AI in East Asian Medicine

Karen started her career in healthcare as a physiotherapist and has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese medicine for 30 years. She is licensed to practice in Australia and the USA having worked there for 15 years. 

Her career has been greatly influenced by long-term mentor Dr Leon Hammer, MD, renowned Chinese medicine practitioner, physician and child psychiatrist. During their 27 years together, she inherited the Menghe-Ding pulse method and the application of ontological psychology to the Chinese medical model defined by Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies (Hammer, 2005). Karen also has studied Classical Chinese herbal medicine with Professor Heiner Fruehauf and Jing Fang prescription with Professor Huang Huang.

Karen completed doctoral studies evaluating the reliability of pulse diagnosis and is co-author of a Handbook of Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis. She has lectured at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine NY, the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Western Sydney. She has taught pulse diagnosis classes and presented at conferences in China, USA, Australia, and New Zealand and has published in peer review journals. 

Currently she is in clinical practice in Sydney, Australia, and continues her exploration of acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine in relation to Daoist cosmology. She endeavors to share her knowledge teaching classes in pulse diagnosis and the psychology of Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies. 

In addition to eighteen years in private practice as an acupuncturist and herbalist with a focus on reproductive/hormonal health and pediatrics, Dr. Rivkin is an experienced writer, teacher, and editor in the field of East Asian Medicine.

Her writing has been published in Chinese Medicine and Culture, The Lantern, Medical Acupuncture, Convergent Points, and the North American Journal of Oriental Medicine (NAJOM). She was featured on the Qiological podcast discussing her research on case studies and narrative medicine, and has presented at recent East Asian medical history conferences in Taipei, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Shanghai, China. She is currently a peer-reviewer for Chinese Medicine and Culture, served on the advisory board of Easy Eats, an online health and wellness magazine, and spent four years as a field editor for The American Acupuncturist, a professional journal previously published by the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (AAAOM).

Dr. Rivkin is on the doctoral program faculty at the Seattle Institute of East Asian Medicine (SIEAM) where she teaches case study analysis and clinical writing. She formerly taught in the post-graduate Chinese Herbology Certificate Program at Tri-State College of Acupuncture, where she designed and implemented a unique case-based learning curriculum. She has also taught the integrative gynecology course for master's degree students at Pacific College of Health and Science, as well as courses at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies.

She is on the advisory board and is the Director of Community & Outreach for White Pine Circle, a community for practitioners of East Asian Medicine. Other past professional activities include a term on the board of the Acupuncture Society of New York (ASNY), the state professional organization for acupuncture. She lectures publicly on a variety of topics, including keeping healthy with East Asian Medicine, qi gong, and acupressure for infants.

Dr. Rivkin has a Doctorate in Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine from the Seattle Institute of East Asian Medicine (SIEAM), a Master of Science in East Asian Medicine from Touro College, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from Northwestern University in Comparative Literary Studies.