Qiological Podcast: The Invitation to Troubled Times

What do we do when the world feels like it’s unraveling? How to respond when our systems—political, economic, medical—feel brittle, even broken? It’s easy to fall into despair, or look away. But maybe what we’re being asked to do is look closer. To stay present.

In this conversation with Ed Neal and Mel Hopper Koppelman, we explore the edges where medicine, ecology, and culture meet. Both are thinkers who don’t shy away from complexity. Ed draws from classical Chinese texts and ecological systems. Mel, from her knowledge of science and systems thinking.

Listen into this discussion as we explore the role of Chinese medicine in times of crisis, the importance of narrative and metaphor in clinical work, how despair and possibility coexist, and the invitation to practice medicine as an act of presence and participation.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• The cracks in our systems might be invitations, not just failures
• Ecology teaches us that resilience lives in complexity
• Chinese medicine has tools for navigating disorder, not just disease
• Medicine works better when we stop trying to control everything
• Linear thinking can’t help us make sense of living systems
• Sitting with despair can be more honest than trying to fix it
• Language shapes healing—diagnosis is not the whole story
• Certainty in medicine often comes at the cost of curiosity
• The Neijing speaks clearly to the chaos of our current moment
• Hope is a discipline, not a feeling
• The body is not a machine—it’s an ecosystem
• This moment asks us to show up with presence, not perfection