A theater kid who didn't fit in until he did.

I want to start somewhere you don't usually start. Middle school. You told me once that you got teased a lot back then, and that you moved around between private, Christian, and Montessori schools, looking for a place to fit. What was that like?

It was lonely. There's no other word for it. I was the kind of kid who was already paying attention to weird stuff, books, ideas, plants, the way people talked to each other, and middle school is not a place that rewards that. So I got teased, and the schools kept changing in the hope that the next one would be different.

In retrospect, the moving around was probably useful. You learn to walk into a new room and figure out the social ecosystem fast. You learn that no group is permanent and no label sticks if you don't let it. That's actually a good clinical skill; every patient is a new room, with a different ecosystem.

But I wouldn't romanticize it. It was lonely. And then theater happened.

Tell me about that. The high school theater years.

Theater was the first place I felt like I had a tribe. Theater kids are weird in a way that gets celebrated instead of punished. We were all there because we wanted to be.

It's also where I learned to communicate. Acting is just paying very close attention to another human being and responding honestly to what's actually happening in front of you. That's what I'm doing in the clinic now, the words are different, but the work is structurally similar. You watch the patient. You read the body, the breath, the affect. You respond to what's actually there, not what you expected to find.

When I went to Pacific University, I majored in Creative Writing, English Literature, and Theatre. People sometimes ask how I got from there to acupuncture. The honest answer is that all of those disciplines are about reading texts carefully, and the human body is just another text.

And aikido is in there, too. By the time we met at OCOM, you already had your black belt.

Aikido was the body education I didn't get from theater.  Aikido teaches you what's happening in the wrist, the shoulder, and the center of gravity. When somebody grabs you, and you have a fraction of a second to decide whether to redirect their force or absorb it, you start to understand the body as a system of tension lines and pressure patterns. That carries directly into palpation and acupuncture.

It also gave me a relationship with discipline that wasn't punitive. You show up, you work, you fail, you bow, you start over. There's a humility built into the practice. Clinical medicine demands the same thing.

Hai Shan Clinic and the Heiner Fruehauf years

After graduating from OCOM in 2009, Brehan spent five years in residency at the Hai Shan Clinic under Heiner Fruehauf, PhD — a renowned scholar and clinician who specializes in chronic infectious diseases and recalcitrant medical conditions, and the founder of the Classical Pearls herbal formula line. Fruehauf taught at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine and is one of the most influential figures in classical Chinese medicine in the US. The Hai Shan years are where Brehan moved from being a strong student to being a clinician who could hold a difficult case.

OCOM, Hai Shan, and learning to hold a hard case.

When we met at OCOM, you were already obviously good at the herbal stuff. What was happening for you back then?

Herbs were part of the curriculum that I was most excited about. Herbs felt like a language I'd been reading my whole life and had finally been given a dictionary for. I think the literature background helped; herbal formulas have an internal logic that's almost grammatical. There's a chief herb, deputies, assistants, and an envoy. 

And honestly, our cohort was a great group. Study groups, kickball team, the talent show — we had fun. That matters. When you're learning a difficult medicine, the social fabric around the learning process is part of what makes it stick.

For the record, you and I were going to start a clinic together. That was the plan.

It was. I have some regret about that not working out, honestly. Though looking at where we both ended up, I think it probably went the way it needed to.

I think you're right. I think it had to play out the way it did. We've stayed in each other's orbits, and what you've built is meaningful, and what I've built is meaningful, and the work we do together now is, I think, better for both of us having had our own runs.

After graduating in 2009, I went to Hai Shan. Five years studying with Heiner Fruehauf. That's the period that made me into a clinician.

What did Heiner give you that you couldn't have gotten elsewhere?

A way of seeing chronic, recalcitrant disease that nobody in conventional medicine, and frankly, very few people in modern Chinese medicine, was talking about. Heiner trained in classical Chinese medicine in a way that takes the old texts seriously as clinical documents rather than historical curiosities. He treats infections that hide. He treats people who have been sick for a decade and have been told there's nothing left to try.

Watching him work with those patients and being expected, eventually, to do the work myself, was when the medicine stopped being academic. Either you can help them or you can't. 

That was also where I started seeing chronic Lyme. A lot of it. And the pattern recognition started building.

Building Crawford Wellness and finding Lyme on the West Coast.

In 2010 you started McMinnville Community Acupuncture, which became Brehan Crawford Acupuncture, which became Crawford Wellness. 

McMinnville Community Acupuncture was a community acupuncture mode.  I learned a tremendous amount in that period because I was seeing high volume, all kinds of presentations, and no time to overthink it. Pattern recognition gets sharp fast under those conditions.

Over time, the cases that were actually moving were the ones where we were getting people into remission instead of just relief, which were the chronic, complex cases. Lyme. Fibromyalgia. Stroke recovery. Chronic infection. Those need more than a 30-minute community acupuncture visit. They need herbs, time, and follow-up. The clinic had to evolve.

Eventually, we became Crawford Wellness. In 2018, we built out a dedicated Tibetan foot soak room and a yoga studio where Jocela teaches her adaptive yoga practice. The clinic has grown to the point where we're seeing patients from around Yamhill County, Portland, the coast, the I-5 corridor and from Singapore, China, Germany, and the UK. People travel.

Why Lyme specifically? It's not the obvious specialty for someone in Oregon; it's much more an East Coast disease.

Lyme found me before I went looking for it. People with chronic Lyme were showing up at my door because they'd been everywhere else and run out of options. Conventional medicine was failing them long after the last antibiotic course; they were still in pain, still exhausted, still dealing with neurological symptoms that nobody could explain.

Chinese medicine has a remarkable amount to offer this population. Not because we have a magic herb that kills Borrelia, we don't, and anyone who tells you they do is selling you something. But because we have a clinical framework for treating ecosystems instead of single pathogens. We have ways of thinking about damp, heat, deficiency, biofilm, and terrain. We have herbs that have been used for two thousand years to do the work of restoring conditions where the immune system can function again.

Once I saw what was possible with these patients, I couldn't unsee it. I read everything I could find. I trained with leaders in the US and in China. I've spent more than a decade now refining how I treat this population, and I'd say I'm a different clinician now than I was when the first chronic Lyme patient walked into the office.

And then at some point, the geography became a problem.

It became impossible to ignore. The clinic was busy. Most of the people who needed this work weren't in Oregon they were in Connecticut and Vermont and Pennsylvania and Long Island, where Lyme is endemic. They couldn't get on a plane every two weeks to come see me. And even the ones who could, that's a brutal way to manage a chronic illness.

So I had to ask the harder question. What does it look like to deliver this kind of care at a distance? What can be safely scaled and what can't? What do people actually need that we can ship to them  information, education, formulas, community, accountability, and what still requires a body in front of you?

That's the question that became Chorus for Life. And eventually, the Skool community.

What you can expect from his work.

The life that protects the work.

I want to talk about what your house feels like. Because the people in this community are reading you online  they're not getting on a plane to come to McMinnville. They don't know that there's no big-screen TV in your living room. They don't know about the music and gardening 

I think this matters, actually, so I'm glad you're asking. The work I do is intense. People bring me their hardest cases, patients who have been in pain for ten years, who have tried fifteen things, who are running out of hope. If I'm absorbing that all day and then numbing out in front of a screen at night, I cannot do this for thirty more years. The math doesn't work.

So we've built a life around the things that genuinely restore. The garden. Real food, cooked at home. Music Jocela sings, our daughters do their thing. I picked up the cello a few years ago, and I'm still terrible at it, but it makes me happy. The forest behind the house. We don't have a big TV. We have a lot of instruments.

It's not a quiet life. It's a connected one. There's a difference.

Jocela has been part of this whole arc. She teaches at the clinic now.

Jocela teaches Adaptive Yoga in the studio at Crawford Wellness. Her work is profoundly aligned with what we do clinically, adapting movement practice for bodies that don't fit the standard yoga template. People with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, post-stroke patients, and Lyme patients in flare. Most yoga studios are not built for those bodies. Hers is.

She's also the person who makes my life work. Anything I do well in my career, she's part of it. 

Last one. Somebody in this community is reading this. Maybe they have chronic Lyme. Maybe fibromyalgia, MCAS, long COVID. They've been through the wringer. What do you want them to take away?

That you are not crazy, you are not lazy, and you are not stuck with what you've been told.

There are pattern-based, ecologically-minded ways of understanding what's happening in your body that the conventional system has not made available to you. There are clinicians who take chronic Lyme seriously. There are formulas that have been refined over centuries to do the kind of restorative work your body actually needs. There is a community of people who have walked this road and are willing to walk it with you.

Find them. The Skool community is one of the easier places to start, because it's free. But wherever you start. Don't accept that this is just how you are now. Twenty years of practice tells me it isn't.

Brehan Crawford, MAcOM, LAc

Brehan Crawford, MAcOM, LAc, is the founder and lead clinician at Crawford Wellness in McMinnville, Oregon, and the founder of Chorus for Life. He is internationally recognized for evidence-based treatment of chronic and complex conditions using Traditional Chinese Medicine — with a particular focus on chronic Lyme disease and its co-infections, chronic pain and fibromyalgia, neurovascular conditions including stroke rehabilitation, oncology support, and digestive disorders.

He earned his Master of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine from the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine in 2009, and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, English Literature, and Theatre from Pacific University. After OCOM, he spent five years in residency at the Hai Shan Clinic studying Chinese herbal medicine under Heiner Fruehauf, PhD, founder of the Classical Pearls herbal line and one of the most influential figures in classical Chinese medicine in the United States.

Crawford Wellness was founded in 2010, originally as McMinnville Community Acupuncture, then as Brehan Crawford Acupuncture, and grew into a multi-modal clinic serving patients from across the Pacific Northwest, the I-5 corridor, and internationally — including Singapore, China, Germany, and the UK. The clinic at 117 NE 5th in McMinnville now includes a dedicated Tibetan foot soak room and an Adaptive Yoga studio taught by his wife, Jocela Mae Crawford.

Through Chorus for Life and the Gut-Brain Synchrony Skool community, Brehan is now extending the reach of his clinical work — building a global community of patients, practitioners, and the curious, anchored by long-form education, herbal protocols, and a clinical team that includes Dr. Andrew Miles, Dr. Jin Zhao, Dr. Joshua Park, and Dr. Qiu Xuelan.

The community Brehan founded.

Free to join. Built around real clinical thinking. Anchored by Brehan, Dr. Andrew Miles, and a clinical team that goes where conventional medicine stops.