Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 311 - Free Radiculopathy

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

In which Dr Steve and crew discuss Evy's boyfriend's temerity, cervical radiculopathy, absence seizures, fugue states, leg hair, and more. Visit: Stuff.Doctorsteve.com simplyherbals.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's a ninja's favorite section in the bookstore? Stealth help. Why are zebras bad at baseball? Three stripes and they're out. Why does Snoop Dog use an umbrella? Fodrysal You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast network, Riotcast.com. I've got to diphtheria.

I've got Subolivodes dripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my imbettable woes. I want to take my brain now, blast with the wave, an ultrasonic, egographic, and a pulsitating shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent of Citizen Kane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet,

I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steed. it's weird medicine the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio now a podcast I'm dr. Steve with my little pal night nurse evie podcast audience doesn't know you as well as the serious x-m audience does matter of fact I don't think you've ever been on the podcast I haven't well we have to talk about all your mess I got plenty to tell this is a show for people who never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet if you've got a question you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider

If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call 347-7-66-4-3-3-23. That's 347. Take it away, Evie. Who-Hare? Oh, very good. Ah. You get a... If you're listening to us live, the number 754-227-3-6-47, that's 754-22-p penis, or my personal favorite, 754-Bairnip. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine, at Lady Diagnosis, and at D.R. Scott, W.A.

ma'am, you don't have Twitter yet, do you? Or you do? I do have Twitter, but I have to tweak it. Oh, you got to tweak it. I got to change my name. Visit our website at weirdmedicine.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Or go to our merchandise store at cafepress.com slash weird medicine. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers.

Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctrist, yoga, master, physical therapist, or whatever. All right, very good. Well, okay, so welcome to the podcast. For the people who listen to Sirius XM, Evie's been on our show there for a couple of months. Yes. And she's not actually a nurse,

but a night nurse would not necessarily be a licensed nurse. They would be somebody that's practicing, you know, nursing for like superheroes on the side. Yes. So that's what Evie do. I'm Wonder Woman. And she likes to regale us about regarding her sexual escapades because she had quite the dry spell there for a while.

I did. And now she won't shut up about it. No, I won't. So if you want to hear about, you know, intercourse and stuff to keep listening because she'll tell you everything that you want to know. Yes, I will. She's very open about this. You ask.

That's good. Yeah, good. Did you bring any news stories with you today? You did not. No, I did not. That's fine. I want everybody to check out something. This guy sent us some stuff, and I'll give you a bottle of this, Evia.

You cook, right? Yeah, I do. Okay. So this is called ramp salt. Okay. It's made from ramps and salt. Well, there you go. Hence the name.

It's kosher salt. Pick and clean every ramp. We make sure to preserve the West Virginia ramp population and never over harvest. Well, I always thought ramps were weeds. So this stuff really smells good. And it was, wow, that really smells good. I can't wait to cook with this stuff. But anyway, you go to WV, like West Virginia, WV, WV, Ramp Salt,

dot com and uh you can buy some and it's pretty inexpensive oh wow um you look up ramps real yeah well i'll give this to you later are they doing it um r yeah okay okay well else would you spell ramp well you really don't know well that's true it could be w r a i yeah yeah that's why i asked right okay okay all right yeah just let me the benefit of the doubt i always do yes you do All right. While you're looking that up, I'm going to read to you a recent article from medical press. It's kind of a throwaway online medical journal. But says new paths to cure cancer emerge from immunotherapy trials.

Now, people have been listening to this show for any period of time already know about this. And as a matter of fact, if you want to read about non-sudoscience cancer cures, go to Dr. Steve. And in the upper right hand corner, there's a bunch of links. And one of them says non-seudoscience cancer cures. And we, in there, I have articles regarding the abscopal effect for melanoma, which, in which if we could learn how to stimulate that every time, we could cure melanoma just about every time. Melanoma is a, you know, it's a really angry, progressive disease. when you have it, when it's metastatic. Yes.

Most of them can be cured if they're caught soon enough just by a wide excision, you know, just cutting it out. But if it becomes metastatic, it becomes tough. We've got more stuff now than we did. But this abscopal effect is really interesting. And this occurs when, let's say, someone gets a tumor in their hip, and they get radiation. And the radiation, of course, kills the cancer. But there's leftover proteins.

It doesn't make them go. away. It just disrupts their function to the point where they can't live anymore. And as they're disrupted, those cells start to open up and there's proteins that are presented now to the immune system that it couldn't see before. Maybe they were blocked by some factor that causes the immune system to just gloss over it. Right. You know, I always use the analogy of a serial killer in your neighborhood. You know, they're out in front of, you know, in the front mowing their lawn, waving to you as you drive by in the morning, you can't see what's, you know, the people that are chained up in

the basement, you know, and once one of them gets out, though, it says, hell, then everybody knows, and then the, you know, the villagers can come with the torches and burn the house down. Hopefully they've got the victims out first, but it's the same kind of situation. You've got these cancerous tumors growing in the body, and the immune system just walks right on by, doesn't see anything. And then now, when we do this radiation on these people with melanoma in the bone, and we open up that basement door and one of the victims gets out, and now the immune system goes, oh, wait, what the hell is this?

And it starts recognizing it'll go and just kill all the tumor in the body. Oh, wow. Now, this will happen about one time out of every 250, maybe one time out of every 500, if that. Okay. But when it happens, it's dramatic. It will affect a complete cure in people. And so one thing we've got to do is figure out how do we trigger this? You know, what's the best way for us to tell the immune system to go and kill this cancer?

Right. Because unlike chemotherapy, which is a, you know, you're just poisoning cells, and it's like dropping a smart bomb in the middle of Baghdad, there's going to be collateral damage, right? You're trying to kill living human cells inside a living human. human body. And if, but the immune system can go in and just kill the only the cells that you want it to kill and, uh, and do it perfectly. And it'll, it will, it is relentless until every cell is gone. You know, that's amazing.

That's the way we're going to eventually cure cancer. I used to say it was 100 years away. Then I said 50 and then 25 and now we're, you know, I'm saying, man, maybe 10, 15 years we'll have it. So here's this article and says in the winter of 2013, Sue Scott, who was 36, had planned her own funeral. Her cervical cancer, which cervical cancer is, that's a rough one,

was spreading fast, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. It all failed. The tumors were invading her liver and colon and squeezing her ureters. Those are the tubes coming down from the kidney into the bladder. And when you squeeze those,

you get back pressure, you get kidney failure. So her last chance was to enroll in an experimental trial in which doctors were trying to partially replace patient's immune system with T cells that would specifically attack cancers caused by the human papillomavirus, which is where cervical cancer comes from, by the way. So first lesson of this is get your damn pap smears. Definitely.

If you get your pap smears done on the schedule that they recommend, you will catch the vast, vast majority of these before they become cancerous, and they can be cured right there in the cervix before it becomes cancer. So they did it, and within a few months, her tumors completely disappeared. This March, she celebrated five years cancer-free, and according to her doctors appear fully cured. Now, this sounds like a damn miracle, and it is a miracle of modern science. And this is what we're going for.

And there's no question that if she had maintained chemotherapy surgery, radio therapy that she would be gone by now because stage four cervical cancer is a terminal illness. My sister had part of her cervix removed for pre-cancerous cells. Oh, is that right? Yes, twice. Okay. Yeah.

So they did a closer examination of why Scott's cells worked so well. It led to new discovery that may be helpful in killing other kinds of solid tumors. See, once we show that we can do it once, we know we can do it. We can replicate it. Then you start looking now. How do we make this happen every time? So they're at the National Cancer Institute. Straight out of you, we've got the gene sequence now.

We can put it in anyone's cells and make their cells attack cancer the same way. And so that's something we're working on trying to bring it to the clinic to see if it will work. So there you go. How about that? That is good news. Let's see if there's anything else in here. Yeah, next steps. There are hopes to open the first clinical trials on cancers that express this certain

antigen called KKLC1 in about a year, and international patients are welcome to apply. They can't say often these experimental trials work or give percentage rate for success. The study sizes are just too small. So if you're interested in doing something like that, the place to go is a website called Clinical Trials.Gov or Clinical Trials.gov. He put in the cancer type that you, let's just say, that you know somebody that has metastatic pancreatic cancer.

And then you put in Clinical Trials.gov and click on active studies and it will give you all the people that are recruiting people for studies.

Now, some of them will be epidemiologic. In other words, they're just trying to collect data. If you're interested in getting a novel treatment, that's not

going to be for you, but there will be one or two in their, you know, immunotherapy for stage four pancreatic cancer, and then they'll have criteria. You've got to not have

certain other problems. You know, they may not want people with renal failure or liver failure or stuff like that. And so if you meet the criteria, you get your primary care, or your oncologist to give them a call, get you signed up, and go for it. So clinical trials.gov is a great place when current therapies have failed and you want to try something else. But you want to do it soon enough. You can't wait until you're on death's door because all of these trials want people who are otherwise relatively healthy, but most of the time have a single problem like, you know, pancreatic cancer, cervical cancer, lung cancer, something like that. And if you, you know, if you wait until you've had your third pneumonia and now you've got, you know, problems with your lungs and your kidneys and your liver, it may be too late.

It may be too late because they want people who are going to survive long enough to survive the treatment so they can see if it works. So anyway, all right, there you go. What did you find out about ramps? Well, ramp salt. Here, let me open up my input. I don't care about ramp salt. I'm interested in ramps. Oh, ramps.

Yeah, because they're making the salt out of these ramps. So anyway, oh, shit, I'll look it up. Oh, I've got it. I've got it. Oh, they're wild leaks. Yeah. Okay. That's all they are.

I've got it here. All right, well, tell me about it. Yeah, I want to know about it. I'm opening it up. Oh, for God's sake. Okay, it's Allium Tricocum, known as the ramp in North America. Wild Leaks. Yeah, it's a species of wild onion widespread across eastern Canada and the eastern United States.

They're high in vitamin C. Well, there you go. And they've saved many mountaineer from scurvy and nutritional maladies, believe it or not. So they were eating these things. Yes, they were. Now, one of those things that grow, like, I get chives that grow in my yard. I wonder if that's, are those really chives? The wild onions is what they are.

Okay, okay. Because if you ever pull them up, they have the onion bowl, but they're. the bottom okay but you can't eat those oh yeah yeah yeah we used to eat them um we used to make um or uh i when i used to have a big garden i would take little onion sets and put them all the way around in the periphery of the garden at the end of the year you've got onion fresh onions and it keeps a lot of the some of the animals don't like them oh good they don't like the smell of them i had deer ravaged my garden one year i gave up in canada ramps are considered rare delicacies well they're They have a garlicky onions flavor.

So this is like onion salt. It's made with kosher salt and these ramps, and they apparently dry them out and crush them up. And it looks like it's well distributed in the powder. So I can't wait to cook with this. What are you going to try with it? WVRampSalt.com. I don't know.

I might try steak first. Okay. Something like that. Or just any time you're going to use salt, throw it in there. All right. Maybe I'll take it on my next date. You're going to take it on a date? Yeah, where he cooks for me.

Oh, okay, okay. And having him tried it. I was trying to imagine how there would be some sort of, you know, sexy salt sort of thing that you would do. Everything's kind of salty down there anyway. Well, cooking naked in the kitchen with salt, yeah. Oh, hell. It works. You should write a book, cooking naked with salt.

I am. It's a good idea. All right. Hey, don't forget stuff. Dr. Steve.com. Stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com makes a huge difference. Please use that whenever you can.

And it has all the stuff that we've talked about on the show. And it also has direct links to Amazon and makes a huge difference in the type of equipment that we can buy and all that kind of stuff. So please use stuff. So, please use stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com whenever you're going to do online shopping. In addition, check out tweaked audio. Use Offer Code Fluid for 33% off of your order. It is a Tennessee-based company, and they have the best earbuds for the price on the market

and the best customer service anywhere. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. And don't forget if you're interested in hearing more than the most recent five episodes, go to premium.com for a buck 99. You can hear whatever premium content happens to be there, but you can also get your hands on the archives of weird medicine that goes way back. So, all right. Okay, let's take some phone calls.

You ready? Yep. Oh, shoot. Why did I do that? What did you say, Ronnie B? Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Absolutely.

All right. Let's see what we got here. Well. Hello. Oh, there we go. Hi, Dr. Steve. I'm not going to have mental health problems, but I have random blackouts that I have no recollection of. Friends and family members will tell me that I said or did something, and I don't remember at all.

Thank you. Okay. So he says he has periods where people say that he's saying things, and he has no recollection of it. So this could, this could be many things. absente seizures is one but usually those people aren't walking and talking they may stand there and stare yeah we think of seizures of being you know people shaking all over and all those those are called generalized tonic chronic seizures and those people are unconscious during those and they're shaking and stuff and that's you know sort of random electrical discharge in the brain that kind of

gets out of hand yeah and travels around around the brain and causing trouble. And usually those things are self-limited, and those patients, you know, they wake up after a while, and they may be fatigued or may be drowsy for a while. We call that a post-dictal state. But for the most part, those are self-limited. When it's not, by the way, if it just goes on and on and on, that's a medical emergency that's called status epilepticus.

So just a fun fact. But an absinance seizure, well, you can have Jacksonian seizures. That's where you get one arm or one. leg that starts jerking but you're awake and you're looking at it and you can't control it and it may travel up the arm and then become a generalized tonic clonic seizure and then there are these sort of absinance or pedimal seizures where you're you just kind of go blank for a little while but i'm not heard too many times when a person is talking unless they're saying crazy thing yeah something crazy so um but it is possibility

That that's what it is. Or it could be a fugue state. A fugue state could be manifested as a multiple personality situation where people, you know, one, the model that we use is one model, one personality takes over for a while and then recedes back. That may, in fact, not be really what's happening, but it is a model that you can use to kind of explain it. And often the personality aren't aware of each other. Right. So that's a possibility. But either way, this person needs to be seen by a neurologist.

Yes, that's what I was thinking. This is not normal. Yeah, at all. Not normal. And before it gets worse, go get checked and see what they say. And let us know what they tell you. Okay. There are some studies.

If this happens frequently enough, they'll do what's called a sleep-deprived EEG, where they'll have you stay up all night, and then they'll hook you up and do brainwave scan. and they'll watch for telltale signs of seizure disorder. And sometimes they'll try to stimulate it with flashing lights and stuff like that. If they can see it, then they make the diagnosis. Then they put you on medication and keep challenging you with those stimuli until they can't make you have a seizure and then it stops. Oh, that's right. But this person should also not be driving.

No. I was taking the same thing. Yeah. Should not be driving until it gets this straightened out. All right. Let us know, though. Please let us know. All right.

Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Ron from Maryland. Hey, Ron. I'm 47 years old. Within the past year, I started losing all the hair on my legs. Now, I'm not a hairy person by nature in no way. No hair on my chest. No hair on my back.

You know, slight balding on top. But what could be doing that? It's pretty bizarre. It's kind of freaking me out, but I don't know if it's that bad or not. Okay. So do you like hairy men or men with a clean, shaven body? Hair is okay. I just don't like a lot of hair.

Like back hair, being madded back hair. I can't do that. No, that's nasty. Yeah. It's like a bear. I feel like I need to calm your back or something. I had a friend in high school, and he was so unbelievably hairy. I mean, it's just covered his whole body, you know.

And he went through puberty really early, and he had a beard before anybody else did and all that kind of stuff. And he was quite hearsuit, is what that's called. Oh, wow. And, yeah, so I have back hair. I have to shave it once a week, you know, with one of those. Well, that's not bad. Because it's, it is kind of gross. And then I used to have, when I was a kid, like chest hair, that was, like, sexy.

Because James Bond had it, and, you know, he had all that chest hair. And then my wife's like, oh, hell no. You got to get rid of that. So then I have to shave my chest every week, too. Why don't you just wax it? I have done that. It lasts longer. It's more painful.

It's way more expensive. It's just easier to shave it. Now, if you don't like ass crack hair, this is a little bit of an aside, do not shave it. Because if you shave it, you will have to shave it all the time. And there used to be a guy on this show. that was a master barber, and he explained it very well. Why that is? Because if you wax your ass crack, if you get a Brazilian, you don't have that stubble.

But if you shave it, you're going to get stubble in a couple of days, and it's going to drive you crazy. And the reason is when you shave, you're going to get a flat top to that hair strand, right? So it goes, you know, it's a cylinder, and it's got a flat top on it. And that flat top has an edge. And that edge, you know, just think of, you know, a Coke can. You know, a Coke can is cylindrical and then it's got a flat top. So there's an edge there. And those edges, you get, you know, 100,000 edges in your ass crack.

And they're going to be rubbing on the skin that's going to drive you crazy, especially when the hair is really short. Well, it's like a cactus in between your ass. Exactly right. But if you get it waxed, when it comes back, it comes back tapered. And the tapered, you know, is the tapered end is very flexible and it won't irritate your ass crack. And I can attest to that because way before your time, Evie, I did this thing called the ass crack challenge. And one of us shaved their ass.

One was going to nair their ass. And thank God we read up on that and said, don't do it. Because you can swell your ass crack up so bad that you can't shit past it. And it can cause real problems. So don't use nair on your ass crack. It's not made for it. Nair is calcium hydroxide. It's a very strong base, and it's very, very irritating to genitalia and stuff.

Your legs can handle it, but your junk cannot handle it. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. So, I know, that's why I'm telling them, don't do it. So, but I had mine waxed, and I recorded it. And the only thing that I found was, first, I didn't get any stubble when it grew back. and when I passed Flatus, it sounded different because now I had pure skin slapping around

instead of the hair-covered skin slapping around. It sounded like a queef. Yeah, no, it was weird. I have a recording of it. Maybe I'll pull that out sometime. We'll replay that. But anyway, so now what the hell were we talking about? Oh, oh, yeah.

He's losing hair on his legs. on his legs. I got a sidetracked by, well, just a shiny object. So losing hair on your legs. Now, he is not very hairy in the first place. But he had some leg hair. You can lose hair on your legs just from wearing socks every day. And if they're tight enough and just kind of pull,

particularly if your hair follicles are not particularly strong, if it's easy to pull hair out. The other thing is you could have crummy circulates. And the not being hairy everywhere else could be a red herring. Actually, now he's having a problem with circulation. So I would ask him, do you have problems getting an erection? Because that's a circulatory issue as well. And sometimes it can be the canary in the coal mine, you know, an early sign of problems with your circulation.

There's a really easy test that they can do in the primary care provider's office called an ankle breakule index. and it's just where they take a blood pressure in the ankle, take a blood pressure in the thigh, compare the two. There should not be a big difference between the two. And there's a way, you divide the numbers out and you come out with a number, and then you can look on a chart, and you can see if you've got a problem. And if that ankle brachial index doesn't look good, then you can do further testing to see if you've got bad circulation. And then there's medication you can take for that.

Oh, really? Okay. Increasing exercise and all that. Well, how would women know if they had an issue? Because they're shaving their legs, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, they may notice that they don't have to shave as often.

Or you could just check your pulse and see if, you know, if it's diminished in the feet, you feel it on the top of the foot between the long bone going to the first toe and the second toe. That's where your dorsalis petus pulse is. And then, how else? Well, a sign of severe bad circulation is a thing called clodication. When you're walking and all of a sudden your calves cramp up and then you stop and then it goes away. And then you start up again and then cramp up again. It's usually those people will tell you, I know to the step how far I can go and then it starts happening. And that's because they've got decreased blood flow to the legs.

And as you exercise, of course, you demand more and more blood flow. And when you get to a certain critical value, the legs will cramp up because they're not getting the blood flow. They need to work. So that's called claudication. Okay. So if you have claudication, you got to go get checked because you may have a blockage in one of the big arteries to the leg. And sometimes they'll put a balloon in it, open it up. Sometimes they'll use medication.

But that's a sign that needs to be evaluated. Right. Okay. So just get checked. All right. Dr. Steve, I'm Marcus from North Carolina. Hey, Marcus. I've got a question about the mandible.

So I want to know why the women can sit around and jack their damn jaws all night at a party. But when we get home and I wanted to suck on my big old fat, meaty penis, her damn mouth hurts too much to give me a fucking blowjob. Can you answer that for me? Thanks, Dr. Steve. And hey, fuck PA John. That's right. Fuck PA John. You know, you know what I do in a situation like that?

Are you going to ask them? All right. So the reason your wife can talk all night to her friends and then come home and not give you a blowjob because you're an asshole. Yeah. That's probably what it is. You've been, you are at this party drinking, checking, looking down some of the big titty girls blouses and stuff and ignoring your wife. and then you get home and you want a damn blow job. You want some attention.

That's not going to happen. Is that how it is? Am I right about that? Do I have that nail? Yeah. Either that or you might need to go take a shower first. Oh, yeah, you might be smelling. You know, we always shower before we have sex. I've always done that.

Yeah, I like that. Do you get in the shower together? Yeah, no, his shower's too small. Okay. But, you know, he's never had a problem with me giving him a blow job. Yeah, there you go. Of course, he's clean and he's shaving and he's well-groomed at the same time. That makes a difference?

Yes, it does. Oh, really? Because we do not want hair. See, I'm... I mean, you could be shaved and trim, but don't be bushy. Oh, yeah. You know? We need to get somebody in here who is an expert on male trimming up.

Yes. Because I've bought those devices, like man groomers and stuff. I think they suck. They don't work right. I don't know. I don't know what to do because, you know, look, I'm a child of the 60s. hell nobody i mean i'm just remember 60s and 70s

bushes you know women didn't shave yeah they just had this sort of natural thing going on down there and uh you know i've never I mean I've tried to groom down there but I don't know what the hell to do we just gotta just groom it away like this guy easier said than done

he's so smooth what does he do I believe well I know he shaves the top okay but I think he also waxes oh because it is is nice and smooth. Really? Oh, yeah.

Now, if he waxed the whole thing? So he looks like a baby down there? There's no hair at all? No, he's got hair. No, he's got hair. Okay. I'm just talking around, you know, the NAD area. Yeah.

Yeah. That's hairless, which I like. The Nads are hairless. Yes. But he's real close shaved around the shaft. I'm out of touch on this. And I have tried, you know, I have bought so many different things. Yeah.

And I've got no real success with it. at all. I look weird and it comes out kind of patchy looking like I had chemo and you know that some of the hair's falling out but not all of it has yet and then if I shave down too far then I get stubble right above

like where my bladder is. Well I'll tell you a trick to shaving men listen. All right. And women you should already know this. In order to keep from getting razor bumps or anything like like that after you first of all you should shave with coconut oil

hmm coconut oil and after you shave with the coconut oil you need to rinse with ice cold water to close to close the pores to close the pores yeah exactly or it's just going to remain open and you're going to get irritation the other thing that um our master barber would say is don't shave too damn close either because if you do what happens is the follicle retracts or the hair shaft retracts and then it gets below the level of the skin and as it tries to grow out sometimes it'll get caught and it'll just curl up in that follicle yes and you'll have hair and it will hurt yes yes i never had that problem because i've never got that close to getting it i had one i got too close oh my god it hurt we need to get somebody in here who's an expert on this

yes you know anybody some somebody that does like Brazilian wax and stuff like that. Yeah, I think I know a couple people. Okay. We'll check it out. I like to wax up. Make sure they got some big ass tities. I'm saying it helps on the radio.

It helps on the radio. Yes, it does. That's the only reason. I don't know. Well, you have to be some sort of woman to do Brazilian waxes the mink. Come on. Well, the ones that did mine were hilarious. One was teaching the other one how to do it.

And here I have my ass sticking up in the air. Pull the cheeks apart. Oh, my God. It was humiliating. Were they gorgeous, though? Oh, yeah, both of them were. Yeah, it was insane. Yeah. So it makes it that match. No, it wasn't hot. It was not hot. It wasn't hot. It was humiliating. And, you know, and I've got, P.A. John was there who I don't think you've met, but he started this show with me. And I didn't realize till later. I said, yeah, my partner wants to come in. And I'm sure they thought they meant, you know, my partner partner. Yeah. And anyway. And then Jefferson, the Scheister, said, I should have. rubbed shoe polish in my underwear. I love to see that.

Yeah, well, we'll put that on a best up here directly. Okay. All right. Awesome. Let's take another one and we'll get out of here. Hey, Doc. My name is Curtis. About approximately a month ago, my right eye, my eyelid has been twitching.

throughout the day basically all day long sometimes i get a a break here and there but it's driving me absolutely insane so i don't know maybe um you know something that i don't know very good thank you sir yeah man um it's called blephar spasm and the problem with blepharous spasm is that And no one knows what causes it most of the time. You can get twitching that's chronic and persistent. It could be there. It could last a day. Could last a month.

Sometimes it can last years. And every once in a while, you'll get it that's severe enough that the eyelid spasms down so the person can't open their eye and they become functionally blind. So, you know, botulism. is something we've talked about on this show is a deadly disease caused by a certain bacterium causing a very potent neurotoxin in canned foods.

People get botulism that can't breathe because it paralyzes their muscles. Oh, it paralyzes muscles and he's got a muscle that's twitching. So if you take purified botulism toxin and let's call it Botox and inject it into the eyelid,

You may have a slightly droopy eyelid, but it won't twitch anymore. Could it be related to stress, though? Yes, thank you. Stress levels may be too high. Stress is a huge issue with people with blephor spasm. And before you go to Botox, you should do stress management things. Yes. Like yoga, meditation, that kind of stuff.

Massage works well. Eliminating stressors in your life. There are drugs that can induce blephorospasm. So there should be medications that they can give you to prevent blephorospasm. So people will sometimes use antispasmodic type medications or things like gabapentin that sort of stabilized nerve cells. I'm not seen really good treatment for blephor spasm. in pill form. If you don't do well with the medication, which are generally short term, or with botulism,

they can do surgery, and it's called a protractor myectomy, and they just basically remove the muscles responsible for eyelid closure, but again, you're going to have an eyelid that doesn't work right after that. Anyway, and then they can do a sensor motor activities as well to just rewire the brain, and you have to, they'll do this a lot of times at university centers, and it's called neuroplasticity-based re-education, and you're just re-educating the neurons not to fire. And so you can talk to something about that. But where you want to go for this is an ophthalmologist, not an optometrist.

Optometrists are awesome, but an ophthalmologist, that's an MD or a DO that treats medical conditions of the eye. And then go from there. So good luck with that. All right. Sorry about that, man. A lot of times it's self-limited, though. It just goes away on its own. So instead of the Sherwin Slave thing today, I have a new synthesizer here.

And I'm going to use it to walk us out. It is called a gecko loop synth. Very inexpensive. They're handmade in Europe. And it's relatively inexpensive. You can see it's in a little wooden box. that looks like a music box, right? And you open it up and you turn it on.

And then it's got all these different channels that you can program. And let's do channel one. And we should get some music. And let's make it louder, though. Well, shit. Let me see. Oh.

Okay, I've got that channel. that's why. Let's see where the volume is on this. It's a podcast, so we can take time. Kind of relaxing, though. Let's see if you tap on it. It's got a little delay in there. Yeah.

Let's see here. Increase. Well, you can hear my voice, too. Okay, and your reverb. Button two. Yeah, it's got little speakers in it and little sensors. Look, I can do this sensor here. It'll increase the bass.

I'm going to cut off our mics just for a second. You think of that. Oh, man, that's awesome. I like that. I don't have to get one. Gecko, G-E-C-H-O, loop synth. If you get one, tell him Dr. Steve sent you. Thanks always go to Nice nurse.

Well, you are a nice nurse. I am a nice, naughty nice. Night nurse, Evie. Can't forget Rob Sprats, Bob Kelly, Greg. Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Tept, Eric Nagel, Roland Compos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Ron Bennington, and Fez Wattley, who's early support of this show had never gone unappreciated. Thanks also go to a certain Reddit community that's chosen not to shit on us.

Thank you for that. We appreciate that, and that is also greatly appreciated by all. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel. Sirius XM, Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand and other times at Don Wickland's pleasure. Many thanks. Go to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas made this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.

We're going to be able to