University Communications

Hui made the connection between Burke’s symptoms and fertility treatments she’d been receiving, which were causing her to produce unusually high levels of adrenaline.

“When nobody could give me answers, he was really able to see the full picture and integrate all of these fragmented pieces,” says Burke. “He helped me understand that I came to the situation already [physically and emotionally] depleted ... and was somebody whose life wasn’t really in balance. My body reacted to all that, so that all I needed was something like this experience with fertility drugs to be tipped over the edge.”

Hui, an internist, clinical pharmacologist and geriatrician, established UCLA’s Center for East-West Medicine (CEWM) in 1993 to bring together the best of modern Western and traditional Chinese medicine. As a youth in Hong Kong, he benefited from conventional Western medicine as well as Chinese herbalists, and became intrigued with the chemical basis of herbal medicine.

“My original intention was to be a chemist/ pharmacologist and to develop a Western drug from herbal medicine,” says Hui, noting that there are more than 10,000 Chinese herbs, each with multiple uses. “The beauty of herbal medicine is how the herbs are mixed together and used in total.”

This philosophy — that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — drives Hui’s approach to the CEWM and to medicine in general.

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