When a Siquijor Healer Fixed my Shoulder
I am not one to believe into superstitious bullshit of any type. But, the traditional healers on Siquijor Island in the Philippines fixed a pretty serious sports injury in my shoulder. So, let’s get back to start: What happened, and where?
I have spent a lot of time in the Philippines in recent years. My home base is Dumaguete on Negros Island, and across, on the horizon, lurks Siquijor, the magic island of fire. Siquijor is known for its healers – magicians – doctor quack-quacks – they go by different names, used with different connotations, from respectful to suggesting that they are not legit. Siquijor – as of 2025 – is having a bit of a tourism boom, but generally it’s still a very chill place, with less traffic, smaller crowds, and more pristine beaches than many other parts of the Philippines. The island’s healers convene every Easter, a convention I still hope to witness someday. The magic on Siquijor isn’t considered a positive influence by everyone – older generation Filipinos from the countryside on neighboring islands sometimes refuse to travel to the “Island of Fire” out of fear of being hexed.
Main theme number two of this story is that I enjoy lifting weights. It’s probably healthy in some way or form, but I am not doing “fitness”. I’m not trying to look trim for the beach; I’m trying to bench press and squat more than I did last year. It’s a good kick for me. I occasionally turn into what’s called an “ego lifter” in gym lingo. I go a bit too far with the plates I put on the bar. So, this is what I did one day in 2017 in a gym in Dumaguete when doing the close-grip bench press.
Yes, the close-grip bench-press. I don’t do that exercise anymore. It puts too much strain on the shoulder in the lower part of the movement. It’s okay, in my opinion, for beginner lifters. But even for myself as a moderately powerful dude – nowhere near the top – it can cause injuries when you perform the lift with somewhat more weight. And so it did on that day, and my shoulder really hurt, and I am almost certain that it was a rotator cuff which was injured. There was no way I was going to lift heavy anytime soon, maybe ever. I felt sad. Rotator cuff injuries often need surgery.
On a side-note, these days I use the JM press instead of the close-grip bench press:
So, soon after this injury happened I crossed over to Siquijor, to manage my friend’s dive resort, Apo Diver, for two months while said friend was in Germany for business. At that place in San Juan, Siquijor, one of the island’s healers was offering her massages. I enjoy getting massages, but I didn’t have any particular hopes in regards to my shoulder. I still mentioned it to my masahista.
The healer working on my sore muscles and tendons was a woman in her forties, though she looked older, due to a lot of sun on her skin and generally a hard life in the countryside, I assumed. She could speak English, though not completely fluent, but she could nevertheless get her points across. The occasional grammar mix-ups didn’t hide her intelligence. She caught quickly what I had done to my shoulder, and started working.
And, this sometimes hurt. I have a fairly high pain tolerance, but these massages, especially when they hit my injured shoulder, made me jump up a bit from my vertical position. She used a rounded piece of wood, and dug in really hard. With her knitted hat on she probably weighted 45 kgs, much less than half of me. She knew how to use that weight. Each massage was an event, an experience. I felt better, rotator cuff-wise, after each massage, and after 6 or 7 sessions my shoulder was fixed. A miracle? Skilled healing work for sure. After my stay in Siquijor ended a few weeks later, I took the boat back to Dumaguete and started lifting again. Other than the fact that the affected shoulder had lost some muscle mass, and I had to catch up unilaterally, I had no problems anymore.
On another side note, the scuba diving in Siquijor is absolutely fantastic:
So, for me the Siquijor healer did an absolutely awesome job. “Magic”? “Faith healing”? That wasn’t involved here. Good knowledge of how to fix human skeletomuscular system problems was involved.
This isn’t to say that that all traditional healers in the Philippines are genuine and do good things to their clients’ bodies. I have witnessed a case where a friend’s employee’s daughter – friendly, but simple minded women, both daughter and mother – spent the considerable amount of money which my friend had given them to see a medical doctor instead on a doctor quack-quack. The daughter had symptoms which could have been an indication of a serious neurological problem, and my friend intended to sponsor her visit to a hospital, including a battery of tests to be run there. Instead, she gave it to a hoaxer and got a string with a stone attached for it, to be worn around her increasingly adipose teenage belly. Her neurological status remained un-assessed. That didn’t happen in Siquijor, but in another part of the Philippines, btw.
There is, like with so many things in life, a range. The doc quack2 who “treated” my friend’s daughter was a predatory con-man. The lady who fixed my shoulder was a skilled healer, albeit without a medical degree from a university.
Postscript: 7 years after this happened, I have forgotten which shoulder, left or right, I had injured, the healing was so complete! And I am back to benching in the 120 kg range. Regular bench press, not close-grip. You can see me in action in the video below, plus some small primates I filmed, which are surprisingly connected to powerlifting and human evolution:
