Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Auriculotherapy

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Everybody loves harnessing the power of reflexology, but what if you want all the great, totally real, not at all fabricated benefits of reflexology, but don't wanna touch people's feet? Friends, auriculotherapy is here for you. ... You're OK with touching ears, right? Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saw bones is a show about medical history and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. All right, the tour is about to books. One, two, one, two, a day for our fans. We came across a pharmacy with the two in that's busted out. We were sawed through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around. Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones, a medal to your of Miss guided medicine.

I'm your girl, Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Thanks. Hey, I was under the table. I missed your applause. Is it about how about E.C.L. with how mine was? That's exactly the table. I missed your applause. Is it about how about equal with how mine was? Exactly the same. Exactly the same. Excellent.

Well, welcome. Yeah, me too. You. Welcome to Seattle. That's weird. So, yeah, we love to come back to Seattle. Our family comes back to Seattle a lot, I feel. Yeah, we're here a lot. It seems like it's like a second. It's our vacation home in the cloudyville. We love Seattle so much that this morning,

after we got up, our daughter, Charlie, climbed up into the window sill and stood there and looked out over the city and said, hello, Portland! LAUGHTER APPLAUSE That's very good. This apricot of nothing.

Just, where did you say we were? So we usually like to theme our episodes to the area that we're in, Seattle. But we've been to Seattle so many times, so we're kind of out of things. From being honest. I'm sure there are more, but then Justin had a whole other, he said, well, we're going to Seattle,

but we're also going to PodCon. Maybe there's a connection there, and I'm going to let you explain. It's not that. He said she was going to explain. It's not that. Let me say she's gonna explain. It's not a long chain. I just thought podcast go in here. Okay, podcast is about podcasts.

And podcasts go in your ear. So maybe an ear thing. It's not a long trip. Ear stuff. And ear thing. and I said, hey, you know, we just got to, look, there was a tweet, I think, the other day about how we should look

into a regular therapy. I wonder if that would be a good topic. And I'm guessing you all don't know much about it because nobody got excited. That's very good. Now that's ideal. Justin, what do you know about a regular therapy? Well, Sydney.

I mean, do you want me to be honest because you kind of tell me a little bit, or should I lie? Well, we always edit this part out. No, just kidding. Normally she doesn't tell me about stuff. Okay. I know a little bit about it.

Okay. Has to do with the ear. Ear stuff is involved. Ear therapy. Ear therapy. Ear therapy. I mean, that's in the word, right? Ericulo meaning of or pertaining to the ear area in the Latin and the original Latin.

Ear area. Ear area. So, Ericulo therapy is considered an alternative medicine, which it's similar in some respects, I would say, to acupuncture, and then I would also say it's similar to reflexology, except it's the ear. a therapeutic procedure whereby you poke or burn or squeeze or apply some sort of electrical current to various parts of the ear that correspond with all the other parts of your body. So if you have a problem in your knee, you just like squeeze this part of your ear and... It's the same.

I mean, it's the same. So I had never heard of this. I've heard it because reflexology is the same idea, but with the feet. Like, feet. Reflexology is foot massage with rules and charts, basically. And this is like ear massage, except it sounds less pleasant because you of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a

little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a

little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a little bit more of a sort of a which is done, but then it kind of goes astray. It goes off on its own little tangent, which is where sobboons live on these tangents. So, like I said, its origins are quite ancient, and it was originally based on the same ideas that acupuncture is based on. So, the body has meridians, like these pathways through which energy can flow.

And these are ideas that don't always sync up as well with like Western medicine and our idea of like what causes disease and what treatments are and that kind of thing. Nice, nice way to put it. Well, I'm just saying like most of us don't treat based on like energy. Energy. Right. the flow of energy. The flow of energy. Right, like acupuncture is. Irregular therapy was like, there were scattered attempts

throughout history to kind of make it into its own thing. Like, for instance, one of the reasons, one of the like kind of folklore behind why a sailor might get a bunch of earrings is that it supposedly improved your vision to pierce your ears. I didn't even know that. Wow, this is our, I'm already learning like so much from this episode. In ancient Egypt, sometimes you could like burn or pierce a certain part of your ear if

you wanted to like prevent pregnancy. Wow, this is like very potent stuff we're playing around here with, said. Well, no, I mean, it didn't work. I'm just saying it. You said you just closed it in ancient Egypt. That would work. So I don't know, you might try this. It might try that in ancient Egypt and maybe it would be more effective because of, I

don't know, the time period. Is it a faith thing? No, I mean, again, like, is it like, are you asking me what it really is? No, no, no, keep going. What it really is, is it doesn't work, but the theories behind it are that there are parts of your ear that for some reason are connected either believe you could believe through energy or as I'm going to get into, there were some more like sophisticated, embryologic origin theories. Whoa.

But we'll get there. There was also, Hippocrates said, if you want to, you can bleed someone behind their ear. So like make a cut behind their ear and bleed them there, specifically to improve their erections.

Wait. And you want to? And their, and their adjaculations will be stronger if you bleed them behind the ear. Oh, why? Let me have Pogger teeth, man. Yeah, you can't just throw a Pogger these other busts like that.

One of my favorite, because these are all just like these little snippets throughout history. There was somebody who was like, let's try that ear thing again. No? OK. No, don't tell us. All right. One of the little, I guess you could call it a case report,

although I don't think these qualify as medical literature case reports. One of the anecdotes, if you will, is in 1810, there was this professor in Italy who reported that he observed that a man who was stung by a bee on the ear was immediately relieved of all leg pain. And so the thought was if people could just get like needles poked in their ear, then leg pain vanishes. And so this actually for quite a while, a regular therapy was applied mainly for leg pain,

sciatica. I found this again and again, people would come in and be like, ah, I have back pain or leg pain, I have sciatica and they'd be like, no problem. Now what hurts most? Oh, now what's the most painful thing on you? My ear?

Hey, we did it. So in the 1800s, it became sort of popular to use this for specifically for sciatica. And then also for toothaches, for whatever reason, toothaches were a very popular use. But again, these were real scattered. It was really, it took about 100 years of this kind of scattered use before the doctor who,

I think you could consider like the father of modern oriculotherapy. Dr. Paul Nozier saw these healers in Southeast France using a type of oriculotherapy. He observed a lot of people in the community had a very specific burn on the back of their ear. And he started asking, like, I've seen a lot of people with this burn, what's the deal? And it turned out that there were healers in the community who were burning a

very specific part of the ear for back pain. And he was so intrigued by this that he took this information back and he studied it for like six years. And he came out with the idea that the whole ear corresponds to the human body and it's really easy. You can visualize this. If you want to know what part of the ear to poke to fix different parts of your body, all you have to do, and he published this drawing, by the way. I wish I had this original journal with this published drawing of a human fetus superimposed on an ear. So just think about the ear. Think about the ear. Picture a fetus.

Picture a fetus. A fetus. Upside down, head down, like head down, ready to go, like full-term, you know, like. Like a fetus, folks, come on. No. Work with us. I'll curl up and then just kind of superimpose it on an ear

and you can kind of see it, right? Like a car. Okay, I'm gonna look dead ahead. You can kind of indicate sort of where on my ear we're talking about. Is this gonna, oh, maybe, this will work. And you turn it there. Okay, so like the head would be here.

And then you'd get like the spine curling around here. And you got like the butt. Oh my God, my ass tomorrow is like going crazy right now. I'm gonna be like, this is gonna be the next 20 minutes of the show. I feel so pampered and cared for. You got like the knees. Personal attention, a hoi.

The hands, or the hands for some reason, kind of go like this. There's gotta be more, Sydney. This is so chill. But with this in mind, it would be as simple as like, let's see, there's this spine, so like, does your back hurt? Yes, you better keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How does it feel now?

Bit worse. Yeah. It was, I was about to say better and you let go. Sit out to Taurus. I'm sorry. So, you know, that's kind of a bad thing to make up because normally you would need to go to school like for reflexology.

It's all higley, pickledy, along the foot in different areas but this is just very easy. Bottom of the ear, baby head. Up here, the butt, the top of your ear, the butt, or feet, butt or feet, it's easy. It's one chart, you don't need to go to school for that. It was really, I looked up this picture, I had to see this for myself,

because I read the description of like, just this superimposed fetus on an ear, and I thought, I can't beat that simple, because when he published this, people got really excited. Like the medical community went, oh, yes, oh, this is excellent. I love this, this is so simple, it must be true. And if you look, it really is that simple.

It's a picture of a fetus on an ear, and everybody went, bravo. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, found out about this, about Euricula therapy, and got really excited and thought, we need to figure out how this works. Because he didn't really, he didn't propose necessarily all of the mechanisms by which this was possible. It was kind of like, we've established this works. Now let's go back and come up with a reason why,

which isn't typically how we do things. But so everybody started trying to figure out, well, a lot of the doctors who were studying it in like Europe and in the United States were saying, well, we don't really have that concept of the flow of energy, so that doesn't fit into our medical paradigm. So we need to come up with some other reason.

So they started doing all these studies where they like, they buy up seed parts of the ear to see like, are there secret structures that maybe we have in our ear that we don't know about? Is it weather? No. They tried that. They tried measuring measuring the electrical resistance of different parts of the ear.

And this is stuff like this has been done with acupuncture, in case you're interested. They're very similar kind of studies. So they tried to measure the electrical resistance. Is there something different about certain parts of the ear that we don't understand? They tried to apply functional MRI. So they were like, OK, we're going to put you in an MRI machine, and then we're gonna poke your ear, and

we're gonna look for other parts of your body to light up. Just when you think MRIs couldn't be less fun. It comes ear poking. And then they're like, we'll try it the other way. We'll poke your foot and see if your ear lights up. Like, you know, like that operation guy. Meanwhile, Dr. Nosey or had his own kind of method that he was arguing, I know it works. I still can't tell you why, but I have new evidence as to how, as to the fact that it does work. I have new evidence to present.

So he invented a method of testing irregular therapy, which he also kind of, he didn't invent, but he rejuvenated. His method was called the vascular autonomic signal or the VAS. And what this is is he would poke your ear with one hand and then take your ear with one hand and then take your pulse with the other. And he could sense very slight subtle changes

in your pulse that no other doctors could detect. Oh, it's pretty valuable skill. And this is part of the problem is he started doing this to people, he'd be like watch I'll show you that it works and he'd grab their ear and get me your hand. Oh my gosh. And he'd go Ah, the problem's in your butt I mean that's where you're right. It is. Yes. Yes, like all Macroi men, the problem does have to be in my butt, Sid.

A lot of planes, like, a lot of time zones. Now. A lot of booze. Now the thing. Not a lot of booze. Now the thing. Not a lot of vegetables. That's your own problem, man. You have gotten like no cookie points on this trip.

Not true. So the problem. I ate very small potatoes yesterday. Like they're red ones. Is that anything? They're very small, they look very rustic. This is nothing. It seems like at that level of rusticity, there should be some vitamins involved. Was my instinct upon it?

I got three of them and I thought, there's certainly some vitamins in here. You say this and I'm a doctor and then people hold me accountable because these are your ideas about nutrition. It's not fair. I give him green things. I show him where they are. The cheese ravioli was bad. I knew that.

Okay, back to this. Back to this. There was a sauce, a cheese sauce for it, you know what I said? It was so good, you know what I said, to the other people there? I was like, I was like, hey, Roman Mars. This sauce is so good. It's bestia melting my heart. That's what I said to him.

And he was like, what did he say to you? As somebody who's an expert in the bill world, I want you to know that was the finest joke ever bill. I want to tell you that new King of Podcasts. And you're such an inspiration to me because of the great joke about G-South. It reminds me of how elevators, you know? How they do their thing.

Did you ever stop to think about that? Because I know the names of everybody that made up elevators. Let me tell you, then. Roman is a partner. We work on a podcast called Smart Stuff. So we go back and forth like this. He knows he's a cat bird with a wiretail, folks.

He doesn't mind us at all. He loves a good natured ribbing about the built world. Do you want to hear about this Euriculous Arapie? Some more. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. I just got, yeah, a little bit of attention, huh? Sorry about that. You went on another podcast, I think.

I think. I mean, it's PodCon. It's going to happen. I think if it's going to happen somewhere. Podcasts. Podcasts. Podcasts. Inpodcasts.

The layers between the realities are recent. The medicines, the medicines, the escalate macabre for the mouth. So we started proposing this way of testing whether or not this works by indicated by the radial pulse. And the problem with it is that it was, as he told people, this is an incredibly difficult technique to master.

You have to practice for years and years and years, and some people can never master it. So it was incredibly difficult to learn, and it was also really difficult to teach because you're like, here, feel. Do you feel it? No? Feel again. Do you feel it? No? Feel again. Do you feel it? No?

Feel again. I don't know. It's there. Oh, I'll tell you. And so this was his argument. All these other researchers who did all those other experiments that I mentioned just kind of said, we don't really find anything.

We didn't see anything new, any new structures that carry secret pathways of energy or anything that we couldn't find anything physical. We did the functional MRI thing, and it just like stuff just lit up all over the place. Nothing connected to anything, nothing was consistent, nothing could be reproduced. We did, they did do the thing where they measure

the electrical resistance on different parts of the skin to see like is there a difference between one of the pressure points, one of the points that correspond to a body part and then just like a random place. And there was a difference, but like it wasn't consistent. It was like, well, that is stronger. But so is that one, and that's not a point. And that one has nothing. But that one has nothing too, it's nothing it was just nothing was consistent But they did know that like you know some parts do have more electrical resistance than others

What could this mean and no cheer came back with the argument that like we haven't discovered all of the points yet There's more their secret points. There's secret points. There's satellite points. There are emerging points that are as of yet not fully matured as points. So there might be 2000. We don't know. You can't test this. That's a weird.

If you believe in either God and Jesus or evolution, both make that a buck-wild thing to be there. That is like such, I don't care where you fall on the spectrum. Whatever you think made the things, I very much doubt it's like, and finally, there's 2,000 buttons in the ear that do a wide variety of wild things. And I'm curious if they'll find it, because it is really good. But there are a lot of them, folks, it's like the walk-a-vader up there.

The only study that supported it at all is they somehow they tried it on rabbits to see if they could measure if they could help her rabbit. Those ears are huge, that's 4,000 points. If they could poke its ear and make it feel good somehow. And I was reading this and I kept reading this study and looking at what they did and going, what? How? going, what?

How? What? Where? I couldn't even figure it, but at the end of it, they were like, I don't know, the rabbit seemed to like it when we poked their ears. Maybe he's on to something. So that was the only study that was kind of like supportive.

Like, well, we did that to those bunnies. Rabbits are just stoked to have your attention in a way that doesn't involve pulling them out of hats. They're just trying to make the rabbits feel really good. Just chill out, rabbit. So after all of this publication and all of these studies, and then this one rabbit study, they were sort of like, maybe we don't know.

People got really interested and started using these ideas and kind of expanding on them. And I always love when I see these kind of pseudo-siancy concepts, then get taken to the next level and the next level, because they don't really have a, they're on shaky ground to begin with, and then the house of cards that gets built upon them. So anyway, part of Nose Year's work was the idea that the body is responsive to seven frequencies.

And these frequencies can change the function of your body because they're like vibrations and wear mostly water, so water vibrates. So it's that simple. You just have to know the right frequency to fix a different part of your body. And the easiest way to do this, as we'll get to, is to apply that frequency to the ear.

So you just like vibrate the ear at a certain frequency at the place where the problem is. And like an example is, frequency A helps with wound healing. So if you vibrate the ear at the shoulder at frequency A, then you could fix a cut on your shoulder. No. Wait, wait, wait. False.

False. It's important to remember frequency A because it also helps with tumors. So either. I bet it also helps with tumors. So either. I bet it doesn't though. Now this is all very legitimate right? We're all vibrations. We're all energy.

The secret tells us that it's folks, it's just sit out. It's a law of attraction. Okay, hold on. I have a whiteboard here. What you want, the secret is, what is the secret? Let me go back. That's the secret, folks. Law of Attraction, vibrated into the world, cure the tumor

in your shoulder. Ask the universe to heal you. That's what I'm saying. Vibration. Is that what the secret is about? That insured is the secret. Law of Attraction, like attraction, like attracts like vibration. It's energy.

It's not McDonald's, folks. You can't just go up to the universe and say, how I want a cheeseburger. You have to tell the universe you're hungry and the universal feed you cheeseburgers. You're gonna attract what you're a vibrational match force. Universe, please do not feed my husband anymore cheeseburgers. Please feed him some vegetables.

He needs the roughage. The universe is not a gift registry, Sidney. You can't order up vibrations for me. It's very personal. So, like I said, there's frequency A. Some more examples. Frequency D is really good for stress. So, if you're stressed, which I guess that wouldn't be like a body,

like maybe the whole ear, is vibrate your entire ear, a frequency D, and then you'll feel less stressed. G is the universal frequency, which I found very convenient that you could use it for anything. It also made me wonder why the other frequency is. Yeah, why waste it at the time. Because you just use this one. And then specifically, F is really good for dogs.

I don't know what. I was like, for what for dogs? Anything. Anything for dogs. Just vibrated dogs ear, the frequency of F. Vibrate your dog. I'm assuming not like this. And they're fine. Thanks for my dog. And by the way, you may be wondering, are there products that I could purchase to help me in these efforts? Certainly not. Of course there are.

There are like pressure feelers and color filter. Wait, what? And what's the Rikolo therapy point detectors? Nice. All these different ways of like looking at the ear and like finding like there's, I see the point is here, and there's the problem, and then there's ways for treatment, too. And they're mainly like electrical devices

that you're like, okay, here, vibrate. Or electric here, here. Ah! Shock. Don't do that, physicians. American physicians, come on. Some of these are hundreds of dollars. Of course.

What? They're going to cut you a deal on carrying your tumors? What, my favorite application of these frequencies, though, because this is one thing, so I'm going to vibrate your ear. OK. The best for me was a doctor, Emoto, who took these frequencies that Nozier had discovered. And he started using them to vibrate water.

And then he observed the water to see what kind of crystals were forming as he vibrated the water at different frequencies, and then in response to different things like music, and phrases, and phrases. I thought you were going to say, Frazier. Maybe Frazier, I don't know. But he started sending these vibrations into samples of water and arguing that if you send a sample of water, some sort of loving message, if you look at the water and say,

love and gratitude. Then, and then freeze it, then you'll form all these beautiful snowflake, like lovely patterns of water of ice. And that if you, he's found the same thing when he played amazing grace to the cup of water. So if you hold up a cup of water and you're like, hey, baby, I hear the blues.

Oh, it's all salad and scrambled eggs. You're gonna get like a very good... And then freeze it and you're gonna see beautiful... Distinguished, urban, witty structures and crystals. Uh, he argued that on the other hand, if you say mean things to the water, if you look at the water and you're like, I hate you water.

He paid me, I hear the bludes of Colin, toss salons, scramble eggs. He specifically said, heavy metal music is really bad for water. And that it would create these as they were described like like, demonic images. When you play heavy metal music at water and then freeze it, it's very scary looking.

It was the same as if you look at water and yell, you fool. You fool. You fool. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm like, you have to picture like, like, these scientists

and like lab coats. And they're in a lab, like, you walk in, you're like touring like a research facility. There's this one doctor who's staying there with a cup of water. You fool. You fool. Freeze it.

Freeze it. Freeze it. That's good. I put a lot of stink in that one. So that sounds like nothing. I've heard we've heard a lot of stink in that one. So... That sounds like nothing. I've heard we've heard a lot of things that sound like nothing, staring at crystals that have been scolded

and trying to find devil faces. That sounds like more nothing than usual. Now, from this, because that was like, okay, so we have decided that water responds to vibrations by forming pictures. I guess by communicating with us like, don't yell at me. Here's a demon face. What do we do with this in terms of medicine? I have to imagine at some point somebody went, and?

The idea is that if you then apply any of these pleasant frequencies, either the nose-ear frequencies or this positive music or whatever, to the water, that the water will hold the memory of the vibration and then you can drink the water and it will heal you. And what's wild, what's wild is that I read this. I'll say it works. I will quit the show. No, no. Don't say it works. I'll quit. No, it doesn't work.

No, but I read this and I thought, I've heard this before. And then I remembered. I was on my way back from a medical conference when I was a student and I was writing in like the hotel shuttle back to the airport and my friend and I also a medical student. This guy said so, what are you ladies been doing in the city? And we were like, we were at a medical conference and he was like, oh, let me tell you about vibrational water. And the entire way to the airport, this guy told me about how he cured himself of something

by placing vibrational water under his tongue. And you were trapped in the car when he was... The entire way. And like... This is your origin story, I feel. This is like at the end of it, you're almost lifeless body, fell out of the back and you had to be rescued by monks,

took you to a medical school and brought you back to health. It was, I still remember it because I remember I was just thinking, just be nice, just be nice, be pleasant. Oh, okay, that's interesting. Yeah, and it was all the like, you'll never learn this in school. Listen to me, those crooks won't teach you this stuff. And I remember at one point saying,

so do you make it or do you have to buy it? And he said, oh, you can't make this. You can't, I don't have that kind of technology. I wish I like it, wouldn't it just take like a tuning fork and like a cup. I mean, anyway, I don't have that technology. I have to purchase it. It's worth every penny. And all I thought was, oh, oh, you poor guy.

How much water, how much money? And he was showing me it was a bottle like a little teeny with a dropper. So this is still a thing. I just thought this was interesting. If that happened to you now, would you like say something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was still in medical school.

I was terrified. And I was just thinking, like, please get me to the airport. Please just let me get to the airport. The only other concept that I thought worth mentioning that was born of Euricula therapy and Dr. Noseyre's teachings was the idea, and this was based on that pulse thing that I mentioned, that you could also detect food allergies this way, and that there were a lot

of people who have secret food allergies that don't know about it, which to be fair, you could have food insensitivities you don't know about. That's not like a while belief. A lot of people do. But his theory was that most disease is probably related to a secret food allergy that you don't know about. Yes. Because you eat the food and you don't get the symptoms for several months. So there's no way you could ever connect the two, which would be very difficult were that the case. That logical leap is sound.

Yes, that would be challenging. That would be incredibly challenging. So his theory was that what you could do is take a little ring to which you have applied like some like mushed, I don't know, cannelope or whatever, whatever you think they're allergic to. And you just put it on them somewhere, put it on their skin,

and then feel their pulse. Eazy. Again, he's the only one that could do this radio artery food testing or raft. He's the only one who could do it. So good luck. But I think this is still practiced today by some who will just put a bunch of little rings on you, and then feel your pulse

and be like, no, no, cheeseburgers. Cheeseburgers are your problem. What is this used for today? Ericulotherapy is still practiced. A lot of times it overlaps with ear acupuncture, but it's also just practiced on its own, like burning the ear, cauterizing the ear, putting pressure on the ear, anything like the applying. I found some that apply like colored lights to the ear. Good, good. It's like we don't work that way.

I can't shine some colorful lights on you. Fix the, I mean, come on. But there's a lot of different ways that people are practicing it as to what they say that it treats everything. I mean, your entire body is mapped on the ear. So anything in the body can be treated by the ear. Specifically, they'll talk about pain. It's very, it's very commonly advertised for pain. It's a very commonly advertised alternative way to quit smoking. A lot of times they'll tell you they can help you quit smoking by doing this to you. Presently your ears are in such discomfort that you just don't feel like it. After you're like, fine, okay.

Please quit burning my ear. Take the cigarette from you and just stick it in your ear. There, you're cured. Every time you light a... It would work. I mean, it would work. It would work, not for why you're saying, but it would work. You'll also find it advertised for things like

any kind of like stomach stuff, like diary and constipation. It's a really commonly advertised thing for and any sort of psychiatric problem, like depression, anxiety, anything like that, they'll be like, we gotcha. Let me just... Problem. I don't remember. I guess it would be the brain part.

Did I fix your anxiety? I mean, for the moment. I'll just do the rest of the show like this. Perfect. It's very, oh. I'll squeeze you later when we're alone. Where? Oh, great.

Yikes. It's hugely displacing. It's hugely unpleasant. The one question that I really had is that I have seen a lot of people get the piercings in their ear, because this is where this comes from. If you've seen people get piercings specific places in their ear for migraines, this acupuncture of the ear and aricula therapy and all this, this is all derived from that same kind of body of knowledge.

And so I was reading about that, because I've seen people specifically get, this is the trigas right here, the little part of your ear that kind of covers, you can use it to kind of like cover your ear or like the dace, which is like right up above it. You can get those pierced and people say that it relieves migraine. I looked into it and it's like most of the things, I can find a lot of anecdotes for you. I can find some like case reports that have actually been published like in the medical literature. Here's a patient I had. I did they did this. They're migraines decreased in frequency by this much. But for the most part, even the doctors who will tell you it's worth trying because there are doctors out there who say, look, I have no evidence for it. I'm not saying it works, but maybe so you can try it because

migraines a terrible thing to have if you have my brains are terrible. And even those doctors who say that actually recommend your acupuncture over the piercing, because what they say is, listen, if you're going to do this, the acupuncture works by the same principle and you don't leave something there forever that could get infected. So, even the piercings, really, even the doctors who say, like, do, I mean, you should probably use the acupuncture. But that was it, as far as like practical applications. I mean, I like, I guess, maybe an ear massage would be good.

You know, I actually think, I know of one thing that you can poke in the ear that'll always make the patient feel better. It's podcasting. Thank you podcast convention for having us here to discuss this topic. Thank you for all your support over the years of solbons. We have a book. It's called The Solbons Book.

You can find it where we're fine books. It takes a long time to come up with that title. Yeah. It's called the Solbaans book. You can find it where we're fine. It takes a long time to come up with that title. Yeah, yeah. And thank you to Podcast Convention for having us here as part of their Podcast Convention. Thank you for listening. Make sure you stick around.

Thanks to the taxpayers for you. So our song, Medicines as the Intro and Outro of our program. And most of all, of course, as always, thanks to you for listening. We will be with you again next week. So until then, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. It's not bad, it's time to stay the same. It's like a fucking cross.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture, artist owned Listener supported