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
Is it a Fairy Tale?
The conceptual model of physical “reality” articulated by modern scientific medicine is powerful and compelling. It appeals to our naïve experience of living in, and learning to manipulate, a mechanistic physical world that submits to our control according to fixed “laws of nature.” The ideas of scientific medicine are deeply satisfying to many, especially relative [...]
Passive Health Care Breeds Dependence
Passive care is ANY form of health care where the patient is a passive consumer of a good or service. That might be a pharmaceutical medicine, surgery, joint or other physical manipulation, dietary supplement, or any other consumption-based attempt to improve your health. Let me be very clear: I don’t consider this a problem with [...]
Posted in Health Care Policy, Personal Health Tagged acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine Leave a comment
Indicator Symptoms: A Patient’s Best Friend
Don’t Shoot the Messenger Symptoms are the embodied spirit’s gesture to communicate its distress. They are intended to get the individual to focus his or her conscious awareness toward discerning the nature and causes of that distress. Though symptoms seem to be afflictions (to the personality), they are NOT themselves the problem. They are only [...]
Are they Divergent Channels or Channel Divergences?
I say potāto and you say potäto… Does any of it really matter? I talked with Andy Ellis a few days ago, who brought to me the question posed in the title of this posting. He mentioned that according to Chinese syntax and usage, the translated name should be “channel divergences,” rather than the commonly [...]
The Philosopher’s Stone Hasn’t Disappeared…
It has simply changed venue. Steven wrote a regular column called “The Philosopher’s Stone” for Acupuncture Today from April, 2006 through April 2009. That opportunity allowed me to work on the challenging process of articulating the nature of classical Chinese medicine, by sharing my thoughts regularly with the profession. Those short essays include many concepts [...]
Hello world!
Let’s Hope Three is Indeed a Charm! Late in 1995, I was one of the early acupuncturists intrigued by the endless potential of the Web for communicating to a broad audience. Indeed, since that time there has been a stupendous growth in the internet. Yet, my attempts to use it have come to naught. During [...]
Human Life: It’s NOT Just Physical