Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I thought, you know what? That sounds great. Definitely has the least side effects. So that's what I'm going to go with. Unless, of course, a cheaper, more effective method with fewer side effects comes out, then I'm all in.
The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1085: Traditional Chinese Medicine | Skeptical Sunday · 1 Dec 2024
podcast
I'm feeling peachy, man. Peachy. Interesting. Did you eat peaches to become peachy? Because in traditional Chinese medicine, maybe. I don't know.
Well, that's interesting because that is the crux of traditional Chinese medicine. A traditional Chinese healer is trying to restore balance between these two complementary forces that flow through not just your body, but throughout the entire universe. According to traditional Chinese medicine, a person is healthy when harmony exists between these two forces.
And sickness occurs when there's more yin than yang or more yang than yin.
We've all seen the graphic representation on posters in teenagers' rooms and on the walls of suburban dojos. For lack of a better example, it looks like a white sperm and a black sperm positioned head to tail in a circle.
Fine. Okay. But even then, these cliched posters I'm talking about, they're just graphic representations of something actually unseen, an invisible life force. Yin is considered the female of these two forces.
Yin's opposite won't surprise you either, then, because Yang represents masculinity. Light and warmth actually sound more female than male. Yeah, ironically, they got yin and yang mostly backwards, although the female yin does also represent earth, softness, and rain. So those are nice. As well as blackness, evil, smallness, and even numbers.
Yeah. As we'll see, much of traditional Chinese medicine isn't that far removed from numerology, astrology, and stuff like that. Yang represents heaven, sunshine, hardness, goodness, the color white, largeness, and, of course, odd numbers. According to ancient texts, the interplay between these forces make up qi, which is the life force that flows around and through our bodies.
Okay, look, after a lot of research, I can only say with some generosity that chi is a metaphor, an attempt by ancient peoples to explain complex systems like nature and the human body. If I wanted to be really generous, I'd say it's kind of like the force in Star Wars, which that's pretty cool.
And traditional Chinese healers try to correct the imbalances of qi and yin and yang through the practices of herbal medicine, acupuncture, and cupping. These practices originated as far back as 22 centuries ago.
No, because right off the bat, there's a misconception there. Traditional Chinese medicine. So can we just call it TCM? TCM. But people might confuse that with Turner Classic movies. I think it'll be all right. Okay, fine. So back as far as the 1600s, TCM had been written off as superstition in China. And by the 1800s, TCM had pretty much been completely abandoned.
The Chinese were adopting Western medicine and leaving TCM to the fringe few.
As my weird social studies teacher at high school used to say, communism doesn't work. And that's what happened. Okay. What do you mean by that? Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party found themselves in a bit of a pickle in the early 1960s. They had promised healthcare to everyone, but didn't have the doctors, facilities, or medicines to make good on that promise. TCM offered a solution.
Practitioners didn't require the same extent of training as Western doctors. The doctor shortage in China was particularly pronounced in rural China, and rather cynically, the Communist Party kind of assumed these, for lack of a better term, hicks wouldn't know the difference anyway.
So this gave rise to what they called the, quote, barefoot doctors, which were basically just farmers who had taken a crash course in TCM. Chairman Mao was happy as he was able to fulfill his promises. And in general, people were happy as they had medical care. And after a several centuries long break, TCM came roaring back.
Yeah. In fact, Mao himself was an avowed believer in Western medicine. His personal physician quotes him as saying, quote, even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine, I personally do not believe in it. I do not take Chinese medicine.
Yeah, I was absolutely not going to guess Richard Nixon. What does he have to do with any of this? In 1972, Richard Nixon famously visited China. And as always, a press pool followed. In that press pool was James Reston of the New York Times, a political reporter. While there in China, Reston fell ill and needed an emergency appendectomy. Oof, ouch.
And meanwhile, there was an entire room full of anesthetics in the next room over, and it was just this stereotypical evil East German dentist. No, we have no anesthetic. Yeah. All right, fine. He really just didn't like me at all, I think, is what it came to. American, huh? No anesthetic. Sorry, we're out. All right.
Chinese doctors gave James Reston, who we were originally talking about, almost entirely Western medicine when they performed surgery on him. He had normal anesthesia, antibiotics, etc. But... As a little showcase for TCM, his post-surgery routine included acupuncture.
Reston, who, as I said, was just a political reporter, he had no medical training or an expertise to judge this, but he went back to America and he wrote a now-famous op-ed in the New York Times completely touting this amazing ancient procedure, acupuncture.
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