Stuff You Should Know - Aspirin: The Wonder Drug

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Humans have been using a form of aspirin for pain relief since at least the Sumerians. But in recent years we’ve come to learn the wonder drug is indeed awe-inspiring, from preventing heart attacks to possibly protecting humans from cancer. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry out there. Coated in powder, and this is the Stuff You Should Know,

the Aspirin Edition. Why'd you pick this one? I've been reading a giant book on aspirin, and... Oh, yeah? Yeah, biography behind the scenes backstage about aspirin. Cool. All the ups and downs behind the music. Basically, yeah.

I don't remember why I picked this. I just don't remember, but I did, and I'm gonna stand by it. Do you remember when aspirin OD'd on itself? Yeah, yeah. Is it chewing its fingernails? That's some nasty stuff to OD on, too, it turns out. I would think so.

I mean, not only the result, but just the taste. I don't like the taste either, but haven't you said that you're like a goodies headache powder dude? Yeah, goodies are BC. I will, you know, that's a lot of aspirin. It's like, you know, and we'll get to this, but if you have like a heart issue,

they recommend you take something like 85 milligrams. Yeah. And a goodies in a BC is like 850. Holy cow, is it really? Yeah, plus caffeine, it's a big dose of aspirin. Plus acetaminophen, too. It's powdered, et cetera, and it's what is the same formula. Well, they're both different, but yeah,

one of them is, I can't remember which one. I think goodies is powdered, et cetera. Yeah, I think BC does not have the acetaminophen and just has caffeine and maybe more caffeine. Wow, it's like the jolt coal of headache powders. But point is, I don't take that a lot anymore and it, I don't mind the taste. I know it grosses a lot of people out,

but I don't love it and I don't just like let it sit on my tongue and dissolve forever. Like I wash it down very quickly. But I'm not like, ugh. I got you. It's just very better. You have no problem with the drain, you're okay. Fun to get.

So we are talking aspirin today and it is kind of tough. I've realized to overstate the importance of aspirin as far as like the world's medicine cabinet goes. Like there is no other drug that has been sold more than aspirin in the history of humanity. Did you know that? Sure.

Okay. I mean, it's the go-to or was for many, many, many, many years until other NSAIDs started making the scene for decades and decades, aspirin was sort of the go-to for a lot of stuff. That's true. All right, let me see if I can impress you with this. Okay.

One of the great things about aspirin is it's synthesized from nature. That it's actually a perfected version of something that you would find in a number of plants, salicylic acid, but specifically it was willow that yielded up her secrets for mankind to use as a medicine to make things better. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of medicines.

And that's, you know, Emily has gotten really into herbalism here in the last few years. And that's kind of one of her beefs is that the medical and pharma industries have synthesized things and gotten rid of a lot of the great parts of the plant that she feels like are of great use to human beings

to make the synthetic versions. Okay, fair enough. In this case though with aspirin, I would argue that it is the improved version of nature's version. Oh yeah. I think so, and we'll talk about why, but like I said, it was the willow plant

that people realized pretty far back Chuck. I believe it was at least as late as the Sumerians who I think there were clay tablets found that basically said, are your joints achy? Try a little willow leaf tea, it'll fix you right up. Yeah, it was, you know, they, I don't think they had the name for it at the time, but it was salicylene.

Right. It was the ingredient and you could boil it down into a tea, like you said, you could dry it out and powder that bark up and pound it down and work it through a sieve and get, you know, I guess an early version of goodies. Basically. And you would, I mean, everything from the Egyptians,

there's the Ebers papyrus, which is a kind of a fun little cookbook, textbook medical journal kind of thing. Right. That has recipes for myrtle and willow leaf tea for joint pain. Great chili recipe in there too. Great chili.

Too bad they didn't know about Fritos back then, but. And by the way, speaking of Fritos. Yeah. You know, there's actually a chapter in our book about Frito Toes on Dogs. There is, I know, Momo is in it. I think that we don't talk enough about the fun chapters of our book.

There's a lot of like kind of heady stuff, but there's also a chapter about Frito Toes, which if you don't have a dog, it is the smell of corn chips that a dog's paws can emit. Yeah. And that was kind of one of the more fun chapters, I think. It was a good chapter for sure. Cause we talked not just about that,

but about not just about how humans perceive the smell of dogs paws, but how dogs perceive the world with smell. Yeah. And how different bacteria can make different smells. And it's pretty, it was a good one. I like that one. Although I like our whole book, to be honest.

I finally got it two days ago. Who Ray, what'd you think? Well, first of all, I was very happy about how many they sent. Yeah. I thought they were gonna send me a couple of books. They sent me a big old box of books, like they did you. 25.

And it was just really great to hold in my hand. And it's awesome. It looks great. It's the size we wanted. It looks like a real book. It is, it's a legit book. Like we made a book. Which is weird to see our names on a real book.

I know. Did they put your name on the box? No, your name was on my box. Is that right? They put my name on my box too. They just said, what do you mean? It just said the book titled in by Josh Clark. Yeah.

Yeah, that's what it said. I think they just didn't print the whole thing. Oh, okay. Well, I liked my idea that they were gonna personalize each of our boxes. I was like, wow, nice touch, Vlad. This just sounds like lazy box printing. But I got you.

It didn't bother me. Okay. Well, yeah, I wasn't like trying to rub it in. I was thinking that they would have personalized your box too. But you're like, I'm gonna save that box. But whatever. Yeah, actually, can you send me your box?

Sure. Okay, good. I also need a box with a big old load of poop in it. Yeah. There's like a foothold where it used to say Josh Clark. So anyway, you can pre-order that book, Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

But back to aspirin, this book was, I don't even know where I was talking about. Oh, people like Pliny the Elder and Hippocrates had written about aspirin, or it wasn't aspirin yet. The cellacyline as, you know, basically early on, it was all about reducing fever and reducing joint, like arthritis, joint pain. Inflammation, and it's still really good for that too.

Totally. Aspirin, it turns out, is a non-seroidal, anti-inflammatory drug, an NSAID. And it, like people realized that it was useful, like you said, for joint inflammation for a fever reduction, which makes it an antipyretic, which I think is a great word. And we knew about this for centuries,

and apparently Europe introduced it to China for once rather than vice versa. But then it just kind of fell away. It fell to the wayside, kind of out of human knowledge. Although like it was still there, just nobody was thinking about willow any longer until malaria became a big thing. When the age of discovery began,

and Europeans started to colonize other parts of the world including South America, malaria became a bit of a problem. And one of the remedies for malaria we figured out was cinchona, cinchona, right? I always said cinchona, but I think it is cinchona. I always say cinchona too, but I'm looking right at it. And I don't see that first age.

Unless it's a weird pronunciation thing, I think I've probably just been saying it wrong. Okay, well let's say cinchona then. We'll pronounce it correctly for once in our lives. And that's a different kind of tree whose bark works really well to treat malaria and not just treat malaria, but also reduce fevers as well.

But the problem is is getting it from South America can be very, very expensive or it certainly was in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. So it caused this one guy, a European doctor, I believe, or at least a researcher named Edward Stone to look for an alternative for it. And he came upon willow. He rediscovered willow again

for the treatment of fevers and inflammation. And by the way, I think we've mispronounced it. Is it cinchona? I just know it's neither. That's so us. I just looked up real quick. It says it's sun chowna. Okay, I like that one.

It almost sounds like Quimby saying chowda. It's so weird. So sun chowna. Yeah, Edward Stone goes looking for an alternative and he starts looking at the willow bark and its properties and does a pretty decent study for back then in 1763 and found that a four hour administration of willow bark powder would reduce fever pretty consistently.

And like I said, it was a good study for back then. There were some other Europeans who were also extracting the active ingredient from willow. And it was kind of happening all around the same time. I think a guy named LaRue did the best job of it in the early 1800s, 1829. And what they got was the substance salicine. Right, so that's basically the isolated

the active ingredient in willow bark. And not just willow bark, salicine or salicylic acid, which probably sounds familiar if you've ever used some sort of skincare treatment, say to combat acne, because it actually goes in and dissolves the stuff in your pores. So it comes in handy like that.

When they isolated it, they found out that, oh, actually this pops up elsewhere in nature. It's actually a kind of hormone that plants use for their own immune response. And you can find it in everything from willow or myrtle or meadow sweet to jasmine, peas, clover. It pops up everywhere. It's a pretty common plant hormone.

And it was isolated finally in the early 19th century. Yeah, and there were a couple of other kind of important side roads on the way to aspirin that happened. One in 1853, when a French chemist named Gerhardt, he invented aspirin by accident, but he wasn't very refined in how he did it. It was not a very good quality.

It was pretty impure, not very effective. So it was not paid very much attention to, but we have to mention him. And then in the 1850s and 60s, some German chemists figured out how to produce it synthetically. They learned the chemical structure of salicylate, which is just kind of crazy to think

that they could do stuff like that back then, that they were that advanced in learning chemical structures of something like that. I was impressed by that. But they figured out how to produce it synthetically, made it very much available, very inexpensive. That was a big one. All of a sudden, it was a very popular

fever reducer and pain reliever, despite its side effects, which are mainly stomach problems and tinnitus. Yes, but the thing is, is with that, especially tinnitus and nausea, like it can be really bad if you take too much. It's temporary, but it can be a real problem. And over time, they also found out

that it can produce long-term chronic effects because it's so hard on your stomach. Because again, you're using the same substance that you use to clean out the pores, dissolve the stuff in your pores, that has a big effect on your stomach. And in fact, we would find later on that it erodes your gastric mucosa, your stomach lining,

and that can produce all sorts of problems on its own. In the short term, it makes you wanna just throw up and die if you take too much aspirin. And that's what we figured out with salicylic acid. And that was the point of aspirin, was to figure out how to create, how to take this really useful, important drug that had been known for millennia by this time,

and make it so it was, it didn't have any of these unpleasant side effects. And that's where aspirin came from. Yeah, so maybe we can take a break and come back and talk about a very sort of legendary company out of Germany called Bayer, right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise

or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. If you heard me say buyer, and you're thinking, dude, it's Bayer Aspirin. What are you, German?

No, I'm not German, but that's how you pronounce it over there. It's Bayer. We pronounce it Bayer over here. They were originally a dye making company, but like so many other companies involved in chemistry, they could pivot very easily. And you start discovering things when you're working in chemistry that might make you more money.

And that was sort of the case with Bayer. And they set up a pharmaceutical wing and said, hey, we're discovering these other things and you can make a ton of money in pharmaceuticals. And this is just sort of the beginning of that. They had no idea what they were on to. But they started a pharmaceutical wing and said one of our first things we want to try and do

is to create a version of salicylate that doesn't have all these nasty side effects. Yeah, and there's a longstanding story in the chemistry community that a guy named Felix Hoffman, a German chemist who worked for Bayer, was trying to figure out a way to make salicylic acid more easy on his father's stomach. His father had rheumatism,

which is a chronic inflammation of the joints. And he had to take salicylic acid a lot. So Felix Hoffman was trying to figure out how to help his dad out when he stumbled upon the recipe that or what would become the recipe for aspirin. That's right. So all of this led to one of the most popular drugs in the history of the world.

There is some debate like with everything like this. It seems like sometimes it's hard to tell who exactly is given credit because history is written by the victors. And in this case, well, there's three men. There's a fourth dude named Carl Doisberg, who is included as being a big person in the development because he was a marketer.

And his marketing skills were a big, big reason why aspirin was so successful. But a lot of people point to Felix Hoffman as the quote unquote inventor of aspirin. Because on August 10, 1897 in his notebook entry, he described adding acetic and hydrate, and hydride to salicylate and created aspirin. I'm gonna say it if you won't say it.

It's called aspirin. Acetylsil... Man. Aspirin. Acetylsalicylic acid. Yeah. It's kind of fun to say it has like a acetylsilicylic acid. It's the acid that you love.

But Chuck calls it aspirin because it's easier. And he can call it that legally because aspirin's now a proprietary eponym as we'll see. Put a pen in that. Wow. That was something. Should we leave that in? Sure.

All right. I think that's our gift to the listeners. That's some end of the year zaniness right there. That means our brains are entering the December mush phase. Yeah, boy is it. I'm looking forward to that break. I know you are too. I can't wait, Chuck.

Yeah, everyone, I think we said this before. We take a few weeks off at the end of the year. And it's just, to not have to research stuff for three weeks is really nice. That's all I say. Yeah, you guys don't notice because we make sure we record extra episodes in advance,

but we actually do, we bulk up the kitty as we say. That's right. So just real quick to put a button in this. Felix Hoffman is said to be the guy who created this. A guy named Arthur Eichengrun said later on, he actually wrote a letter to Bayer from a concentration camp during the Nazi,

the Third Reich because he was Jewish. And he said, I was the one who came up with this, but my records were expunged by the Nazis. Other people were like, I'm not sure if that's true or not. And a guy named Heinrich Dresser, he said, it doesn't matter if it's true because I rediscovered this stuff.

I told both of these guys not to mess with this. They did anyway. I took their research, published it, didn't give them credit. And now I am the one officially who is listed as the inventor of aspirin, even though it was really Felix Hoffman and possibly Arthur Eichengrun who did.

Yeah, and I guess you could do that if there isn't any patents being filed. You could literally just sort of publish something and steal someone's work. Yeah. Which is, I don't know. It's kind of weird to think about, but I guess the law was the law.

But they did file patents. And I mean, Bayer realized pretty quickly, this is at the same time they were coming out with heroin too. So Bayer had two really big hits, like right from what I read within a couple of weeks of each other and Felix Hoffman was central to both of them.

But with aspirin, they were like, this is kind of a big deal. Everybody loves salicylic acid and the effects that it has, but they hate the side effects and we just got rid of them. So they patented it and they came up with the name aspirin. So the A is a nod to the acidic anhydride, the acetyl part. The spur is a reference to the botanical name spirea ul maria, which is the name for meadowsweet,

another source of salicylic acid, right? Yeah, so that would be aspirea. And then they added the IN at the end because that was just sort of one of the naming conventions for medicines, just like we have cane, like cocaine and cilin for antibiotics. They would add an IN, so aspirea became aspirin. Yeah, so if you picked up the box and you're like,

asper, what is this? So you get to the end and see the IN and be like, wow, it's a medicine. That's right. So Germany patents this in 1900 in the United States after patenting it in Germany. And everywhere they could, they would try and get a patent. And it's been sort of an interesting story since then

because after World War I, and this is, I didn't even know this kind of stuff happened, but Germany had to surrender their patents to countries that had defeated them. And one of them was aspirin. So they couldn't prevent competitors all over the world from making their own version. They did retain the trademark in a few different countries,

but that is, like you said earlier, that is why you won't see aspirin, or you don't have to list it with a capital A because it is just one of those, what do you call it, proprietary eponym? Yes, I love those. Yeah, those are great. Yeah, you don't have to list it.

You don't have to say aspirin. Aspirin. Correct. Some historians actually make the case check that World War II happened because Germany was treated so harshly after World War I that it led to such draconian, basically revenge on Germany and the German people

that it allowed a guy like Hitler to rise as this populist and gain control. Yeah. So yeah, I didn't know about the patents either, but that kind of jibes and dovetails with that whole view. Yeah, it's like, give us all your art and patents. Right. What else you can ask for?

Land. Sure, I guess, but that's for sure. And they did do that. Remember the Nazi Gold episode we did? Yeah. So there's another side story to all this that came out of World War I as well, in that there was an embargo on phenol by England.

England said, hey, we make a lot of phenol over here and it's an active ingredient and a lot of stuff, including aspirin, but not just aspirin, explosives too, which is one big reason why we wanna keep a lid on this thing. And we're gonna make sure that Germany doesn't get any. And there wasn't anything official in the United States banning anyone from selling to phenol to Germany,

but it was definitely looked like as you were aiding people who were at the very least the enemy of our enemy, if not our enemy yet, because we hadn't entered World War I yet, but that didn't stop Thomas Edison from selling phenol to the Germans during World War I, did it? No, Germany was looking at losing one of their most profitable drugs and said, all right, we're gonna send a spy over there to secretly buy phenol

from Thomas Edison, because he loves to blow stuff up. He's lousy with it. And I think it was just exposed when one of the conspirators accidentally left his briefcase on the train, and it was a real black eye on not only Bayer, but Edison as well. Yeah, and I mean, like a lot of people are like, oh, wow, they were trying to keep the Germans

from having aspirin during World War I. Again, you could use phenol to create TNT and other explosives. So that seems to be the reason why, which makes Thomas Edison, he actually created the phenol himself, and then selling it to the Germans, all the more shady, you know? Yeah, totally.

So it was definitely a blemish on Edison for sure. And he eventually stopped selling it to them and then donated the rest of the US Army, I believe. Right, so Bayer is selling a lot of aspirin as a powder at first, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, but they figured out that people, and this is kind of how a lot of medicaments were powders at this point.

And I think aspirin from Bayer was one of the first ones to be made into a tablet. And they said, hey, if we can compress this stuff into a little tube, people, it won't make people like wretch with disgust from how bitter it is. You can just pop it in your mouth, wash it down with some liquor or absinthe or something.

Some schnapps, peach schnapps. Yes, peach schnapps. And people will take it more readily or at least not want to not take it. And it really, really worked. And that really popularized the use of tablets kind of from that point on. Yeah, not just with aspirin, but with all medicines.

It introduced the public to it. And Bayer was actually with their aspirin, they were also, I think we talked about this in the Tylenol poisoning episodes, that they were the ones who introduced the cotton ball to pill bottles. And they did it to keep the aspirin from breaking because they were worried that somebody

would take a broken tablet and it would be too little of a dose, or they would take a bunch of broken tablets and it'd be too much of a dose. So they put the cotton in there to keep them from breaking. And with the advent of gel caps and coated capsules and all that stuff, there's never been a need for the cotton ball any longer,

but we've all gotten so used to it, we would be suspicious of opening a bottle of pills without it, even though it's totally unnecessary now. I love that little cotton ball. That's a great, great, great. It's at least one of the better cotton ball facts out there. Well, I like anything that can be repurposed, like a twistix on a loaf of bread that ties that up.

Oh, sure. Or, you know, you gotta use that cotton ball. You got a great, like, do you stick it back in your pill bottle, do you? Or do you? Yes. Oh, okay. I actually go to the trouble of taking it out,

getting the pills out and then putting it back in like a total schmuck. Oh, that's right. I try to use those things. What I do is I just wrap a toothpick with this cotton and I use that as a ear swab. Well, that's not bad. Not bad at all.

Yeah, the toothpick that came with, what comes with the toothpick? I guess from the pig in a blanket or something. When you went and used the bathroom for free at a Shoneys, but refused to eat there. I still have all these things left over from being a kid from the lower middle class, you know? Like, it feels weird to throw away a twistix

or those rubber bands that come around asparagus. Yeah, yeah, who throws that stuff away? Nobody. You gotta use that stuff. No sensible human being. I don't know about using the cotton from a pill bottle as a Q-tip with a toothpick. It's actually very dangerous, Chuck.

No, no, no, let's get this. I like the spirit behind it, you know what I mean? Yeah, you should not do that, because a Q-tip or a toothpick is way too stabby to be putting into your ear. Yeah, for sure. And you should be using those ear swabs anyway, right? From what I understand.

Oh, and one more fact, one more cotton-based fact. Remember, Q-tips were originally called baby gaze. Oh, that's right. Yep. Little baby gaze. What was that from the ear wax episode, maybe? Or ear candling, maybe? Maybe.

I can't remember. Don't do it, don't ear candle everyone. Nope. Emily's got that shirt now. Friends don't let friends ear candle. Right. Teenage ear candle in, don't do it. So, Bayer is selling a ton of aspirin.

They've always sold a ton of aspirin. I think the most recent stat that Ed was able to dig up was from about nine years ago in 2011, where worldwide, there was about 40,000 tons of aspirin produced. And in the US, Americans were taking 10 billion aspirin tablets a year. Yeah, billion.

It's a lot of aspirin. In 1950, it was the world's most purchased drug, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. I also read that in Argentina, in part because they have a change shortage, like a legit one going on there. One of the things you might get is change at the grocery store, gas station or whatever,

is a couple of tabs of aspirin. Oh, nice. Sure, if you need it, why not? Yeah, but they apparently, they love their aspirin there for sure. So, aspirin's one of those drugs where for many, many, many decades, they had no idea how it worked.

It was prescribed a lot. It eventually made its way to over the counter in the 1920s. It was one of these things where they knew it worked because they did tons and tons of studies where like this stuff is really effective and the side effects aren't terrible as long as you're not using a ton of it.

It's pretty safe, but it's really complex when you try and figure out how exactly chemically any drug works in the human body because of what happens when it gets in your body. It's just, it's really hard even still to pinpoint the exact path something takes when it's a lot easier to say, well, hey, who cares?

We've got a thousand studies that show it works. Who cares what chemical process does it work? Yeah, we just know that it does work and in this way, and we also know from all these studies that it has this side effect and it might affect this group more in this way than other groups. Apparently, aspirin has the largest chemical database

of any compound anywhere. I don't know if that's true or not. I read it in a Croatian brand profile of aspirin, but it's a great knock your socks off kind of fact, if you ask me. Yeah, but they eventually did learn, didn't they? They definitely did learn that it does work and exactly how, I guess, yeah,

that is kind of one of those rare examples of how we did figure it out, isn't it? I think so, in the late 60s and early 70s, and they were building off the work of Harry Collier, John Vane and Priscilla Piper, they figured out that there was a substance in the body. It's weird, they kind of figured it out in a roundabout way,

because they figured out what the substance was that actually causes inflammation in the body, which is the release of prostaglandin, and they figured out that NSAIDs actually stopped this from happening, and aspirin is an NSAID, like we said, and so in a roundabout way, they ended up figuring out how it worked.

Yeah, and so prostaglandins are like a whole class of hormones that are produced at the site of an injury or an illness to help your immune response, like inflammation, pain, all sorts of stuff that basically says this needs to be taken care of and we need to get some immune response here as fast as possible, and so aspirin blocks prostaglandins from being released

by enzymes called cyclooxygenase, which kind of kick off the production of prostaglandins, and they figured this out, they said, this is how it works, this is how the anti-inflammatory process works, and it was a big enough deal that John Vane received the Nobel Prize for it in 1982 for medicine. Yeah, and they also figured out,

and this is kind of key with aspirin, not only does that enzyme inhibit that release, but it kind of can do it permanently, which is what separates aspirin from, what's the one, the other one, the big famous one? Advil. Advil, yes, I'm blanking, because I never take any of that stuff really.

I'm an Advil guy, I try not to take it because I don't want my kidneys to blow up inside of my body, but. Like when will you take it? Like headaches, basically it's a headache. If my headache is bad enough, I will take an Advil. It's pretty rare that I actually do, but yeah, I mean, that's my go-to,

because other stuff doesn't work, like Tylenol doesn't work, I mean, it doesn't do anything for me, it's weird. You get headaches, like regular? No, it's pretty infrequent. I have to say, I have been like the last couple of weeks, but yeah, I probably have more Advil in the last couple of weeks than I have in the last couple of years.

And then run up to the election. That's pretty funny. Yeah, I don't ever get headaches. I mean, the rare hangover headache, but I don't get just like regular headaches for no reason. Yeah, no, I normally don't either. So what do you take? You take, oh wait, we establish this BC, right?

Yeah, and that's again, just for hangover cures. I hate that that's the only time I use that stuff, but because I don't want to come across as a drunk, but it's the rare hangover remedy. Gotcha, okay. Yeah, I think that's what most people use that stuff for too. Yeah. It's the caffeine in there.

It really gives you a little boost. Sure, but you know, all you gotta do when you get into, when you're approaching 50 isn't, learn when to stop drinking. Right, but the problem is, is as you're approaching 50, it takes like one drink to get a hangover. Oh no. Really?

Sure. No, I'm sorry. That doesn't happen to you? No, I'm good. Okay, good. So there was one other thing that happened too, when people were studying aspirin. Like this is the point.

So many people were taking aspirin that an average doctor conduct like basically a straw poll or some sort of study on his patients or her patients, to investigate the effects of aspirin. That's exactly what happened with one doctor. And I believe the fifties named Lawrence Craven, who basically said, I've noticed that there's some sort of weird connection

between more blood loss and tonsillectomies that I'm performing on my patients. It seems like the people who take aspirin regularly bleed more, and he figured out that aspirin's a blood thinner from this. Yes, and I guess let's take a break now. I was gonna say to save something for a surprise, but that was the surprise,

but we'll talk more about that right after this. We'll see you next time. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

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so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atekular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

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There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are gonna change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we spoiled the big surprise, which is,

we just spoiled the big surprise, which is the value of aspirin more and more over the years has been, especially once other insets came on the scene and took a lot of the market share, has been less fever, reducer, less pain reliever, and more anti-coagulant, and more, hey, this can really help you out if you have a potential heart condition.

Yeah, because they figured out there's another prostagland in thromboxane A2 that forms platelets in the blood. Like if you have a cut or something like that and your blood eventually clots, you can thank thromboxane A2 for forming the platelets or joining the platelets together. And aspirin specifically keeps that from happening.

And like you said, the other insets don't do that. It's just aspirin and from that discovery, aspirin was saved from probably obscurity. There was a point in the, I think the 70s, 80s, 90s maybe even where aspirin didn't even make the list of top 10 over-the-counter pain relievers. It had fallen so far out of favor. Yeah, it was like, that's your parents' pain reliever.

Right. It was not cool, it was not hip. Aspirin was going the way of the dodo and then they discovered this anti-coagulant sort of, I mean, not a side effect. I guess it just became a cross-use or something. And then it became the main use. And there are a few different reasons

why you might take something like, it's usually like a baby aspirin. It sort of depends, but it's always very low dose. But primary prevention, if you've never had a stroke, you've never had a heart attack, but you may be at risk for something like that, your doctor might say you wanna get on a daily baby aspirin. Not always, cause the benefits are somewhat uncertain

and there are other risks like, again, it thins the blood. So if you get cut or something, you're gonna bleed a lot more. And they don't exactly know why, but it affects, it helps prevent heart attacks better for men, strokes better for women. That's so weird. It is very weird, but that all falls into the banner

of preventative aspirin taking. Yeah, and because it can cause bleeding and it can also cause potentially gastrointestinal bleeding from messing with your stomach so bad, even a low dose, but a chronic low dose, that they say unless you have a high risk, you probably don't wanna start that regimen every day. So basically don't start taking aspirin

without talking to your doctor first. Like that's definitely one of those caveats that you wanna say too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Secondary prevention is the next one. If you have actually had a vascular event, if you've had a stroke or a heart attack, then you will probably almost assuredly be prescribed

to take that daily low dose aspirin because it is statistically significant that they have found there are large, large reductions in subsequent heart attacks and strokes if you've already had one and then you start that low dose. And that nuts. Yeah, it's amazing. Like there was a study in 1994 that estimated,

I think it was a British study that was published in the British Medical Journal that aspirin probably saves 100,000 lives a year. I guess back in the mid 90s at least just from that secondary prevention. It's amazing. And then there's acute vascular events, e.g. you're having a heart attack or a stroke right now.

They say go take an aspirin, at least one aspirin, maybe two, and it will actually possibly save your life. Yeah, I mean, they've done study after study and it has significant increase in survival rates. So Chuck, there's some other weird stuff that they're like, we don't really know how this works. It's just typical aspirin stuff.

We just know that it works. That are starting to become like a pretty substantial body of medical literature about other benefits that aspirin provides. Not the least of which is it seems to prevent some forms of cancer. Yeah, cancer is a big one. It might slow or even prevent dementia onset.

They've shown that there is some evidence that it reduces mortality for women that are high risk for preeclampsia, which is sort of a high blood pressure thing that happens to pregnant women. So yeah, they're just now, and like you said, there's been more studies about aspirin than like any other medicine. And they haven't stopped

because they're still discovering things like this. Yeah, so with specific kinds of cancer, it seems like colorectal cancer is the one that people benefit from the most, at least as far as we know right now. There's one study that found a 38% decrease. This is a 14,000 person population study. Yeah, population sample.

38% reduction in the chances of getting colorectal cancer if you took a daily aspirin regimen. It's amazing. It's not all great though. Like we said, there are the regular side effects, like the bleeding and the stomach issues and potentially stomach bleeding.

They've also found that it suppresses immune response and they don't fully get that. But they do think that I think it's the low dose aspirin over, I think the low dose aspirin is not hindering the immune response. It's really just the higher doses. But they figured out, well, actually we can use this on like graft operations or organ transplants.

You can give somebody aspirin and it will help keep the body from rejecting it. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Historically, they have sort of looked back now and said, I think all this heavy aspirin use might have hurt us in the past with things like the 1918 flu pandemic. The mortality rate could have increased

because they were just like shoveling aspirin down those thirth throats. Yeah. What else? A couple of other things. Again, there's that GI bleedings. They found that if you already have a blood clotting disorder you probably don't want to take aspirin.

And I read somewhere that Rasputin actually gained favor from the Romanoffs from saving one of the Romanoff kids lives who had hemophilia by saying like they needed to stop using any kind of modern medicine which included aspirin which probably saved the kids life because it kept it from being, kept the blood from thinning in a kid

that already had hemophilia. And they thought Rasputin was a magical healer for that. And then another thing we should mention in the 80s and 90s, they discovered that giving aspirin to kids really increased their chances of something called Ray's syndrome or Ray syndrome, R-E-Y-E, which causes brain swelling, brain damage,

very often leads to death. And there were, this was a big discovery and a lot of guidelines went in place where they all of a sudden like kids using aspirin went down by 90% which at the time was, along with the increase of other NSAIDs really, really put a hurting on aspirin's market share. Yeah, no, they found that if you cut the use of aspirin

the rates of Ray's syndrome and kids went down 90%. So it was like, yeah, so they were like stop using, stop giving your kids aspirin. So it went down by 100%. Yeah, basically, and it was already like you're saying, I mean, the other NSAIDs had cut into their market share and that one almost killed aspirin. It was just the heart protectiveness that brought it back.

Yeah, another thing that almost killed aspirin and Bayer was after World War I, they were bought out by IG Farben. And if you know anything about IG Farben, that company, they manufactured Zyclon B, very scary stuff, but Bayer survived all that. The dissolution of IG Farben eventually happened and they were able to kind of just say, hey, that wasn't us, we weren't doing that.

We're the good old fashioned aspirin and heroin people. Right, exactly. So over the years, they figured out like, okay, there's still problems with aspirin that we could stand to still keep going. Like that whole GI bleeding thing seems to be a problem. So they've come up with different formulations. And Ed, who helps us with this one,

turned up that there was at least one mention that they tried a chocolate coating of aspirin, which sounds delicious. Ew. But he couldn't find any other place that had that. No, but they did make the just easier to swallow and less bitter coated versions. They did, and let's not forget, Bufferin.

Remember Bufferin? Yeah, what was Bufferin even? Bufferin was an aspirin with an acid attached to it. Oh. And that was it. It kept your stomach from getting upset. And apparently, Bear also came up with a version that had a coating so strong, it survives your stomach.

You just poop it out. And it dissolves in the gut where it's needed, where it's absorbed. You just poop it out, yeah, it's totally useless. It's called Bear Useless Aspirin. It's called corn. Right, that's what they coated in. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. Okay, well, since Chuck said he's got nothing else, and I said I got nothing else, and we're just both presuming that Jerry's got nothing else, it's time for Listener Mail. This is from Alex Ramos about The Bay of Pigs movie. And by the way, we should issue a quick correction.

I had one too, but I know that you very much misspoke when you said Roberto Clemente was dishonorably discharged. Oh, thank you, yes. That was just a mouth error. We knew that it was honorable, and I didn't catch it at the time either, so thanks for those, for Jens Pittsburgh Jens who wrote in. Yes.

And then there was one I did. Oh, I think, oh yeah, rabbits aren't rodents. I got that wrong. No, but rodents are rabbits. Right. What? All right, greetings from State College, Pennsylvania. I love your show, guys.

Started listening a couple of years ago to Issa Payne and Monotmy of scraping off old wallpaper in the house. My wife and I had just bought and have been a devoted listener ever since. Listening to Bay of Pigs right now, haven't finished yet, so I may be jumping the gun, you're not. But you were musing about making a movie one day about The Bay of Pigs operation.

I wanna let you know that there sort of is. There's a Coleman Francis movie called Red Zone Cuba that is partially about The Bay of Pigs operation and also for some reason about a tungsten mine with hidden treasure. It's a real snooze fest, plotting and confusing, which is why it was picked up by Mystery Science Theater 3,000 back in the day.

It's a film for derision. I may have actually watched it then, if that's the case. I don't remember it though. I don't remember that one either. He's saying their commentary is great and makes it watchable. I love the show, keep it up. Also, in the off chance you read this on the air, I wouldn't mind you plugging my artwork.

Of course, Alex will plug your artwork. I'm a self-taught painter, mostly painting realistic, still life pieces and acrylic. My work can be found at alex.ramostudio.com. That is R-A-M-O-S. Very nice. Nice plug, Chuck. That was beautiful.

It's good. We don't plug stuff a lot, but we love artists and people are out there trying to scrape by here in this weird time. Yeah. And I'm not seeing it right now. When I just clicked it though, oh, I think I clicked on the wrong thing.

Okay. So if you're not ever... I would got to just fall for a fishing scam. I don't think so. I think I just went to R-A-M-O-S-T-U-D-Y-O and it's alex.ramostudio, or R-A-M-O-S. Yeah, we're going with R-A-M-O-S. Although I'm not seeing it there either.

Famous R-A-M-O-S is what we're gonna call Alex from now on. Well, if you want to send us a confusing email, or at least confusing with a confusing URL, we love those because Chuck loves to try them on air and then hilarity ensues. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.