Qiological Podcast

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 “one day at a time,” and the quietly radical skill of addition by subtraction. Sometimes the way forward isn’t adding another technique. It’s stopping something. Simplifying. Doing more with lessing.There’s also the importance of tenderness . Neal works with older animals and the humans who love them, he leans on the practice of accompaniment—staying present when things are hard, not avoiding the difficult moments, but instead inhabiting them. It makes a difference.Listen into this conversation for how failure teaches, and what it asks of us when we’re the ones doing the learning.

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 patients on the other side of the country.Misha’s curiosity has kept her at the leading edge of weaving Chinese medicine and biomedicine together—without flattening either one. In practice, that means clearer thinking, better collaboration, and a steady reminder that acupuncture and herbs often fill a hole in the modern medical system.Listen into this conversation for a glimpse of what integrative medicine can look like when it’s practiced with an eye toward honoring the value—and the real clinical power—of Chinese medicine.

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—and why, when used thoughtfully, it doesn’t override the body so much as restore missing information. From a Chinese medicine perspective, this opens the door for acupuncture and herbs to once again regulate, refine, and integrate, rather than constantly compensate.Listen into this discussion as we explore hormonal signaling and receptor responsiveness, why balance can sometimes reach a ceiling without additional support, how acupuncture can smooth the transition into HRT, and what it means to practice medicine that restores communication rather than chasing symptoms. This is a grounded, nuanced look at aging—not as decline, but as a shift that asks for better listening and a more open mind about how, and when, to intervene.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Dr. Marc Grossman, an optometrist and licensed acupuncturist, integrates Western eye care with Chinese medicine. He reveals how eyesight intertwines with emotions and personal histories. Marc discusses how nearsightedness can stem from overwhelm and how eye conditions might reflect emotional dynamics. He critiques traditional prescription methods for their rigidity and highlights the importance of understanding each patient's unique story. The conversation encourages viewing eyes as storytellers, emphasizing a holistic approach to vision care and healing.

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.