Dr. Thay Joe Tan

Twenty years to find twelve points

Dr. Tan was born in Leverkusen in 1965, to Indonesian parents of Chinese origin. He studied medicine at the University of Cologne and qualified as a doctor in 1991, taking his PhD in 1996. He also trained and qualified as a dentist, and spent eighteen months in one of Germany's largest clinics for oral and maxillofacial surgery.

Acupuncture had never interested him. Then in 1996 he watched a German dentist use it to stop a patient retching so that a procedure could go ahead at all. That was the moment he started learning.

He joined the first German hospital for traditional Chinese medicine at Kötzting, a teaching hospital of Beijing University of TCM. He became Senior Resident and, for a period, temporary Deputy Head. Over twenty years he learned from teachers in China, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

He took the best of what each of them taught him, and did something none of them had done: he compressed it. Instead of around five hundred classical acupuncture points, TurboAcupuncture uses twelve. Instead of years of training, it takes a weekend.

He named it after the Porsche Turbo, because the effect is fast and powerful.

In 2009 he opened his practice in central Stuttgart. It grew into a four-doctor practice and one of the largest physician-led practices for Chinese medicine in Europe. He is also the first doctor outside China to be granted the Inherited Master Fellowship of the Qi Lu School of TCM for Complex Diseases.