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
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Category Archives: Health Care Policy
The Cost of Scientific Medicine
Many patients faced with serious illnesses seek the assurance that their practitioners are using proven healing methods. Many practitioners also seek the security that the therapies they use have been proven by scientific research. Yet, few ask the question: What is this proof that so many seek, and what are its limitations? In modern “scientific” [...]
Also posted in Scientific Medicine Tagged chronic disease, embodied spirit, progressive/degenerative disease Leave a comment
Focus Health & Wellness Educational Symposium
While my domicile remains in Sonora, I haven’t been focused on the local community since closing the Healing Center of the Sierra several years ago. I’ve cut back my practice quite dramatically, so I could focus more intensively on my researches into classical Chinese medicine, and work on various writing projects. Some of those writings [...]
Also posted in Personal, Scientific Medicine Tagged embodied spirit, health care revolution Leave a comment
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 [...]
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 [...]
Also posted in Channel Divergences and Distinctions, Personal Tagged embodied spirit, healing process 2 Comments
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 [...]
Also posted in The Philosopher's Stone Leave a comment
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 [...]
Will We Get True Health Care Reform?