Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 334 - Flatus, Take Me Away

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

Dr Steve answers a bunch of medical questions. What else is new?   PLEASE VISIT: 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 to touch it. Yo-ho-ho-ho-ho-he-haired. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got subalibrethripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain now, and blast with the wave, and ultra-moving. It's a scientific and a pulsating shape

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and then we'll get into medical questions, how virtual reality can boost your workout. Now, I've been waiting for this. It's like, yes, I've been waiting for this for quite some time. Let me read this story. This is from medical news today. It says research shows immersing oneself in a virtual environment during a workout helps boost performance and endurance as well as reduce the levels of perceived pain and effort.

Researchers have been looking more and more into the potential. therapeutic applications of virtual reality, and they've used it in cognitive behavioral therapy as well as exposure therapy to reduce post-traumatic stress, and also for confrontational therapy, for people with phobias. Like if you have a fear of heights, you slap on the VR, and then you throw the person up in the air on a pole. The weird thing about it is people who have a fear of heights, they're not afraid of being high up in the air.

Most of the time they can fly. They're afraid of being high up in the air when they are attached to the ground, which is interesting. So you think of it, you know, if you were on a pole and you were 30,000 feet up looking down at the ground the way it looks, it would be terrifying. But you're in an airplane. You look out the window. It's not that big of a deal unless you're just afraid to fly and start thinking of all the catastrophic things that can happen when you're 30,000 feet up. But so, yeah, they can use it for phobia. is or, you know, one little spider becomes a whole bunch of big spiders for people that

have a phobia for spiders. But anyway, so these researchers looked at 80 participants and asked them to perform an isometric bicep curl at 20% of their maximum strength and hold the weight for as long as possible. So isometrics is where the length of the muscle stays the same. So iso, meaning the same, and metric being distance. So we used to have these isometric exercise things. They look like a Z, and you would pull on them,

and the muscles never changed length. They would just change tension. So isometric. So they had them hold this up for as long as possible. And of the participants, 40 were a headset and 40 were asked to do the same lift, but without the headset. And those that were in the VR headset saw a virtual recreation of the same environment that the group was in. The same room decorated the same way, but they were also able to see a visual representation of their arm holding the weight.

So computer, that was part of was computer generated. And they measured their study participants, heart rates, time to exhaustion, and private body consciousness. And what that is is, you know, an awareness of your own body's. sensations and feeling and stuff. So, let's see. Previous studies showed that people with a high private body consciousness tend to perceive more pain during exercise. Well, that must be me.

So the researchers wanted to see whether the psychological factor would have any bearing on the VR effects of exercise. So overall, the use of VR led to a decrease in pain and effort perception. After one minute holding the weight, the pain intensity report, in the VR group was 10% lower than in the control group. That didn't a lot. So that means on a scale of 1 to 10, it was one lower, right? Basically.

If the other people were 10, of course. Also, the VR users lasted two minutes longer. Now, that's interesting, before feeling exhausted and had a 3-beat-per-minute reduction in heart rate. And, you know, the crazy thing is it wasn't that the VR was distracting them. They were showing them the same room that they were in. So this is fascinating because this is my idea. I'm just going to put it out there because I'm never going to do anything with it. What I would like is an exercise bike on a gimbal.

So you'd have a counterweight above you so this thing could rotate along your axis of rotation from side to side. and it would be balanced so that your center of gravity was right in the middle of this thing so you could kind of spin around. You'd strap yourself in and you'd have to be able to have some control over that so there'd be a handset where if you rotate to the right, you'll start spinning a little bit to the right. And it doesn't have to be a lot. You'll notice like these Disney rides, they make you feel like you're spinning upside down and stuff, but you're just moving a matter of inches sometimes. the brain can be easily fooled. There's a Disney variety, well, several of them that use, you know, the sort of 4D effect where the system around you is moving, and then it enhances the visual effect that you're

seeing in front of you, like dropping down on a roller coaster, you know, lifts up the back and you feel like you're flying downward when that's really just in. illusion. Well, anyway, so I would like a setup like that with an exercise bike and then a VR headset, and then you'd have a series of different games. Maybe you're just flying through an asteroid field in the beginning. That would be the tutorial to get you started. And then later on, you know, you're shooting, I don't know. I'm a nerd shooting dragons out of the sky or whatever, or playing Magic the Gathering. But it would require. you to, um, uh, you know, expend effort or you wouldn't get anywhere. And, uh, depending on the

level, you know, it could be more effort or less. Um, they always tried this with these exercise bikes. Well, oh, you're going up a hill, but all it did was just get harder. And you'd see this little sort of two D side scrolling representation of a hill. That always just pissed me off. But this would be cool. And, you know, I know, uh, I'll whitewater raft, uh, uh, to the point of exhaustion because it's fun. You're going somewhere. It's a challenge. There's lots of different movements you have to make.

And by the end of that, I may totally collapse, but I will have exercised the crap out of myself. I will snow ski to the point of exhaustion because it's fun. And so I would do this to the point of exhaustion as well. Now, if they could figure out a way to work out some upper body and some abdominal movements that were required to make the game work, I'm all in favor of it. So the fact that science backs me up is very encouraging to me because, you know, I'm getting old and I need to get off my ass and take my own advice. You know, at the end of every show, I say, get off your ass, get some exercise, and, you know,

quit smoking and check your stupid nuts for lumps. But I have yet to take my own advice on that. And I really need something fun to do that I could do in the privacy of my own home that I will do to the point of exhaustion. That's my point. So anyway, so we'll look forward to seeing more on the virtual reality exercise front. If anybody knows of anything like what I'm talking about, please let me know. And, you know, I looked at that Peloton, and I have a friend that has one, and he says what he does, and look, it's 2018. This is him saying it, not me.

But he goes, the Peloton, if you're not aware, is an exercise bike that has a screen on it, and it's interactive. And you can do live or pre-recorded spin classes. And I looked at it just wasn't interesting enough to me because you're just looking at a bunch of other people on bikes. But he said what they do is a lot of the guys will, you know, join classes where the instructor has, you know, excellent click. So they can stare down her shirt while they're exercising and it helps take some of the some of the time away. I don't know. That's what he's saying. I'm just telling you.

Don't. Anyway, whatever. I wanted to talk about some historical medicine. You know, when we used to have double vasectomy feces on this show, he was a master barber. And he used to talk to us about barbers as physicians back in the day and where the red barber pole came from. was they would hang the blood-soaked gauze on a pole outside. It was so sanitary to dry. And then they would use it again.

And they'd sort of wrap it around this pole. And that became the white and red barber pole. You know, you could tell there was a barber, which at that time was a doctor. If you had depression, which they called melancholia, they could bleed you to try to make you feel better. It just made you lightheaded. But, you know, for some period of time, this stuff was acceptable medical practice. But you could tell where they were because you could see the strips of red blood-soaked gauze hanging outside. Now they have, you know, a graphical representation of that.

And it's just like so many things that we do that are cultural and we don't know where the hell they come from. You know, the Easter bunny comes from the ancient Babylonians because the Babylonians revered the rabbit for its ficundity, meaning its ability to reproduce. And at Easter, women in the Christian faith, often will put on a new dress for Easter. Why do they do that? Because the Babylonians celebrated the festival of Ishtar. and they saw that the trees put on their new coats every spring. It was kind of a fertility thing. You know, at the end of the winter, the spring starts happening.

Things are coming back to life, and they revered that. And so the trees would put on their new coats. And so, you know, a woman in 2018 who practices that tradition that was passed down to her from her mother, is practicing a ritual that, or, you know, part of a ritual that was established 4,000 years ago. And we don't know where it came from. We just know that we did it. So it goes from mother to mother to mother, father to son, father to daughter, whatever. So that's interesting.

But anyway, so I wanted to talk a little bit about some bizarre medical techniques from history. And this, again, is from medical news today. and number one is the tobacco smoke enema. In the late 1700s, tobacco started to arrive on English shores from Americas. And along with it, yeah, it's our fault. Along with it came the idea that when used as an enema, tobacco smoke could cure a wide range of ailments. As the name suggests, that tobacco smoke enema involves literally blowing smoke up your ass. The so-called pipe smoker, London medic, would use the technique on those who fell into the

River Thames and were near drowned. So you fall into the River Thames, which at that time was full of feces and urine because people were taking dumps in the river or taking their chamber pot and just throwing it in the river. Matter of fact, I was at the Tower of London. They used to flood it, you know, had a moat around it. And Queen Victoria came to visit at one time. and she was so disgusted by the smell that she had it drained. People who are English history buffs will know this story better than I do. But anyway, it had something to do with Queen Victoria smelling shit.

Anyway. So the Royal Human Society left resuscitation kits, including the equipment necessary to carry out a tobacco enema, at certain points along the river. And one particularly graphic description from 1746 is described in a paper published in The Lancet, a man's wife was pulled from the water, apparently dead, it says. Amid much conflicting advice,

a passing sailor proffered his pipe and instructed the husband to insert the stem into his wife's rectum, cover the bowl with a piece of perforated paper, and blow hard. Miraculously, the woman revived. now see that's all it takes and we do all this CPR and shocking people and pushing drugs and stuff we should just be sticking a pipe up their ass i would wager to say she was not actually dead back now back then the definition of death was ceasing respirations so we had that definition of death for some time where if you stop breathing you were dead then uh the

the ventilator was invented where you can shove a tube down somebody and breathe for them if they're not breathing. And so we had to change our definition of death. And so for a while it was if your heart stopped and then you were dead. And then we developed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the advanced cardiac life support protocol with chest compressions and cardioversion and intubation. life support and medications. And then we really couldn't say, well, if your heart stops, you're dead. So now it is cessation of brain function. Now, if the singularity happens and we're able to upload our consciousness to machines,

then the whole concept of death will change radically. And, you know, there may be the demise of the body, but the consciousness will persist. So that's, if you're interested in that at all, just Google Ray Kurzweil, because he's the man on that. Word of the benefits quickly spread. People were soon using tobacco smoke enemas to treat everything from headaches and abdominal cramps. Now, that might actually work. There are nicotine receptors in the bowel. So they were also treating typhoid and chloride.

I'd say that probably didn't work so well. As a matter of fact, when you're shooting. liquid feces out of your rectum and someone's sticking a pipe in there and their mouth is very close to it and blowing, I suspect that they may be at some risk of being exposed to the disease themselves. You can figure out how that might happen. Yeah, it says if a practitioner were to accidentally breathe in rather than blow out, it's like, that's kind of basic. If you're going to do a tobacco smoke enema up somebody's ass, it's like Chauncey, breathe out, don't breathe in.

Perhaps doing a bout of tobacco-induced coughing, cholera flagellets could pass into their lungs and infect them fatally. Thankfully, the introduction of a bellows made the job slightly less hazardous. So there you go. Let's see here. how about cutting teeth in the old days infant mortality was sky high much of the time the reason for death was completely unknown children frequently died at six months to two years of age which coincidentally was around the time their first teeth were coming through so the medical minds of the day thought this might not be simple coincidence so they concluded the process of teething was also the cause of infant death and in england and wales in eighteen thirty nine over five thousand deaths were attributed to teething. And even by 1910, the figure was still

1600. So they combat the evil teething. Unfortunately, for some of those children involved, they developed a wide variety of interventions, including bleeding, blistering, and placing leeches on the gums. In some cases,

they even burned the back of the baby's head. Why? Burned the back of the baby's head during the 16th century French surgeon Ambrose Parre introduced gum lansing

and this became the preferred method a paper again published in the lance that explains how popular Lansing baby's gums became John Hunter would lance a baby's gums up to ten times and John Marion Sims

1313 to 1883 treated his first patient a baby of 18 months old as soon as I saw some swelling of the gums. I at once took out my lancet and cut the gums down to the teeth. Oh, come on. The author continues, The physician Marshall Hall, 1790 to 1857, wrote that he would rather lance a child's gums

a hundred and ninety-nine times unnecessarily than omit at once, if necessary. and he instructed his students to do it before, during, and after the teeth appeared, sometimes twice a day, these poor kids. Oh, my God. It's unknown how many children died from infections that they developed following such procedures, because you know they were very sterile procedures back then. It didn't disappear for a surprisingly long time, even as late as 1938, a dentistry textbook offered instructions for gum lancing, a teething child. Yeah, so the kid is, gums are hurting because teeth are coming through, and now you're going to take a knife and cut their gums and make them worse. So there you go. All right.

Let's do another one, improving your smile. Today, urine has few everyday uses, which is a shame considering its wide availability. Yeah, it would be great if it was worth something. I used to write a graffiti on the wall of the bathrooms at the university I went to, and I would write, when shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. And then I realized that really isn't true. It's really, if shit becomes valuable, those without assholes will be poor. Thank you.

all right okay thank you thank you thank you stop yeah urine was such a popular commodity back in the day particularly in roman times that people collected it from public urinals there was even a tax to pay for those who profited from the sale of this golden liquid many of urine's uses were non-medical such as the production of gunpowder, or to soften leather. I didn't realize the ancient Romans had gunpowder. I don't think they did. One less savory use for urine, however, was as a tooth whitener. The ammonia allegedly helps clear teeth of their stains.

Probably didn't do much for morning breath. It's funny. Apparently leaving the urine to fester for some time gives the urea time to convert into ammonia, which is an antibacterial and bleaching agent. used in household cleaning products. It was not only the ancient Romans who use this teeth whitening method. Throughout history, it's been used by a number of people. And even today, some are tempted to give it a try.

I remember the first weird medicine we had, a guy called in and he would pee on his feet to try to treat his toe fungus. And if you remember, back in the opium anthony days, we brought a double vasectomy feces and P.A. John, who is a well-controlled diabetic. and Pat from Munaki, who at that time was a poorly controlled diabetic, and then Big A, who's just, you know, it's Big A. We had them piss in little jars, and then double vasectomy turd had to taste each one to see which one of them, if he could tell which one was diabetic. And I really want to tell him that there's no history behind that. We just made him do it because it was funny. But in fact, back in the day, hundreds of years ago and going back thousands of years, physicians actually tasted urine in their patients that had what we call polyurea or increased urine output.

So the word diabetes comes from the Greek for siphon. And melitus, diabetes melitus, or what we call it, diabetes meletus, means that it was siphoning, you know, siphon-type urine. The guy's pissing like a racehorse, and it tastes sweet because melitus means of honey. And then there are other people who have a brain tumor or some other problem where they're peeing out free water. And when you taste that, it tastes insipid. I mean, there's no flavor to it. No delightful sweetness that you would get with diabetic urine. So they called it diabetes insipidus.

And we now would call that diabetes insipidus. So very interesting. And so there are, thank God, they develop test strips. So I never had to taste anybody's urine. but we made double vasectomy ton and it was a good radio bed. Have you heard of trepination? Boy, this is a rough one.

Trapanning is the process of boring a hole into somebody's skull, and it sounds just as brutal as it is. And it wasn't always boring like with a drill. Sometimes they would use a hatchet and just, you know, hit a glancing blow to knock a hole in their skull. And the crazy thing is, there are skulls that you find in burial sites where they did this trepination, and you can see that the bone was healing.

So they must have lived for months, if not years, with a big hole in their skull. So it says 5 to 10% of all Neolithic skulls that scientists have so far dug up bear the unmistakable marks of Trapanning. And they aren't always able to tell the surgery was carried out before or after death, but some patients were certainly alive. And that leads to the story that I was just telling you where you can see these where there's definite healing of, you know, the hole was maybe three inches across and now it's only an inch across. and you can see remodeled and healed bone. It's crazy. It says, though mostly carried out on adult male, scientists have also found trapanning holes in the skulls of women and children.

During Neolithic times, the practice was widespread from a period when long-distance travel and the exchange of ideas was limited, experts of unearthed skulls bearing the marks of Trapanning in Europe, Siberia, China, and the Americas. It was all the rage. didn't die out with the Stone Age it carried on through the classical period and even as far as the Renaissance and you know

specialists will use craniotomies now to treat hematomas you know where blood builds up between the skull and the brain and we'll do what I guess you could define as trepination but we'll call it craniotomy in other words putting a hole in the cranium

and or actually cutting the cranium. so otomy would mean cutting craniostomy would be leaving a hole there. But anyway, did you know heroin used to be cough medicine? Bayer, German company Bayer marketed a particularly potent ingredient, which was heroin. The inclusion of this highly addictive substance was meant to replace opium, which would become a popular drug of abuse. So this was sort of the way things went back then was so we had opium and then that became addictive. So let's try morphine is supposed to be non-addictive opium.

And then heroin was supposed to be non-addictive morphine. And then now we have, you know, Tramidol, which was supposed to be non-addictive pain medication that still hits the opioid receptors. And it just, it's not technically an opioid because it's not derived from, you know, the opium molecule or the, yeah, opium molecule. But it's still habit forming. I've heard of lots of patients who have a significant withdrawal syndrome when they try to get off of that stuff. So, you know, the question is, did heroin work any better than modern over-the-counter cough suppressants? Because, you know, we have narcotics and cough syrups now. You can get robitussin A.C.

That is a guifenicin syrup. Gwifenicin is an expectorant, which basically irritates the stomach, stimulates this nerve called the vagus nerve, which increases fluid secretion into the lungs, leases the hypothesis, causing your cough to be more productive, which is good if you're trying to get stuff out of there. And then they'll put a little codeine in it just to suppress the cough.

So you're only coughing when you absolutely need to. You can get hydrocodone in cough syrup. There's all kinds of stuff that you can do. So it was heroin any better than any of those? And apparently it was not. As far as they know, it didn't do any better or any worse than any of our current cough syrup. So anyway, you know, yeah, before we become too content with today's comparative medical wisdom, when we look back at today's medical practices 100 years from now,

which parts of it are we going to say we're barbaric? I can tell you what they'll be. It will be chemo and radiation. We will look back at this age and we will say that was barbaric to try to kill human living cells inside the human living body with basically poison or radiation. Now, for right now, it's what we got. But we are advancing, and if you're interested in non-seudoscience cancer cures that are immune-mediated, go to my website at Dr.steve.com and click on the link that says non-sudoscience cancer cures. This stuff, Catruda, I don't know if you've seen the ads for it, it's fascinating.

What it does, it's a monoclonal antibody. So that means it's an immune molecule that targets a specific, uh, protein, um, uh, site. And the one that it goes after is a site that tumors use to protect themselves from the, uh, immune system. So, you know, it's just like they've got, uh, blinkers on, say, just pass on by, pass on by. And then when the, uh, when this thing attacks it, all of a sudden, the lymphocytes, uh, which are, uh, immune cells that will kill tumor cells if they're pointed in the right direction. they will all of a sudden go, hey, what the hell are you doing here?

It's almost like the scales fall from their eyes, and they see these tumor cells exposed, and they'll attack them. So it's pretty cool stuff. Where we will have real generalizable cancer treatments will be not in these sort of indirect ways, but in a more direct way where you will expose your own white blood cells to your own tumor in a way that it can now recognize. recognize that tumor as being foreign. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. But when you do that, those immune cells will go back in and kill every tumor cell and mop up every molecule in a very efficient way. And for the most part, leave everything else alone.

Now, the protein that's on that tumor cell is close to, like, say, your thigh, something, a protein that's expressed on your thyroid, they may attack your thyroid, too. That's the essence of an autoimmune disorder. But triggered properly, it will just kill the tumor cells. They did this. I have this article on my website. Dr. Steve.com click non-sudoscience cancer cures, where they have a patient with multiple myeloma, which is a B-cell discreation.

Don't worry about that. But it's basically multiple tumors in the bones. and they gave this person six million doses of measles vaccine. Now, they had genetically modified the measles vaccine, but only to allow it to take on radioactive, I think it was iodine. Radioactive iodine. It was either radioactive iodine or radioactive potassium. I can't remember which.

But anyway, if it was, let's just say it was radioactive iodine. And so these multiple myeloma cells were all infected by this measles vaccine. Now, the person felt crappy. You give somebody six million doses of measles vaccine, which is a live virus. They're going to feel like crap for a day or two. But these viruses have infected the multiple myeloma cells. And the reason that they modified them so that they would hold on to this radioactive atom was so that they could image them. And so they put them in front of the scanner and saw that all the multiple myeloma tumors were infected with this measles virus. And then what does the body do when a cell is infected with the measles virus? It goes in and kills it. And in that, at least that person

was cured of multiple myeloma, which is felt to be an incurable disorder that if you have it long enough can become a terminal illness. So that was really exciting. So very interested in this stuff. If you know somebody that has cancer that wants to get in on a clinical trial, if they're healthy enough to do it, just go to clinical trials.gov and put in the specific cancer and see what kind of trials are out there. And the things you're looking for, if you're interested in these virus studies, are like viral oncolitic studies or immune. Just you can Google the, or sorry, search the keyword immune, and you might be able to get into one of those or your friend or loved one might be able to. So anyway, all right, let's take a couple of questions. We've got a few minutes left.

Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. There could not be better advice given. Yeah, I'm just listening to the bit about the monks praying over. the water droplets and uh first off i don't know what the hell he's talking about but let it was on a retreat once uh instead of going to like a rehab anyway uh the uh was kind of a choice is retreat but they were showing us stuff about the power of the mind and they did one with uh people and emotions and freezing of snowflakes and if people were angry the snowflakes

looked angry. If they were happy, the snowflakes looked happy, or the ice pickles, or how they formed. I don't, I haven't ever researched it further, but I'm sure you can find it on the internet, but it was interesting to see that the snowflakes looked like the mood that the

person was trying to project at them. Okay. When they, when they froze. The water froze into the flake. So this is a trick that you use to motivate. people.

And it has a psychological aspect to it. So how would we study this? First off, how does a snowflake look angry or happy? Well, that's going to be in the eye of the beholder. But you could test it. And this is how you do it. You get someone who's angry and you freeze these water droplets so that they become snowflakes.

And then you show it to somebody else. Okay, you have to pass it to somebody who doesn't know if the person was angry or happy. Okay, so this is one of your researchers, and then they have to take it to the next person who is a research participant, and their only job is to look at snowflakes and say, do they look happy or mad? And if there is a statistical correlation that is greater than chance, then you can say maybe there's an effect, and then you've got to investigate it. Because what in the hell a mechanism could you propose that would say that the mind is able to affect the way a snowflake melts so that it – or snowflake freezes so that it looks happy. I just have to know what that would be. So it's like a double-blind study. The Amazing Randy does these things with these fake psychics all the time, and this is the way to do it.

You have two rooms and a researcher in both rooms and then a researcher that goes between the two. And you get the angry person, get people to come in in a random. I don't even know how you get somebody that's angry. Or you could say, you know, get angry about something and watch these snowflakes form and make them be angry. And then take pictures of them or however you're going to preserve them. you then would hand it to the runner between the rooms and there's ways you can keep them from seeing your bias. You know, you could pass it through a hole in a curtain or there's all kinds of things that you could do. And then they take it to the next room and say, look at this snowflake.

Does it look – it's so ridiculous. Does it look happy or does it look mad? And again, at the end of the study, you would decode these. You would have to correlate, you know, make sure that you're keeping track of the result on the right-sided room with the attempt on the left-sided room, right? And so that you can match them up. So a 100% correlation would be every time the person was. mad. The person in the other room looked at the picture and said that snowflake looks mad.

And if it was happy, then they said it was happy. So anything. And then, of course, perfect 50-50 isn't what we're really expecting, is it? We would expect it to approach 50-50 over time. if the answer is purely by chance and if there's no bias been introduced through this process. But it's not going to be exactly 50-50. It might be 49-51, and you have to calculate what the error of measurement is so that you can say plus or minus. As long as that plus or minus intersects with 50-50, then you can end it.

Or there's no statistical significance between the two. That's really what I'm trying to say. Then you can say it's just chance and that it's a psychological effect when people stare at a snowflake and they're mad and then they look at the snowflake, they perceive it as being mad, or whatever a mad snowflake still. I don't know what it looks like. Now, we would need a P value. So you may see these studies and it'll say P less than 0.05. What that means is that there's only a five and a hundred chance that this could be that this positive effect occurred because of random chance. And that's an acceptable P value.

So five and 100 be one in 20. So it's only 19 times you do this and you'll get a positive effect because it's a true positive effect. And then one time it might be chance. So we want there to be compelling evidence, and you have to do the statistics right, which means you're going to have to have a large sample size. But you could do this study. I would love to do it. I mean, if somebody wants to fund the study, we'll do it. It wouldn't be that, that expensive to do.

I'd have to figure out, I don't know how they were doing the snowflakes, but anyway. But, see, we can take a bullshit study like that or a story like that. and teach science from it. So I think that's a worthy thing. All right. Hello there, Dr. Stairs. Phil here. I have a question.

How is it that a tattoo is put on your body and it goes to layers of skin? And my question is we always regenerate skin, slough, floss, so how does it stay in? Now, I'm assuming it must be through a certain level of skin. it stays where skin would never flip off, but doesn't skin like resurface and go up one, you know, shed, go up one, or if it's just not, it's just, that's why it stays because the upper layer always goes off. I'm assuming that's it. You've got to answer my own question, but let me know that, Dr. Steve.

Thanks. And good job. Give yourself a bill. Yeah. So if you only put ink in the epidermis, which is the very top layer of skin, not only would it look bad because those cells really are very thin and they're just mostly made up of keratin, which is sort of the body's version of plastic, your hair, and nails are made up of keratin as well. Then, yeah, it would just sluff off.

So when you do a henna tattoo or you do a fake tattoo, you know, they just kind of slough off eventually. A real tattoo goes down deeper than that into the layers that are more permanent. So skin – sorry, I keep getting – getting interrupted, sorry. Your old pal, Dr. Steve, is on call 24-7. Both of these were non-urgent calls, so I'm going to blow them off for now. Skin cells, there's a basal membrane – because, you know, if it all just slept off, it seems like our skin would just fall off, right? Then why doesn't it do that? Well, there is a basement membrane that is very elastic for most of the skin.

And there are basal skin cells that are round and have small, you know, normal looking nuclei. And they look just like regular cells. If I showed you those, you would look like a classic depiction of a cell. And these are attached pretty firmly to the, the bottom membrane, and that's why your skin will move a little bit and be a little elastic, but you can't just rotate your skin off of your arm. And as time goes on, those cells, and their program to do this, will become more and more superficial. And as they become more and more superficial, they'll let go of that basement membrane,

and they'll become flat and with a little tiny dead nucleus inside. And those are called squamous cells at that point. and they will eventually slough off and fly out into the atmosphere and get all over everything. The interesting thing is, is what happens if you have a piece of skin that can't sluff off? What would happen then? Well, that is the case of a sebaceous cyst. You may have seen people that have these cysts on their skin, and they'll almost always have a little hole in them. that's the site of the original injury, and they may have poked a hole in their arm from a pen or a fast-moving grain of sand at the beach, who knows, and it drives living skin cells under the skin.

So now those cells, when they mature, they've got no place to slough off. So if they don't have any place to slough off, what are they going to do? They're just going to collect under the skin, and they'll eventually form a cell. cyst. And the inside of that cyst will have this sort of mangled cottage cheese stuff that stinks to high heaven. It's really pretty nasty. And my wife had some protein shampoo that smelled just like the inside of a sebaceous cyst.

If I can find it, I'll tell you all about it so that you can go to like a beauty salon and you can smell it and get a whiff of what sebaceous cyst smells like. Rich Voss used to have one behind his ear, and that's what he would rub behind his ear and then stick his finger under people's noses and make Bobby Kelly puke. So there will be a cyst wall, and then there will be this nasty stuff in the middle. Now, when the pressure of the cyst growing is exactly equaled by the pressure of the skin around it, I'm trying to hold it in, it'll stop growing. So there's a terminal size that it can get.

This will be violated if these things get infected. If one or two bacteria and get there, that dead skin that's in there is moist and it's proteinaceous and bacteria love it. And all of a sudden that cyst, the internal pressure will increase tenfold. And those cysts will grow tenfold, which is why if you've got one, it's usually a good idea to just have it removed while you can do it. because when it gets infected, now it becomes an urgent thing. And you have things like happened to your doctor like what happened to me when I opened one of those up once. And it was under such high pressure. It just sprayed into my face and covered my glasses.

And what do you do when something surprises you like that? You open your mouth in shock and exclaim, oh, my God. and then a bunch of infected sebaceous stuff goes inside your mouth. And you can't stop because you can't just go and puke while your patient is lying on the table. So kids, don't let this happen to you. If you have a big sebaceous cyst somewhere on your body, just have it removed before something like that happens to it. All right.

And I have a question, but someone emailed me and said to call into the show, I think they put one o'clock Instead of 10 o'clock I don't worry about it Anyways Instead of going the edge That Jim Norton does Because you might blow a load

Is get a wreck Usually during a shower After a shower And put a wet towel Or a I use a beach towel Because I have a big cock So you do

Pinch pushups And it's kind of like A keggle exercise okay so he's draping a beach towel over his erect penis and then doing lift like chin-ups with it once you build up that muscle or curls penis curls you can actually turn off you from a you know blowing a load so but yeah that's that's basically what I do I last for hours on end only because I can turn off. It's very hard to turn it back on sometimes, but...

This guy's just bragging, but that might work. That is one way to do kegill exercises. No question about that. I mean, I don't know how many reps you have to do. I'm doing kegles right now just because I'm thinking about it, but I do not have an erect penis and I don't have any, you know, a weight hanging off of it. If any of you all try this, use a washcloth first.

Don't use a heavy weight. Don't put too much tension on your erect schlong. Let me know if you have any positive effects from that. That would be very interesting. Not advocating that you do it. I'm just saying if you do decide to do it because this guy said it. Then let me know. Thanks always go to Dr. Scott.

When he's here, we can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington and Fess Watley, who's early support of the show. has never gone unappreciated. 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 Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise.

We'll see you at one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thank you.