Confusion is often treated as a problem to solve on the way to a real answer. But in the clinic, it may be closer to the beginning of the process than an obstacle to it.

In this conversation with Linda Kim, we explore what it means to practice acupuncture with curiosity rather than certainty. We discuss why diagnosis may be something revealed through treatment—through palpation, real-time feedback, and the willingness to be wrong and adjust—rather than something that must be figured out in advance.

We also discuss constitutional nature versus compensated presentation, how playfulness loosens the rigid thinking that blocks perception, and why the most obvious thing in the room is often the most important.

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 language patients could understand.

Finally, we unpack shen—a concept that “spirit” never quite captures—and consider it instead as the seat of cognition, emotion, and the body’s own governance.

Listen in for a conversation that moves between ancient battlefields and modern clinics, superstition and evidence, and the long effort to explain what's happening inside us when nothing else makes sense.

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 teaching acupuncturists to read cortisol, cholesterol, and thyroid markers as stories of stress and imbalance; how spleen-chi deficiency hides inside ordinary lab numbers; and why cortisol has been unfairly demonized online.

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 mentorship, practice building, being authentically who we are clinical work, a bit of Qiological’s backstory, and reflections on the journey that has brought the podcast to its ninth anniversary.

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 in for a discussion on ancestry, symbol, and resolution, and what it means to work toward wholeness within the currents of one's own life.

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.

We also touch on why epidemics are never purely individual, and how a culture's own excess heat may shape its susceptibility to illness.

Listen in for a conversation that brings clinical experience and classical theory to a condition modern medicine still struggles to treat.

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 weren't looking for.

Listen in for a conversation that moves between anatomy and intuition, structure and change, and the practice of staying open to what doesn't yet fit.

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 they trace her path from a free-roaming Florida childhood, through law school and a hitchhiking trip across America, to a chance encounter that changed everything; how clarity differs from having all the answers; why difficult moments deserve to be revisited rather than carried; and what it means to spend a lifetime devoted to this work.

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 have no fixed name or location. Why not-knowing deserves patience rather than anxiety. And how a chance discovery from French auricular medicine gave Shaun a way to find points no teacher was there to point out.

Beneath the technique is a simpler idea: that what looks like magic is really just a system, once you learn how to see it.