Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 325 - Green is the Color of Stool

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Dr Steve discusses ketogenic diets (again), what causes green stool, influenza vaccine, "cool sculpting" (a euphemism if there ever was one), solar sneezing disorder and more! STUFF.DOCTORSTEVE.COM simplyherbals.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. I need some touch it. Yo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. In the garretail. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola fibs stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain now, blasts with the way.

an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want some magic pills 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 to requiem for my disease. So I'm paging 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, and this is a show for people who 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. 347-7-6-4-3-23. That's 347 Poohhead. If you're listening to us live, the number 754-227-3-6-47, that's 754, double-duce penis. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine, at Lady Diagnosis, at DR Scott WM, and at WM, the intern. 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, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctures, yoga master, physical therapist, or whatever. All right, very good. So, yeah, you haven't surmised. I'm here by myself today. and Dr. Scott and the rest of the crew will be here next week. Don't forget to check out stuff. Dot, Dr.steve.com.

Please use that link. Stuff.com, whenever you go on and go shopping on the internet, it takes you to a click-through page where you can click through to go to Amazon or you can scroll down and look at different products that we've talked about on this show, including one that saved my butt recently, literally and figuratively. and that was Ibigard, which is intericoded peppermint oil. And I came back from Hawaii with a raging, oh, I feel sorry for me. I came back from Hawaii, but with a raging case of Tourista, which fortunately did not really bother me until I got back.

and I was, you know, basically just having liquid stool. And I took some of that Ibeguard. I also took some other things, but that really helped with the abdominal pain and the cramping and stuff. It's a topical anti-inflammatory at the level of the surface of the bowel. And I was very pleased with that. So you can get at at stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com.

By the way, if you have ongoing abdominal. pain or chronic diarrhea or something like that, don't go to and just treat it yourself on Amazon, go to your primary care provider and maybe get a referral to a gastroenterologist. But in the meantime, you can go to stuff. Dot, Dr.steve.com, and there's also other stuff there, too, hence the name, stuff. dot dr steve.com. Don't forget tweaked audio.com

Offer code fluid. It's a Tennessee business had no idea until recently. Using offer code fluid, you get 33% off the best earbuds for the price on the market and the best customer service anywhere.

And Dr. Scott, even though he's not here, we'll plug his website simplyerbils.net. I'm telling you during allergy season, I live on his simply herbal sinus rinse

and it actually is very good as much shit as I give him when he's here when he's not here i will have to give him props for that uh if you would like archives of the show and get them quick because something may be happening where all of the shows go away i'm hoping not but i'll tell you about that as time goes on i go to premium dot dr steve com, just download them all. And then if you want to cancel your subscription, feel free, but premium. Dottersteve.com.

And if you use that, I found the easiest way to listen to this show if you've got a premium membership, if you want to go back and listen to old shows, is to use the weird medicine app, which you can get at iTunes or Google Play Store. So anyway, all right. All right. So I don't have anything for you today. other than let's take some phone calls. Number one thing.

Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Hey, Dr. Steve. Brian from New Hampshire. Hey, Brian. I was wondering about that cool sculpting. I think it's called to get rid of fat. Can you get the same results with some ice packs? How does that stuff work?

Well, it's kind of interesting. Cool sculpting is a misnomer. You know, that's not how it works. it's not cool, it's cold as shit. What they do is they deliver precisely controlled, hopefully, cooling. Yes, okay, technically it's cooling. You're taking it from one temperature and dropping the temperature, but you're, you know, it just sounds so nice and just nice and smooth and easy when you call it cool,

sculpting. But what you're really doing is you're freezing fat cells. And so it's cryolipolysis is the proper name for it. Of course, you couldn't sell that to anybody. Well, you know, we do cryolipolisis. It's like, you know, not on me or not, but cool sculpting. Now, that sounds awesome. So what you do is you have a probe and it's in it, you can dial the temperature down. And if you know what you're doing, you can freeze fat cells where people don't want them, they die, and then when they die, that area will, the body will eventually come in and clean up that area and leave it less prominent than it was before. The way that they discovered this was interesting that there were some scientists noted that kids that ate a lot of popsicles got dimples in their cheese. And they hypothesized that these kids were freezing the fat cells in their cheeks and the fat cells were dying and they got a depression there. And in fact, that's what it was.

So they got this idea that cold can target fat cells without hurting the skin or the surrounding tissue. Now, that's true if it's done properly. So anyway, it's, you know, the cells die off. And then the body knows when cells die, and it comes in and cleans up the mess and leaves less volume there. So this has done a lot. There are a lot of people that are doing it. It's relatively well accepted at this point. And it's totally fine.

But no, you can't. I mean, you could do it with ice packs, I guess, if they were cold enough. But you would really be giving yourself frostbite, which is not the. purpose of this. So do not try this at home. This needs to be done by medical professionals with the correct equipment. And you can't save yourself a grand by just laying ice packs on your abdomen. All right. Okay. I love how on their website they say it's a holistic approach to your body sculpting and transforming. I'm not sure how it's holistic in the definition that we usually use holistic. You know, a vegan diet to lose the fat would be a holistic.

approach. This seems more like a technological approach. But anyway, there you go. All right. A doctor or the grocery store pharmacy. What? Hey, Dr. Steve. I was wondering when, when does the new flu shot come available? Is it always in the fall or should I get it now in the summertime? And also I was wondering, it doesn't matter if I go to my doctor or the grocery store pharmacy or a quick care clinic or even at the fire department. Are they all the same? Thank you.

Yeah. No, that's a great question. The new influenza vaccine should be out sometime in September, I think. And the way that this works, the reason that comes out in the fall is because the influenza or season tends to run in the fall, winter, and early spring in the United States. And they, the vaccine makers need time to figure out what strains of influenza we should be protecting against. So the way they do that is they look at what's going on in the southern hemisphere during our summer, which is their winter and see, well, what's going on

down there. And when they identify these strains that are sort of mutating and working their way around the world, they can make a prediction that this is what we're going to see in the northern hemisphere during our flu season now. Sometimes they nail it. Other times they miss it miserably. One year, I think it was only 6% effective at preventing influenza, but it still was reasonably effective for preventing death and hospitalization. So we still recommend it. The last two years in a row, we've not had flu missed. That's my other favorite influenza vaccine. It's a live attenuated virus that they spray up your nose and you actually, it multiplies just like any other virus and you get a mild form of this influenza that you can also spread to other people. So it will spread through the population protecting them from the naughty influenza strains.

And, you know, I can't get it because I think the cutoff age is 50 for that. And it's considered, quote, unquote, too risky for people over my age. That just means they didn't test it in people my age or they did and there were problems, one of the other. I think it's the former. And but I would get it for my kids. And my kids, being nasty kids, would easily transmit it to me by sticking their finger in their nose and then not washing their hands and handing something to me. And then I would pick it up on my hands and get it that way. So by the way, that's called fomite transmission.

When you sneeze into your hand and then like a disgusting person, don't want. wash your hands afterward and then open a door with a doorknob and then leave snot and viruses behind and someone else touches that door and gets the disease. That's called a fomite transmission. Fomite being an inanimate object that can harbor an infectious agent for some period of time. But anyway, I digress. the oh hell where was I and I don't have Dr. Scott here to tell me where the hell I was oh yeah the flu missed so but the last two years it's been no good so they didn't even bring

it out this year we're hoping it's a good vaccine we always hope for that you know it would be great would be to have one vaccine for all influenza strains you say well why do we have to get a vaccine every year if you can only get, you know, each virus once. Well, the stupid thing keeps mutating. And influenza is really easy to mutate. If you've ever seen that movie Contagion, I highly recommend that you do. That virus passed through a bat to a pig and then mutated enough to where humans could get it. And it was a bad one in that particular scenario. And Steven Soderberg, I mean, there's no plot to that movie. It's just, What would happen if we got an influenza strain that became pandemic and killed people like the 1918 swine flu did or the so-called Spanish flu?

They blamed it on the Spaniards. Back then, of course, we did not have ventilators and we didn't have Tamiflu. We didn't have vaccines. So that particular strain of influenza, if it hit us now, probably wouldn't do nearly as much damage as it did back then. when it killed 1% of the world's population. So 10% of all people in the world are estimated to have gotten that form of influenza, which, by the way, means 90% didn't. So the vast, vast majority of people didn't get it.

But when you're talking about 10% of the population, that's a huge number. Even back then when there was, what, a billion people on Earth, maybe 2 billion? So 10% got it and 10% of those people died. So any virus that came through that had a 10% mortality rate, that's huge. So it was pretty scary. But again, no vaccines, no Tammy flu, no ventilators or respirators back then. So it was a bad one, but I really do believe if that particular strain came through, today wouldn't cause nearly the havoc.

But what if we got an avian flu? That was a problem. Again, hopefully we could rapidly develop a vaccine, hopefully in time to save lives. And we do have antivirals that may be of some use. And we have better supportive care now than we did. Having said that, get your damn flu shot. Flu vaccine saves lives on our podcast. We're going to have Richard David Smith, who survived an episode of influenza that nearly killed him.

And if you're a listener to our podcast, we had Barry the Blade, who was our trucker duty correspondent who got us turned on to the whole idea of how truckers move their bowels when they're over the road. And it started a whole thing. Well, sadly, he died from swine flu that year. year. And we had a couple other people who have, you know, listeners of ours, people have called in or friends of ours who have passed away from influenza. So please get your influenza vaccine when it's ready. And if they have flu missed this year, vaccinate your kids. And we will get a secondary benefit from that because the adults, even if you're in my age group and you're not allowed to get flu missed, you still get it anyway. It's kind of a dirty little

secret that that particular influenza is transmissible. Now, people will say, well, I don't take influenza vaccine because the last time I did it, I got to flu from it. And that's completely incorrect. You cannot get influenza from the influenza vaccine shot. It is a killed vaccine. As a matter of fact, it's not even killed. It was never alive.

You're just using certain viral proteins that are grown in the laboratory and injecting those. And your body develops antibodies against those proteins. And those happen to be on the surface of the influenza that you're hoping you get exposed to. And so you have immunity from it. But it's not the actual vaccine or the actual virus itself. so but people swear that they got influenza from getting the flu vaccine so this is why if you have 400 million people in this country and let's say only 10% of them get vaccinated so you're talking 40 million people so 40 million people over a let's say a five-month period so hang on a

second. That would be eight million people a month, right? So let's see what eight million divided by 30 is. Alexa, what's eight million divided by 30? Eight million divided by 30 rounds to 266,666. Okay, okay. All right. Shut up. Shut the fuck up. So on any day, around 250,000 people are getting vaccinated, right? That's if only 10% of people get the vaccination. vaccine. So I'm being very conservative with these numbers. Now, of those 250,000 people on any one day, let's say 1% of those were going to get influenza on Wednesday. But they've already been exposed. It's cooking in their body. They're going to get it on Wednesday. And let's say another 1% of those got the vaccine on Monday. So I'm just

ratcheting these numbers way down. So about 250 people every day will come down with influenza two days after they got the flu vaccine, right? And 250 times 30 times five months, that's a bunch of people. So there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. out there that people got influenza vaccine and they got the flu two days later. And it was because they were going to get it anyway and they didn't get vaccinated in time. That's all it is. And, you know, it's a selection bias. It's a bias of, you know, small results stemming from large numbers, those kinds of things. And it is, it's just fallacious, but it's, you cannot convince those people that the flu shot didn't give them influenza

unless they're willing to listen to logic and delve into the science of it and they were just unlucky. So now you can get influenza from, as a matter of fact, you're intended to get influenza from the flu-miss vaccine. That's the whole purpose of it. But again, the last two years, we haven't had that.

Now, I started talking about this. Wouldn't it be nice if we just had one vaccine for all of influenza? and in fact, that's being worked on now, a universal influenza vaccine. So, you know, you get your measles vaccine, you get it once or twice, whatever the number is. And there are a smallpox vaccine when we used to get it. We got it once. And it was lifelong immunity, or we hoped it was anyway.

and if we could find one protein that's expressed on the surface of the influenza virus that we could target with a single antibody, then we could use one vaccine and we'd never need any. We could absolutely eradicate influenza in this world because there are very – there are asymptomatic carriers of insomnia. of influenza, but they don't last very long. Now, why is that important? Well, the reason we were able to eradicate smallpox was there were no asymptomatic carriers. In other words, people that had it that were spreading it to other people like typhoid Mary, but that didn't have symptoms of smallpox.

If they were transmitting it to somebody else, they had smallpox, and you could tell just by looking at them. So rather than vaccinate everyone in the whole wide world, what they did was they went to places where there were smallpox outbreaks and just vaccinated people around those people. So you would find someone with smallpox, vaccinate everyone they had came in contact with and keep those people from getting smallpox or transmitting it to somebody else. And the last case of smallpox was in, I believe, Somalia in, I believe, 1997 or 1987. maybe. And it was declared eradicated three years later when we didn't have any more cases of smallpox. So that's how you would do that. Now, with influenza, people can carry the or transmit the virus before they become sick, but not for very long. So we could, in theory, use a universal vaccine, try to get a lot of herd immunity as many people as we can vaccinated. And then when somebody comes

down with the case, vaccinate everyone around them, and within maybe a decade, we might be able to eradicate the influenza virus from this world. And, yeah, it would be extinct. We'll keep it in the lab just in case we find out our evolution is tagged to influenza outbreaks or something, and just to make sure that somebody can go ahead and release it and ruin everything a hundred years from now, if things really go south in this world. So, you know, smallpox exists in laboratories, frozen, all over the place. We have it.

The Soviets have it. Hopefully nobody ever weaponizes it. But, you know, when you make something extinct, you kind of feel weird just saying it's gone forever. we want to have some record of it. I think having a DNA record so that we could make it again if we really had needed it for some reason would be good enough. But apparently they like freezing these viruses and keeping around just so somebody could steal them and cause problems. But anyway, that's sort of my treatise on the influenza vaccine and vaccines in general. And, you know, please get your flu vaccine.

It does save lives. I don't want any more weird medicine listeners dying from influenza for no good reason. Okay. All right. Talk to your primary about it. Oh, and the other thing that he asked was, is it okay to get it from the pharmacy or the fire department? It's all the same. It's all the same vaccine.

They all cover the same viruses. So it's fine. I don't go to my primary care anymore to get my vaccine. I go straight to the pharmacy because the pharmacists were allowed to give them, and it's just a lot easier. So there you go. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. I called you probably like two months ago and asked you about the ketogenic diet.

And with that call, I had asked about the part of eating the green leafy vegetables and using. Yeah. Okay. Let me get everybody on the same page. So we've talked about ketogenic diets multiple times here and on the podcast. and a lot of people have this idea that the ketogenic diet is supposed to be the all meat diet or the meat bacon and mayonnaise diet. And those, if you do that, it will be ketogenic in the sense that your body will burn fat

because you're malnourished, but that is not a healthy ketogenic diet. I guess I should give you some background on ketogenic diet. So the classic ketogenic diet was the Adkins diet. Now, why is it called ketogenic? Well, so your body stores carbohydrates in muscle tissue and in the liver in the form of a sort of starch, which is nothing more than sugar molecules all stretched or not stretched, but stitched together. And it's called glycogen. And so glycogen is in the liver and in the muscle tissue.

If you've ever heard to somebody that was a marathon runner, when they hit the wall, they've run out of glycogen. And so it's a source of ready energy. And when you eat carbohydrates, particularly, you will store leftover glucose in the form of glycogen. And when you've filled those stores up, then the next thing you're going to do is start laying down fat. So if you eat a ketogenic diet, what you're doing is you're eating a low carbohydrate diet. So you are having to burn all of the glycogen stores in your body, in the muscle and in the liver, particularly. And when I say all, you know, it's a relative term. You're burning up most of them.

When you stop being able to burn glycogen readily, you've got two other sources. of energy that you can tap. One are fat cells and one are muscle cells. And we don't want to burn muscle cells to make energy. That means we're starving. So if you eat plenty of protein, you will not burn muscle tissue for energy. So you will preferentially burn fat. And when you burn fat, when fat starts to break down to make energy for the body,

bodies, you know, daily routine, you will produce these things called ketone bodies. It's just a byproduct of fat destruction or lipolisus. And you can detect those in the urine. If you get enough of them, you can actually smell them. They smell kind of fruity. And, you know, if you ever had a friend who was type 1 diabetic and they went through diabetic ketoacidosis, you could smell that sort of fruity aroma. on their breath and you could kind of get an idea that they were going through diabetic ketoacidosis

besides the fact they were sick as hell and probably in the intensive care unit. But anyway, so when you burn, so we're eating a low carbohydrate diet, getting plenty of protein in, so we are no longer burning carbohydrates, but we're not burning muscle tissue. We have to burn fat. and that is the basis of the ketogenic diet for weight loss. Now, it does other things as well. Ketogenic diets have been found to be good for type 2 diabetics because their blood sugars will normalize.

Many times their sensitivity to insulin will increase, and so they will be more glucose-tolerant instead of glucose-in-tolerant. And there are some benefits on parameters regarding metabolic syndrome, which are parameters, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, glucose intolerance, those kinds of things that increase people's risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, the correct ketogenic diet is a balanced diet that has lots of green leafy vegetables and lean animal protein. Now, you can have some fat because fat is not the enemy. Eating fat isn't the enemy.

Carbohydrates are the enemy. There was a study that just came out recently that showed people on a very, very low carbohydrate diet may be at slightly increased risk of all-cause mortality. In other words, people on a moderately low cholesterol diet might live 80 years. I'm just giving you some numbers. I don't know what the actual numbers were in the study because I wasn't planning on talking about this today, but we will on this week's podcast. But let's say it's 80 years. People who are on the very, very lowest end might live 79 years and, you know, other people. who are on high carbohydrate diet might also be around 79 years.

So if I remember correctly, it was about a one-year swing, and I would really want to see the evidence on this and study it to see if it was truly statistically significant and whether I'm going to radically change my lifestyle for a one-year swing that may not even be real. That's a whole other, that's the topic of a whole other show. But green leafy vegetables and lean animal protein will result in that burning of fat over time. And I would do this with a nutritionist or at least read a decent book about it.

Don't just go on the web or YouTube. Read a book, learn about it so that you know what you're doing. And very many people have found that to be very successful. Data on it is pretty good. It's got, you know, at one time the nutritionists were like, oh, they were horrified by a low-carb diet. And over time, the data in the literature has come around to show that the low-carbhydrate diet is actually a pretty healthy diet for you and may lead to some improvement in those parameters that already mentioned. So, anyway, let's finish this guy's talk. a Nutra Bullet.

My question is now, like, I've been using the Nutra Bullet and everything. Love it. Okay, the other thing that he was talking about was the difference between eating vegetables and masticating them in a Nutra Bullet versus juicing. So I'm not a fan of juicing. I bought a juicer and I used it one time and I threw it away. You put a bunch of vegetables in there and all the fiber. and all the good stuff goes into the back. And then you get this sort of watery concoction that it really has very little nutritional value.

And then the juicer's out there screaming at the radio. Sorry, it's true. It just depends on how you're using it. I mean, juice has a place in a healthy diet. And then the damn thing is impossible to clean. That was my issue with it. there's this screen in there and then just trying to get all the junk out of it so that you didn't have dried vegetable matter in it next time you used it

kind of just drove me crazy I've got a little bit of OCD so that made me wacky but so but I like the Nutra Bullet because you get all of the nutrition a hundred percent of the nutrition from whatever thing you put in there so for example if you like eating chia seeds well Well, if you're putting them in your muffins, you're probably actually digesting less than 10% of those. But if you put them in a neutral bullet, you'll get almost 100% of it, if that's what you want. Same thing with spinach, you know, if you just chew up spinach, we're just terrible at chewing things up and you end up, you know, defecating whole stems and leaves and stuff like that that never quite got fully digested. Whereas if you put it in the Nutra Bullet and pulse it effectively,

you're basically able to digest all of the nutrition that's in those leaves because it's all broken up and liquefied. But not juiced, so you're not losing all that good stuff that went to the back of the juicer. So that's what we were talking about. But oftentimes when I'm taking a dump, like my crap is like dark green, which I understand probably isn't a problem. But I was curious, like a lot of times when I eat salads and stuff, too, like, I'll see, like, leaves of, like, spinach and stuff. Yeah, there you go.

I was curious, does that mean, like, my body's not correctly absorbing? No, it's got nothing to do with that. It means you're not correctly chewing up your food. And when our human bodies are not able to digest and break down cellulose. So, and it isn't easy to break down. That's why goats and cows. and cows and other ruminants have to have four stomachs and they have to chew their cudd. So how do they live on grass when we can't?

Well, they chew it up and they swallow it and it goes into this first stomach. And then they regurgitate it back up after it gets some digestive juices and some enzymes in there. And you can see them just sitting there chewing when they haven't eaten anything. Well, they're just borking this stuff up, throwing up into their mouth, so to speak. and chewing it to get even more mechanical trauma to it. Then it has to pass through these four stomachs for it to be fully digested. And even then, my understanding is that cow patties are, you know, still significant fraction of it is undigested plant matter to the, to the point where you can make cow food out of cow turds.

Crazy. But anyway, so yes, it has nothing to do with your, like that there's something wrong with you that you're not able to somehow break down and absorb these leaves that you haven't chewed all the way. It's just purely part of the human condition that we're not able to do that. The vegetables or what? Let me know. Okay. Oh, okay. That's the end.

so yeah and the green okay there's two things that can make your stool green one is if you eat blue food dye and where do you see blue food die not in most of foods that adults eat but there's a lot of blue food dye and stuff that kids eat because god forbid they eat something that doesn't have a bright crazy color and you know the kids don't care it's the adults that are buying it oh you know I are attracted to this for kids, you know, eating green cereal and blue yogurt and all this kind of stuff. It's all food dye. And for whatever reason, blue food dye does not break down in the human stomach or in the GI tract anywhere. And it will pass through into from the stomach into the small intestine where it's mixed with bile. Biles yellow and blue plus yellow equals a very beautiful emerald green and I know this from personal experience because I was feeding my kid when he was a baby feeding him yogurt and it was kids yogurt and it was blue and then I changed his diaper and the turd that was in there I'm telling you it was the most beautiful emerald. deep dark emerald green like emerald green velvet it was absolutely a beautiful color and which was a weird juxtaposition because it was a turd you know it was disgusting but it really was

beautiful in the color and then i realized you know i'm feeding my kid this stuff god knows what it's doing to him probably nothing it's probably totally inert it certainly passed through him unchanged. But there was no reason for it. So I started feeding him, you know, regular things that didn't have to have all those wacky colors. And kids cereal, same thing that there's, oh, and you know what else did it? They used blue food dye in these Halloween cheeseburgers. I can't remember which fast food chain had them. And the bun was black, but they used blue food dye to accomplish that. And there was a lot of it in there. And everybody was, uh, turting out these emerald green logs. So anyway, so blue food diet. But the other way that you can get a green stool is to eat lots of green leafy vegetables, particularly spinach. So if you get over a certain threshold, the body just can't deal with that chlorophyll

and it passes through unmolested and it mixes with the stool and gives you. with the stool and gives you a nice green stool. It's not as pretty as the blue food dye green stools because that is fully ad-mixed. You get the nice blue dye with the yellow bile and it totally mixes in with everything. The green you're getting from eating green-leavy vegetables is basically just undigested vegetable matter

so it's not as well homogenized into the stool so it's not that beautiful green color anyway. All right. Comosta, Dr. Steve. Komustaka. So here had two questions. Okay. One being, is there anything medically tied to when you look at the sun and it helps you sneeze?

Yeah. I had a guy that I knew everything, went to college or private college, and he said there isn't. I believe them only because medically it might have been. But I swear to God, anybody I know and probably yourself, bright things make you sneeze. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's for real. For some people, there are some people who will get a histamine response, so a histamine response, in other words, a release of histamine.

You go, well, what's histamine? I've heard of that. Well, it's because you take antihistamines in allergy season, right? So Benadryl is an antihistamine, Allegra, Zyrtec, those things are all antihistamines. So when you block histamine, you're blocking that response that's causing irritation in the nose, increased mucus production, dilation of the blood vessels that causes nasal congestion, all that stuff. So there are some people that will get histamine response not only to allergens, but to change. changes in environmental factors, like sunlight or cold.

Some people walk out in the cold and they'll start sneezing or they'll get hives. Hives is just a histametic response of the skin. And other people will get solar urticaria, which is they walk outside and all of a sudden they get hives on their skin. Or they may walk outside and get exposed to sunlight. maybe it's heat. It may not be, it would be an interesting experiment. It would be easy to do to determine whether it was sunlight or change in temperature, but they'll start sneezing.

So how would we determine whether it was sunlight or change in temperature? Well, the main component of sunlight, of course, is ultraviolet light. So what you would do is create a room where you could bathe it with ultraviolet A and B and white, but not heat and that's pretty easy to do and see if they start sneezing and then don't and then put them back in regular light and just crank up the heat and see if they start sneezing that's easy to do too with using infrared and that way you can determine whether it's change in temperature or a change in exposure to ultraviolet light that's doing it anyway so yes that's a real thing so

your friends who told you that that was bullshit, they were stupid. So we'll give them one. All right. Let's see here. Hey, I have a weird one for you. This morning I woke up with a hole in the back of my throat. Oh, you did. It looks like there's a puncture, no blood.

And it's not sensitive to anything spicy. it literally just had a ghost pepper and no pain from it from that just feels like a weird like a weird stinging hole back there. A wife took a picture of it and there's definitely a hole back there, a small one, looks like about the diameter of a pencil lid, but don't know what it is. You can get fooled back there. You look back there and you see things and I've seen people say that, oh, you know, I've got some sort of weird exudate back through. I was just light shining off the back of the throat

because it's shinier back there than you think. And, you know, you could have had some microscopic or, you know, micro trauma to that area and it could be duller than the other part and your eye is fooling you into thinking it's a hole. If it's truly a hole, if you can see depth to it, I would get that checked out because that's not normal. Now, what other holes are there in your throat because you're not telling me where it is. So there are people who will look in their mouth because they've never looked in there before and they'll see tonsill or crypts and they've never noticed them before because they never looked. And that can really, you know, scare them and enough to seek medical evaluation. people can have where their tonsils used to be in the little pillars, the

area where the tonsils used to be, if you look at it just right, can look like a hole on the back side of your throat. I've seen people say, well, I've got these giant lymph nodes on the back of my tongue, and those are just the giant papilly, which are normal features in the back of your tongue. And then the other thing you could be seeing there are adenoids, which would be unusual to be able to see them. But if you open your mouth wide enough and if your anatomy is a little weird, you may see the opening of the eustation tube that's surrounded by the adenoids. And adenoids are just basically, you know, immune tissue like the tonsils that surround the eustation tube. The eustation tube being the tube that transmits air pressure from the middle ear.

out to the real world. And it's right behind the, or in the back part of the throat, just where the soft palate is. So most of the time you can't see it. But if you're really able to lift up your small palate, you may be able to see that. That may be all it is. I would just get this looked at.

If you really think you've got a hole in your throat that needs to be looked at and let me know what they find, I'm betting it's the opening of the Eustation, too, but I could be all wet. So, all right. Hey, Dr. Steve, can you explain how a drug gets its name from the Latin term to the common name to the street name? I'm just wondering if there's think tanks that come up with these or if there's any rhyme or reason to what their names. I always wonder to that.

Yep. Absolutely. it is crazy and there are um there's a chemical name which could be well there's really four names there's the chemical composition that's not really a name it's um you know how many carbon atoms there are how many hydrogen atoms there are etc and that could be in the form of like C-12-H-26-O-3-S-2, something like that. And then you can have a drug classification type name. And that's sort of the, oh, gosh, I can't think of the dang name of it, but like, shit.

But words like tofacitinib, that's an epidermal growth factor receptor, and it has NIB at the end. And so all of those things will have that monoclonal antibodies will have MAB at the end of those. Statins will have statin at the end of theirs. And so they've agreed that certain chemical subtypes will have these sort of meta names. And then there's the trade name. So let me think of one. I'm just having a metal block right now. Okay.

How about this one? Okay, so oxycodone is the sort of chemical name for an opioid analgesic. and it goes by the name oxycontin or roxycodone. Oxycontin being the long-acting form and roxycodone being the short-acting form. If you have oxycodone with acetaminophen, that may be called Percocet where you are. So the Percocet being the trade name that they sell it under and oxycodone being the quote-unquote generic name. So there are trade names that these companies market them under, and then there's an underlying set of names that will also indicate the same drug. So lovastatin is, oh, for God's sake, hang on a second.

Atorvastatin is, why am I having this problem, is Lipitor, golly, and I know people who are on it are screaming at their, I wasn't expecting to go this deep into this. So that's, but so a torvastatin is the generic term or a generic name for the drug we call Lipitor. And lovastatin is the generic name for the drug we call mevacore. Okay. So that was one of the first statin drugs. And we call them as a class statin drugs. And yes, it's just a think tank. And the weird thing is now, so there used to be this drug called previsid, and it was Lansoprosol.

And they called it previsid because they were very clever because it prevents acid, right? Well, now the FDA said you cannot name something that any name that talks to the benefits of the drug. So a name like Previs said would no longer be allowed. They all have to be nonsense terms. So that's why you've seen all these weird names. Like there's some drug called Taltz. To me, that's just a goofy name for a drug. And Op Devo, and there's a bunch of other weird ones.

If you notice on these drug commercials, you'll see weirder and weirder names. And that's because the marketing people are trying to come up with names that, number one, haven't been used before. So they're not going to confuse people. because when let me see what was it Prilasek came out it wasn't called Prilasek

it was called Losec this was back in the 80s and Prilasek is a proton pump inhibitor it was the first one that hit the market for acid reflux and it was called Losec

and apparently people got it confused with LASX particularly when doctors wrote it with our crummy handwriting And so people freaked out and they said, well, we got to change it from Losec to Prylasek. So that's where Prylasek got its name. There's another one called Trintelix that I think started out as a different name, Brintillix. And then Dexelot started as Kappa Dex.

And that was too close to something else. So all of these drugs. So the first thing they got to do, come up with a name that nobody's thought of before that isn't close enough. to some other drug. And then it has to be a nonsense word, just nonsense syllables. So, anyway, so yes, it's just all marketing. There are exactly, in every pharmaceutical corporation, there's a think tank that comes up with drug names, and the goofier, the better, apparently.

All right. Hey, Dr. Steve, I have a question for Casey. Oh, well, she's not here. She could recommend a face and hand SPF lotion, like a daily, daily use for use, that we could buy it at, you know, buy on Amazon. We can spend maybe 30 bucks a month for... Okay. Well, you can go to Amazon, or no, I'm sorry, stuff.com as your Amazon portal. And I know my wife would recommend Nivia, the Nivia SPF cream. because all of the supermodels use Nivia cream.

Now, look, some of these supermodels you've seen on TV, they don't seem real bright, but they have genius IQs when it comes to skin care and stuff like that. They absolutely do, and they know the good stuff. And I believe to this day, Nivia is still one of the things that's at the top of their list. And they make a cream with an SPF, so you can look for that. But anyway, yeah.

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I think that's it. Well, I think I can do this one quickly. Hang on. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Matt from Connecticut. My mother has cancer and is being treated with radiation and chemotherapy. No, I'm sorry to hear that, man. She has breast cancer.

Yeah. And she. is not able to live where she was, so I am taking her in with me. And I have my kids every other weekend, and my ex-wife and her infinite wisdom has told me that her family doctor said that people who have gone through radiation cannot be in the same bed or share the same bed as people who have not gone through this because they are, quote, radiating radiation, unquote.

I'm assuming my ex-wife is crazy, but I just want to hear it from you. Give yourself a bill. When my kids are not around, I'm assuming my mom can sweet wherever the fuck she wants to. So let me know if you can. Okay, okay. So, yeah, this is, we need to clear this up.

So people with cancer who are getting chemotherapy and radiation and surgery and stuff have enough problems without this kind of misinformation floating around. Now, there are some forms of nuclear. medicine treatments that render people somewhat radioactive. And those are things like radioactive ablation of the thyroid where you're giving people radioactive iodine that gets incorporated in the thyroid and that kills it and some other things. The kind of radiation that she's getting is external beam radiation.

This is where, and look, light is a light is. a form of radiation, right? So when we think of radiation, we're thinking radioactivity. But in fact, the type of radiation that she's getting, it does not render her radioactive, okay? Radioactivity comes when you have a heavy atomic nucleus that breaks and then emits, or for other reasons, emits, emits a, neutron or an electron or an alpha particle, which is basically a, it's a hydrogen nucleus. So it would be a proton and a nutrient. So I heavy, oh, shit, you know, I was a physicist, but I'm old alpha particle. Let's see.

I'm sure I'm right about this. but now I'm driving myself crazy. So, yeah, it's a helium nucleus. Okay. And they originally regarded that as a ray, but it's really, it's a particle, subatomic particle. So, but that's not what she's getting. She's getting some sort of photon therapy where they just rev up like, you know, and irradiate her bad word when we think about radiation with gamma rays or something like that.

you can get protons as well. There's proton beam therapy, but none of these render the person radioactive in the sense that they are emitting radioactive particles that can be detected with a Geiger counter. Now, you can go borrow a Geiger counter, and you can hold it up to your mother and demonstrate to people that she's no more radioactive than your couch is. And I highly recommend that you do that. and she doesn't need to be deprived of the presence of her grandchildren at a time like this. All right. Now, if she ever has something where she's going to be a danger to other people or increase risk, and a lot of times it would be to kids, they will tell you that.

Now, one thing that you can do, go with her to her radiation oncologist, and they will have a little pamphlet that says people who are getting radiation therapy are not radioactive. They all have stacks of them. And you can go and hand it nicely to your ex-wife. She is incorrect, but it doesn't mean that she's necessarily being malignant. You know, I know how it is. I've got two ex-wives, so I'm, you know, I get it.

But anyway, be nice. Show her, hey, everything's fine with the kids. All right? Very good. Okay, listen, thanks all. Always go to Dr. Scott when he's here, but he's not here. So, F him. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coombe, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Eric Nagle, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, Fess Wattley, and Dandy, Don Wickland, whose early support of this show has never gone on appreciated.

We appreciate the help Paul Ophcharski gives us on the regular Sirius XM show. Speaking of Sirius XM, go to our Sirius XM show. On the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM, Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern on demand, most importantly, and other times at Don Wickland's pleasure. Many thanks. Go to our listeners whose voicemail 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.

Thank you.