MEET
SOPHIA CHANG, DACM, LAc
Giving You a Lifelong Relationship with Your Health
Dr. Sophia Chang is one of the most credentialed and sought after practitioners at the intersection of Traditional Chinese Medicine and modern medicine. With a Doctorate in Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, a Master of Science in Traditional Oriental Medicine, and a pre-med foundation from UCLA, she completed both her masters and doctoral programs in just three years, nearly half the time it takes most students. She brings a rare dual fluency in Eastern wisdom and Western science that eludes most practitioners.
Her patients include people navigating chronic pain, fertility challenges, mental health, anxiety, trauma, and cancer treatment, as well as military veterans who carry the kind of invisible wounds that conventional medicine rarely knows how to address. She sees the full range of the human experience, and she treats it that way. Every patient gets a roadmap, a clear and personalized path forward through whatever complexity they’re carrying, one that accounts for the body, the mind, the nervous system, and the life surrounding all of it.
That same depth of care is what has made her a trusted provider for some of the most elite patients in the world. She works with Olympians, active and retired professional athletes, and amateur athletes chasing peak performance. She is also a trusted current provider for USA Rugby and previously worked with Major League Rugby, bringing her integrative approach to some of the most physically demanding sports at the national and international level.
Her clinical training was anything but conventional. As a masters and doctoral student at Pacific College of Health and Science, she completed rotations across UC San Diego at RIMAC Sports Medicine, Moores Cancer Center, Integrative Pain Clinic, Neurology department, Veterans Affairs, Rady Children’s Hospital, and an integrative senior medicine clinic serving low-income communities downtown. She also delivered care to veterans at the American Legion post and participated in Veterans Stand Down, providing acupuncture to unhoused and at-risk veterans in the field. That range of exposure, across age groups, conditions, and populations, built a clinical foundation that most practitioners take a full career to develop. After graduating, she continued at the UC San Diego Center for Integrative Medicine, assisting under a master practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine specializing in integrative neurology, deepening her understanding of the relationship between the nervous system and whole body health through interdisciplinary case reviews and collaborative care within one of the country’s leading academic medical systems.
Her clinical depth was further forged over a decade as a Teaching Assistant at Pacific College of Health and Science, inspiring the next wave of Doctoral and Masters students across some of the most advanced coursework in the field, including Treatment of Orthopedic Disorders, Advanced Needle Techniques, Chinese Herbal Medicine and Internal Medicine, and Integrative Medicine Case Management. Beyond her formal education, she has invested hundreds of hours in advanced sports medicine training, covering orthopedic assessment, injury rehabilitation, and the integration of Traditional Chinese Medicine with Western sports medicine principles. She has also mentored a generation of acupuncturists, passing on methods rooted in the belief that the most effective medicine and the most gentle medicine are rarely opposites.
Dr. Chang is licensed by the California Acupuncture Board, nationally board-certified through the National Certification Board for Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine (NCBAHM), and is an active member of the Academy of Integrative Health Medicine.
Dr. Chang has carried this work far beyond the walls of her clinic. As a volunteer with The Integrative Health Project, she traveled to Guatemala to deliver Traditional Chinese Medicine to underserved communities, working shoulder to shoulder with Western medical practitioners and local healthcare providers to address everything from type 2 diabetes and hypertension to a wide range of acute and chronic community health needs. Using auricular acupuncture protocols specifically developed to help patients manage blood glucose levels, she contributed to a model of care that was genuinely collaborative, culturally grounded, and built around the people it served along with traditional forms of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Some of her most formative clinical experiences happened in those communities and the people in front of her.
Her relationships with physicians and other healthcare providers are a core part of how she delivers care. Treatment plans are precisely tailored to each patient, pulling the best from every discipline. That collaborative reputation has made her a trusted partner among medical professionals who want someone they can count on for their most complex cases.
Dr. Chang founded Pure Health Alliance because she kept seeing the same story. Patients navigating a fragmented system, falling through the cracks between specialists, never quite getting a complete picture of their own health. She built it to be something different, a place where Eastern and Western medicine work in partnership, where the whole person is treated rather than the isolated symptom, and where every patient walks away with a lifelong relationship with their own health rather than just a treatment plan. Pure Health Alliance has since been recognized with the San Diego Small Business Excellence Award and the Founder’s First Award for its innovation in integrative care, built on a simple belief that transformative, quality care should be accessible to everyone, not just those who know where to look.
If you have been searching for answers that conventional medicine hasn’t been able to give you, if you are an athlete whose body isn’t bouncing back the way it used to, if you are carrying stress, grief, or trauma in ways that feel physical, if you are trying to conceive and don’t know where to turn, or if you are simply exhausted from managing symptoms without ever getting to the root of them, you are exactly who Pure Health Alliance was built for. Dr. Chang takes the time to listen, to look at the full picture, and to build a plan that actually addresses what is driving your experience, not just what shows up on a chart. You deserve care that sees all of you. That is what Dr. Chang shows up to do every single day.
