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: The Philosopher’s Stone
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, [...]
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 Health Care Policy, The Philosopher's Stone Leave a comment
Human Life: It’s NOT Just Physical
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 [...]
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 [...]
Also posted in Personal, Personal Health, The Philosopher's Stone Tagged chronic disease, Jeffrey Yuen's teachings, progressive/degenerative disease 1 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 [...]
Also posted in Personal Health, The Philosopher's Stone Tagged chronic disease, progressive/degenerative disease 1 Comment
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 [...]
Also posted in The Philosopher's Stone Tagged Acupucture Today, articles, column, essays Leave a comment
Drowning in a Sea of Information