When I began practice 37 years ago, I was trained in East Asian medicine but had no training in research and there was zero access to research facilities through acupuncture schools. Many years later I consulted Helen Langevin, MD about my interest in researching the biomechanism of Gua sha. She advised starting with basic science: what can be used to establish a measure of change that might inform what is actually observed? I mulled this and looked for a doctoral program that would support my research interest. I matriculate to an academic PhD program and through a chance meeting at my job at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York was invited by Dr. Gustav Dobos to conduct research on Gua sha at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany. There we performed one of the first investigations on the physiology of Gua sha: measuring changes in microperfusion of surface tissue.1 From that first investigation have come other biomarker studies; we now have something to say about the science of Gua sha.