Understanding Embodied Health Practices and Their Impacts in a Traditional Chinese Medicine Program: A Mixed Methods Study

This study takes an embodied experience perspective to understand health communication, highlighting how physical interactions and experiences shape our attitudes, decisions, behavior, and sense-making of health. While this approach has gained increasing research attention, the cultural and social contexts of embodied experiences are often neglected. There is limited research on health-related embodied experiences in the Chinese culture, and how Chinese people perceive and communicate the impacts of embodied health practices is under-investigated. To bridge this gap, the study employs the managing meanings of embodied experience theory to design and evaluate a one-year traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) embodied health intervention. A mixed methods approach, combining in-depth interviews (N=17) and a pre- and post-test experiment (N=59), was used to understand the role of embodied experience in TCM health communication. Through thematic analysis, four key themes emerged from participants’ interview responses: habits and motivations, lived experiences and feelings, identity construction through communication, and health-related behavior change. The experiment results showed significant positive changes in various health indicators (including weight, BMI, tongue coating, and umbilical cord status) before and after the intervention. These findings contribute to increased understanding of embodied health practices in TCM, provide preliminary evidence for their effectiveness, and inform future health communication strategies based on experiential principles. Theoretical and practical implications of the embodied experiences in health communication are discussed.