My initial education in health therapies was from my mentor and uncle, Sifu Tom Turcotte DOM, someone who has dedicated the better part of 60 years to discovering first hand the limits of human potential. Spoiler alert- he hasn’t found a limit yet. I was 26 years old, my college football and wrestling days were over, and one day I couldn’t stand up and walk across my bedroom. My ever-wise mom said over the phone, “You better call Tom.” I did, and he sent me to one of his former Tui Na (Chinese Medical Massage) students for a treatment. For the next decade Sifu Turcotte hit me right between the eyes with a boatload of qigong, diet, and herbs. He taught me the importance of keeping a positive mental set in any circumstance and how to manage my own energy system with high reward and low risk.

Eventually I decided to abandon my public accounting career and take the plunge to get a formal education in Chinese Medicine and make this adopted lifestyle a livelihood. As I neared the end of my Masters program, my wife was 6 months pregnant with our first child. My uncle understood I would be both opening a practice and starting a family in the same month. Knowing I had invested all my resources into my Chinese Medicine education and imagining that I would need an additional source of income to support my growing family, he gifted me two external-use family formulas that he originally developed and used in his martial arts training and later adapted for use in his clinic. Red Emperor’s Immortal Flame is one of them. My part was and still is today, to produce it to the exacting standards of a kung fu grandmaster and to help as many people on the planet with it as I can.

I always say I’ll keep making it as long as it keeps helping people. With any product that you put on or in your body, trust is a big part of the decision to use it. Through my informal training with my uncle, I became uncompromising with what goes in and on my body. From Sodium Laureth Sulfate in hair products to the ungodly excitotoxins in our food supply to off-gassing formaldehydes in carpet glue, I awakened to the fact that grocery stores and department stores are mine fields of chemicals which in the doses intended by manufacturers, are unfit for human contact. So when it came to putting my own product out into the public sphere, I envisioned a domestically-produced world-class topical pain product made with unreasonable patience, care, and high quality ingredients, and an inspiring story behind it.

The REIF mission is not only focused on the end user, but on practitioners and business owners. “A rising tide raises all ships.” Manufacturing a unique topical product that offers unmatched value and making it available through my colleagues’ clinics and businesses (as opposed to a simple centralized website or selling on Amazon) fulfills my mission of maximizing the impact of REIF on the vitality of my profession across the country.