About Steven
Steven Alpern, L.Ac., practices acupuncture and Chinese medicine as applied clinical philosophy. He is also a teacher, author and speaker. His efforts to discern the nature of individual health draw upon the classics of Chinese medicine and several historical traditions and specialties. Learn more...Subscribe by Email
Author Archives: Steve
Busy, Busy, Busy
I haven’t quit blogging. In fact, I have A LOT of ideas I want to explore in this venue. This past month has just been AMAZINGLY busy.I hope to return to blogging CCM at least a couple times per week, even though I have many other things on my platter. In addition to me ongoing [...]
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The Archeology of Disease
People develop progressive and degenerative diseases from stagnations that accumulate within the embodied spirit. We can tolerate those accumulations for some time, but eventually they impede or obstruct “normal” physiological process. Each embodied spirit is provided with an amazingly effective collection of “storage reservoirs” that allow them to adapt and adjust to pathogenic stagnations. (Technically, [...]
Lessons from the River
My brief hiatus from blogging has come during a Colorado river trip through the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Phantom Ranch. It was a GREAT trip, but alas I wasn’t well prepared with a backlog of posts to publish while I was out of contact! While I was hiking out of the wondrous canyon, [...]
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Teaching the Soul of Classical Chinese Medicine
Give a man a fish to feed him for a day; teach him to fish to feed him for a lifetime! I’m committed to sharing the wealth of classical Chinese medicine, which I’ve been able to learn through the generous teachings of Jeffrey Yuen. Yet, Jeffrey doesn’t make it easy – The sage is not [...]
Some Treatments Are Plain as Day
Stagnant blood is the somatic version of unresolved emotional conflicts. Who doesn’t have any of those? No attachment to having your way? Don’t think your way is the right way? Well, I don’t believe contemporary people come close to that stringent standard of spiritual liberation. We have too much apparent (temporal) power, and generally fail [...]
Is Health Care Against Society?
I ran into an old friend at the grocery store a couple days ago. We greeted each other warmly, after not seeing each other for several years. Matt is a medical doctor, specifically a radiologist, who was one of few medical professionals in our small rural California town to accept my efforts practicing Chinese medicine [...]
Posted in Health Care Policy, Personal Tagged health care revolution, normative standards Leave a comment
Practicing Health Care
A few weeks ago, I taught a weekend continuing education seminar for acupuncturists on the channel divergences, which have central importance for both understanding and reversing progressive and degenerative disease. Early in that seminar, I posed the following question, which I believe lay deep in the soul of many health care practitioners: Do you want [...]
To Publish or Not to Publish?
That is the question. It’s particularly salient for me, as my own editor and publisher of this site. I’m wanting to make good use of my precious time and energy, and have bit into a REALLY BIG project — trying to share a worldview about health and healing that’s profoundly different from our modern “knowledge.” [...]
Health Care: NOT Just a Funding Challenge
The Problem with Health Care is the Pervasive Fantasy that We Can Treat It as a Consumer Good! Health and healing are not consumer goods. Why would one think we could treat health care as one? If consuming health care actually made people healthier, there could never be enough. Our society would have to ration [...]
Focus Health & Wellness Educational Symposium