Between Qi and Science: My Experience of What Can't Be Measured

What does the placebo effect actually reveal, once you stop using it to dismiss healing you don't understand? 

In this fourth episode Kin turns from his father's individual miracles to the mechanics of healing itself, opening with an acupuncturist who feels the same "qi" his family does and moving through decades of placebo research — sugar pills whose size, color, and price change their effect, sham knee surgery that heals as well as real surgery, and a study in which only the prescribing dentist's belief (not the patient's) changed outcomes — to argue that placebo is less a "mind trick" than an embodied ritual, one that mainstream medicine performs just as much as it accuses alternative healing of doing. 

Kin lands on a position of strong agnosticism — code-switching between mainstream and Chinese medicine rather than picking one as more real — while acknowledging, through his father's attempts to remotely heal a troubled relative, the real limits and dangers of that confidence, setting up the next episode's turn to his father's healing as an act of intimacy rather than mechanical fixing.

See also: 

• Kneebone 2016 - Performing Surgery: Commonalities with Performers Outside Medicine  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5006638/ 
• Johnson 1994 - Surgery as a placebo https://www.proquest.com/docview/198981324?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals 
• Moseley et al 2002 - A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259 
• Kaptchuk interviewed by Shankar Vedantam on The Dramatic Cure https://www.hidde     nbrain.org/podcast/the-dramatic-cure/
• Kaptchuk 2000 - The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine https://www.goodwillbooks.com/the-web-that-has-no-weaver-understanding-969-9780809228409.html 
• Kaptchuk 2010 - Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3008733/ 
• Cheung 2025 - “Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention_ How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms” (ch10_p197-222) https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836245643 
• Lévi- Strauss, C. ([1958] 1998), ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’ in P. J. Brown (ed.)
• Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company), 129– 37.
• Moerman 2012 - Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/meaning-medicine-and-the-placebo-effect/C189929ABE972E5D4C7FE32008EE8838 
• Tilley, H. (ed.) (2021), Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge and
• Law. Osiris. Vol. 36 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
• Solomon, M. (2015), Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Gracely et al. 1985 - Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/gracely-rh-dubner-r-deeter-wr-wolskee-pj-1985/ 
• Scheid 2020 - Some Moments in the Encounter between Chinese Medicine and Covid-19 https://www.asianmedicinezone.com/p/the-pan-of-pandemics-why-and-how?open=false#%C2%A7some-moments-in-the-encounter-between-chinese-medicine-and-covid-19 
• Cheung 2021 - Merit, Karma, and Exchange: Chinese Buddhist Mountain Tourism Company Listings on the Stock Market https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/89/3/931/6377686?redirectedFrom=fulltext 
• Raz and Harris eds 2016 - Placebo Talks: Modern perspectives on placebos in society https://global.oup.com/academic/product/placebo-talks-9780199680702?cc=us&lang=en& 

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

Is my dad's healing real, and if it is, how do I make sense of it without simply translating it into mainstream medicine's terms? 

In this third episode, Kin recounts his father's most striking healing feats — restoring his grandmother's face after a paralyzing stroke, dissolving a neighbor's decades-old tumor, and developing an involuntary "sixth sense" that guides his hands to heal — and wrestles with how to understand them as a scholar of religion trained to be skeptical of both mainstream and religious explanations. Kin argues that his father's healings might best be understood not through translation into biomedical terms but through code-switching — holding qi, karma, and biomedicine as parallel languages rather than collapsing one into the other — setting up the next episode's turn to the placebo effect and what it reveals about the shaky boundary between mind and body.

See also:

• Cheung, K. “Miracle as Natural: A Contemporary Chinese American Religious Healer.” In Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, edited by Karen R. Zwier, David L. Weddle, and Timothy D. Knepper. Comparative Philosophy of Religion Series 3, 131-154. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.
• Klass, Morton (1995) - Ordered Universes: Approaches To The Anthropology Of Religion
• Sered, S. (2003). Afterword: Lexicons of the supernatural. Anthropological Forum, 13(2), 213–218.
• Campany, R. F. (2012). Signs from the unseen realm: Buddhist miracle tales from early Medieval China. University of Hawaiʻi Press.
• Kim 1999 - “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans”

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

What does it mean to carry a wound forward in time without ever fully being able to close it?

In this second episode, Kin traces how his father was forged into a healer by the brutal conditions of New York's Chinatown sweatshops — grueling factory work that wrecked his body and left him with no access to formal healthcare, pushing him to piece together an eclectic, self-taught practice from whatever was within reach: cupping and moxibustion learned between shifts from Dr. Mui, a former Chinese doctor turned factory worker; herbal tonics from a Shaolin-trained coworker; feng shui wisdom from Cantonese radio; and an improvised, budget-conscious version of a Buddhist life-release ritual using brine shrimp. 

Weaving in his father's childhood poverty and neglect in Guangzhou, a marriage strained by money sent across oceans, and the family's brush with his mother's cancer diagnosis, Kin draws on Jung's and Henri Nouwen's idea of the "wounded healer" to frame his father as someone who heals others precisely because his own wounds, physical and relational, never fully closed — while reflecting on his own distance and privilege as a scholar able to analyze what his father could only live.

See also:

• Father John Catoir interviewing Henri Nouwen about his 1972 book titled The Wounded Healer: Fr. Catoir & Henri Nouwen, Part 6, "On Loneliness"
• Henri Nouwen 1972 The Wounded Healer

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung 

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

In this first episode of Between Qi and Science, host Dr. Kin Cheung recounts the night at seventeen when his father first taught him hei gong (qigong) in their Coney Island living room, and traces how that moment set him on a lifelong path between two worlds: the mainstream biomedical view of the body and his father's practice as a self-taught community healer who blends hei gong, acupuncture, cupping, feng shui, and Buddhist ritual. 

Weaving together his father's immigration from China, decades in New York's sweatshops, and eventual emergence as a healer, alongside his own path from a philosophy student to a scholar of Buddhism, Kin explores what's lost in translation between biomedical and Chinese medical ways of knowing, the politics of studying one's own family and community, and what it means to hold multiple "code-switched" worldviews at once without collapsing one into the other.

See also:

• Cheung, K. “A Chinese American Religious Healer: Toward Filial Ethnography.” In The Familial Occult: Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography, edited by Alexandra Coțofană. European Association of Social Anthropologists Series 47, 17-44. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2023. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/CotofanaFamilial 

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

Can healing be real if science can't measure it?

Between Qi and Science: My Experience of What Can’t Be Measured is a six-episode audio memoir about qi, Chinese medicine, and the limits of Western biomedicine. It follows a Cantonese immigrant sweatshop worker who became a self-taught community healer in Brooklyn's Coney Island. His son, Dr. Kin Cheung, a scholar of religion and Buddhism, takes us on the journey of living with and learning from his father. 

The story starts with a teenage encounter with qigong (hei gong). From there it traces the sweatshop labor, poverty, and immigration that shaped a "wounded healer." Later episodes dig into acupuncture, placebo research, and the politics of "traditional medicine." Other episodes cover Asian American masculinity and stereotypes, and the challenge of holding mainstream medicine, Chinese healing practices, and Buddhism as equally real.

The series blends personal narrative, oral history, and religious studies scholarship. It's for listeners interested in alternative medicine, Asian American stories, religion and science, and healing and grief across generations.

Created by the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Executive Producer: Brad Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski