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Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst 

Michael Max

Acupuncture and East Asian medicine was not developed in a laboratory. It does not advance through double-blind controlled studies, nor does it respond well to petri dish experimentation. Our medicine did not come from the statistical regression of randomized cohorts, but from the observation and treatment of individuals in their particular environment. It grows out of an embodied sense of understanding how life moves, unfolds, develops and declines.

Medicine comes from continuous, thoughtful practice of what we do in clinic, and how we approach that work. The practice of medicine is more — much more — than simply treating illness. It is more than acquiring skills and techniques. And it is more than memorizing the experiences of others. It takes a certain kind of eye, an inquiring mind and relentlessly inquisitive heart.

Qiological is an opportunity to deepen our practice with conversations that go deep into acupuncture, herbal medicine, cultivation practices, and the practice of having a practice. It’s an opportunity to sit in the company of others with similar interests, but perhaps very different minds. Through these dialogues perhaps we can better understand our craft.

Qiological Podcast

In the clinic, communication happens before a word is spoken. It unfolds through attention, listening, and the tactile information the body offers when we slow down enough to notice.

In this conversation, we explore palpation as a central pillar of acupuncture practice—not simply as a diagnostic tool, but as a way of relating. Drawing from diverse clinical backgrounds and decades of hands-on experience, in this panel discussion we move out of theory and into the wordless language of the body. We explore how palpation becomes a bridge between thinking and sensing, diagnosis and treatment, practitioner and patient.

Listen into this conversation as we explore how palpation provides real-time feedback in treatment, how it keeps acupuncture grounded and responsive, the ways in which touch builds trust and rapport, and why listening with the hands can reveal what words and symptoms alone cannot.

Attentive touch doesn’t just inform our treatments—it changes how we show up to the work itself.

443 Panel on Palpation • Slate Burris, Rick Gold & Mark Petruzzi

The lines we draw define us. In the pursuit of "objectivity," modern medicine draws a sharp line between the observer and the observed—the doctor and the patient. But what happens when we intentionally blur that line? What is discovered when we move toward the subject rather than away from it?

In this expansive conversation with Daniel Schulman, we explore what happens when acupuncture is practiced not as a technical intervention, but as a relational art. Daniel reflects on a lifetime of moving between worlds—science and spirit, objectivity and intimacy—and how Chinese medicine became a place where those apparent opposites could finally speak to one another.

Listen into this discussion as we explore clinical intimacy, the difference between judgment and discernment, why knowing a patient is not the same as knowing their diagnosis, and how self-cultivation becomes an ethical foundation for practice. We wander through Saam acupuncture, Goethean science, deep time, and the quiet moments in clinic where something larger than technique makes itself known.

442 When Knowing Becomes Love • Daniel Schulman

Good medicine has less to do with having the “right system” and more to do with the human being holding the needles. With the way we listen. The way we wait. The way we’re willing to not know… yet.

In this conversation with Stephen Brown we trace his unlikely path from welding in a west coast shipyard—literally working with fire and metal—to becoming one of the key bridges between Japanese acupuncture and the English-speaking world.

Along the way he unpacks how history, culture, and politics have shaped East Asian medicine in Japan, Korea, China and beyond, and why arguments about “the one true method” miss the living heart of the work. We wander through blind practitioners and palpation-rich traditions, meridian therapy, “scientific” acupuncture, dry needling, and the long-standing turf skirmishes between them.

But repeatedly Stephen brings us back to the clinician’s interior: the courage to admit “I don’t know yet,” the discipline of returning to basics, the craft of letting the body teach you through touch, timing, and attention.

Listen into this conversation on how Stephen refuses both magical thinking and rigid certainty. Instead, he points toward a grounded intuition born of repetition, body-based knowing, and genuine curiosity about the person in front of us. It’s a generous, searching exploration of what it means to practice acupuncture as a lifelong craft, in a world that keeps trying to turn it into a billable procedure.

441 History Series, What Happens When You Look with Interest • Stephen Brown

There are seasons in a woman’s life that don’t arrive quietly. They come with a tremor, a shimmer, a sense that something deep in the architecture of who you are is being rewritten. It’s not collapse, but instead a reordering that can’t be ignored.

In this conversation with Heidi Lovie, we wander into the transformation of menopause. She invites us to consider this transition not as a breakdown, but as a profound renegotiation between heart and kidney, ancestry and agency, biology and identity.

Listen into this discussion as we explore how hormones shape our sense of reality, why perimenopause can feel like the caterpillar dissolving into goo phase of becoming a butterfly, how grief and sovereignty intertwined in midlife, and ways clinicians can expand their imagination beyond the default kidney-yin story. This is about expanding language, reframing experience, and recognizing the second spring as a time of creativity, clarity, and unapologetic self-definition.

440 Reimagining Menopause • Heidi Lovie

Medicine finds its way into our lives not through textbooks, but by getting sand in our shoes, salt in our hair, and noticing how our hands long to be in the dirt—or on people.

Liz Vitale didn’t simply move to the Oregon Coast. She rooted herself there among fishermen, surfers, firefighters, foresters, Latina moms, and retirees. Over time she became part of the village, not just as a practitioner, but as a neighbor, a volunteer firefighter, a customer at the grocery store and regular at the surfer pub.

In this conversation with Liz, we explore what happens when medicine is not practiced from behind clinic doors, but amidst the actual people it serves. We talk about treating fishermen underserved by mainstream care, how not to impose our “Chinese medicine stories” on patients, how community softens judgment, and how sometimes medicine works quietly—by helping people first feel seen.

Listen into this discussion as we explore how healing unfolds differently in rural places, why living joyfully may be part of the prescription, how treating everybody includes those who don’t agree with you, and how sometimes you find out how your treatments are working not from a clinic visit—but from the local pub, where someone shouts over fish and chips, “Liz, the herbs are working.”

439 Inhabiting Community • Liz Vitale

We tend to think of eyesight as a technical problem—retinas, optics, refractive errors, clearer lenses. But eyes don’t just see—they interpret. They blur when the world feels too intrusive, or sharpen when clarity feels like safety. The eyes are woven through with story, memory, emotion, and the ways we've learned to look—or to look away.

In this conversation with Dr. Marc Grossman, optometrist, acupuncturist, and lifelong investigator of vision, we explore how eyesight is more than biology—it’s biography. He's spent decades asking not just what eye problems are, but why they appear in this person, at this moment, in this way. His work lives at the intersection of physiology, psychology, Chinese medicine, and the soul’s need to see clearly—not just out into the world, but into one’s own experience and heart.

Listen into this discussion as we explore how nearsightedness can emerge from emotional overwhelm, why some people develop tension in just one eye, how the optic nerve can reflect sensitivity and empathy, and why prescriptions sometimes don’t correct—but instead freeze—a moment in our story.

This isn’t a conversation about fixing eyes. It’s about recognizing eyesight as a living conversation between body, spirit, and the world we orient ourselves toward. It reminds us that inquiry—not protocol—is often the most powerful medicine.

438 Visionary Chinese Medicine Ophthalmology • Marc Grossman

Some people find acupuncture after a twisted ankle, a twist of fate, or some stubborn health condition that finally surrenders to a few needles. But every now and then you meet someone who caught the spark early—before the world had a chance to talk them out of their own curiosity.

In this conversation with Will Martin, we trace the path of a high-school kid who dove headfirst into Chinese medicine—ordering textbooks at sixteen, poring over ideas he could barely pronounce, and never letting that fascination go. Will brings a mix of youthful boldness and genuine reverence for the medicine. He’s thoughtful about the landscape of healthcare, clear-eyed about the challenges in our field, and articulate in how he sees acupuncture stepping more fully into the role of primary care.

Listen into this discussion as we explore why he thinks the medicine needs less defensiveness and more confidence, what it means to keep your treatments simple, how to stand in your authority as a new practitioner, and why the future of acupuncture might be brighter than we’ve been telling ourselves.

437 I Thought About Chinese Medicine in High School • Will Martin

Punk rock and Chinese medicine might seem worlds apart, but both pushed back on dominant systems. Punk challenged the mainstream music industry; Chinese medicine, the dominance of biomedicine. Each created space for alternative voices, for people questioning authority and rewriting the rules.

In this conversation with Tyler Phan, we explore how rebellion, identity, and power intersect in the making of American Chinese medicine. His research looks at how a healing tradition that arrived through the Chinese diaspora was caught by the imagination of white countercultural movements, shaped by state regulation, and often distanced from the very communities that carried it here.

Listen into this discussion as we unpack Foucault’s ideas of power, the counterculture’s fascination with the East, the formation of professional standards, and how the DIY ethos of punk still hums beneath it all.

Tyler’s perspective challenges us to see that medicine is never just about healing—it’s also about who gets to define what counts as knowledge, and who that power ultimately serves.

436 History Series, Punk Rock American Chinese Medicine • Tyler Phan

Sometimes clarity doesn’t come from adding more—it comes from taking away. Simplifying helps to see more clearly what’s already there. In medicine, that often means noticing the simple patterns hiding beneath complex presentations.

In this conversation with Fang Cai, we explore the meeting place between Saam acupuncture and dermatology. Fang brings years of clinical experience and study with Mazen Al-Khafaji, and she shares how integrating Saam principles with herbal dermatology has deepened both her diagnostic precision and her ability to communicate with patients in clear, everyday terms.

Listen into this discussion on using Saam acupuncture for troublesome skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, urticaria, rosacea, and acne. We’ll explore how the skin reveals patterns of physiology and imbalance, and why simplicity in treatment—done with discernment—can create profound change.

Fang’s reflections remind us that good medicine doesn’t always come from complexity. Sometimes it’s about listening closely, trusting what you see, and being the kind of practitioner you’d want to visit yourself.

435 Saam and Skin Conditions • Fang Cai

The tools we use to shape our world, they in turn shape us. Whether it’s the brush in a painter’s hand or the software code that organizes the clinic day. The interface becomes part of our perception. Technology, like medicine, is an expression of relationship.

In this conversation with Kenan Akbas, we trace the unlikely path from acupuncture to algorithms. This is a story that begins in the club scene of 1990s New York, winds its way through photography, Chinese medicine, Taiwan, and eventually the creation of platforms that help practitioners connect more fluidly with their patients. Kenan’s work sits at the intersection of tradition, innovation and inquisitiveness.

Listen into this discussion as we explore what it means to build technology rooted in care and how AI might become not a replacement for human skill, but a partner in the development of it. There are challenges in evolving with our tools as we move into a new stage of development with our exo-nervous system. There’s no going back, the question is how do you move forward into a new terrain.

434 The Art of Connection- Healing in the Age of Technology • Kenan Akbus.mp3

Chinese medicine is fractal nature. We can take the broad principles outlined in the Yi Jing, Five Phases or Six Jing and watch as they help us to tune in the particular level of life in which we are embedded or observing. Be it the resonance from tendon, to Liver, to Spring to the arising energy of the East. Or the way Taiyang cold balances Shaoyin heat. Or how the trigrams of water and fire are mirror images. The ancient Chinese sciences and philosophy can help us to unfold a phase within the ever-shifting tides of change.

Today’s conversation takes one of these fractal perspectives, the heavenly stems and branches, and investigates how it shows up in the practice of acupuncture.

Listen in to this conversation on how the stems and branches are reflected not just in heavenly cycles, but in the arrangement of acupuncture points and how this fractal energy can help enliven the work we do with our hands and needles.

 

Head on over to the show notes page for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview.

087 Stems and Branches: A Down to Earth Perspective on the Practice of Acupuncture • David Toone

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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