Steven Alpern graduated from Dartmouth College in 1978. Shortly thereafter, he began to pursue studies in Chinese medicine, first as a private acupuncture student of Tseui Wei (from whom he learned and practiced tuina and traditional Chinese bodywork), then as a student of Fang Feng, a master herbalist in Oakland, Calif. He graduated from the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1986.
Mr. Alpern has been in private practice since 1986, and has continued to further his knowledge of acupuncture and Oriental medicine. From 1989 to 1994, he studied Japanese empirical acupuncture methods with Kiiko Matsumoto. From 1994 to the present, he studied classical Chinese medicine with Jeffrey Yuen, an 88th-generation Daoist master, both in California and New York. He has used the written word to explore his understanding of Mr. Yuen's teachings since 1999.
During 2008, Mr. Alpern will be teaching one-day introductory seminars on waike and the Digestion specialty through the professional education program of Golden Flower Chinese Herbs.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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