Category Archives: Personal Health

The Archeology of Disease

By Steve | Published: November 5, 2009
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, [...]
Also posted in The Philosopher's Stone | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Some Treatments Are Plain as Day

By Steve | Published: October 11, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Luo Vessels | Tagged | Leave a comment

Human Life: It’s NOT Just Physical

By Steve | Published: September 16, 2009
Each person is an embodied spirit, who lives through interacting with the world. Those interactions are polar, as individuals take in various influences from the world and release byproducts of their life process back out to the world. Breathing is one such interaction; it provides the source of Being. Each individual’s Quest for food and [...]
Also posted in The Philosopher's Stone | Tagged | Leave a comment

Is it a Fairy Tale?

By Steve | Published: September 8, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Personal, The Philosopher's Stone | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

When is a “Cold” not Just a Cold?

By Steve | Published: September 6, 2009
Ms. C. is a thirty-seven year old woman, who called me about four months ago seeking relief from persistent pain and dysfunction of her right hand, which made her work difficult. She came for an appointment, and reported having received treatment for neck pain and nerve root impingement causing pain and dysfunction of the arm [...]
Also posted in Stories of Healing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Passive Health Care Breeds Dependence

By Steve | Published: September 3, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Health Care Policy | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Indicator Symptoms: A Patient’s Best Friend

By Steve | Published: September 3, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in The Philosopher's Stone | Tagged , | 1 Comment

  • 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