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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1085: Traditional Chinese Medicine | Skeptical Sunday · 1 Dec 2024
podcast
You're spending your entire life on the spot your parents conceived you. Okay. Gross. It does not sound like a very good deal. Yeah, it's actually really rough. And as a result, plants have to deal with everything life throws at them while totally stationary, like environmental assaults, temperature, drought, co-evolving bacteria and fungi, and animals that want to eat them.
And they do it all with one thing and only one thing to defend themselves. Chemistry.
And as a result of that, and the fact that they've had 500 million years to tinker with chemistry, plants have developed an absolutely jaw-droppingly massive array of chemicals. Chemicals that can be helpful to humans, They can be hurtful to humans. And some of these chemicals just make people trip their faces off.
And like plants experimented with chemicals, humans have experimented with plants for thousands of years. So just statistically speaking, if enough people tried enough plants enough times, it stands to reason they would have figured out a few that act as medicine.
Yes and no. Most of it is not proven and almost certainly not effective. But a tiny fraction of it is, yes, effective. As effective as pharmaceutical drugs then? No, probably not. But pharmaceutical drugs owe a lot to plants and will continue to as chemists and pharmaceutical companies still look at plants and plant chemistry.
Some Chinese herbal medicines have proven to be the basis for modern drugs. In fact, the Nobel Prize-winning treatment for malaria artemisinin is a giant leap forward in treating this deadly disease. And the treatment was first written about in ancient Chinese texts.
Yeah, you got that right. In fact, according to a recent WHO report, 97 countries have a malaria problem. About 3.4 billion people are at risk of getting malaria and 1.2 billion are at high risk. So... Not a joke. But thanks to artemisinin, the mortality rate has dropped 42%.
And Jordan, key component to the drug was first written about by Ge Hong in his book, A Handbook for Prescriptions for Emergencies in 340 AD.
Very good questions that, unfortunately, I don't have answers to. But I like the idea of a handbook was called that because you needed your hand servants to carry it around for you. Just as amazing in that handbook, by the way, was his instructions to use cold water instead of hot water to extract the active ingredient, which helps preserve the chemical. So he was like really onto something.
This dude was making cold brew almost 2,000 years ago. So take that, Starbucks.
Actually, okay, that's where skeptics of herbal medicine point out that in drinking the Artemisia tea, the chemical is eliminated just too quickly from the body. And therefore, the original treatment, as it was written about, only led to a temporary reduction in symptoms. The old treatment just reduced fever.
The new treatment, which exists now, which combines the Artemisia with modern medicine, created a sturdy, stable drug that actually knocks out malaria.
Right, which is why I say that there is a there there with herbal medicine. Plants have been running trial and error experiments and tinkering with chemistry for 500 million years. Some people say Aristotle was the first scientist, but I say plants were the first scientists. And people will accuse you of being on certain psychedelic plants for that opinion, for sure.
That is probably true, but 25% of drugs we use today are either directly from plants or modified versions of molecules we find in plants. So Chinese herbal medicine is kind of real? Kind of. Like with all things, knowledge is built on previous discoveries. So for my money, I'm going with the latest knowledge. I think that's way smarter than putting your health in the hands of ancient knowledge.
I'm pro-medicine all the way. I'm just saying when it comes to acupuncture and cupping, those were just flawed ideas of ancient people making stuff up about energy flows and meridians. And again, no hate towards the ancients. They were doing the best they could with the information they had.
But modern people turning to unproven ancient remedies aren't really doing their best with the information they have. They're doing the opposite.
Yeah, okay, fair point. And by the way, now an old Michael Richelieu has some everything pain.
Individually, they're idiots, but collectively, they're a genius, you know, and I think that you have to respect the genius of your audience, right? Your audience is smarter than you. And so you have to be humble and you have to listen to the feedback you're getting.
Totally. Like, I think that, you know, I'm doing a new thing about first acts, how to write a good first act, how to get your story started off with as much sort of emotional rooting interest as possible, how to kick things off.
I'll just say I had a script that I wrote years and years ago and I sort of did three drafts and then it sort of petered out because I always knew the first act wasn't doing the work that it needed to do. I gave it to people and people were like, I'm not really into this character. And it was a really short first act. First act was like 17 pages.
Showing 1861–1880 of 2,071 · page 94 of 104
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