Velia Wortman was born to Canadian-Chinese parents and grew up in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. She received a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Toronto and her medical degree from the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, University of London. She completed her postgraduate training in Germany and worked as a general practitioner until 1995.

Velia considers herself a student of Ted Kaptchuk, Dan Bensky, Shou-chun Ma and Volker Scheid, and for the past 15 years she has worked exclusively as a practitioner of Chinese medicine, using acupuncture, moxibustion, gua sha, cupping, Chinese nutritional therapy and Chinese herbal medicine.

Since 1998 she has been a guest lecturer at the medical faculties of the Friederich-Alexander University of Erlangen and the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich as well as in various TCM clinics and schools in the Netherlands and in Germany. She has written numerous articles and reviews for TCM journals (the Lantern and Journal of Chinese Medicine) and from 1996 to 2000 she was the editor of Orientation, the journal of the Anglo-Dutch Institute.

Publications include: Pocketbook of Acupuncture (co-author Carl-Hermann Hempen), Thieme International 2005; A Materia Medica for Chinese Medicine by Hempen and Fischer, Elsevier 2008 (translation), Acupuncture in the Treatment of Pain by Bäcker and Hammes (translation).