Custom herbal formulas, prepared by reading you.

An intake is the part of the practice where the formula is assembled. It is the opposite of a code-and-prescribe interaction. The clinician does not enter a diagnosis into a billing system and let the system choose the medicine. The clinician reads the person, and the formula follows from the reading.

The reading has four classical components — taken together, they are the diagnosis. No single one of them is the diagnosis on its own.

Pulse. Tongue. Intake. Pattern.

What gets read

Pulse. The classical pulse exam reads twelve channels at three positions on each wrist. It is not a heart rate; it is the body’s circulatory signature at this particular hour. Quality, depth, rate, rhythm — and the comparison between sides — produce a textured map of where the body is holding tension, deficiency, heat, dampness, or stagnation.

Tongue. The tongue is the heart’s voice in the body. Its color, coating, shape, moisture, and the geography of where each region presents — taken with the pulse — narrows the pattern. The tongue is the most stable diagnostic surface in the body; it changes slowly enough that you can watch a pattern resolve in real time.

Intake. The conversation. Sleep, digestion, energy across the day, menstrual rhythm if applicable, history of treatment, drugs the patient has taken that nobody has tracked, work conditions, what the patient ate before they walked in. The intake is where the patient’s life as they are living it enters the diagnosis.

Pattern. The pattern is what the four readings, held together, are saying. Patterns are not diseases. They are how the body is responding to its conditions. Treatment addresses the pattern, not the symptom — which is why symptoms resolve.

Six factors, briefly

Classical Chinese medicine reads illness as entering the body through six environmental factors — wind, cold, heat, damp, dryness, summer heat. Each leaves a distinct fingerprint. Modern stress, modern food, modern climate — all of it filters through these six. The chambers go into each factor in detail; the intake reads them in your particular configuration.

The intake is open.

The Rootworth online intake is now available. Custom herbal formulas, prepared by Michael Woodworth, L.Ac., shipped to anyone the formulas can lawfully reach. Read how the process actually works — the steps, the fee, where your records live — and begin from there.

If you would rather stay in the methodology before booking, the chambers are the way in. When you arrive at the intake, you will already be inside the language the practice uses.

What this is not.

Rootworth is the online herbal arm. It does not provide acupuncture, in-person treatment, or insurance-billable services — those live on the clinic side of the practice, Makari Wellness, where Michael is also the practitioner. Two reaches of the same practice. One breath.