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.

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