Explore every episode of the podcast Between Qi and Science: My Experience of What Can't Be Measured
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Just a Placebo | 19 oct. 2026 | 00:51:51 | |
What does the placebo effect actually reveal, once you stop using it to dismiss healing you don't understand?Ā In this fourth episode Kin turns from his father's individual miracles to the mechanics of healing itself, opening with an acupuncturist who feels the same "qi" his family does and moving through decades of placebo research ā sugar pills whose size, color, and price change their effect, sham knee surgery that heals as well as real surgery, and a study in which only the prescribing dentist's belief (not the patient's) changed outcomes ā to argue that placebo is less a "mind trick" than an embodied ritual, one that mainstream medicine performs just as much as it accuses alternative healing of doing.Ā Kin lands on a position of strong agnosticism ā code-switching between mainstream and Chinese medicine rather than picking one as more real ā while acknowledging, through his father's attempts to remotely heal a troubled relative, the real limits and dangers of that confidence, setting up the next episode's turn to his father's healing as an act of intimacy rather than mechanical fixing. See also:Ā
Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian RacismĀ (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern WorldĀ (University of Hawaiāi Press, 2024).Ā Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung Ā Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127. Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.Ā Host: Dr. Kin Cheung Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi Producer: Andrew Gill Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne Production Assistance: Kari Onishi Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski | |||
| Natural Miracles | 19 oct. 2026 | 00:46:24 | |
Is my dad's healing real, and if it is, how do I make sense of it without simply translating it into mainstream medicine's terms?Ā In this third episode, Kin recounts his father's most striking healing feats ā restoring his grandmother's face after a paralyzing stroke, dissolving a neighbor's decades-old tumor, and developing an involuntary "sixth sense" that guides his hands to heal ā and wrestles with how to understand them as a scholar of religion trained to be skeptical of both mainstream and religious explanations. Kin argues that his father's healings might best be understood not through translation into biomedical terms but through code-switching ā holding qi, karma, and biomedicine as parallel languages rather than collapsing one into the other ā setting up the next episode's turn to the placebo effect and what it reveals about the shaky boundary between mind and body. See also:
Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian RacismĀ (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern WorldĀ (University of Hawaiāi Press, 2024).Ā Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung Ā Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127. Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.Ā Host: Dr. Kin Cheung Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi Producer: Andrew Gill Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne Production Assistance: Kari Onishi Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski | |||
| The Wounded Healer | 12 oct. 2026 | 00:41:23 | |
What does it mean to carry a wound forward in time without ever fully being able to close it? In this second episode, Kin traces how his father was forged into a healer by the brutal conditions of New York's Chinatown sweatshops ā grueling factory work that wrecked his body and left him with no access to formal healthcare, pushing him to piece together an eclectic, self-taught practice from whatever was within reach: cupping and moxibustion learned between shifts from Dr. Mui, a former Chinese doctor turned factory worker; herbal tonics from a Shaolin-trained coworker; feng shui wisdom from Cantonese radio; and an improvised, budget-conscious version of a Buddhist life-release ritual using brine shrimp.Ā Weaving in his father's childhood poverty and neglect in Guangzhou, a marriage strained by money sent across oceans, and the family's brush with his mother's cancer diagnosis, Kin draws on Jung's and Henri Nouwen's idea of the "wounded healer" to frame his father as someone who heals others precisely because his own wounds, physical and relational, never fully closed ā while reflecting on his own distance and privilege as a scholar able to analyze what his father could only live. See also:
Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian RacismĀ (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern WorldĀ (University of Hawaiāi Press, 2024).Ā Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheungĀ Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127. Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.Ā Host: Dr. Kin Cheung Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi Producer: Andrew Gill Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne Production Assistance: Kari Onishi Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski | |||
| What Counts As Real? | 12 oct. 2026 | 00:42:59 | |
In this first episode of Between Qi and Science, host Dr. Kin Cheung recounts the night at seventeen when his father first taught him hei gong (qigong) in their Coney Island living room, and traces how that moment set him on a lifelong path between two worlds: the mainstream biomedical view of the body and his father's practice as a self-taught community healer who blends hei gong, acupuncture, cupping, feng shui, and Buddhist ritual.Ā Weaving together his father's immigration from China, decades in New York's sweatshops, and eventual emergence as a healer, alongside his own path from a philosophy student to a scholar of Buddhism, Kin explores what's lost in translation between biomedical and Chinese medical ways of knowing, the politics of studying one's own family and community, and what it means to hold multiple "code-switched" worldviews at once without collapsing one into the other. See also:
Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian RacismĀ (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern WorldĀ (University of Hawaiāi Press, 2024).Ā Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung Ā Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127. Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.Ā Host: Dr. Kin Cheung Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi Producer: Andrew Gill Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne Production Assistance: Kari Onishi Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski | |||
| Trailer | 02 oct. 2026 | 00:01:44 | |
Can healing be real if science can't measure it? Between Qi and Science: My Experience of What Canāt Be Measured is a six-episode audio memoir about qi, Chinese medicine, and the limits of Western biomedicine. It follows a Cantonese immigrant sweatshop worker who became a self-taught community healer in Brooklyn's Coney Island. His son, Dr. Kin Cheung, a scholar of religion and Buddhism, takes us on the journey of living with and learning from his father.Ā The story starts with a teenage encounter with qigong (hei gong). From there it traces the sweatshop labor, poverty, and immigration that shaped a "wounded healer." Later episodes dig into acupuncture, placebo research, and the politics of "traditional medicine." Other episodes cover Asian American masculinity and stereotypes, and the challenge of holding mainstream medicine, Chinese healing practices, and Buddhism as equally real. The series blends personal narrative, oral history, and religious studies scholarship. It's for listeners interested in alternative medicine, Asian American stories, religion and science, and healing and grief across generations. Created by the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.Ā Executive Producer: Brad Onishi Producer: Andrew Gill Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto Story Editor: Leah Payne Production Assistance: Kari Onishi Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski | |||