. Neither is useful on a Tuesday.

So this site does one thing: it says what today is like, and what to do about lunch.

What the engine actually is

Under the hood is a calculation engine built on two classical models, running entirely in your browser:

• Five Movements & Six Qi (Wuyun Liuqi, 五运六气) — the classical model of how the year's climate moves through six steps, each ruled by a pair of Qi, and how that bears on the body. It is a genuinely old model: the relevant chapters of the Huangdi Neijing are about two thousand years old.
• Your birth moment — the seasonal structure you were born into: which year's movement was in charge, which Qi was governing the half-year and the step you arrived in. We use it the way a gardener reads a planting date: it says what conditions you started in. (This is the seasonal layer only. The full four-pillar chart — hour included — belongs to the Chinese edition's separate engine and is not part of this site yet.)

Both feed one output: a direction for today — a phrase like Add moisture · Support Metal. From that direction the food, drinks and practice recommendations are selected. The rules are fixed and inspectable; the engine does not "learn" anything about you and does not improvise.

One honest technical note for people who care about this: for births outside China we convert your local birth moment to the Chinese standard-time clock before reading the seasonal calendar, because what determines your birth season is the exact astronomical instant of a solar term, not the number on the wall clock where you were born. The converted moment is shown on your reading page so you can check it.

The limits we hold ourselves to

• We never predict illness. Not as a feature, not as a teaser, not ever. You will not find a disease name on this site.
• We never diagnose. A reading describes tendencies — abundant or thin, warm or damp. It is not a medical finding.
• We say "speak to your doctor" and mean it. Anything that sounds like a symptom belongs in a clinic, and every page says so.
• No miracle claims. We are not going to tell you a bowl of congee cures anything. It is a bowl of congee, eaten at the right time of year, and that is already worth something.
• Nothing about you leaves your device. No account, no analytics on your health inputs, no server holding your birth details.

Why it's free, and what may come later

The daily card is free and always will be — that is the whole point of it. If this becomes a business, it will be one of two honest things: a subscription for the personalised layer and structured courses, or a licence for clinics and practitioners who want the same engine under their own name. It will not be advertising, and it will not be a supplement store with a text editor.

Coming next

• The full sky chart (year, ten-year cycle and month layers, in plain English)
• Guided practice audio for the standing and Baduanjin routines
• A nightly wind-down routine, matched to the season
• Weather-aware timing (the free card currently uses the seasonal calendar only)
• Reading traditional Chinese lunar birth dates directly