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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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

It was lovely, with lovely people. I laid on a bed with needles sticking out of my face and my arms and my chest and legs, and I meditated to New Age music for like 30 minutes. And when it was all over, I felt chill and good. What ailment were you there for? Arm pain. It's kind of similar to me, actually. So did it help? No, not even a little bit.

Unless you account for the fact that over the course of months of acupuncture and not overusing my arms, it got better, which is exactly what happened the second time in my life. I had arm pain, but only took a few months off of strenuous work and did no acupuncture. Kind of turns out that we humans heal with or without acupuncture. But you know what?

In truth, it was lying in that acupuncturist's office that I first tried meditating. You said strenuous work, but dude, you're a comedian.

Yeah, Jordan, there's an old saying inside every comedian, there's a great waiter. And I'm not an exception to that rule. I was waiting tables at that time in my life.

Yeah, actually, I knew a bunch of servers back in the day when I was doing it who had tendonitis in their wrist and problems like that from carrying those trays around. Oof, yeah.

I don't know if it didn't do anything and neither do the acupuncturists, which is pretty strange for a medical procedure. Have you ever met someone after having a broken bone set or LASIK surgery or disc replacement in their back that couldn't tell you if it actually did anything? Medicine is a science. It's based on being able to objectively tell if it's doing anything.

Yeah, that's what medicine should be, objective results. And look, while I'm on the subject, and again, nothing but love for acupuncturists since I've known a few and they are truly lovely people, but I looked up what is on the California certification exam.

And it's a bunch of stuff about the 12 primary meridians and their acupoints and then something about the eight extra meridians and divergent energy channels. And this is upsetting to me.

Yeah, an acupuncture board test should be about hygiene and the safest ways to poke people with a needle. And that's kind of it.

Great question, because those are two totally different treatments. So let's go with cupping first. All right. So the obvious question is, what is cupping?

I will expand on it, but you're not going to get any further explanation out of me. It's just a hickey. Okay. So it sounds like cupping sucks. Yes. Cupping is a technique in which a practitioner takes a glass container, like a cup, heats the air inside, usually with fire, then places it directly on the skin. When the hot air inside cools and condenses, you get suction.

Right. Yeah. And that's actually the whole point. When you combine the fire show with the cooling air beginning to suck on your skin, it's pretty cool. It looks and feels like some ancient wisdom at work.

You won't be surprised to learn that it's correcting qi and balancing the yin and the yang. But just like acupuncture, modern people assign different reasons to the benefits than the people who created it. In this case, they say it improves blood flow, which in a way it definitely does if by improvement, you mean it increases blood flow to the capillaries until they break.

Yeah. And a lot of them. In fact, anyone who's ever seen a person post cupping knows it's like crazy what it looks like on their body. They look like they've been attacked by an octopus.

Yeah. In fact, that's where many people heard of the technique for the first time. In fact, Phelps made quite a splash with his cupping hickeys, huh?

No, look, you have no idea how hard it was for me to resist the temptation to say I was poking holes in acupuncture.

Because I don't doubt for a second that it makes him feel good. Again, pain, especially minor pain like sore muscles, is partly just perception in our brains. Plus, like with acupuncture, if you believe it and you're getting an endorphin release from it, then it's real. You're experiencing pain relief. So what's the harm, then, with the cupping?

If it's done repeatedly in the same spots, it can cause permanent skin damage. And if you already have eczema and psoriasis, it can inflame those conditions.

It's like walking into a natural history museum or something when you walk into the Chinese herbalist. And in a way, we have saved the best for last. And I'm not being altogether snarky because with herbal medicine, there is a there there.

Okay. To understand herbal medicine, you have to go back, like way, way back. 500 million years ago, the first plants appeared. Plants are sessile organisms. That is to say they are permanently restricted to spend their lives on the exact site of their germination. Can you imagine spending your life on the spot where you were born? It's not just born.

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