Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Yet More Medical Questions Answered

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Does chewing Excedrin really make it work faster? Does gasoline help a bee sting? We'll answer those queries and many more as Dr. Sydnee and Justin take on more of your weird medical questions. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones 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. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, and welcome to Saul Bones, a mayoral tour of Miss guided medicine.

I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Sydney, welcome to the program. Thank you. It's been a long time since I've welcomed you to the show, so I want to make sure you knew you were still welcome. Oh, well, that's nice. I mean, I do feel like I'm welcome because I kind of,

I mean, to be fair, it's kind of my show more. Yeah, I've been looking for more than years really. I reached out to some other doctors to see if there's just any sort of interest and just know that. Oh, you have, yeah. Yeah. Other kinds of doctors, like, Dr. Feel Good, you know,

that guy, he's probably got some stories. I love the chat with him. Dr. Oz. So maybe I should start reaching out to some other people who know absolutely nothing about medicine and see if they wanna. Good luck finding a him that knows a little about medicine if I do.

You'll never find that. So what are we doing this week, Sid? Well, Justin, I thought it was about time for us to do another question and answer episode. Oh, fantastic. I love, I think these are public, you know what, I would labeled it public service. That's what I, these are a service we do. Well, I think they're fun. That know what I would label the public service. That's what I, these are the service we do.

Well, I think they're fun. That's what adds in the middle. And, and let me say, as always, these are not meant to be medical advice episodes. Might add already said that. Right. Well, I just like to clarify, because we're saying it's a question and answer episode.

Right. These are more kind of your wacky medical, slash science questions just out of interest, common interest. But not anything you should act on. No, no. As always, if you are seeking true medical advice because of a problem you're having, please go see your physician. So here is our first question, Sidney.

Are you ready? Yes. Does gasoline do anything to inhibit inflammation when applied to a bee sting? That's from Jessica. This is a great question because I will see, I have personally, and then I have heard many stories of patients putting gasoline or caracene is the other big one,

on bee stings, poison ivy, any kind of insect sting or spike, you know, spider bites or mosquito bites or anything, I see that a lot. And I'm fascinated by it because I don't know where these ideas originally came from. I think they're more of a, like, I have tied them to our area to our region because I see them a lot in some of the more rural populations in Appalachia, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I think this is widespread. We don't know where Jessica lives. She could live next door to us. We're fairly insular people. That's true. That's true. But I, but I do, I realize, as I've read about this,

this is not just a local phenomenon as I assumed. But let me tell you, gasoline will probably not help your beasting. Oh man, I mean, that's what I predicted, but it's such a bummer to find out that's true. I started, what am I gonna do with all this gasoline? I started reading to figure out why that thought process is there. And for a lot of people, it hinges on the ethanol

that is present in gasoline. They, the belief that ethanol will somehow reduce the inflammation and that that's the active ingredient that you're actually getting the benefit from. The problem with that is twofold. One, I have now read a lot about ethanol and gasoline in the United States. In every country, it's different. So depending on where you are, there's a different amount of ethanol in your gasoline. And in the United States, it's up to 10%. So that is intentionally

vague. I have no idea how much ethanol is in the gasoline that you're putting on your beasting. You don't either. We don't know. The government doesn't want us to know. That being said, ethanol doesn't reduce inflammation. It could kill germs, I guess. Yeah. It could disinfect it. Alcohol does that. But I don't know why gasoline would be your chosen vehicle.

You'd be like rubbing alcohol, right? Right. There are lots of ways to get alcohol onto your skin. Ember clear. Yeah. Maybe just vodka if you have it or something. Because I mean, if you're thinking 10% ethanol and gasoline versus 30%, 40% alcohol in like any liquor you have on your shelf. And it's all just so flamble.

I mean, like, it's just all of it is highly flamable. There's the other thing. You could accidentally catch yourself on fire. So gasoline won't help your beasting and it may catch you on fire. So now ethanol doesn't, does the ethanol work though? Like I said, ethanol can, I mean, it kills, we alcohol is commonly used in hand sanitizer

and other things to kill germs, right? To kill bacteria on our hands. And so ethanol can clean. If you're worried like your beasting is dirty, it might help clean germs out. I don't know why you're worried about that. But no, it's not going to do anything else. It's not going to reduce inflammation. It's not going to fix the beasting.

Now, this next question I have for you said, we kind of already know the answer to because we we dealt with it briefly in last week's episode, but I'm gonna ask any way from Deanna, is it possible to get a disease you have been vaccinated for? Well, Deanna, yes it is. As I as I mentioned last week, scientifically, through your experiments and you get the flu. I wanted to make sure that I understood this problem fully. So I got the flu vaccine, and then I did in fact get the flu. Yes. Um, I, I, I want to preface by saying vaccines are amazing. They are a triumph of the human will.

And I will never, I will never be on the opposite side. I know, I never want to be accused of slagging off vaccines. Okay. But the truth is, no, they're not 100% effective for every person in every disease case. Obviously, they're not. The flu vaccine is a great example. The, while the speculation about the 10% effectiveness in the US is not true, it probably is higher than that. At the end of the day, US is not true. It probably is higher than that at the end of the

day. It's not 100% effective and you can still get the flu even if you've been vaccinated for it. The reason for that, and we've kind of talked about this before, is how a vaccine works. So generally speaking, a vaccine has a piece of a bacteria or a virus in it that you get exposed, that your immune system gets exposed to that and then you start generating antibodies against it, right? So that when you get exposed to the actual virus or bacteria, your body already has the army in place to fight it. Correct.

And you don't get sick. Understood. That immune response while we can generalize what it will be for most humans, it's not everybody's not the same. So in people with certain disease states or immunodeficiencies or on certain drugs or just certain genetic makeup, they might not respond. In which case you got the vaccines, but your body never made that army. So when you get exposed to the disease, you still get it. But sometimes your body makes like a crappy army like a rat tag

Band of like the expendables except like bad like a bad army. How does that? Well, because then it's like it sort of helps, but it doesn't yeah I mean that like if you're talking about like some cross your activity It made an army that really wasn't Fit for that invader But they're gonna do their best anyway. They hired like the Marines, but then the disease came via air and the Marines are like, oops, I don't know. We'll do our best from now.

They probably all have planes. I don't know anything about the armed services. I'm sorry, but like, if you know about the army now, because like the army would have been a better choice. Yeah, but see like, because now the Air Force is set because it used to be the army or Corbin out there force. So is there separate? Don't I have no we don't know.

Don't know. Don't know. We don't know. Anyway, the point is no vaccines are not 100% effective in everybody. That doesn't mean you shouldn't get them because they work in most people and why not? Yeah. Why not?

It's like five minutes at right. I just go get it and move on with your life. Go get your vaccines. They're still, and unless your doctor has told you not to, for some reason, they're very important. And if you're worried as to whether or not you got an immune response, and most people don't do this,

let me say this, this is not standard practice, but for myself as a physician, I had to go get antibody titers drawn, meaning they took my blood and they looked to see if I had made the response I needed to to certain diseases before they let me start practicing medicine. Because if I didn't have that antibody response, they would have given me booster vaccines to try to get my body to respond. So there is a way to find out, but that's not like a standard thing.

I'm not saying go ask your doctor for antibody titers not everybody needs those and they're really expensive I have a question for you Sydney. Well Stanley does and I'm conveying it to you because we're in the same room Okay, why does chemo cause hair to fall out? This is a good question and thank you so much. I am actually gonna take credit for now Oh, are you? No, this is a good question. This is a common question, actually. So there are certain not all chemotherapy will cause your hair to fall out. That's an important thing to know first.

But there are many chemotherapy agents generally, we're talking about treatments for cancer that can make your hair fall out. And not just the hair on your head, your eyebrows, or your eyelashes, or hair on other areas of your body can fall out as well. The reason for this is the way that these drugs work. Chemo drugs, not all of them, but the ones we're talking about, tend to target fast growing cells. And that is because cancer cells are fast growing cells. Now, the problem with that is that there are other fast growing cells in your body that

aren't cancer cells. The cells at your hair roots, those are fast growing. The cells that line your GI tract are fast growing. So that's why when you're on certain chemo drugs, you can see side effects like hair loss because those cells are being damaged or nausea, vomiting, diarrhea because the cells that line your GI tract are being damaged. So it's an unfortunate kind of collateral damage that is happening as we're trying to target the cancer cells. That being said, most of the time these side effects are

transient and your hair will grow back after you complete the chemotherapy. So for most patients, this is something that while it can be very life-altering while you're dealing with it, is a time-limited thing, and hopefully if the chemo drugs do what they're supposed to do, we'll be worth it in the long run. This is also why cancer researchers are constantly working to come up with new drugs that are more targeted and less toxic so that there won't be so much of a trade-off for cancer treatment. So, okay, well I understand that now. Wow, man, it's a nice app one that can actually like really get. It was a relief when I learned that in med school because I found it very... Okay, I understand that. med school because I found it very okay I understand that.

Yeah, that makes sense. There's so many things you learn in med school and they say it and you're staring at them going, I heard all those words but I don't understand what you just said. And it was one of those things where I went, oh, that's weird. That must be a weird feeling. I've never actually experienced that while recording solbons, but I can imagine that would be very disconcerting to have the feeling that you're hearing a lot of words that you may not completely understand. It's hard.

I mean, yeah, I can imagine it's chilling. You've never experienced it. Never. Next question. Next question. Next question. Would a person with cytos and verses... Speaking of words, you don't understand.

All right. All right, sir. All right, you can do it. Pipe down. Let me do my limited portion of the program. Uh huh. Cytus inverses require a donated organ to also come from a Cytus inverses donor. And that's from Jen.

Jen, now, pretend that the audience, I mean, the audience doesn't know what Cytus inverses is, obviously, I do, the audience doesn't know what side is inverses is obviously I do, but I would rather you explain it because I kind of have my own way of understanding it. And I think your perspective would probably be better. And I don't want to embarrass you if mine is like really good. This is, this is one of those where the words may sound difficult to comprehend, but when I explain it to you, it's actually pretty easy to understand.

Scytus inverses, or Scytus inverses totalus, sometimes it's called, is simply the reversal of several of your internal organs so that they are positioned mirror image to where they are in most humans. So your heart, your lungs, your liver, and your digestive organs are just flipped to the other side. They're just the opposite of where they are in most people. Okay. And that works. Yeah, it still works. Everything works. It's just on the opposite side. Okay. And when it when we're talking about their other conditions where this can also be associated with them and there are other issues there.

But if we're talking about just purely cytos and verses totalus, why would that happen? It just has just random. They're not even sure if it's hereditary. They've seen some familial kind of cases like it seemed to run in families, but not always. So it just happens. Yeah. I mean, if you like it, it changes in embryonic development.

Yeah, or like, if you're kind of a higher-power person, maybe God just like, ah, check this out. Nothing but net. No look behind the back. And I can, I mean, if that's the case, I can only imagine it's just a mess with doctors who are going to do X-rays of you someday and then go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's not there, what's up? I moved it. And this is actually, in the case of pure just cytos and verses,

there would be no reason to know necessarily that this was true for you unless you just randomly got an X-ray or a CAT scan or some other kind of image. And the doctor went, whoa, hey, everything's flipped. That's something wrong with my machine. Yeah, you may not, I mean, there is no reason to believe that this condition necessarily has any kind of pathology related to it.

Okay. Now, and sometimes it can actually, it means it doesn't cause you any harm necessarily to have this. It just is something that's good to know because when your doctor starts examining your liver, you can tell him, hey, hey, buddy, it's on the other side. And then they'll look at you and say, no, no, no, I'm sorry, your liver's on this side. And then you say, no, no, no, I've got side to some versus. And then your doctor's like, whoa, mind blown.

Cool. I want to get everybody in here. So here's the thing. Most of the time it's caught incidentally. Now, in this particular question, it's interesting because the thought would be, if everything's reversed, I mean, the organ is still the same, it still works the same, but all the, to put it in a term, I think we could understand, all the hookups are in different places. Right.

Right. From where most people would be. And so if you're talking about transplant, that provides a lot of extra challenges. Specifically, I want to focus on the heart, because this is what I've found some cases of, our heart transplants for these patients. And actually, you can have just isolated where the heart is flipped. It's called Dexter Cartia,

where the heart is just flipped around, which is a whole other thing. But anyway, if you have sinus and versus and you need a heart transplant, if you had to wait for a sinus and versus donor to give you one, unfortunately, that's a pretty dire picture or paint. Yeah, that's quite a random chance.

This occurs about one in 10,000 people. And so the chances that you're going to get a donor in that case are pretty slim. So no, you don't have to wait on a side as inverses donor, but it does make the surgery way more complicated because they have to figure out how to hook up all those veins and arteries when they're all positioned on the opposite side. It's like me trying to get my Sega CD working like, okay, this plug, the two power plugs look exactly the same, but I know one of them will fry the genesis and then the other one goes into the Sega CD and then I've got this S video cable that I think I'm in an adapter for.

Yeah. It's exactly like that except a human life is hanging in the balance. Okay, but my human life really wants to play Super Shark. So kind of the same. No, but. If I don't, if I don't play Wirehead once a year, I'll die, Sydney. I'll die.

Here's the good news. They have been able to do this. It takes, it's a more complex, it's more complicated surgery. And sometimes you have to actually get graphs of veins and arteries and things from other places in the body to add on to make some wires longer, some things need to be shorter, that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, we've done it. Humans have done this.

So you don't have to wait for a side of some versus donor. You do have to wait for a donor, which we've talked about organ transplantation before can be a long wait, right no matter what your condition is. But you don't have to wait for a side of some versus donor. We have the technology. We can rebuild you with parts from just regular all human anatomy bodies. We have got a lot more questions to come, but since I'm the one that gets this to you this, I'm the one who's going to tell you why don't you follow me to the Billing Department. All right, I guess I will.

That's not what I say. Let's go. There we go. All right, are you ready for another question, Sydney? Has your contraction subsided? that I skill it my God for the mouth. All right, are you ready for another question, Sydney? Has your contraction subsided? Yes, I'm ready. Is it true that chewing excedrin, holding the chewed up medicine goo in your mouth for five minutes and then swinging it and swallowing it all with a Coke helps

the medicine work faster. That's from Nora. And I only know about this because I remember Jack Torrance did it in the shining the book. And just the image of that was so buck wild to me that it's like stuck with me to this day. And I think if I remember correctly from the email, Nora blamed her dad for this.

That's her dad. This is your grand. Your grandpa, this isn't chewing it, but your grandpa Dan told me that after like when he had a long shift or a long drive, he would do like excedrin and then chocolate milk like pound it down. Remember that. Yeah. So let me, let me preface with this. Generally speaking, here's my disclaimer.

Take medicine the way the bottle or the doctor whoever gave it to you. I mean, assuming that they're licensed professional and not just, you know, like Joe on the street. Take medicine the way it is instructed to take. Okay. I mean, that's, that's a general rule. What you would say. Of course, what are you hiding? There's a reason that it says to swallow certain pills and choose certain pills and all this.

Okay, this one's going to work, isn't it? This is a thing. And this is why you're counting it so much because this one is a thing. I'm just saying, okay, there are lots of reasons why a pill might specify the way that you should take it. For instance, there are lots of pills that say things like sustained release, long acting, controlled dosing, extended release. All those things, if they're on a medicine, you should not mess with how you take them. If it says swallow, swallow. Generally,

those are swallow pills, you swallow them. The reason is that they are made, physically made, to release slowly, and if you chew them or crush them, you have mess with that. And so you might get a big load of a dough, so all at once, that you were supposed to get over 24 hours. Does that make sense? Yes. So don't mess with those.

But also some pills say, in tarot coated. And what that means is that they are made to survive the stomach because they're coated a certain way and dissolve in the small intestine because that's where you're gonna absorb them. So if you chew them up, either they won't work at all or you might absorb them wrong, or so they're not gonna work.

So in general, also they taste really bad. That's another reason. If you chew pills that are supposed to be swallowed, they tend to taste kind of bad. In general, please do not chew pills that say swallow. But in the case of et cetera. If we're talking about the combination of aspirin, acinaminophen, which we tend to call Tylenol a lot, and caffeine, that is kind of a standard for their different et cetera, but that's a standard formulation of et cetera. I can't tell you that there is an intrinsic danger in chewing it.

Plain all Tylenol, acetaminophen, we could crush. And we know this because there are patients who can't swallow pills and so we've learned what we can crush and what we can't. And a pharmacist can always be very helpful in telling you this, by the way. If you're at Walmart or Target or Kroger or CVS or Rite Aid or wherever you are. Come on, you got to have some other pharmacists. Go to the pharmacist and say, can I chew this? Can I crush this? They will know they can help you. But aspirin specifically has been studied to see if it will work faster if you chew it than if you swallow it. Why?

Because it's what we tell people to do in a heart attack. The thought being that if you chew an aspirin and can get it into your system faster that way, it could maybe help prevent clotting and help stop a heart attack faster than if you just swallowed them, which is why we will commonly tell you if you think you're having a heart attack, call an ambulance, but also chew some aspirin while you're waiting for them. You've probably heard that before. Yeah. So studies do show that aspirin works faster if you chew it, then if you swallow it. So theoretically, since aspirin is one of the active ingredients, in et cetera, perhaps

it does work faster if you chew it, then if you swallow it. The addition of coke is probably just more caffeine. And generally speaking, if you're taking a medicine that already has caffeine in it, we tell you not to drink more caffeine with it. Now depending on how much caffeine you drink in an average day, this might not matter for you. It's probably fine. But because caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, right?

And that helps with headaches. Hey, there you go. For some people, not for all my grain sufferers, but for some my grain sufferers, caffeine can be very helpful. You need to be careful. Caffeine is a stimulant. It's a drug. You can't just willingly take as much caffeine as you want and then throw it back with coke.

But that being said, et cetera, and may work faster if you chew it. I will still tell you, please do not chew a medicine. We tell you not to chew. Just all right dad. Take it the way it says on the bottle. And if it's not working, go talk to your doctor because I can help you with my grains too. There's lots of stuff. Okay, I have another question here for you. Sydney. It is from Morgan and Laura. And it goes a little something like this. Why does the pins and needles feeling happen when your feet slash hand slash other pinnages fall asleep?

I know, I think it's from lack of blood flow, but why does it feel like that? And that's from Morgan and Laura. So that's an interesting question. The first of all, you're kind of on the right track with lack of blood flow, but it's not completely that. When we get that sensation that one of our limbs has fallen asleep, or that pins and needles feeling, whatever you want to call it, it's really an interruption in the signals between

our nerves and our brain. So the nerves in whatever body part we're talking about, in our fingers or toes or whatever, in our brain. So the nerves in whatever body part we're talking about in our fingers or toes or whatever in our brain. And this can be caused first and foremost by pressure on those nerves directly. So like there's a classic thing we call Saturday night palsy in medical terms where if you I mean the idea is that you got drunk and you fell asleep over the back of a chair with like your arms slung over the chair. And so you wake up the next day and you can't move your arm in certain ways. And it's because you compressed your nerves over the back of the chair all night. So and that's a lot of it is you've been sitting in one position or laying in one position.

You've been asleep, whatever. And the way that you chose to position your body, just compress those nerves, interrupted those signals long enough that your brain and your hand or foot are whatever aren't communicating. Now the way that blood flow feeds into that is that you're also compressing the blood vessels that feed those nerves, because nerves need oxygen too, and they get it from blood from blood vessels. So yes, blood flow is part of it, because you've been compressing that blood flow, so those nerves haven't been getting oxygen either. Part of why they're asleep.

Now all that being said, why do you get the pins and needles sensation? That's kind of everything waking back up. Now we call it pins and needles because that's what it feels like to us, like little prickly sensations. Those sensations are just the way it feels as your nerves start to wake back up and send signals to your brain that are incomplete and don't make much sense just yet, and so you don't know how to process them. And this just tends to be the way our body experiences that. Now, the good news is for the vast majority of people, unless maybe you did fall asleep over the back of a chair all night long,

it could take a little bit longer. But for most of us, if something falls asleep, you just kinda move it around, shake it out, stand up. I'm pleasant though. It is unpleasant. But for most of us, it goes away after a few minutes. But those are just those nerves waking back up. That's it.

It's all it is. Oh, okay. Well, you were hoping it was something much more dramatic. I, okay, this is going to sound stupid, but I always thought it was blood. And so like when it would start to come back, I always thought I could feel the blood like going back into the hand. There is, I mean blood flow is part of it because when you compress the nerves, you probably were compressing blood flow too.

But the bigger issue is just the nerves themselves, not so much the blood. I mean, because if you're, let me say this, if you deprived your limb of all blood flow for a significant period of time, it wouldn't just go to sleep. I mean, it would, but like forever. Got it.

Gross. Can we, before we do the closer one, which is my favorite, can we skip ahead to this one that you didn't know real quick? Okay, you just want to take a moment to drag me. That's cool. Simon asked why the hospital is saying not to eat before surgeries. You have 30 seconds to drag me. Go.

I'm not dragging you. I just, I thought, I guess this is one of those areas where I thought like, oh, I think most people know that. I don't know if that'll be as interesting. Justin didn't know. Twenty seconds. So in general, the reason we tell you not to eat before surgery is not because we're mean, although we, some of us are mean, but that's not why.

Because if we're going to put you under any kind of general anesthetic, which we don't always, but sometimes things happen and we might need to. In it, you are at risk if you are completely asleep or paralyzed or we've had to put you on a machine to help you breathe during a surgery, that kind of thing, you're at risk for contents from your stomach coming up through your soft gas and then going back down into your lungs through your trachea. That's called aspiration. You are at lower risk for aspiration if your tummy's empty. That's it.

We just want anesthesiologists really appreciate an empty tummy when they're gonna do a surgery so that they know the risk of aspiration is lower. If it's an emergency, obviously all bets are off. We do what we gotta do. But if we've got the time, we would much rather you have an empty tummy. Got it.

Thank you for enlightening me and not shaming me publicly too bad. Here's one that I'm real curious about. Sid, this is gonna be a long-ass question from Billy. So here's a quick one. What's the adjective form of the word pus? Hold on. Pause for the listener to answer that question in their own head.

Okay, and now go. Billy. Billy. Billy. Come on, Billy. Person after my own head. Okay, and now go. Billy. Billy. Billy. Billy. Come on, Billy. Person after my own heart. I think you're looking for something that's going to be kind of outrageous, but here's the boring medical fact. If I'm talking about a woman that is full of what you're referring to as pus, which I mean, we say pus. Like I'm not gonna pretend like doctors don't say pus Of course we do and when we say pus, let me say we're talking about thick white Drainage coming usually from like a wound or something and it's white because of all the white blood cells that are in it

all those little heroic army cells that have come to challenge an infectious invader and have given their lives in the pursuit. That's rational. And now they are leaking out of your body in the form of this white fluid that we would call purulent drainage. So if a wound is full of pus, it is purulent. Sorry, there you go.

That is not the answer I was hoping for, but that is the truth. Yeah, I guess. That's fine. That's fine. That is going to do it for us, folks. That is an entire episode of solbona's The Medical History Show that we make. That's true. And this will be my last, um, pregnant episode, pregnant episode. Pregnepisod.

My last, that bed of neiligism. Pregnepisod. Um, we will be taking next week off. Yeah, hopefully not the week after that, but like, listen, y'all, it gets right or die in there. It can get hairy. So I don't know. Hopefully everything goes as planned this coming week. And if you listen to someone, you know, they didn't shake out so great last week last time. But okay, well, okay. In the end, it did because we have an amazing daughter who is happy and healthy and we're very lucky to have. Indeed. That being said, we won't be here next week because we'll be having a baby. Yep.

And then hopefully we'll be back the week after and we'll tell you about how great it went. Yeah. That's the plan. God willing, the creek don't rise. You're there the week after, but that's going to do it for right now. Thanks to Max Fun Network for having us as part of their extended podcasting family. You can go to maximumfund.org to find a lot of more great shows. Thank you to the taxpayers for letting us use their song

medicines as the intro and outro of our program. You can go buy their music wherever fine music is sold which is the internet. And that is going to do it for us. So until next time, my name is Justin McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listener Supported