Qiological Podcast

 I had the delightful surprise of Zoe Coldham reaching out to me to tell me about the documentary she’d created that goes into the early days of acupuncture finding its way into the mainstream of British culture.

As you probably know, Qiological has been doing a little mini-series on acupuncture’s journey to the west as well. So I was keen to have her on to hear her perspective and what she’s discovered.

Listen in for this documentarian’s perspective on acupuncture’s Journey to the West.

The late 60s and early 70s were a time of openness and experimentation. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement, more equality for women, and the recognition that sexuality included more than love between men and women.

Cultural norms were questioned and that included dietary practices, the healing arts and the relationship between humans and the planet. It was in this rich milieu of change that acupuncture started to take root in the imagination and then practice of those who were willing to follow a path with heart.

We are going to hear more about those early days with Randall Barolet. Some of you might recognize his name on the first Formula and Strategies book from Eastland Press. Randall did not set out to be a translator, that was something that organically showed up as he followed his interest with Chinese medicine.

In the words of Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter, what a long strange trip it’s been.

It’s fun to solve problems. Especially when you’re not quite sure what to do, so you have to pay attention and learn what’s important. You must develop the capacity to learn from both your failures and success.

Mark Brinson wanted a liniment for patients and was not happy with what was on the market. So he thought he’d just mix up his own. That turned into a process of learning a lot about everything from the quality of the herbs, to the nature of the water, to distilling his own alcohol.

The final product is not just a quality liniment, but a point of view. When it comes to marketing and assisting practitioners not just about helping their patients, but also doing well financially so they can sustainably do their doctoring work.

Listen into this conversation on herbal alchemy, marketing with a sense of humor and how to have fun as a mad scientist.

The Chinese are right, the brain is a curious organ. The way the nerves entangle their way into every aspect of our body, and how their gentle electric hum gives us awareness of this container we call ourselves.

Pain is how our nervous system lets us know there is a problem. Acupuncture has rightfully been seen and used as a way to intervene. Strangely enough the ear has a powerful influence on the brain and nervous system.

In this conversation with John Howard we take a look at  Battlefield Acupuncture, its origin, unique place in the military, and how it works with the curious organ of the brain.

Listen into this discussion on the influence of the zero point, the curious relationship between blood types and pain, sacred the geometry of 30 degree angles, importance of titration and how causing some trouble got him a job working for the Yankees.

What is our universe made of? How does it work, and more importantly– what are we doing here and how do we make sense of it? Eternal questions, unanswerable, but maybe the questions are not for answering, perhaps they are for focusing attention.

In this conversation with Rory Hiltbrand we take a look at our peculiar situation as Beings in between the circle of heaven and square of earth. We dip into mathematics, Donghan Daoist numerology, metaphysics and others head scratching ideas about medicine that practitioners have puzzled over for centuries.  

Listen into this discussion of sacred geometry, alchemy, Quantum mechanics and perception. It gets a bit Alice in Wonderland like, but I think you’ll enjoy the trip down this rabbit hole.

While many are keen on looking to “science up” acupuncture and squeeze it into the thinking and theories of conventional medicine, others are quite content with the weirdness of it. And enjoy playing around in the territory that’s off the radar of Western science.

Julian Scott is one of those pioneering acupuncturists whose background in theoretical physics primed him for the strangeness of the world of acupuncture.

In this conversation we explore how healing and science don’t always go together. His surprising introduction to treating children, and the weirdness that is inherent to both physics and healing.

Listen into this discussion on root causes, developmental stages, the influence of vaccines, along with the role of mind-to-mind connection and emanation in healing.

As anyone who has started an acupuncture practice and tried explaining it to potential patients knows, it’s not easy taking the terminology and thinking of East Asian medicine into English speaking Western culture.

The guest of this conversation, John Rybak, has thought long and hard about this. He is keen on helping our profession bridge how we think and work with the constraints and opportunities of the conventional medicine world.

Listen into this conversation on the importance of effective communication, concerns with our scope of practice losses, need for advocacy, and how expanding our vocabulary can help us to engage the broader medical community.

Brenda Hood often reminds me “Chinese concepts, especially classical Chinese concepts, are big and multidimensional. They are extremely dependent on context and while shades of meaning often cross over, they can be quite different and be more or less encompassing of ideas depending on actual context.”

Which is why I’m always questioning myself when wrestling ancient Chinese ideas. What’s more, it will seem culture itself is constantly rewriting history to fit the current zeitgeist. So words and ideas, they shape-shift through time.

In this episode we discuss 意 Yi, commonly translated as Meaning or Significance, and also as Intention.

Intention gets talked about a lot in our trade, but for me over the course of time, I feel less and less clear just what Intention is, and how it relates to my clinical work. I’ve got some questions about it, and was delighted to sit down with Stephen Boyington, Leslie de Vries and Volker Scheid to see if they could thrown some light on what for me has increasingly become a murky term.

Listen into this both scholarly and practical discussion on 意, Yi as it relations to medicine and how the doctors, poets and calligraphers over the centuries have puzzled over this as well.

Saam acupuncture with its unique channel pairings, perspective on psycho-emotional dynamics, and capacity to interweave the Five Phase with the Six Qi is a powerful tool for understanding the interplay of yin and yang along with body and mind.

In this conversation Joshua Park joins us to explore how Saam acupuncture gives us a holistic view and allows practitioners to approach diagnosis and treatment from multiple perspectives.

Listen into this discussion of how using multiple lenses gives a more dimensional understanding to your patient's condition. Along with how the Zi Wu “Chinese Clock” helps us to discern the interconnections between Heaven, Earth and Person, and how the flows of dissatisfaction and satiation are built into being human.

In the late 60’s and early 70’s of the last century East Asian medicine began to emerge into mainstream culture. The Reston NY Times article is often cited as a catalytic moment that put the idea of Chinese acupuncture into the minds of Americans. But other streams of medicine from Japan and Korea were also finding their way into the imagination of those who would be a conduit that would help these methods to flourish in the mainstream of Western culture.

Peter Eckman has been a unique bridging influence. His acupuncture came from the currents of Korea, as well as Japan and Taiwan via the Worsley tradition of England.

Listen into this conversation on inquisitiveness, constitution, and how saying “yes” in pivotal moments opens up a world of possibility.