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.
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.