How to hold office hours with Ni Haixia in your AI

Most people go into a doctor's appointment with a feeling and leave with a prescription, and the part in between — what the doctor was actually weighing — stays invisible. Heropedia's Ni Haixia persona is built to make that reasoning visible from the other direction: the classical Chinese medicine side, taught by a lecturer known for refusing to water it down.

This is an AI persona based on Ni Haixia's public lectures, his clinic's own biography and his published Tianji series, with every fact and quote tied to a source on the hero page. Ni Haixia (倪海廈) died in 2012; this persona is not him, and neither he nor his estate has any affiliation with or gives any endorsement to Heropedia.

The one rule that shapes every answer

The persona exists to help you prepare for a real appointment, not to replace one. It never diagnoses what is wrong with you, never names a formula, herb or needle point for you to use, and never tells you to start, change or stop a treatment. When a student or patient tries to pull a diagnosis or a treatment out of the conversation, it redirects every time toward the question to bring to an actual practitioner instead.

That boundary shows up clearly in how the hero page itself handles a hard case. Asked what classical Chinese medicine can do about a tumor an oncologist just found, the persona answers: "I won't tell you what to do about a tumor — that decision belongs to you, your oncologist, and a licensed TCM practitioner you see in person, not to a conversation with me." It then explains how the classics would frame the question — sleep, the warmth of hands and feet, cravings, bowel and urine patterns — and closes with: "Write the answers down. Bring them, and the question 'what pattern would you look for here,' to your real doctor and to a licensed TCM practitioner — not to me."

That same discipline applies to the clinic's own claims. His clinic's biography says he treated internal-medicine conditions and malignant tumors with classical formulas and cured many conditions Western medicine considered incurable — but that is the clinic's claim, not an independently verified result, and the hero page says so directly: no controlled trial has tested it, and mainstream medical authorities are explicit that "no complementary health approach has been shown to prevent or cure cancer." The persona teaches the reasoning behind the claim without restating the claim as fact.

Why the questions are about observations, not conclusions

Ni Haixia trained as an acupuncturist and opened the Han-Tang Chinese Medicine Clinic in Florida in 1989, then spent years turning the four canonical texts — the Huangdi Neijing, Shang Han Lun, Jin Gui Yao Lue and Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing — into hundreds of hours of lectures under his Renji curriculum. The persona is built directly from that teaching style: classical Chinese medicine reads the body as one system of Yin, Yang and the Five Elements, never an isolated symptom, and the diagnostic questions it asks — about sleep, appetite, thirst, the warmth of hands and feet — are the same ones a real practitioner uses to find a pattern.

That is exactly why the persona hands those questions back to you as things to observe and report, not things to self-diagnose. If you tell it you wake at 3am most nights, it will not tell you what that means for your liver. It will tell you to write the hour down and bring it, with the question "what pattern would you look for here," to an actual practitioner. The reasoning is the lesson; the conclusion stays with someone licensed to give it.

Three ways to start

ChatGPT, Gemini or any chat window. Open the Ni Haixia page, press Copy the Ni Haixia office-hour prompt, paste it into a new chat and send. The persona is inside the prompt, so there is nothing to install.
Claude. Add Heropedia once as a custom connector with the URL https://www.heropedia.org/mcp (Settings, then Connectors). After that, say "Hold office hours with Ni Haixia on the questions I should ask my doctor" in any chat. The setup guide walks through each step.
Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI. Install the office-hour skill with the command on the hero page, then say "Office hour with Ni Haixia before my next appointment." Your notes stay on your machine.

The six questions it will ask

Bring a real health question — your own or a family member's — and have rough details ready, because the persona pushes until an answer is a specific, reportable observation.

What specific question will you bring to your doctor or a licensed TCM practitioner this week, instead of asking me to answer it? It wants one precise, written question, not "what's wrong with me."
When you describe your sleep to a real practitioner, what exactly will you say? Whether you fall asleep easily, and the hour you wake, not "I sleep badly."
How will you describe the warmth of your hands and feet, your appetite and any craving for sweets? A plain observation, not a pattern you have already assigned yourself.
What does your daily water intake and thirst actually look like, and have you written it down? A number of cups or liters, or an honest "I don't track it."
If you're weighing a classical approach alongside a Western diagnosis, what two questions will you ask each practitioner about how the treatments might interact? Two concrete questions aimed at a named practitioner.
Which classical concept do you want explained well enough to ask a sharper question, and when will you actually bring it to a practitioner? A named concept plus a real appointment, not the explanation treated as the treatment.

How to get a useful session

Bring one real situation, not "review my health." A specific symptom, test result or family pattern gives the persona something concrete to teach against.
Answer with observations, not conclusions. When it asks about sleep or appetite, give the plain fact. Let your doctor or practitioner do the interpreting.
Keep your current treatment in view. If you're already under a doctor's care, the persona's own rule is to ask about interactions before changing anything, never to reason its way to a change on your behalf.
Write down the questions, not a verdict. The session is built to end with a short list to carry into your next appointment, not an answer to walk away with instead of one.

Try another hero on the same question

A different lens on the same body of knowledge comes from Sun Simiao, the Tang-dynasty physician known as the "King of Medicine," whose persona leans on four-diagnosis methods and a strict ethic that no life is worth more than another. Every hero page offers the same three ways to start, so switching personas costs nothing but a new chat.