Dr. Cheng is the founder and director of Dr. Cheng Integrative Health Center and Doctor's Anti-Aging and Weight Loss Center, of Columbia, SC, since inception in 2003. Dr. Cheng and his colleagues take an integrative approach to help patients with chronic diseases esp. diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. In recent years, Dr. Cheng grew particularly interested in functional medicine or anti-aging medicine. The current healthcare focuses on symptomatic treatments for many diseases, ignoring the root causes. For example, when we control the blood sugar of a diabetic patient or the blood pressure of a hypertensive patient, we are only treating the symptoms. We are not doing anything to the underlying disease processes. Functional medicine tries to address the disease processes in addition to symptomatic treatment holistically. Dr. Cheng is a Fellow and board-certified anti-aging physician by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) and also a Fellow and board-certified, A4m Integrative Cancer Therapy. Dr. Cheng served in the United States Army as a commissioned officer (Major) and an Army physician and completed his Army duty in Dec. 2006. While in the Army, Dr. Cheng served in various positions including Chief and Medical Director of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Member of Risk Management Committee, Credentialing Committee, and Staff Physician of Soldier Readiness Program, Consultant to the Shaw Air Force Base Laboratory, and College of American Pathologist Inspection Team Leader for the Greenville SC Hospital Lab Inspection. Before serving the United States Army, Dr. Cheng was a senior physician-scientist at Variagenics, a research organization affiliated with MIT and Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, MA. Variagenics later merged with Hyseq. At Variagenics, Dr. Cheng's primary responsibilities include overseeing joint clinical studies with Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, establishing a cancer tissue bank, and developing protocols for tumor gene library. While at Variagenics, Dr. Cheng was invited as a host of a research conference held by the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, MD, on tumor gene library establishment using laser microdissection technology. Dr. Cheng was also a visiting scholar to the Netherlands TNO (national health institute) on a NATO Scholarship. Dr. Cheng served as a medical staff fellow at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, in hematology/pathology. While at NIH, his time was split between patient care and clinical research. He participated in several clinical research projects, in collaboration with the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH (Dr. Francis Collins' group), and research groups in Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan. Dr. Cheng completed residency training programs in internal medicine and laboratory medicine at Shanghai Medical University and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Dr. Cheng completed his medical school at Shanghai Medical University in Shanghai, China, and completed his Ph.D. degree at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in biochemistry and molecular biology. Dr. Cheng published several research papers in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals and was an invited speaker at several scientific conferences by Dr. Harold zur Hausen (2008 Nobel Laureate) of the German Cancer Research Center, Shanghai Medical University and China National Genome Center (Shanghai) (upon invitation of Dr. Zhu Cheng, former Health Minister of China). Dr. Cheng has medical licenses in several states, including South Carolina (active), Arkansas, Maryland, and Virginia (inactive).
