Qiological Podcast

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...

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, researc...

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 pres...

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...

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 sens...

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...

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 recove...

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...

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, ho...

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 incr...

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 on...

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...

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 Tu...

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...

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...

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 b...

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 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 changin...

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...

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 me...

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 wh...

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 exper...

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 practice...

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 acupunc...

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, b...