1085: Traditional Chinese Medicine | Skeptical Sunday

1085: Traditional Chinese Medicine | Skeptical Sunday

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm with Skeptical Sunday co-host comedian Michael Regilio. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs. Athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though, we do skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I break down a topic that you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as why tipping makes absolutely no sense.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, traditional Chinese medicine might have started in China, but these days it seems to be everywhere. Acupuncture is practiced worldwide.

The ancient practice of cupping is growing in popularity, and herbal medicine is in pretty much every pharmacy. Everybody knows somebody. Who swears by one or maybe even all of these practices, but is traditional Chinese medicine effective medicine, passed on for millennia or ancient superstition? Here in the modern world today, skeptic and comedian Michael Lio is here to express the Tao.

Or is it Dao? I would say Dao, of how traditional Chinese medicine works or doesn't work. How's it going, Michael?

[00:02:05] Michael Regilio: Hey Jordan, how are you feeling today? I'm feeling peachy, man. Peachy. Interesting. Did you eat peaches to become peachy because in traditional Chinese medicine, maybe. I don't know. I didn't come across that.

[00:02:16] Jordan Harbinger: I thought you were just making a really terrible dad joke. But I know that when you eat certain things like cold or hot foods, something, something, your energy, you know what I was really getting at is are you feeling balanced? Well, I'm not falling outta my chair, so I'm physically balanced. I have a balanced diet, a balance between work and leisure.

So I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. What do you mean? Am I feeling balanced? I simply meant your yin and your yang. Ah, of course. How could I forget? No, I'm not so sure about that. I don't really know. I don't know what my yang is up to today. I.

[00:02:46] Michael Regilio: 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 complimentary 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

[00:03:13] Jordan Harbinger: than yin.

Okay. Seems like the obvious next question is, what the heck are yin and yang?

[00:03:20] Michael Regilio: 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 69 ing.

Oh

[00:03:36] Jordan Harbinger: God, okay. You couldn't have thought for like one second longer and come up with a less crass description. Tadpole would've worked. You could have added the word whale. A sperm whale looks close enough, like a beluga thing or I, that's totally different, but whatever. And you could have left out the other bit

[00:03:52] Michael Regilio: 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.

[00:04:08] Jordan Harbinger: For an ancient, highly patriarchal culture. Yeah. I'm actually kind of impressed. They chose to represent females.

The female force yin is considered cold, dark, and passive just once. I'd like to be surprised by an ancient patriarchal culture, but not this time. Apparently, I. Yin's opposite. Won't surprise you either then. 'cause Yang represents masculinity, light and warmth actually sound more

[00:04:30] Michael Regilio: 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

[00:04:47] Jordan Harbinger: numbers. Okay. Even numbers. So the ancient Chinese also had an opinion on even

[00:04:53] Michael Regilio: 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.

[00:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: So yin and yang represent two opposite polarities within the force of Qi, like the positive and negative polarities in electricity.

Yeah, actually that's really good. You might have a little side hustle in traditional

[00:05:35] Michael Regilio: Chinese medicine in your future. Joy.

[00:05:36] Jordan Harbinger: I like poking holes in people. Okay, let's leave that there. But what is Qi like scientifically speaking, what did this thing that they thought was, gee, okay,

[00:05:44] Michael Regilio: look after. A lot of research.

I can only say with some generosity that she 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.

[00:06:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's definitely pretty cool, but it's also definitely made up.

But I'm guessing we're gonna get to that shortly. Yes.

[00:06:13] Michael Regilio: 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. Wow. So people have

[00:06:29] Jordan Harbinger: continually researched Q and yin and yang for.

2200 years or so. That's frankly, that's incredible and impressive. And one would normally think speaks to some effectiveness some

[00:06:43] Michael Regilio: way. No, because right off the bat there's a misconception there. Traditional Chinese medicine, so can we just call it TCM? tc, but people might confuse that with Turner Classic Movies.

I think it'll be all right. Okay, fine. So back as far as the 16 hundreds, TCM had been written off as superstition in China, and by the 18 hundreds, TCM had pretty much been completely abandoned. The Chinese were adopting Western medicine and leaving TCM to the fringe few. So even

[00:07:16] Jordan Harbinger: 400 years ago, people had walked away from TCM and moved towards Western medicine, which by the way, at that point, Western Medicine was probably something like, oh, she's got the vapors.

I'll go get the leeches. So that's surprising. It's so strange to me. They were ditching this stuff way back then because it's so huge these days. So what happened? Was there an event or something along those lines?

[00:07:38] Michael Regilio: Let's put

[00:07:39] Jordan Harbinger: it this way, as

[00:07:39] Michael Regilio: 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. I. Practitioners didn't require the same extent of training as Western doctors.

The doctor shortage of China was particularly pronounced in rural China and rather cynically, the Communist Party kind of assumed these, for lack of better term, Hicks wouldn't know the difference anyway, so this gave rise to what they called the barefoot doctors, which were basically just farmers who were, 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

[00:08:42] Jordan Harbinger: came roaring back. I guess everybody was happy with that, right? So Mao, he looks good. The people who are getting treated look good and feel good.

Well, except for the people who actually needed medical treatment. This was a clever solution.

[00:08:55] Michael Regilio: 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

[00:09:12] Jordan Harbinger: medicine. So he really could not be any clearer on that. That's funny. It's so blunt. But how did so many people in America then come to believe in TCM? How did it make its way here and then suddenly become like ancient Chinese technology that they don't want you to know? Some of the credit goes to, and I'm sure you've probably already guessed this, Richard Nixon.

[00:09:34] Michael Regilio: Yeah, I was absolutely not going to guess. Richard

[00:09:36] Jordan Harbinger: Nixon. What does he have to do with any of this?

[00:09:39] Michael Regilio: 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,

[00:09:55] Jordan Harbinger: ouch. Getting sick in a foreign country is scary. Getting surgery in a foreign country would be really scary, especially if it's China in 1972. So I had a root canal in the former East Germany, which was very developed by the time I got there in the nineties, it was no longer East Germany, of course.

And the dentist. He had been trained in the Soviet Union and just happened to be out of anesthetic or didn't use it. He only had that banana flavored spray. This spray is what they use when they're like, oh, I'm gonna scrape something under your gum. They don't need to inject you. That's all he had. But then I got a root canal with that, and it hurt really bad.

They had to hold me down, not the dentist, obviously he was working. His assistants held me down in the chair. It was hopefully as close to being tortured as I will ever get.

[00:10:43] Michael Regilio: Meanwhile, there was a, uh, entire room full of anesthetics in the next room over, and it was just this stereotypical evil East German dentist.

Right. No, we have no anesthetic. Yeah. All right, fine. He really just didn't like me at all. I think is, is what it came to. And, okay. American, huh? No anesthetics. Sorry. We're out. Chinese doctors gave James Reston, who we were originally talking about almost entirely western medicine, when they performed surgery on him, that he had normal anesthesia, antibiotics, et cetera, but as a little showcase for TCM, his post-surgery routine included acupuncture, restin, 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. Even though Restin 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 turned 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, 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 outta curiosity. I asked my phone where the nearest one was. Can you do the same? I'd be curious. Where's your nearest acupuncturist?

[00:12:20] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. I don't even necessarily need to use my phone. My wife's parents know plenty of these folks. I. And I've had it done for pain and I've done an entire skeptical Sunday episode on acupuncture alone, and it's everywhere.

I live in the Bay Area here in California. There are literally hundreds of places to get it around here, but I last had it next door to my house because this friend of my wife's parents just happened to roll through and I was like, sure, I'll do it. Wow. Okay, so you're like

[00:12:47] Michael Regilio: 15 yards away. 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. Okay, but in truth, you're in la.

[00:13:09] Jordan Harbinger: And I'm guessing that's not the national norm to have acupuncture within walking distance at your house.

[00:13:14] Michael Regilio: 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. Shish. 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, right? Like

[00:13:49] Jordan Harbinger: nearest Navajo medicine. Man, I need some. Burning herbs blown in my face. Oh, you just walked down the road that way. And if you go up to the third floor, that guy's a little bit better, in my opinion.

Wow. So it sounds like it's big business giving people

[00:14:00] Michael Regilio: little pokes. 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.

[00:14:14] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like a good time to ask, since many people won't have recently heard our episode on acupuncture, which was a zillion years ago in podcast timing.

What exactly is acupuncture besides stabbing your way to the balance of yin and yang and whatnot? Okay,

[00:14:28] Michael Regilio: acupuncture, like all things TCM has to do with qi, which for the record is spelled Qi. 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 chief flows. According to TCM, there are 12 major meridians that connect to. 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.

[00:15:11] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so is any of it real? Are the meridians, did they turn out to be nerve pathways that everybody has? Does the human body have 12 of those? Can scientists see those on a cadaver or measure or detect any of this stuff? Uh, short answer,

[00:15:26] Michael Regilio: no.

[00:15:27] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. That's

[00:15:28] Michael Regilio: a really short answer. 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?

[00:15:46] Jordan Harbinger: You know, what'll leave you feeling balanced? The fine products and services that support this show, we'll be right back. I.

This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and a MD episode. Four of the cybersecurity tapes has dropped. This one takes us to Silverwood Heights, a small town that went all in on becoming a smart city. But of course, on election day, all that high tech dream turns into a full blown nightmare. The parking meters, the voting machines, everything in between starts glitching at the worst possible moment, throwing the town into chaos.

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You'll be in Smart Company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Skeptical Sunday. First of all, if I'm not mistaken, my health insurance, when I lived in LA covered acupuncture. And I know that there have been studies showing some merit, and of course there's all the people I know who swear by it.

We did the episode on acupuncture. A lot of people emailed in and we're like, okay, okay, but you're wrong about a few things and I, I use it for my pets or whatever. I did it for pain on my shoulder. And I am open to the idea that it's just placebo. But first of all, the placebo effect is certainly real and measurable and well studied.

It certainly sounds like there's a there, there. 'cause I will say my shoulder pain was remarkably, I. Degraded, and I assumed it was placebo, but I'll take it.

[00:19:34] Michael Regilio: Fine. Sign me up. Absolutely. I get that. I understand that. But you mentioned the studies and I wanna 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.

So

[00:20:06] Jordan Harbinger: it, it sounds like you're saying the Chinese cherry picked or maybe even fabricated the data or the results. I

[00:20:12] Michael Regilio: don't have to say it. China's food and drug regulators unearth 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,

[00:20:33] Jordan Harbinger: buyers of Chinese medication online, myself included, 10 years ago. Beware. Yeah, I believe that would be called Caveat de Emperor. Hmm. Sometimes I know a joke is clever, which ma makes it even more annoying somehow. So Chinese studies can't be trusted when it comes to this stuff, I'm guessing.

I

[00:20:53] Michael Regilio: mean, that's what it sounds like. 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.

[00:21:13] Jordan Harbinger: I see. I would imagine that would be difficult because how could the person administering acupuncture not know that they're administering acupuncture? It's not like they're giving somebody a pill and they don't know if the pill is placebo or real. They have to stick needles in meridians or whatever.

[00:21:29] Michael Regilio: Right? Yeah. And obviously the flip side of that is how could the person receiving the acupuncture not know they're receiving acupuncture?

[00:21:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So what does an acupuncture placebo even look like? I mean, a needle's a needle. And I guess that's where we get stuck. No pun intended. Again, sorry. I. Placebo, you

[00:21:45] Michael Regilio: could, I don't know, try poking people with insults.

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 am guessing the problem with that should seem relatively obvious.

[00:22:25] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 'cause why would it matter if needles were placed on imaginary meridians or imaginary non meridians? It all, it sounds all the same. I mean, if you, if you just put a needle anywhere and it'll maybe do something, you're right.

Because if it's not real and that's what you're testing for, then. You can't really check where the meridian is 'cause you can't see it. And it's not detectable anywhere unless you put the needle in it. It does something. Oh yeah. We're sort of caught in this weird loop.

[00:22:52] Michael Regilio: Yeah. And look, that's pretty much what this 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. I'm steel

[00:23:17] Jordan Harbinger: manning this, it sounds like what you're saying is, Hey, there is relief from acupuncture 'cause migraines are tough to treat and lower back pain sucks and so does knee pain.

So sign me up for acupuncture.

[00:23:26] Michael Regilio: Yeah. 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 is like these huge criticisms of meta analysis in general that I gonna be honest with you, I don't understand.

[00:23:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. A lot of that stuff is tough to understand. 'cause I, at first I was like, let me read this and it's.

There's a lot of Greek symbols that are like, when you use Lambda in the wrong way then, and I'm like, oh, this looks like calculus. I am out, so I get it. This would be hard to understand anyway because it sounds as silly as doing a meta analysis of like astrology or something. I. Where do you start?

[00:24:19] Michael Regilio: 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, uh, what ancient people believed with no understanding of biology, and they were totally right about all these invisible things they made up.

[00:24:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's like saying, what if ancient people were right about sacrificing virgins to volcanoes? First of all, you and I both would've been in deep trouble back in high school. That was

[00:24:49] Michael Regilio: a private story. I told you. Not anymore. Okay. Look, we need to understand if the act of needles stabbing the skin does something real, like tangible and scientifically provable, or is it just all placebo?

So

[00:25:04] Jordan Harbinger: I guess my little gripe with this is it sounds like by saying placebo, you're almost saying, oh, this is worthless. And I'm, yes, I'm baiting you because we've done several episodes on the placebo effect. And I've got even more stuff about it in the pipeline, and it turns out that it's like quite a legit way to treat pain.

[00:25:20] Michael Regilio: Yeah, it's awesome. In fact, in researching this episode, I came across like several full throated defenses of the placebo effect by some of the most reputable institutions in medicine. One article from Harvard Medical School was the one that like really set me straight on placebos, particularly when it comes to pain management.

Pain is in the brain. Ooh, that is dangerously close to a Cypress Hill lyric I think. That it is, and I may be insane in the membrane, but the fact of the matter is the way our brain perceives the messages from pain receptors is. Pain. That's just what pain is. So if placebos convince our brains to release endorphins, which relieve pain, the pain relief is as real as if you've taken a pharmaceutical drug without the risks of taking pharmaceutical drugs.

Hey, placebos, like seriously, no disrespect. I get you.

[00:26:14] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, you can't be allergic to your placebo. I don't even know. Maybe I spoke too soon. It seems like that could be one of the things that triggers his allergies, but whatever. So you asked if acupuncture might be doing something more. What would be the more, if the idea is to treat the pain?

Yeah,

[00:26:29] Michael Regilio: so it actually, this is where it gets murky because serious professionals who have respect haven't ruled out that causing micro injuries might. Triggering an immune response or sending anti-inflammatory proteins and other infection fighting and wound healing chemicals to these micro injure areas.

[00:26:51] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, I can get behind that, right? You're sticking a needle into something and maybe your body's like, Hey, send more blood there. 'cause I'll tell you the areas where I got poked by these little needles definitely turned red and. Some of them got a little sore and yada yada. But also on the other hand, the words might be in those sentences that you just previously spoke, it seems like they're doing a little bit of heavy lifting there.

[00:27:14] Michael Regilio: Yeah. Some also propose that these micro injuries might, and you said it increase blood flow to the area or might activate nerve receptors. Like they're still hypothesizing about it, but there's not a lot of evidence. Gotcha. Yeah. And you're still using the word might quite a bit. Yeah, look, in this case might definitely doesn't make right?

So what if they haven't ruled it out? They also haven't ruled it in reputable. People do wonder if acupuncture is doing something more than the placebo effect, but the fact is, all the evidence suggests that on a neurological level it's treating pain just like a placebo does. So for pain relief, it sounds like acupuncture gets a solid maybe.

I don't know. I'd go so far as to say a solid yes for pain treatment. As long as you believe for skeptics, I couldn't help but wonder if the placebo effect is less or even, no. That might be the study we're looking for. That's the control group I'd be interested to see in believers versus skeptics. So maybe that's the

[00:28:24] Jordan Harbinger: control group they're looking for.

And then again, look, I don't believe that much in acupuncture at all. I did the episode on it and I'm extremely skeptical. So when I, like I said earlier in the show, I got a chance to have a university professor from China who teaches acupuncture at like a big respected institution of Eastern medicine or Chinese medicine.

He was just hanging out and he is like, oh, your shoulder hurts. I was like, yeah, I've got something called thoracic outlet syndrome. It's like impingement in my shoulders. And he's like, oh, let me jab you with some needles, right? So I was like, what the, Hey, I'm sitting here in my brother-in-Law's house. Why not?

I was quite surprised when most of the pain went away almost immediately. 'cause I was kind of like, I am only doing this for shits and giggles, really? 'cause you're here and you seem like a nice guy. I don't think this is gonna work. But look, it's not a huge surprise because placebo is legit. And maybe it would've worked even better if I wasn't skeptical.

Decided before I even started that it probably wasn't gonna do anything. I don't know, but it certainly did something placebo or not, and it lasted for several days. It's not like I woke up and I was like, ow. My shoulder, oh wait, I had acupuncture. This isn't supposed to hurt. I spent a good week or two where my arms felt more or less fine.

[00:29:35] Michael Regilio: That is amazing. Look, I don't believe in much either, but I am really determined to find out, and a lot of people have. Been working with acupuncture. In fact, in 2009, the UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence, that is one of the most British sounding names ever. Yeah. Look, Jordan, they still have a king.

Everything over there is the royal this or the Excellency that. So in 2009, the United Kingdom's National Institute for Clinical Excellence did recommend acupuncture for back pain. But I have to keep saying this. Back pain is weird. Specialists have long understood. There's a very real mental element to overcoming it.

Just for comparison, I looked up what our National Institute of Health has to say about acupuncture, and I found I. What they were saying on the subject, on their website to be kind of like how polite atheists talk about religion. They were like, uh, it's good for some people and sure you can't prove it, but hey, people aren't dumb for believing it.

That's fine. Uh, yeah. You said for some people acupuncture is effective. Okay, sure it's effective ish, but for certain things it can assertively be said. It's not effective. And here's the thing, acupuncture makes a lot of claims. Let's shut a few of those down. Yeah, let's do that. Claims such as. Okay. The evidence strongly suggests it is not effective for rheumatoid arthritis, stopping smoking, irritable bowel syndrome, losing weight addiction, asthma, stroke, tinnitus, or thinking your Napoleon bone apart, or whatever else they are claiming that it works on.

But it

[00:31:15] Jordan Harbinger: doesn't hurt to try if you're suffering from those things because you might end up with almost like a. Placebo boost thinking, I can quit smoking because I jab needles into my forearm, so I don't need a cigarette right now. I mean, it seems like you could just as easily snap a rubber band around your wrist or something.

You don't really need acupuncture for that, I suppose. Yeah,

[00:31:33] Michael Regilio: you might say that's like the dumbo's feather effect and you ask if it does any harm though, and I guess that all depends on how you feel about, say. Death because in extremely rare cases it can be fatal. I found examples of it though in fairness.

The only cases of death I came across were not in the us, but really strange. One instance that I found was in rural China, in which it said that the needles, I. Punctured the person's organs. How the

[00:32:03] Jordan Harbinger: hell? I know. I just said I had acupuncture. I read the story where the needle went into someone's organ.

The other one, a person had a punctured lung. These needles are so tiny, they're like hairs. I. Their needles. There's a little, for lack of a better word, handle on it that they can use to tap it in. Obviously, they use the wrong needle if they went and hid an organ or your lungs. There's no way this thing could go across anything that's not just skin and light tissue.

Sounds like some barefoot doctor using a hammer and chisel because they didn't have acupuncture needles and accidentally killing someone. I just don't know how you could screw up that bad.

[00:32:35] Michael Regilio: Yeah, it was shocking to me. But the fact of the matter is soreness, bruising, infection, those can happen anywhere and they do happen very often as a result from acupuncture in whatever country you receive it in.

But for the most part, it's pretty darn safe here in the us.

[00:32:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The guy who did it on me from China, he was using alcohol pads just like you would on an A site you were gonna use an injection on. Now, I have had acupuncture at some of those, like Chinese foot reflexology places that my mother-in-law will take me to.

And they're just, let me jab this needle into your back. And I'm like, shouldn't you sanitize that? Like I just worked out. You just injected me with my own sweat and whatever the hell else was on my skin. Thanks man. And some of those got lightly infected. I was not happy about that. Wow. You know who won't drive a needle through your spleen?

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[00:34:10] Jen Harbinger: And now get $250 when you join ramp. Just go to ramp.com/jordan ramp.com/jordan. That's RAM p.com/jordan. Cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

[00:34:24] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is sponsored in part by the defender. We all have those big goals that seem just outta reach, right?

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And if you can't remember a code or you can't remember the sponsor, go ahead and email me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am happy to surface that code for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday, things are safe in the us. Aside from that place, Cupertino do in large part to regulations and certification, I would imagine.

And how exactly is acupuncture regulated? What training do you need? What certification goes into becoming an acupuncturist? Certainly. You can't just tell people that you are one and start hammering needles in. There's no way that we allow that except for that place in Cupertino. Yeah,

[00:36:04] Michael Regilio: I would like to see their certification because most states require a master's degree in acupuncture and eastern medicine, and then there's the state exams and the actual certification process.

So yes, it is a process. Good. Okay,

[00:36:17] Jordan Harbinger: so most states you said, are there states where just anybody can poke you with needles and call it acupuncture?

[00:36:22] Michael Regilio: Absolutely not a few states. What I say that you have to get the certification in a few states. There is no certifications. Only doctors and nurse practitioners are allowed to administer acupuncture.

In Oklahoma, they allow chiropractors, plus the needles are highly regulated by the federal government. They are coming out of sterile packages for one use only. Unless you go to the place you went, except for that place

[00:36:46] Jordan Harbinger: with Cupertino, where who knows. So a person wanting to try acupuncture. It sounds like they're in good hands if they're in the United States.

[00:36:53] Michael Regilio: Yes. In fact, I am not trying to belittle acupuncturists. I've been to a few. They were lovely people. I even allowed students to practice on me at an accredited college here in la. You've also had

[00:37:06] Jordan Harbinger: acupuncture. I feel like you buried the lead a little bit there. So what was it like for you? Did it help with whatever you went in for?

[00:37:12] Michael Regilio: It was lovely with lovely people. I laid on a bed with needles sticking outta 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 office that I first tried meditating. You said strenuous work, but dude, you're a comedian. What

[00:38:08] Jordan Harbinger: are you talking about? I.

[00:38:09] Michael Regilio: 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 see.

I was waiting tables at that time in my life.

[00:38:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't, I too don't think I could hold my arm up in that sort of like hand behind the head position. I don't even think I'm flexible enough to hold a tray like that. I don't know if they really do that good thing. I'm not a server.

[00:38:31] Michael Regilio: Actually, I do a bunch of servers back in the day when I was doing it, who had tendonitis in their wrist and problems like that for carrying those trays around.

Oof. Yeah, that's

[00:38:41] Jordan Harbinger: a job I could never do. That's why I always tip. But how do you know the acupuncture did nothing? You said you healed both times, so.

[00:38:49] Michael Regilio: 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 like, yeah, medicine is a science.

It's based on being able to objectively tell. If it's doing anything.

[00:39:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a very fair point. That's really good. Like with acupuncture, you kinda have to go, my brother-in-Law had it same day as me, almost the same problem. Me as a frozen shoulder. And he's like, Hey, do you think it did anything? And I'm like, I think it maybe got rid of some of my pain.

What about you? He's, yeah, I think maybe it did, but you're right. When I separated my shoulder and they put it back into place and put my arm in a sling and it was like, oh yeah, that worked. My arm is back in the socket.

[00:39:39] Michael Regilio: 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.

[00:40:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's a state board test on imaginary things, which is not great.

[00:40:14] Michael Regilio: 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.

Keep the witchcraft out of the state government.

[00:40:27] Jordan Harbinger: Please. If you were trying to stay on the good side of acupuncturists by saying they're lovely people eight times in a row, I am gonna go ahead and guess that the witchcraft comment ended it, but TCM is not all acupuncture. I know People are like, Hey, I thought this was traditional Chinese medicine.

All you're talking about is acupuncture. What about the cupping and the herbal medicine and all

[00:40:45] Michael Regilio: that stuff? Great question. 'cause those are two totally different treatments. So let's go with cupping first. All right. So the obvious question is, what is cupping? It

[00:40:54] Jordan Harbinger: is a hickey. Okay. I'm waiting for you to expand on that, but you seem to have stopped talking.

[00:41:02] Michael Regilio: Fine. I will expand on it, but you're not gonna get any further explanation out of me. It's just a hickey. Okay, so it sounds like cupping, uh, 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. Yeah,

[00:41:29] Jordan Harbinger: I have seen it done in YouTube videos. I actually tried it myself. Not for any particular ailment. I just wanted to do it 'cause where else am I gonna do it? And it's quite the production. There's a whole sort of showmanship element to this cupping thing,

[00:41:42] Michael Regilio: 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. I

[00:41:55] Jordan Harbinger: know it leaves a crazy kind of scary looking patchwork of bruises on your back or wherever they do it.

But what else?

[00:42:02] Michael Regilio: 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.

[00:42:25] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's why it leaves the hickey looking round. Bruises. Oh, that makes so much sense. Okay.

[00:42:32] Michael Regilio: Yeah, and a lot of 'em, 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.

[00:42:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Or made out with an octopus if it's on the face.

I've seen, I remember when I first saw it, I saw this girl who she was wearing like a tank top and she had all these bruises and I remember just being so confused and thinking, what could you have fallen on? That would've done that to you? And I remember looking at the guy and being like, did he do that to her?

How would he have done that to her? They seem happy. She doesn't seem scared of him. I don't understand what's going on. So I remember Michael Phelps was covered also in the cupping marks during the Olympics, and that was totally bizarre. I.

[00:43:12] Michael Regilio: 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?

[00:43:21] Jordan Harbinger: You are doing so well with keeping the puns down on this episode, but here we are now. Look,

[00:43:26] Michael Regilio: you have no idea how hard it was for me to resist the temptation to say I was poking holes in acupuncture. Yeah, and now you can't say you

[00:43:34] Jordan Harbinger: resisted it.

Look, Phelps is an Olympic athlete. He's also maybe a smart guy, or at least he has smart coaches guiding his. Treatment and training. Why would he do the cupping thing if it's total nonsense?

[00:43:45] Michael Regilio: 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 get 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.

[00:44:15] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so that's kind of a no for cupping. What about Chinese herbal medicine? This is a huge category. There's places in Chinatown that have what looks like hundreds of different herbs for different things that you can combine in tens of thousands, maybe more ways.

[00:44:29] Michael Regilio: 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 all together snarky because with herbal medicine there is a there. There I. Where's there? Everywhere. There's a there, there everywhere. Okay, Dr. Seuss, how about you just tell us what you mean. Okay. To understand herbal medicine, you have to go back like way, way back.

500 million years ago, the first plants appeared. Plants are cile 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, you're spending your entire life on the spot your parents conceived you.

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. I'm

[00:45:40] Jordan Harbinger: not sure I've thought of it that way, but obviously that's true. So if you're stuck in one spot for life, you are incredibly limited.

[00:45:47] Michael Regilio: 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've figured out a few that act as medicine.

[00:46:27] Jordan Harbinger: So Chinese herbal medicine is actually effective.

[00:46:31] Michael Regilio: Yes and no. Most of it is not proven and almost certainly not effective. 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.

I. 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. Wow.

[00:47:09] Jordan Harbinger: What? Here in the US we live in something of a malaria list bubble.

I'm sure we have it somewhere, but, and I know in other parts of the world, it's a real problem. And malaria is no joke. It kills like a gazillion people every year.

[00:47:22] Michael Regilio: 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 UNG in his book, A Handbook for prescriptions for emergencies in three 40 ad.

[00:47:53] Jordan Harbinger: That is pretty amazing. I love that. I wonder though, what passed for a handbook 1700 years ago.

Like giant stacks of papyrus that you needed your hen servants to carry around. Most people couldn't even read back then. Right. So who's like. Carrying a handbook of prescriptions for emergencies in their backpack, which wasn't invented yet. Maybe

[00:48:13] Michael Regilio: very good questions that unfortunately I don't have answers to, but I like the idea of a handbook was called that because he 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 2000 years ago, so take that Starbucks

[00:48:40] Jordan Harbinger: for a disease that's still rampant.

It's actually crazy to hear that there's been an effective treatment for almost 2000 years. That's incredible.

[00:48:47] Michael Regilio: Actually, okay. That's where skeptics of herbal medicine point out that in drinking the Artemis CIT, 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

[00:49:15] Jordan Harbinger: malaria. Still pretty damn impressive. Imagine the amount of trial and error before you figure this one out. It's unbelievable.

It's really cool. I.

[00:49:24] Michael Regilio: 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. I. Kinda 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 am 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 in 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. Well, I'm not sure

[00:50:42] Jordan Harbinger: that it's totally fair to make that assumption. People who are sick and they're in pain, they're, in my opinion, they're right to try pretty much anything to alleviate their suffering.

Not unlike a young Michael Lio who once had some arm pain.

[00:50:54] Michael Regilio: Yeah, okay. Fair point. And by the way, now an old Michael Lio has some everything. Pain. Yeah. You

[00:51:01] Jordan Harbinger: might wanna try some TCM for that. I've heard it works. If you believe it. Thanks all for listening to and supporting the show topic. Suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday toJordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Love talking with you. There you can find Michael at Michael Lio on Instagram.

Tour date's up now there as well. We'll link to that in the show notes because nobody can spell Lio. This show is created in association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, mil Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer and I'm sure not a acupuncturist.

Or an herbalist. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday. So if you think we really dropped the ball on something, let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that. Y'all know how to reach me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Remember, we rise by lifting others, so share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out here today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to check out, here's a trailer with Eric Aday.

[00:52:27] Clip: Pakistan was just one of the many bad things that have happened to me in my life. I've had so many things happen and I just learned to get over it. You know, you get knocked down six times, you get up seven, and that's the only way I've ever known how to live.

When I got out of the cab with the suitcases to leave Pakistan, the guy who was there was like, next time you come back, we'll show you around. We will hook you up with some girls. You'll have a great time. And I'm humoring this guy. I'm like, yeah, sure. Next time I come back, I, I know for a fact I'm never coming back to Pakistan country sucks.

That fucking country sucks and I'm good at finding like good things that are everywhere. So it's early in the morning and I go into international departures and there's this long line curbing around the corner. I'm waiting in line and the line goes all the way up this wall to where there's customs tables.

And when the customs officer sees me and flags me, 'cause I'm about six inches taller than everyone, and I get brought to another room. Finally, the guy who asked me if there was narcotics in my suitcase comes in and he is holding these two sandwich sealed things. And his exact words to me is, what is this?

And I said, I know what it is. Yeah,

[00:53:27] Jordan Harbinger: sure.

[00:53:27] Clip: He says, this is all film. I said, why are you showing me this? Because it came outta your suitcase. Felt like such a fucking idiot. Yeah, because I thought that the DEA was gonna hook me up, you know, because they were gonna see that I'm innocent. I truly thought those guys were gonna be there to help me now.

Sure. Because I wasn't guilty, so the, this shit doesn't happen. Innocent people, three years of my life for a crime I didn't know I was being used to commit.

[00:53:55] Jordan Harbinger: To hear the rest of one of the most harrowing stories I've ever heard in my time doing this podcast. Check out episode 1 47 with Eric Aday here on the Jordan Harbinger Show.