We often think good treatment begins with certainty: first identify the pattern, then decide what to do. But in the tradition of Dr. Yoshio Manaka, treatment itself can be the means of discovery. The practitioner learns by engaging the body directly and paying close attention to how it responds.

In this conversation, Oran Kivity, Marian Fixler, Brenda Loew, Stephen Birch, and Paul Movsessian reflect on studying and practicing Manaka-style acupuncture. They describe an approach in which the body’s structure emerges through palpation, immediate feedback, and ongoing adjustment—not from a diagnosis fixed in advance.

This is not acupuncture as the application of a preset protocol. It is a disciplined way of paying attention: using touch as both diagnosis and treatment, testing small interventions, observing what changes, and allowing the body’s response to continually reshape one’s understanding of what is needed.

A tradition can feel like a single lineage, but some histories reveal a wider terrain — one that spans discernment, devotion, and the slow accumulation of who gets to call something new.

In this conversation with Volker Scheid, we explore four competing visions of what good Chinese medicine practice actually is, from Zhu Danxi's cultivated discernment to Zhang Zhongjing's devotional authority, and how each answers the challenge of bridging limited tools to unlimited patients.

We also touch on why every historical claim carries its own mythology, and how the arrival of Western medicine reshaped what these traditions were even allowed to become.

Listen in for a conversation that brings historical rigor and clinical insight to a tradition modern practice still draws from.

Liver pathology draws curiosity as both a clinical discipline and a lens for encountering the unknown. Its practice of looking without preconception speaks meaningfully to how we meet the mysteries at the edges of a life.

In this conversation, we visit with Neil Theise and explore the relationship between diagnostic training and beginner's mind. We look at how staying present with what's in front of us reveals more than what we already expect to find.

We also discuss the difference between dying as decline versus dying as transformation, and the nature of end-of-life visions as glimpses of a wider consciousness. And we look at the deeper role of simple presence, an invitation our loved ones are so rarely given.

Listen in for a discussion on consciousness, attention, and acceptance, and what it means to stay open to the extraordinary within the ordinary currents of caregiving and loss.

Confusion is often treated as a problem to solve on the way to a real answer. But in the clinic, it may be closer to the beginning of the process than an obstacle to it.

In this conversation with Linda Kim, we explore what it means to practice acupuncture with curiosity rather than certainty. We discuss why diagnosis may be something revealed through treatment—through palpation, real-time feedback, and the willingness to be wrong and adjust—rather than something that must be figured out in advance.

We also discuss constitutional nature versus compensated presentation, how playfulness loosens the rigid thinking that blocks perception, and why the most obvious thing in the room is often the most important.

Long before Chinese medicine took the form we recognize today, healers drilled holes in skulls to release demons. Philosophers debated what the universe was made of, while a wandering doctor read pulses instead of casting spells.

In this conversation with Henry Tarazona, we trace that lineage from the wushi shamans through the Hundred Schools of Thought to Bian Que, often called the father of Chinese medicine, and ultimately to Sun Simiao.

We also explore Sun Simiao’s “13 Ghost Points,” which turn out to have far less to do with ghosts than with pattern differentiation expressed in language patients could understand.

Finally, we unpack shen—a concept that “spirit” never quite captures—and consider it instead as the seat of cognition, emotion, and the body’s own governance.

Listen in for a conversation that moves between ancient battlefields and modern clinics, superstition and evidence, and the long effort to explain what's happening inside us when nothing else makes sense.

Reading blood work well means resisting the urge to sort everything into simply normal or abnormal. But what happens when the real diagnosis lives in the relationships between markers, not the markers themselves?

Dr. Jessica Parker is an acupuncturist and lab-work educator who teaches practitioners to read blood panels through a Chinese medicine lens. In this conversation, she joins Michael to explore the gap between conventional ranges and true optimal health.

Listen in as they trace her path from a formative year in Hangzhou, where East and West medicine shared the same pharmacy shelf, to teaching acupuncturists to read cortisol, cholesterol, and thyroid markers as stories of stress and imbalance; how spleen-chi deficiency hides inside ordinary lab numbers; and why cortisol has been unfairly demonized online.

In this episode Qiological celebrates its ninth anniversary.

For nine years new conversations on East Asian medicine and methods have appeared in your podcast feed each Tuesday morning

Anita Chopra, our guest from episode 429, joins us again not just to discuss face reading, but to give us a demonstration of how she uses severeal of the basic maps that chart the face.

We’re also joined by Angela Hunt, the winner of our drawing to appear on this episode and receive a face reading.

Listen in for a conversation that touches on mentorship, practice building, being authentically who we are clinical work, a bit of Qiological’s backstory, and reflections on the journey that has brought the podcast to its ninth anniversary.

As astrology draws curiosity as both a spiritual practice and a lens for self-understanding. Its symbolic language of image can speak meaningfully to our modern linear life.

In this conversation, we visit with Gregory Done we explore the relationship between fate and free will, and how inherited ancestral patterns shape our character, our challenges, and our sense of purpose.

We also discuss the difference between astrology as dialogue versus fortune telling, the nature of "ghosts" as unresolved generational trauma, and the deeper role of inner nature as a freedom untouched by fate.

Listen in for a discussion on ancestry, symbol, and resolution, and what it means to work toward wholeness within the currents of one's own life.