Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 323 - Hip Dysplasia, Chronic Pain, Kidney Stones

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

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You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. I need to touch it. Yo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. Yeah, I bring the back. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivis stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and blasted with the way.

an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill for my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. 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 a requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve. Dr. Steve.

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, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medical practitioner who keeps the alternative medicine assholes at bay. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dr. Stee. And she, who will do most anything for a glass of expensive wine,

it's Lady Diagnosis. Hi, Dr. Steve. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call 347-766-4-3-23. That's 347. Who-Head? If you're listening to us live,

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Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking about talking over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctures, yoga master, physical therapist or whatever. All right, very good. Brewmaster. Brewmaster, that's correct. I can't drink during this show today because I've got to go back to work after this. Oh. Yeah, we lost our weekend person, and everybody else on my team is like, oh, I have kids at home and I can't work weekends.

Those two things really don't exactly follow. And I have kids at home, but I'm going to work it because if I don't do it, no, it's not going to get done. So the good news is I'm going to take, you know, if I work two days on the weekend, I'll take a day off during the week. You know, they make people that you can actually pay and they will watch your children for you. Yeah, that's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. So you can keep your job. I know.

Crazy. Don't get me, but, yeah, I don't want to get off on that because, anyway, maybe certain people might listen to this show. It's okay. I need some extra time off, and I don't mind working weekends. I did seven days a week for seven years when I was starting this program. So, you know, it's just kind of going back to that. I didn't hate it then. You don't have to work all night, do you?

No, God, no. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. No. And Dr. Scott and I are going to play. I decided our band name is background noise, spelled N-O-I-Z. Oh, how cute that is. Because I really don't want people to listen to us.

I just want to be background noise. So have you decided are we going to amplify ourselves tonight, or are we just going to sit out there and play? Or is he going to have a PA already? No, we're just going straight acoustic. We're going straight acoustic. Okay. Now, when... I'll be in the front row.

This is playing on Tuesday. Two days from now is going to be Vic Henley at Allendale. So go to et ncom. That's like East Tennessee, E.TN Echotango November Comedy.com. And all the information is there. It's free. This is big for the area that we're in. We really don't get comedians of this caliber here.

and what I'm hoping is that we can continue to grow the gravitas of the comedians that we get in. And this place seats 1,200 effing people. And last time we had Tim Dillon, he did great. He got double the number of people that have ever come to one of their events. But it looked like nobody was there. I felt bad for Tim because he looks out there and they're so spread out. You know, there was, you know, I don't know, they usually get 100 people. They had 250 for him.

So it was a big deal. but it just you looked out there he even took a picture of it and he said oh this is going to go great but it ended up being a great great event it really was but I need more people to show up for this so it's free it's free so Thursday night there's nothing else going on right and even if you're coming from out of town so take a long weekend come here for this and then go up to Asheville or go to Nashville or you know make a long weekend out of it and if you come see Dr. Scott or I, or lady diagnosis, and come say hello. I'll try to get some tokens and you guys can, you know, go get a free beer.

I'll talk to the beer guy, see how we can work that out. Okay. Can I get a free beer? Yeah, of course. Or they can go right down the street to the riverfront, our new beer run location. We can do that after. Well, we still, we won't be open after this is done, though. Well, you have a key, don't you?

We do. We think we can do extended hours and tell everybody to head over there after the event? Yeah. That's true. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. So we'll do a little thing at the beer run that evening.

We'll have to pay Charlie a little bit. There you go. Did you get your draw permit? You've got to have a poor, you got to have a poor license. A license to poor beer. And we don't mean P-O-R-E or P-O-O-R. I do have my P-O-O-R. The P-O-R-E license, that's Lady Pimple-Popper.

Yeah. She's got a great job. P-O-R. Yeah, that's the sucky poor license. I have that one. That's the one we get from serious. Exactly. But anyway, but it's good to be on there.

I'm not complaining. I was on Howard again. Oh, yeah. Howard who? Yeah, that was Howard Who? Exactly. For the third time. Howard Stern.

Shut up. Really? Yeah. Wow. I'm so impressed. It was fun. Well, Shulie, you remember Shulay. You ran him around for the funniest person to Tri-Cities competition.

He, you know, we've stayed in touch, and he was such a nice guy, and he looked, you know, my kids liked him, and we think he's really funny, and he was so good that night. And he just made that night. And for the Howard Stern listeners that hate Shulie, I don't get it. I don't, you know, he gets a lot of hate on Reddit and stuff, and I have to defend him. He was fantastic. He was wonderful. His stand-up was hilarious. People, he did 30 minutes before the thing.

He did crowd work. People were dying, laughing. And then during the event, he was, you know, it was all ad-libbing. We didn't know what the hell. We had nine different comedians do stuff. And then he would comment on it. You know, he was playing the Ryan Seekrest part. And then he made jokes out of all this stuff.

And it was really, if they were bad, he made them funny. And if they were good, he made them funnier. And then he, at the. the end people were like can you do more comedy so he did another 20 minutes and got a standing ovation that wouldn't stop till he left the stage now come on so anyway but shulie and i have stayed friendly and uh when they have something that's medical he'll call me and they called me in hawai at three in the morning one day that i couldn't do that i missed that call but yeah it was fun and then every time now of course uh i called into uh jim and sam they were talking

about black holes and universe stuff and, you know, physics. And so I was talking to them about that. And, of course, the whole preamble is, oh, was Howard on vacation today and all this kind of catching shit. XM 103 is still our home and it always will be. But, you know, nobody gave two shits when I was on Montel Williams show or when I was on the Bob River show or any of the other shows that I've been on. Or Bob and Tom back in the day.

Oh, I love that show. Nobody gave two shits, but all of a sudden I was on Howard Stern one time, and I started catching hell from the 103 people. It's just funny. It's just something to give me shit about it. They're just jealous, what my mom would say. They're just giving me shit. All right. Hey, don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net.

That's simply herbales.net. And he's really spruced up his website, and the greatest thing on there, GVAC used to love this. the fatigue reprieve and my wife likes the stress less but my favorite thing is the simply herbal sinus rinse I use it every day it's the greatest stuff in the world

and even my voice sounds better when I use it on the air gives you that cigarette voice well it gets the mucus out of there so I'm not have like a gurgly you know yuck

I hate that when I hear that in people and when I have it myself I hate it even more don't forget please you use stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com. Stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com.

There's all kind, it's, it's just a click-through page. You can just click straight through and go to Amazon, or you can scroll down and see a lot of the different products that we've talked about on this show, including the amino acids and other things that I use to basically cure my peripheral neuropathy when my neurologist said, hey, well, we ain't got nothing late in day. Well, there was something else you did before. started the supplements. Well, what?

Stopped your stand. Wow. Well, yeah, that's true. Because once you stopped it, I mean, once you stopped it. Well, I did the two at the same time. And, yeah, Dr. Scott is absolutely correct. I'll give you that.

Wait a minute. Oops, what? Have yourself a bill? That is true. You went from being. I'm trying to sell some fucking snake oil, dude. Yes, I love it. And you're telling me of them, well, that wasn't what it was.

Well, I'm supporting you. I appreciate it. So I have a question. On the app, I have the Amazon app. Yes, you can't use it? So you just have to go through the website? You have to go through the website to use our link, unfortunately. Okay.

And anyway, and don't forget tweakeda audio.com offer code FLUID. That's fluid for 33% off. That is a huge discount. You know, Papa John's give you a free pizza every 20. It used to be frequently. Now it's like every 20 pizzas or something. but tweakeda audio.com will give you 33% off every single order you place if you will use the offer code fluid. And they're a Tennessee-based company had no idea until a couple of months ago.

We've got to go out there and see them. I love to. We need to do a road trip. We need to go New York first. Okay. I'm in on that. I have no PTO time, but if I keep working a bunch of weekends, I'll be able to do that. Work every weekend for the rest of the year.

And if you want the archives of the show, and why would you? I don't know why you would. Go to premium.com for a book 99 a month. You can sign up and have access to everything, including premium content. All right. First thing, on our serious XM show, we had a guy on, and we took the whole hour and talked to Robert D. Rose, Jr., who is a guy who is, he is a veteran. He was severely injured during training exercise. and has severe, chronic, non-malignant pain.

And the VA has this new thing where they really want to minimize the number of pills that they're writing. And it seems to, at times, not have any correlation with whether somebody's got legitimate pain or not. They just want to decrease the number of pills that they're writing. And so Robert was, you know, had a lawsuit. and he's we had him on the serious xm show let's have him over here we're going to do quite an abbreviated thing because you can go back and listen to the serious xm show on demand and listen to his whole thing but uh robert um let me bring you up here can you hear me my friend yes dr steve uh can i say one thing of course you can say anything

you want dr steve uh i went back and listened to that episode and other than myself said like an idiot. You, sir, awesome. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. I don't know why everybody's not listening. Well, there's a couple. I like staying under the radar, to be honest with you. But on this particular topic,

I wanted to get that one out there as far and wide as we could, because it is, it's a topic that I know something about. And I'm very interested in seeing a logical resolution to And let me just give the people a little background on my take on this chronic opioid process, or quote unquote, crisis. There is a crisis in overdoses of opioids, but they're not pharmaceuticals anymore. The number of prescriptions that have been written for pharmaceutical grade opioids started declining in 2011 or 2010. And it was a precipitous decline. During that same time, the number of opioid deaths increased geometrically.

And if you go to my website at Dr.steve.com, you can scroll down and I've got an article about it. Scott, you might search for it and see what the title of the article is. And I can put a link up on Twitter. But there's a graph there that is quite stunning. And the reason for it is because doctors got blamed for this. So now doctors are terrified to write anything. They're cutting their patients off. And the street, the number of medications getting on the street has decreased significantly.

You know, we've closed down the pill mills that really were doing inappropriate stuff. And it's basically legitimate patients now who are being deprived of their medications because we've kind of taken care of the other problem for the most part. There are still pill mills out there, but they've got bulls. eyes on them. Now, why are the opioid overdoses increasing and deaths increasing a geometric rate? Well, because it's fentanyl. It's mostly fentanyl that's driving this. What's fentanyl? Fentanyl is an extremely potent opioid. We dose it in microgram amounts, whereas, you know, morphine is dosed in milligram amounts.

Gotcha. And it is, you can get like two million doses out of a pound of this stuff. So it's really easy to smuggle. It's easy to break up. But it isn't so easy to get a consistent dose that's not going to kill people. And so all of a sudden you get a little packet with white powder, and it doesn't have the microgram amounts printed on it, right? How would you distribute a microgram?

That's so small. Well, they'll cut it with other stuff. Oh, okay. Yeah. And, yeah, you can take a pound of fentanyl and make, like I said, two million doses out of it that are a gram each or whatever, you know. But anyway, so, yeah, hang on just a second, Robert. And so that's where we are right now.

And now Robert's dealing with a system that has a policy that they want to decrease the number of prescriptions that are written. So go ahead, Robert. You have the floor. On those micrograms and stuff that you're talking about, people smuggled the stuff in from China and Mexico and buy a pill press from eBay, Amazon, and whatnot, and they will press it into kills that look like legitimate prescribed medications. And so you purchase a Xanax tab.

off the street, you don't know if it's actually a Xanax tablet or one that has been pressed in someone's broad. Wow, that's scary. That's one of the reasons it's so dangerous to purchase these street drugs you're talking about. It's even dangerous to buy them from pharmacies overseas because you can do that. And we had a guy long time ago on the show. It may even been before Dr. Scott was involved in the show that bought. Xanax from what he thought was a Canadian pharmacy.

But when the stuff showed up, it had a, you know, the stamp on it from a country called the Seychelles. And that's an island off the coast of Africa. And when they had them analyzed, it was actually an antipsychotic that they had sent them. So it's my pharmacist can make a mistake. It's, you can't even. And that's almost a perfect system. You know, I'm only, my 62 years, I've had one prescription that was wrong. So if you can't, but that's not, it's 99.999% accurate, not 100%.

So if you can't even 100% trust the system that we have, why in the hell would you trust somebody selling you a packet off the street unless you were desperate? And that's the other side of this is when I see them creating new legislation to crack down on doctors who are writing these prescriptions for patients with chronic pain, where is the money to do the treatment for people to decrease the demand? Because we're not doing anything about the demand. We're getting the pills off the street. No question about it. But the demand is still there. And so they're just going to other sources. But anyway, so Robert is, tell us about the status of your lawsuit and all that stuff, or your injunction or whatever it was that you

were that you were um all right well as we mentioned on the show last time i did have an injunction hearing in greenville tennessee that was uh designed to stop the VA and the CDC guidelines that would deny legitimate pain patients legitimate um pain medications however prior to the injunction uh the judge had written in his order that he was going to allow veterans, civilians, and expert testimony. Prior to the actual hearing, he did go back on what he had written in the order granting the hearing. And then also, as you know, Congressman Phil Roe from Tennessee, First District, is named in the lawsuit. He actually, in 2009, when he was elected, he became a member of the House VA Committee.

In December of 2016, he became the chairman for the House VA committee. But prior to the injunction hearing, in order to be excused, he told the judge that he was not affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs in any way. so when we did arrive in court there in greenville on the 17th it went pretty much as i expected because of the previous phone call in that one hill road did not show up because the judge excused him for not being affiliated with the VA the defendants at mountain home VA medical center here in Johnson City, they did not show up as well, even though the order excused in Roe did not excuse them. And there's several other little errors that occurred during this hearing that has now

allowed me to file a appeal that will take the case completely out of Tennessee. That way, Roe has no influence, has no power in when we go to the Sixth Circuit Court up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Oh, my goodness. And so that is what is going on now. Okay. I have submitted to the court a notice of appeal to let them know that I will be doing this. And at the present time, I am writing the appeal information indicating the harm that's been going on and the stuff that's going on. Like I believe I told you last time, I'd spoken to a 70-year-old Marine that had served in Vietnam.

He had been blown up in a personnel carrier. And here recently, he was diagnosed with throat cancer associated with Agent Orange. Okay. After 35 rounds of radiation therapy, Mountain Home VA Medical Center prescribed to him for the pain, Tylenol, and throat lungages. Okay. So. Well, allegedly. We haven't had a chance to look at his record.

I believe you, but we need to say that. If you had been listening to the stories I've been listening to for the past year and a half, you believe me. No, I know. I know. I do believe me. I just, we have to be real careful about, you know, anyway, you know, when we're talking about specific medical conditions of specific people. But one thing I want to throw out there, I do think that the, and the, And, you know, I hate to use the hysteria word, but the hysteria about prescribing by a lot of primary care guys.

And I do talk to primary care guys say, I just don't treat pain anymore. And it's like, well, all right. Well, I'm just decided I'm not going to treat diabetes. You know, it's really, it's 16 million people complain of pain in the United States. And, you know, somebody's got to, I mean, it's somebody's got to take care of that. So, you know, yeah, go ahead, man. Can I correct you? Yeah, please.

According to the National Institute of Health, there are 111 million Americans that suffer from some form of chronic pain. 25 million of those individuals suffer from severe intractable pain, which at the present time have no current cure. Yeah, that's closer to the 16 million number that I'm talking about. I'm sorry? No, I was saying that's closer to the $16 million number that, you know, that I was talking about. It just depends on, I guess, where you get that. That's what I'm talking about, the people with severe chronic pain that, you know, affects their ability to work or be productive and stuff like that.

So. But the CDC guidelines don't say don't write opioids. And I'm going to read from the CDC guidelines. It says it is important that patients receive appropriate pain treatment. treatment with careful consideration of the benefits and risks of treatment options, which we would do. That's true for diabetes. That's true for a high blood pressure. People need appropriate treatment with careful consideration of the benefits and risk. That doesn't mean do not treat. Matter of fact, we teach people if someone's at high risk, and this is for cancer particularly, but that's a different issue. And they'll say, oh, well, cancer pain is exempt

from all of these rules, but they still, the insurance company still won't pay for a lot of them. They'll only pay for a certain number of pills, even if not taking into account if the patient's been on this for a long time and develop tolerance, or if they have, you know, 28, which I've seen, 28 fractures in their pelvis that can't be treated with the doses that they want them to have, you know? and a couple of the insurers are requiring prior approvals every single time that you write the prescription. So I have a department in my office that does all that. You know, I work at a cancer center, so we have people to do that.

But if you're in primary care and you have to do a prior approval every single month for both the prescriptions that you're writing for person that you know, long, you're just going to quit doing it. You're going to throw up your hands and stop doing it. That strategy has been very successful. Okay, go ahead, Robert. But as you may know from following the news, pharmaceutical providers, I'm not going to name names, so I don't want to get in trouble,

but there are certain pharmacies that you can go to, and because the pharmacy tech to the pharmacist does not like the way you are dressed, the color of your skin, the car you drive, They can deny the legitimately written prescription for you with nothing more than, I don't like you the way you look. And that is given power to people who have no medical knowledge of your condition or your history. And believe you me, if that was what the guidelines said, on some days the way I feel, I'm not. able to shave because my hands are so messed up, I wouldn't give it to me, myself.

Even though I know I'm not going to abuse it, I'm not going to divert it. I'm going to take it the way it is because that's the only way I survive. And one thing that you just saying about doctors, this injunction hearing that I did the request of the federal court, it began with a letter from Mountain Home VA to me. It was the first time that they put it in writing why they are not prescribing opioid medications. Yeah, yeah. May I read that to you, sir? Yeah, and then we'll have to move on, but absolutely.

Yeah, give us the short version of it, Robert, if you can. We have a phone bag full. go ahead buddy no no no no don't don't apologize i'm just letting you know all right on april 20th of 2018 this is a response i received from mountain home when i asked if my new primary care provider would be able to treat the compression fractures in my spine uh...

i'm gonna have to bleep that get the time uh 26 27 i can't i we can't use any real names robert sorry we can use yours and mine but not anybody else's without their permission it's okay i don't hide i know i know i know you can say it and i'll just look at okay here we go dr blank thank you will not or how about dr b will not be able to prescribe either he lives under the same rules as all our providers here at the VA, not our choice to stop narcotic therapy at this point. Due to the VA-wide opioid safety initiative, as previously discussed in detail with the patient.

So it's not the doctor's choice. They are being threatened with disciplinary action or termination if they can continue to prescribe. So, to me, it goes back to Hitler's useless people policy in Nazi Germany. Everybody knows the six million Jews that were murdered, but there's very little talk of the five million others that were murdered under his brain of terror. the majority of that 5 million

where was the elderly and the disabled because according to Hitler they were useless yeah well I know they provided nothing society I know being in your

in your position at this point I think it's I can understand how you would feel that the system does not value you because they're not listening to you and that

I understand and that's something I think the pendulum is going to swing back the other way I think it's already started but you know we'll be following your case with some very great interest and I welcome you to call in

when it gets closer to the Cincinnati thing and just let us know what's going on and keep a surprise to what's going on old buddy because I feel for you it's all in God's hands well and in people who care enough to stick their neck out a little bit and try to get some things done so we'll be following that very closely

and I really do appreciate you keeping us in the loop and just take care and keep in touch okay always Dr. Steve all right my friend all right and thank you and God bless And thank you for your service to your country. We appreciate that more than you know. Yes, sir. All right.

That's tough. That's really tough. So we'll see what happens over the next thing. So he's going to go to Cincinnati and get it out of our jurisdiction, so at least we can talk about it without any fear of having a problem. Yeah. All right. Well, anyway, I do think that a lot of providers are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

That's my stand on that. And what the VA is, I have no idea. I don't work in the VA. I don't know anything about it. What I hear about is what he tells me. So, you know, I wouldn't mind at all having a VA doctor in here, particularly one that will, you know, we can mask their voice and they can tell if there is such a person. Well, I can tell you for an absolute fact, they sent letters out to all the veterans who use the VA. a mountain home.

And about two years ago that they were discontinuing all narcotics. Oh, okay. For all patients unless they had, you know. Cancer or hospice or something like that. In-stage, yeah, in-stage cancers. You know, and the problem is, you know, the one thing that he said that is the most difficult is the definition of legitimate pain. Of course. We don't have a blood test.

We do not. And we, and you know as well as I do, Dr. Steve, we've got people. people coming in with a hangnail that say, oh, my God, it's a 10 out of 10 pain. And we've got something else that's hit themselves in a shin with an axe and say, yeah, if you can put a band-aid on it. Right, right, right. And that's why it's so hard. The knuckleheads out there are the ones that have ruined it for all the legit patients. There's no question about that.

And, you know, ultimately, we are looking for non-addictive pain medications that will work. And one thing that we talked about on the Sirius XM show was having a multifaceted, a to chronic pain, that isn't just the Romans lining up in a line and trying to, you know, poke, you know, swords at the guys on the other straight line in front of them. Instead, you know, you try to flank your pain. That's how the Romans got defeated. You know, their enemies learned how to flank them and violate the quote-unquote rules of war. If you use opioids when they're appropriate and not be afraid of it,

I'm looking at the CDC guideline. It does not anywhere say don't treat people with opioids. It just says choose, select your patients appropriately and treat them appropriately using the lowest dose that's effective, which is true of any medication. You don't give somebody twice the blood pressure medicine that they need. You give them just enough to get their blood pressure down into the range that you want to and keep it there. And you encourage them to do things that would help control their blood pressure. Of course. And that's what I think a lot of the patients that we have in pain medicine, they, the ones we have the most trouble with are the ones that want to be pain free.

That's right. And pain free is virtually impossible if you're alive. That paradigm has been thrown out and everybody, but that's part of counseling people when you first see them. Is that what we're looking for is an improvement in function and improvement in quality of life. And the only way we can eradicate all pain is either to treat the underlying condition or sedate the person to the point where they're in a coma. And may I say one more thing about the VA in Mount Long? Sure. In their defense.

I know people over there, both patients and doctors. And I know. They are doing some extraordinary stuff over there. They've got brand new classes that any of the veterans who have chronic pain can go to. then involve everything from breathing techniques to yoga, massage therapies, et cetera. I mean, all of these stuff in-house that they do, and it's some really great stuff.

And we're seeing some great response from that. The problem is that if you've got someone that's withdrawing from opioids, the last thing they want to hear is you telling them about a yoga class. Oh, I know. No, I know. So this has to be started from the beginning if you're going to do all these things. And anyway, our multifaceted approach would include opioids, would include what Dr.

Scott does despite what that asshole on iTunes said, Dr. Scott has a bunch of modalities that are very helpful for chronic pain that have proven in the medical literature. So go, F yourself, if you start calling him a quack again, because I'm going to say the same shit I said last time. And other non-opioid modalities, including physical therapy, you know, adjuvant medications like Neurontin or. tricyclic antidepressants and things like that you know all these things have adverse effects too but treating all of those you can maybe decrease the the amount of medication all the way around if you use multiple modalities so anyway so yeah here we are talking about chronic pain again but it's a big deal it's in the news every day and you know it's uh i i know people at the VA who are trying to do the absolute best that they can possibly do both patients and doctors.

But I absolutely understand people like Robert having the frustration that they have, too. So we have to be able to address that and come up with a solution that's acceptable. But anyway, all right. So let's move on. We've got everybody else who's been on hold for 32 minutes. Area code 267 You are on weird medicine

Sorry for the wait No problem Hey Dr. Steve I got a quick question for you Sure So I just had a My daughter was just born about nine days ago Okay congratulations

Thank you When they were doing the Thanks Yeah go ahead Sorry What's that? I didn't mean for the studio audience to throw you off like that.

Oh, no problem. So when they were doing the initial exam, they said that they felt like a click and a right hip. And then they've been checking it periodically, like every time they do her assessments and everything. And it's like every other time, maybe every third time they feel it. Okay.

And then the doctor ordered an ultrasound on our right hip. Yes. And that was done when she was seven days. old okay um the guy it was actually done by a doctor they said that uh it couldn't be done by a technician it had to be a doctor that did it because she was so young um he didn't go into details but he said it was definitely abnormal okay but he wouldn't explain what he meant oh um and since then like the next day um she had a regular checkup and the pediatrician said that it was inconclusive because so young. Yes. Um, and they, they want it repeated when she was, when she's going to be a month

two months old. Okay. And my wife and I are just wondering, like, is this anything that, I don't know, obviously you haven't seen the ultrasound? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, is this anything that we should be concerned with or anything? Um, they, they basically said, um, at worst, she might need, like, a hip brace or something until she's about one year old anyway. Sure. So it doesn't sound like it's that big of a problem but you know we're just kind of we're just wondering yeah yeah well they should have sat you down and had a nice long discussion with you rather than going well it's abnormal we'll see you in a month i think i hate that thanks for coming yeah um don't worry good luck to you old buddy no it's um it's what what the we always screen in babies for this thing called

hip dysplasia and what you the way you do it is you get the baby on their back and you put your finger, your middle finger right on the greater trocanter of the hip, that sort of bone that you can feel sticking out. The hip bone. And then you put your thumbs on the inside of their knees. And then you use that as sort of a fulcrum or a pivot point. And then you pivot outward with your thumbs, you know, spreading their legs. And then you feel to see if that hip clicks when you do that, because you've got your finger

right on it. You can feel it. It goes, doop, do it, like that. Okay. So that is a screening test for a thing called hip dysplasia. It's the medical term for a hip socket that doesn't fully cover the ball portion of the upper thigh bone. So what can happen is the kids sometimes can grow out of that clicky and they're fine. Other times it does manifest as problems later on in life.

They can get one leg could be a little longer than the other or they may develop a limp, stuff like that. In teenagers and young adults, I mean, I had a friend who had untreated hip dysplasia, and she had a real hard time getting around because she had pain and stuff. Oh, wow. Yeah, but hers was untreated. So I'm just sort of, let me Google real quick, see how they're treating this these days. Yeah, they use this thing called a Pavlik harness, and it is just as you said, a brace. And what it does is it repositions the baby's hip so that it will learn to grow.

properly so that that socket and the hip and the ball joint will merge together properly. And it says here, infants are usually treated with a soft brace such as a Pavlik harness that holds the ball portion of the joint. Firmly in

its socket for several months, this helps the socket mold to the shape of the ball. This brace doesn't work as well for babies older than six months, but that's not a problem for you, so because they caught this so early. So and then, you know, If that works, then...

They're golden. They can play football. They can run. They can do whatever they want to do. So it's good that they picked up on this so early. But they should have explained this shit to you. You know, it's crazy. You have to call a radio talk show to get this answer when the information was right there in front of them. They could have given you a fucking pamphlet. Yeah.

I mean, I probably could have Google it too, but I mean, I don't know. not your job bro look up the wrong thing you fucking freak out yeah it's not your job but google uh hip infant uh hip dysplasia and that you'll have all the information you need and yeah they just need to uh uh keep an eye on on the baby for the next month or two and then if this doesn't seem like it's going away then they'll put you in that path like brace and you know it'll be inconvenient for a little while and you know but 18 years from now you'll forget about it completely. All right.

Okay. The other thing, let me ask you this. Is this your first baby? No, this is number two. Okay. Well, I was going to say you could go to Dr. Steve.com and in the upper right hand corner, click on my wife's one-page baby manual that she wrote. And it is a wonderful way to get that kid sleeping all night,

which is the thing that's everyone's goal in the early days of having a baby. So, anyway. Yeah, we've actually been using that because I had a conversation with you when our first one was born. So, yeah. Oh, okay, cool, cool, cool. And the other thing that we like, and Tacey and I give everyone who's having a baby are the sleep sacks from baby in a bag.com. And they're wearable blankets. We kept our kids in them.

They've got a bunch of different sizes from, you know, three months to a year size to toddler size. And as long as our kids were in the crib, they had a sleep sack on until they were, what, two. And they never once crawled out of their crib, not one time, because they can't. It's awesome. Oh, okay, great. Yeah, but sleep sac's great because after three months when that kid now is no longer just a fetus that's been delivered three months too early, because that's the truth of human delivery as we're born about one semester too soon because our heads are so big. And if we didn't do that, women would have to have a vagina that's way different than the one that they have now.

And so I'm sort of glad that we do do it this way. But they, so we swaddled those kids for the first three months. But after about three months, they can kick the blanket off. And that's when you stick them in a sleep sack. Okay, great. All right. Hey, good luck. Good luck with the baby.

Keep us in the loop. And let us know how the hip displays these things going. I love hearing follow up on these. things. I hope everything goes okay. Okay. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. All right, buddy. See you. Okay, we'll see you. We've got one more. We'll take now.

And then we'll get out of here. Area code 732, you're on Weird Medicine. Good afternoon, gentlemen. How are you? Good, man. I like that radio voice. Well, I don't know about that, but I have to take a second because I have to laugh. the caller, the veteran before with the VA issues.

Yep. When he said, Dr. Blank, my head went to Anthony Coomia, Chris Hansen voice, and all I kept thinking about was put my blank in your blank that did to all those voices. Never left so hard in my life when he would do that. Oh, yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I was sitting in a meeting, and the guy next to me's name was Chris Hansen, and so I gave him all the to catch a predator. jokes.

He had no clue what I was talking about. And I was just sitting there looking at me like it was an idiot. The other time that happened to me, by the way, was we had a resident, and his name was Muhammad Ali. And he was standing in this group of residents. And I saw him, and I saw his name tag. It was Muhammad Ali. And I started going, the greatest resident of all times, of all times.

And he just looked at me with this goofy smile. He went, well, thank you very much, sir. He had no clue what the hell I was talking about. Oh, he had to have heard something about that. He didn't know that reference. I mean, that was 40 years ago. Oh, okay. That was beautiful.

It made me feel old and stupid. You know, I'm just, why? He must have thought I was the biggest idiot. No, he had to know with a name like that. I don't think he did. I don't think he'd been in the country that long. And although Muhammad Ali is one of the most famous people in the world, I just, he had no, there was no recognition in his. eyes whatsoever. But anyway, all right. Well, anyway, what you got, man?

So, kidney stones. Yes. And I'm not concerned about the treatment thereof because it's pretty much a pretty standard form. Either you PM out or they go get them in some form. Right. I get the understanding of that. But I'm 42. I don't know how far I can go off my history, but I'm not the healthiest of people. Okay. In the in the last 16 months, I have made myself healthier, you know, weight loss and exercise and all those other stuff. Excellent. But I've never had, I've never had kidney stones before. Okay.

And my issue is, is, and I, and I struggle with this, so just bear with me, but I became one of those, I'm very good at it, it's known judge, but I became one of those crossfitter people. Yeah, that's fine. I'm just wondering if there's, I'm just wondering if there's something behind it in a sense, Not that I'm doing something wrong, but is there something related to the output versus the input in terms of hydration and electrolytes and everything like that? Because, you know, I'm not good at it, but I do take it hard during the workouts. And that's why I've actually lost 40 to 50 pounds and my 16 months because that was like my breakthrough moment. But, you know, so the treatment is one thing.

I get that. That's pretty standard stuff for the most part. Do you know what kind of stones you have? I'm sure they analyzed. What kind of stones do you have? Yeah, I had the CT scan. I had the ultrasound, and I just had the x-ray about a week or two ago. Well, that's not what I'm asking.

What I'm asking is, did they take a stone out, crush it up, and do a chemical analysis on it? No, I actually have two. One is about three millimeters. The other one is in a tough spot. It's like 14 millimeters. and they both still sit inside of my body. So you have not passed a stone yet that they could analyze? In fact, two days ago, when I tried to get on the last time,

when I kind of hung up on this, I apologize for that. Yeah, no, no, no. I was actually in my, I was actually in my urology office, and the decision was to put me on high-dose flamax to try to pass the one rather than go beat it up with a shockwave, with those tripsy stuff. Okay. So I have not passed a stone.

I am pain-free. It never bothers me. I'm not in, I'm not on any pain medicine. There's no issues with it. Got it. I know I have them. Okay. So that will be very important someday when they get their hands on one of your stones to say,

what kind is it? Because some of them precipitate. You remember in chemistry, you did these experiments where you'd have this stuff in solution. You'd have two clear solutions and you'd pour one into the other and then it would precipitate out. Or you'd make rock salt or rock candy. Rock salt, yeah. Mr. Wizard. Yeah.

Yeah. And basically kidney salt. stones form the same way. It's a chemical reaction where things that are in solution precipitate out, and then they aggregate together, and then they'll make a stone. And you can have calcium stones, you can have struvite stones, uric acid stones, and these other things called cysteine stone. Sometimes you can have, you know, a combination of calcium and say uric acid, things like that. So knowing what it is will help you to avoid it in the future. For example, uric acid, stones, we can give people potassium citrate and they will never have another stone.

You know, people with calcium stones or oxalate stones can avoid certain things in their diet. But for now, what's interesting you is what are your risk factors that we can put our finger on right now? One of those is dehydration. So not drinking enough water increases your risk of kidney stones because the urine is more concentrated. if it's more concentrated and think and there are solutes precipitating out of solution they're going to precipitate out when the urine is more concentrated so that's one thing uh but the thing that i'm wondering in your case since you've lost all this weight is your diet so eating diets that are high in protein uh may increase the risk of some types of kidney stones particularly true if you

have a high sodium diet if you use a lot of salt and your food and uh so that's pretty interesting you know you wouldn't think that sodium would do it because it's not sodium that's precipitating out but it causes calcium to precipitate out people who are obese you know in other medical conditions that you probably don't have like renal tubular acidosis and stuff like that can can increase kidney stone production but I'm going to guess in your case it's your diet and the dehydration during your workouts so you just got to hydrate better during your workouts and see if you can present this and then or or prevent this.

And then once they get their hands on one call back and let us know what kind of stone it is. And then we can sort of, they'll give you a diet, but we can kind of walk people through how you, you know, determine the proper way to prevent a kidney stone from reforming. And it's not, not also it stones are the same. It just kind of suck, though. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks really bad. And I was going to say, it just kind of sucked that I'm finally turning the corner. Yeah, now you got this.

I dare use the word healthy. I don't want to do that. But now I got this, it's not a setback, but I got this complication. Sure. You know, I've got to go get fixed. And, you know, at one point, I do have to get the one out, you know, with the lipid chips, you're going to beat me up with it. And I'm going to be down for a week or so.

Sure. You know, it just feels like it's the kicking of blood. You may drop the weight. I didn't say, but, you know, I have type two diabetes. My A1C is down like 5.8. There you go. Congratulations. Blood pressure is down below.

Blood pressure is, you know, barely on medicine at this point, all this other good stuff. but then I get the stupid kidney stones. Yeah. Well, you know what? If I told you you could decrease your risk of heart attack and stroke by cutting your risk in half. But the downside would be you'd have to have two kidney stones that we'd have to do something about. You probably would have taken that choice.

Probably would have. Yeah. And you did that. That's exactly what you did by doing what you did with your diabetes and your blood pressure. And it may even be more than half. If you ought to go, you know, it would be fun for you to do is go to just Google Framingham Cardiac Risk calculator and put your numbers in before and put them in now and look at the difference.

And then, yeah, let me know what you get because I bet it was like 10% before and it's down to four now. So it's really a 60% decrease, you know? And it was Framingham like F-R-A-N like Framingham mass. Okay, gotcha. All right, old buddy. Okay. Hey, congratulations on the weight loss.

Sorry about the kidney stones. and let us know how it goes. All right, buddy. Take care. Better than I've been in the while. Oh, good. We'll keep it up. I just hung up on it.

Sorry. All right. Thanks always go to Dr. Scott. Lady Diagnosis. And Tacey's here. You're going to sit in for the next show? The Tacey will be here next show. Can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Cuma,

Jim Norton, Travis Test, Travis Teft, Eric Nagel, Roland, Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fez Wattley, and let's throw old Paul Offcharski in there, too, and Dandy Don Wickland, whose early support of this show never gone on appreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM, 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 voicemails and topic ideas make this job very easy and 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 that's perfect timing i just got perfect all right Thank you.