Heiner Fruehauf, PhD, LAc
Heiner Fruehauf is the Founding Professor of the College of Classical Chinese Medicine at National University of Natural Medicine (NUNM) in Portland, Oregon, where he has been teaching since 1992. As a practitioner, Dr. Fruehauf focuses on the complementary treatment of difficult and recalcitrant diseases, including cancer, chronic respiratory and digestive disorders, and inflammation of the nervous system. The Healing Order is the manifestation of his belief that 21st-century humans can, and must, support their health in harmony with nature. His dream of bringing together the most effective holistic modalities from all over the world comes to life at The Healing Order.
Dr. Fruehauf comes from a long line of German physicians specializing in holistic healing modalities such as homeopathy, herbalism, and hydrotherapy. His great-grandfather studied with Sebastian Kneipp, one of the fathers of the European nature cure movement. Eager to learn from other cultures, a young Heiner left home to study sinology, philosophy, and comparative literature at Tübingen University, Fudan University (Shanghai), Hamburg University, Waseda University (Tokyo), and the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctoral degree from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1990.
The experience of a serious health crisis spurred him to supplement his theoretical training in the philosophy of Chinese medicine with the study of its clinical applications. While completing two years of post-doctoral training at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, he was mentored by the revered Deng Zhongjia, one of China’s primary experts in the fields of formula studies and the classical foundations of Chinese medicine. Dr. Fruehauf continues to publish widely on both the theoretical and clinical aspects of Chinese medicine.
His scholarly endeavors include an ongoing research project on the holistic cosmology of Chinese medicine, in essence a decoding of the ancient symbolism that once correlated the macrocosm of the natural world with the microcosm of the human body. In addition, Dr. Fruehauf is the director of the Heron Institute, a nonprofit institution for the research and preservation of traditional life science. In this capacity, he has been leading the Sacred Mountain Retreat for three decades, a semiannual study tour to the mountains of southwest China that focuses on qigong and other aspects of classical Chinese medicine. He lives in the beautiful Columbia Gorge in Oregon with his wife, Sheron, their kids, 5 goats, 2 cats, and 11 chickens.