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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1085: Traditional Chinese Medicine | Skeptical Sunday · 1 Dec 2024 podcast

Even though Reston was clear in the op-ed about the fact that the acupuncture was just a post-procedure addition to his medical care, the rumor mill did what the rumor mill always does. And it churned out these fantastical stories here in the US about how only acupuncture was used and no Western medicine. And as a result, TCM in America became all the rage. Yeah. Which it remains.

With roughly 38,000 licensed acupuncturists in the US, it's safe to say they are everywhere. In fact, it's so easy to find one that just out of curiosity, I asked my phone where the nearest one was. Can you do the same? I'd be curious. Where's your nearest acupuncturist?

Mine says 0.3 miles away is the closest acupuncturist, but then it tells me 0.4 miles away, there are three and a half mile away, there's even more acupuncturists. And when I hit the button for directions, the phone defaults to walking directions. That's how close my nearest acupuncturist is.

Yes, I anticipated that you might say that, so I had a friend in Iowa do the same, and he said there are four in his zip code. The nearest one is under a mile from his house. Wow. Point taken, I guess. There's a lot of acupuncturists in America. Sheesh. Yeah, that was a good one. Compare the 38,000 acupuncturists we have here to the measly 18,000 podiatrists in the US.

It's really wild how many acupuncturists there are in the US. Could you imagine if you went to China and there was a Navajo medicine man on every corner in China?

Absolutely. Acupuncture brought in $27 billion in 2021. So when looking at the reasons these treatments are perpetuated, you really can't overlook the money. And that's not to say that there aren't other reasons.

Okay, acupuncture, like all things TCM, has to do with qi, which, for the record, is spelled Q-I if you're looking to Google any of this stuff we're talking about later. And qi, which again is an invisible energy, it flows through invisible meridians in the body. Meridians are like channels through which the qi flows. According to TCM, there are 12 major meridians that connect to qi.

organs, tissue, veins, nerves, cell, atoms, and mother-freaking-consciousness itself. And so then the needles are inserted into the meridians to readjust the flow of the qi in order to readjust the balance between the yin and the yang.

Fine. Longer answer, hell no. Am I being snarky? Hell yes. Is there more to it? Yes. The big question is if the acupuncture is doing anything or is the relief people receive, is it all in the brain?

Sign me up. Absolutely. I get that. I understand that. But you mentioned the studies and I want to talk about them. Let's start with those studies because you're right. There have been studies and studies do show acupuncture to be effective, but there's a problem and it's a big problem. Most of the studies that prove a benefit were conducted in China.

And these Chinese studies stand in contrast to most studies done outside of China. And scientifically speaking, when you have, that's a big red flag. And I don't just mean the one with little yellow stars on it.

I don't have to say it. China's food and drug regulators unearthed widespread data fabrication in these studies. Oh, wow. Chinese regulators carried out a one-year review of clinical trials and concluded that more than 80% of clinical data is fabricated. And this doesn't just go for acupuncture, by the way. These studies included all the Chinese pharmaceuticals.

Here's the thing. Actually, most studies of acupuncture can't really be trusted because of the impossibility of performing a true double-blind study. That is to say, a study in which both the researcher and participant don't know which is the placebo and which is the actual treatment.

Right, yeah, and obviously the flip side of that is how could the person receiving the acupuncture not know they're receiving acupuncture?

Look, to do a proper scientific study, you need a control group. And that's just not possible with acupuncture. So in studies, the control group receives the placebo, right? Yes, exactly. So what some studies have done is to test acupuncture against what they call sham acupuncture. Basically, one group, they use the real meridians, by which I mean the imaginary meridians.

And in the other group, they just randomly put the needles in non-meridian spots. And I'm guessing the problem with that should seem relatively obvious.

Yeah. And look, that's pretty much what the study showed. And these were large clinical trials conducted in Germany and the US. Yeah, not China then. Right, which is worth noting. And these non-Chinese trials consistently showed traditional acupuncture and sham acupuncture are pretty much the same at decreasing pain levels for migraines, lower back pain, and knee pain.

Absolutely. And you'd be right. But is it the acupuncture or is it the placebo effect? There's actually a widely touted meta-analysis of acupuncture that shows a difference between real acupuncture and sham acupuncture. But in reading about this, there's a lot of critics of this meta-analysis. They point out that the differences are very minute between different people. Plus,

There was like these huge criticisms of meta-analysis in general that I, gonna be honest with you, I don't understand.

Yeah. Meridians and chi simply aren't proven, and balancing yin and yang isn't medically sound. And what are the odds that at the end, science ends up going, hey, look, turns out what ancient people believed with no understanding of biology, and they were totally right about all these invisible things they made up?

Showing 1801–1820 of 2,071 · page 91 of 104