Few practitioners arrive at Traditional Chinese Medicine by way of a 27-generation Ninjutsu lineage — but Sherman Lai's two careers, in Guelph, Ontario, were never really separate. Both trace back to the same family tradition, and both were shaped by the same underlying discipline: a belief that the body and mind respond to patient, deliberate training rather than force.
A family tradition, two directions
Lai was born into a family of Ninjutsu masters stretching back 27 generations, and began training in the art as a young child. According to a 1990 Daily Mercury profile, he was also unusually academically advanced, gaining admittance to medical school at age 15. The two paths — the physical discipline of a centuries-old martial art, and the clinical study of medicine — developed side by side rather than in sequence, and both would eventually lead him to Canada.
Arriving in Guelph, 1982–1986
Lai immigrated to Canada in 1982, choosing it after considering Australia and the United States as alternatives. He settled in Guelph, and within a year had founded a Ninjutsu club at the University of Guelph — the beginning of what would become a 23-year program at the university, running from 1983 to 2006. By 1986, he had also begun practising acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine in the city, the start of a clinical career that would continue for the next 37 years. A fuller account of his credentials and clinical work is in Who Is Sherman Lai?
Two disciplines, one philosophy
Press coverage from the late 1980s and early 1990s, collected in the site's Press Archive, shows Lai describing both of his pursuits in strikingly similar terms: an emphasis on restraint over force, on addressing root causes rather than surface symptoms, and on correcting public misconceptions — whether about Hollywood's portrayal of ninjas as violent assassins, or about Chinese medicine as unscientific. In a 1990 profile, Lai described his approach to conflict and to healing as two expressions of the same underlying belief: that what a person puts into the world eventually returns to them, and that both medicine and martial arts exist to reduce harm rather than cause it.
Building a Guelph institution
Over the following decades, Lai's dual career made him a familiar figure in Guelph well beyond either discipline alone. His Ninjutsu program trained students from age six through adulthood, including specialized courses in women's and children's self-defence developed with input from local police and rape crisis centre representatives. At the same time, his clinical practice — the Centre of Integrative Natural Medicine — grew to treat more than 20,000 patients from across Canada and internationally. Guelph's broader relationship with Traditional Chinese Medicine as a field is explored further in Traditional Chinese Medicine in Guelph: A Local History.
Legacy today
Lai stepped back from teaching Ninjutsu in 2006 and retired from clinical practice in 2023. Both institutions he built in Guelph — the university's Ninjutsu program and the Centre of Integrative Natural Medicine — have since closed, but the underlying record remains: a nearly four-decade career built on the premise that discipline, patience, and addressing root causes apply as much to healing the body as to training it.