Qiological Podcast

Long before Chinese medicine took the form we recognize today, healers drilled holes in skulls to release demons. Philosophers debated what the universe was made of, while a wandering doctor read pulses instead of casting spells.

In this conversation with Henry Tarazona, we trace that lineage from the wushi shamans through the Hundred Schools of Thought to Bian Que, often called the father of Chinese medicine, and ultimately to Sun Simiao.

We also explore Sun Simiao’s “13 Ghost Points,” which turn out to have far less to do with ghosts than with pattern differentiation expressed in lan...

Reading blood work well means resisting the urge to sort everything into simply normal or abnormal. But what happens when the real diagnosis lives in the relationships between markers, not the markers themselves?

Dr. Jessica Parker is an acupuncturist and lab-work educator who teaches practitioners to read blood panels through a Chinese medicine lens. In this conversation, she joins Michael to explore the gap between conventional ranges and true optimal health.

Listen in as they trace her path from a formative year in Hangzhou, where East and West medicine shared the same pharmacy shelf, to...

In this episode Qiological celebrates its ninth anniversary.

For nine years new conversations on East Asian medicine and methods have appeared in your podcast feed each Tuesday morning

Anita Chopra, our guest from episode 429, joins us again not just to discuss face reading, but to give us a demonstration of how she uses severeal of the basic maps that chart the face.

We’re also joined by Angela Hunt, the winner of our drawing to appear on this episode and receive a face reading.

Listen in for a conversation that touches on...

As astrology draws curiosity as both a spiritual practice and a lens for self-understanding. Its symbolic language of image can speak meaningfully to our modern linear life.

In this conversation, we visit with Gregory Done we explore the relationship between fate and free will, and how inherited ancestral patterns shape our character, our challenges, and our sense of purpose.

We also discuss the difference between astrology as dialogue versus fortune telling, the nature of "ghosts" as unresolved generational trauma, and the deeper role of inner nature as a freedom untouched by fate.

Listen...

A diagnosis can feel like a single label, but some conditions reveal a wider terrain — one that spans immune response, cultural rhythm, and slow imbalance over time.

In this conversation with Brendan Kelly, we explore long COVID through the lens of classical Chinese medicine, looking at how frameworks like the Shang Han Lun's cold-to-heat progression and the Wen Bing's epidemic theory make sense of a condition with over two hundred possible symptoms. We discuss treatment not as a single formula, but as traditions blended and matched to where a disease has been and where it's heading.

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Much of what happens in the treatment room never makes it onto an intake form, yet it often shapes the outcome as much as anything measurable does.

In this conversation with Bonnie Wright, we explore what she calls the art of medicine, the intuitive, relational sense of truly knowing the patient in front of you, and how the body's structures act less as separate parts than as one continuously adapting whole.

We also touch on what gets lost when certainty crowds out listening, and why the most useful insights often arrive in the things we...

Practicing acupuncture for over fifty years asks us to trust intuition and stay open even when the path ahead isn't clear. But what happens when a life's direction comes not from planning, but from being pulled toward what you love?

Judy Worsley is a five element acupuncturist who trained alongside J.R. Worsley for decades, helping shape this medicine's growth into the profession it is today. In this conversation, she joins Michael to explore the tension between certainty and surrender, and how following what feels true can become its own kind of guidance.

Listen in...

As chronic, hard-to-treat disorders become more common in clinic, many practitioners are returning to Wen Bing theory for answers.

In this conversation with Kerri Westhauser, we explore lurking pathogen theory and how deep-lying evils help explain complex conditions like lupus and POTS.

We also discuss why tonification often backfires in chronic disease, and the importance of venting, regulating, and mobilizing Shen to keep the body's pathways open.

Listen in for a practical rethinking of the Wei and Qi levels and how to locate disease that has gone into hiding.

Not every point sits in the textbook. Others only appear when the body decides to show them.

In this episode we visit with Shaun Goodman, longtime practitioner of Dr. Tung's acupuncture, a Taiwanese system built on its own map of the body. What begins as a question of pronunciation quickly opens into a wider conversation about channels, diagnosis, and the discipline of looking closely.

We explore the palm as a diagnostic tool, the logic of treating through the thigh and shin rather than the familiar fourteen channels, and why some of the most effective points...

As acupuncture and Chinese medicine face regulatory pressure and institutional change on both sides of the Atlantic, many practitioners are asking what it takes to preserve the tradition while still being taken seriously as medical professionals.

In this conversation, we visit with Alex Jacobs, CEO of the British Acupuncture Council, we explore the relationship between tradition and regulation, and how this balance shapes education standards, professional identity, and public trust in the medicine.

We also discuss the value of holding contradiction in clinical practice, the difference between the "disciple" and the "heretic" as two complementary...

Part Two

How does a profession begin? Not on paper. Not with licensing boards or schools. Often enough, it starts with a handful of curious people who become convinced there's another way to do things. Part determination, part serendipity, and perhaps a good measure of luck.

Bill Prensky and Gene Bruno were there before acupuncture had a place in American healthcare. In the wake of the Vietnam War, student protests, and a generation questioning nearly everything, they walked away from academic research that no longer made sense to them. Their Tai Chi teacher, Marshall Ho...

Part One.

How does a profession begin? Not on paper. Not with licensing boards or schools. Often enough, it starts with a handful of curious people who become convinced there's another way to do things. Part determination, part serendipity, and perhaps a good measure of luck.

Bill Prensky and Gene Bruno were there before acupuncture had a place in American healthcare. In the wake of the Vietnam War, student protests, and a generation questioning nearly everything, they walked away from academic research that no longer made sense to them. Their Tai Chi teacher, Marshall Ho...

It’s not news that there are changes afoot in the world of education. You’re probably already well aware of the closure, over the past few years, of schools with a long history. There are concerns with loan debt that have been an issue since Obama was president. Most recently, the changes to student loans that not only fundamentally affect the acupuncture trade, but will change the landscape for graduate education in a notable way.

In this conversation with Bex Groebner we untangle the intersection of education, accreditation, federal student loan programs and professional accountability. We expl...

Some teachings are preserved in books. Others are preserved in people.

In this episode we visit with Johann Hausen, translator, publisher, practitioner, and long-time student of Daoist traditions in the Wudang Mountains. What begins with martial arts and Chinese medicine quickly opens into a wider conversation about cultivation, character, and the responsibility of carrying knowledge forward.

We explore the foundations of internal alchemy, not as a collection of techniques, but as a lifelong process of refining oneself through everyday life. Why difficult people may be our greatest teachers. How attachment can hide in the things...

We tend to think of the acupuncture profession as something fixed and stable, but the reality is that it is always in motion. The practice of East Asian medicine in North America has been shaped by decades of effort—by practitioners, educators, regulators, and advocates working to create a place for this medicine in the American healthcare system.

In this conversation with Valerie Hobbs, we take a historical look at how the profession bootstrapped itself into being. Along with how the creation of educational standards, accreditation, certification, and professional organizations, helped to give the profession the form it...

As the Fire Horse year reaches its peak, many practitioners are noticing shifts in both the environment and the clinic.

In this conversation with Christine Cannon, we explore the interaction of fire and water through the lens of Wu Yun Liu Qi, and how these energies may be influencing respiratory health, anxiety, fatigue, and emotional resilience.

We also discuss the importance of protecting Wei Qi, creating restorative space, and finding balance during periods of heightened activity and change.

Listen in for a practical discussion on seasonal influences, constitutional health, and navigating the energetic...

What if the very things that seem to be pulling our profession apart are actually the forces that will finally condense it into something more resilient? We’re in a moment of choppy waters—school closures, shrinking enrollment, and a shifting financial landscape—where the successes of what have brought us to this moment will not take us into the future. .

In this conversation with Kathleen Lumiere, co-president of the Seattle Institute for East Asian Medicine (SIEAM), we discuss how we might make changes to our educational models that both streamlines and strengthens East Asian medicine.

We d...

Many of us experience life through schedules, deadlines, and calendars, yet beneath them are deeper patterns that shape how we grow, adapt, heal, and change.

In this conversation with Peter Firebrace, we explore Chinese perspectives on time, timing, and the timeless. Through seasonal cycles, the Chinese calendar, and the rhythms observed in nature, we look at how a deeper awareness of time can inform both clinical practice and everyday life.

We also touch on what may be lost when we become disconnected from the natural patterns around us, and why reconnecting with those rhythms can...

We’re at a moment where the structure of loans and professional education is changing. Not just for the acupuncture profession, but across the entire educational landscape. While it seems the storm has suddenly blown in, it’s been brewing for a while.

In this conversation with Ryan Hofer we discuss the reality of Grad Plus loans, the true cost of them in terms of the interest they generate, and why the "math doesn't math" for a lot of people entering the field right now. We explore the various ways loans can be resolved, and the shame and...

Clinical practice asks us to recognise patterns, trust experience, and make decisions under uncertainty. But what happens when discovery comes not from certainty, but from staying open to surprise?

Dr. Neil Theise is a liver pathologist, stem cell researcher, Zen practitioner, and one of the scientists behind the discovery of the interstitium. In this conversation, he joins Michael to explore the tension between expertise and beginner’s mind, and how curiosity itself can become a path to deeper understanding.

Listen into this discussion as they explore the body as both structure and living continuum; how fa...

The acupuncture and East Asian profession is facing a number of critical challenges as long-established schools close, new federal guidelines on graduate education loans will dramatically change how much students can borrow, and fewer students consider a career as an acupuncturist.

How to wayfind through these troubled times? That is the question explored in this series with practitioners, researchers, and educators in the field of East Asian medicine.

In this conversation with Danielle Reghi we follow the arc of her career from acquiring and dealing with upwards of 200K in debt, to building a multi-location...

Medicine is never only about treatment. It also carries culture, identity, and memory. Sometimes preserving a medicine is a way of preserving a people.

In this episode we visit with James Flowers to explore a potent moment in the history of Korean medicine and how Hanbang became part of Korea’s cultural resistance during the Japanese colonization. Not through politics or violence, but through preserving ways of healing, thinking, and living.

We discuss how medical ideas moved between Korea, China, and Japan, the role of Yangsheng in everyday life, and how Korean medicine resisted separating mi...

Often what brings someone into our office looks straightforward at first—a concussion, dizziness, headache, or a sense that something is not quite right. But what begins as the search to fix a symptom often reveals something deeper—a nervous system that has lost its bearings, sensory maps that no longer line up, and a body quietly adapting around signals it can no longer fully trust.

Ayla Wolf and Clayton Shiu both work at the intersection of functional neurology and East Asian medicine. Through clinical observation, modern diagnostic tools, and hands-on palpation, they’ve developed ways of seeing...

We often think of allergies as simple reactions, but some conditions reveal a far deeper conversation between the immune system, environment, and daily life—one that evolves with every exposure.

In this conversation with Rebecca Chrestman, we explore Alpha-Gal syndrome through both modern understanding and Chinese medicine, looking at how patterns like damp heat and spleen imbalance help make sense of complex, multi-system symptoms. We discuss the realities of treatment—not quick fixes, but gradual shifts in reactivity, lifestyle, and resilience.

We also touch on the emotional and practical impact of living with a condition that...

What makes a system feel trustworthy—results, lineage, or the way it brings you into the resonance of what’s happening?

Philip Suger didn’t start with Saam acupuncture. He was in Beijing in 2010, following a thread that led him to Wang Ju-Yi and channel palpation—hands on the body, feeling where things change and where they resolve. Later, back in the States, he found himself working with patients who improved but those changes were not lasting. That got him began circling back to a method he’d once dismissed: four needles, arranged through a set of relationsh...

The path into acupuncture isn’t always clean or linear—sometimes it begins in the grit and confusion of working out just who you are in this world. From anthropology studies in Seattle’s Skid Row to the disciplined intensity of kendo in Japan, Jeffrey Dann’s journey was shaped by curiosity, discomfort, and a search for something deeper. A knee injury, a moment on a subway, and an unexpected recovery became the doorway into a medicine that would take him through Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Beijing in the early days of acupuncture’s global spread.

In this co...

Points don’t really have a number, they have a name. They are not just a function, they embody characteristics and relationships.

In this episode I get to sit for a conversation with Arnie Lade. He’s the author of a book I spent a lot of time with in the library when I was in acupuncture school. Acupuncture Points: Images and Functions wasn’t a book I read to pass exams, it was one I read to get a feeling for points.

We explore how the work of Moshe Feldenkrais has influenced his work. And ho...

In practice, healing often begins with seeking a solution to a problem that has us looking for help. What first looks like a search for relief becomes an encounter with something wider: the patterns of striving, the habits of attention, and the quiet ways body, mind, and spirit reorganise when we slow down enough to notice.

Sue Crites is a qigong teacher with a background in ecological science, holistic nutrition, and bioenergetic medicine. Her path into this work began through caregiving, chronic illness in her family, and her own unexpected experience of healing, which opened into a...

Some projects kick off with a business plan. Others begin as a response to an odd little ad in the back of a magazine, or sparked by following a hunch. When you think about it, this is often how the interesting work begins—not with certainty, but with curiosity and enough craft and gumption to stay with the question.

This conversation with Rick Gold and Yuval Ron moves through the strange and increasingly practical territory where music, medicine, plants, and perception collide. We discuss Yuval’s early work with the pioneer of binaural beats and how psychoacoustics adds...

We all find our own unique way into the practice of East Asian medicine.

It’s part luck, part dogged curiosity and persistence, and sometimes a bit of fate.

In this conversation with Holly Guzman, we wander through her circuitous route into the medicine—from knocking on the door of the Chinese embassy in Kabul, to hanging out at a bookstore in San Francisco, waiting to see who might pick up the one English book on acupuncture. Along the way she crossed paths with some remarkable teachers, witnessed extraordinary ways acupuncture was used in China, and...

Sports medicine acupuncture is one of those phrases that sounds neat and tidy. But, what does it actually mean?.

In this conversation with Darren Maynard, dig into the complexity and methods that fall within the world of orthopedic and musculo-skeletal medicine. We explore what it means to be bilingual in clinic, and the value of being able to hold a Chinese medicine diagnosis and a Western ortho assessment in the same set of hands. We’ll discuss why “sports” doesn’t mean “athletes only,” how palpation is a key to effective treatment, and why training means more than a few w...

Some concepts in Chinese medicine don’t need more poetry. They need a hands-on palpable marker, and a willingness to admit, “I think I get it… and then the light changes and I can’t see it.” That’s the territory we’re in with the Ming Men—the so‑called Gate of Destiny, the fire that isn’t just heat, the thing we can discuss over the centuries and still not be sure about when meeting it again on Tuesday afternoon in clinic.

This panel conversation is an attempt to better understand the Ming Men. Not by flattening it int...

We no longer pretend the gut and the mind are separate; we know the interconnections are vast and rich. Furthermore, their communication isn’t a hack—it’s a relationship that responds to your input, and it’s something you can actually touch.

In this conversation with Henry Tarazona, we hear about his unlikely path into Chinese medicine—his love of tuina, and how he uses it to affect organ function and biochemistry. We’ll discuss Liver/Spleen stress dynamics and the quietly radical clinical power of moderation in improving digestion, along with Henry’s thoughts on the gut–brain...

Sometimes the people who shape us most aren’t the ones who formally taught us anything. They’re the people in a potent moment who say something that we hear with something other than our ears— it sends us down a path we hadn't noticed that was right under our feet.

In this conversation with Haunani Chong-Drake, we explore the edges of mentorship—not as a program, credential, or transaction, but as something serendipitous and unexpectedly catalytic. The kind of connection that doesn’t give you answers, but instead changes the questions you’re asking.

Listen into...

Often enough, medicine evolves not through the accumulation of answers, but instead by posing annoying questions. The thing about learning, it usually carries an element of disruption.

In this conversation with Peter Eckman we follow him in his journey of sleuthing out where JR Worsley learned his medicine. But, it’s not just a story of where Worsley got his stuff, to set the stage we have to go back to the shaman practitioners of a time before history. Then come forward through the pantheon of Chinese doctors of the past, and then into the modern age wh...

There’s a moment, in the slack tide between one flow and another, when a potent stillness arises, and the possibility of a new direction arrives with a feeling of invitation. It’s like standing on the threshold of a dream.

We share this conversation with Gregory Done as we metamorphize from the Wood Snake to the Fire Horse. What’s in store as we enter a year of unmitigated Fire? Where is caution advised and where do you double down with the creative energy of the Horse?

Listen into this conversation as we explore time-a...

In clinical work pattern and intuition inform each other, treatment decisions arise somewhere between what we can measure and what we can only sense. This episode investigates that in-between space, where “knowing” as a human and the patterning of Large Language Models merges in uncanny ways.

Vanessa Menendez-Covelo has been a guest on the podcast and recently she’s been exploring the ever changing frontier of AI, as both a former computer scientist and actively practicing acupuncturist.

Listen into this discussion as we explore how AI “hallucinations” might be creative sparks of fertile imagination; what a tongue-r...

What if “failure” was just expectations being uncomfortably rewritten by reality?

In this conversation with Neal Sivula we discuss the experience of failing forward—what it actually looks and feels like when you’re a practitioner, a clinic owner, and a person who cares. How to navigate the employee who doesn’t show up the way you hoped, the power outage, or the appointment someone forgets. And the uncomfortable moment when you have to hold a boundary, especially when you’d rather not be the hammer.

Neal has found a few steady anchors: the micro-business reality of “...

The path that connects can’t be seen when you’re looking forward, but there are values, hunches—and maybe even whispers from the future—that nudge us onto the path that matches our spirit and heart.

In this History Series conversation on Qiological, we take a trip in the Wayback Machine with Misha Cohen to the early days, when her interest in health and wellbeing crisscrossed paths with Chinese medicine—an unconventional grandmother, a sudden onset of back pain, and the goings-on at Lincoln Hospital quietly setting the stage for her later work with AIDS and cancer pat...

There comes a time in midlife when the body’s signaling becomes a bit disordered. Energy dips without explanation. Sleep thins out. Recovery takes longer. It’s not that the system has failed—it’s that the signals aren’t as attuned as they used to be. Something in the conversation between stress, hormones, and resilience has gone a little quiet.

In this conversation with Mark Brinson, we explore what happens when hormone replacement therapy and Chinese medicine are used to complement one another. Mark shares both clinical and personal insight into how modern, well-monitored HRT has evolved—an...