Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 343 - Lumpy Balzac

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

Scrotal calcifications, bioenergy fields (such as they are), the carnivore diet (such as it is), irritable bowel syndrome, and more! PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com premium.doctorsteve.com (offer code FLUID) 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. Yeah, me garreted. 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 blast with the wharfing.

wave, 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 done, then I'll have to go insane. I want a 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 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 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 you can't find an

answer anywhere else give us a call 347-7664323 that's 347 or follow us on twitter at weird medicine or at lady diagnosis or at d r scott wm visit our website at dr steve dot com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy, 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 it over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, or whatever. So a couple of things. One thing I want to talk about, um, the intro. You know, I was thinking, you know, for the serious XM show, it makes sense for us to have a standard intro. For the podcast, maybe not so much.

Because I notice when I've got, like if I listen to DC on screen, I skip over the, you know, I've heard their intro so many times I just skip over. And I wonder if people are doing that with ours too. So listen, if you're listening to this, just drop me an email at weird medicine at riotcast.com or you can do, I don't know. what other email oh you know what you can just go to dr steve.com and click contact drop me a note would you rather just have a shorter intro we could still use the same music but i'll just cut in way way way sooner but i love that sure and sleeve's music so much and you know have you watched that show patriot yet so i got to tell we just finished the second season that's the best

fucking show i've seen a long time well you know the guy that wrote our theme song writes that show i know did you know that yes yeah okay because we talked about it uh one Okay, okay. It's incredible. Yeah. And that's what I was going to. Second season was the best by far. Oh, my God.

When he's singing, people who haven't watched it don't know what the hell we're talking about. But when he's singing those songs telling you exactly what he's getting ready to do, I guess I'm going to have to kill this guy. And, you know, it was so great. I met John in the Bar the 90s and he was a nice dude. I hated to have to kill him. But I did. I hope his wife doesn't care. That is such a brilliant show.

And I figured those songs. as they got weirder and weirder were probably more often than not written by Sherwin's sleeves, aka Sean Hurley. And if you want to see one of the other funniest things he's ever done, in my opinion, is go on Minecraft or go on YouTube and watch Sherwin's Leaves plays Minecraft. Let me see if I can find it real quick. If you've ever played Minecraft and if you haven't, get your kids who have, have um because they will die laughing yeah okay it's called let's play

Minecraft with sherwin's slaves let's see here if I can um so it starts off with him in this hole select world yeah select world new world and all it says is new world He's all the same. See. I don't know at any of this. So we'll just... Okay, so he immediately gets killed. And there are slimes.

And they're jumping at him and he thinks they're his friends. What are these things? Get away from me. And he died again. What is this game? Okay, I'll let you watch it yourself. It's more visual. Well, you need the combination of visuals and this sort of clueless old man

trying to play Minecraft because it is the most mindless game anyway, you know? I was just wondering, though, if I would love to get the words, lyrics to that, those songs that he does. just because you know the second season. I'd like to have an album of those songs. They're great songs. Well, you know, and the cool thing was the second season they started playing the, they started putting the words subtitling. Okay. To a lot of those songs, which is kind of fun. I always watch TV with the subtitles on anyway.

It was, man, that was great. We started doing that with Sons of Anarchy when they went to Ireland. We couldn't understand that they were whispering and they were speaking with these heavy Irish accents. We can't understand anything you're saying. So we started watching TV with the subtitles on. I love we were

like a couple of old folks in the nursing home, and we always watch stuff with the subtitles on. That's a good idea. Yeah. So people should check it out. But anyway, yeah, check out Patriot on Netflix. No, no, no, no, no. It's Amazon Prime, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Amazon Prime.

You're right. Check it out. And if you're any fan of Sherwin's sleeves at all, watch for his name in the credits, Steve Conrad writes the, I mean, he's the, I mean, he's the, you know, he's the, showrunner, hardest working dude in the business. He wrote the shows with the help of our buddy and directed all of the episodes. And they were all over the place. They were in Paris and all, you know, just, it's an amazing show and it's an amazing creation. Because even Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad, everybody else directed those. He'd direct the first and last episodes, but other

people would direct the ones in between a lot of times. But he directed every single thing. So it's his creation from the beginning to end. It's pretty cool. Good stuff. Even Brian Coppulman can't claim that. Who's that? He's the guy

that did Rounders and he is the showrunner, producer, writer for billions on Showtime. It's a great show. And he's Jenny Hutz's brother. So that's how I kind of know him.

But anyway. All right. Anyway. All right. Oh, let's talk about this for a second. Noom. Not a sponsor of the show. Right.

I'm a huge fan. My Noom app has allowed me to lose 14 pounds so far, and I'm on my way to losing 28, so I'm halfway into my goal. And it's, I'm not going to say it's been effortless, but it has been a lot easier than I thought, and the thing I like about this is they're cool with whatever you want to do. I mean, if you want to do paleo, you can do it. You could just

do it the Nume way. You can do a vegan diet. You can do whatever. Their thing is, it's not about the diet. This is not a diet. This is a way of changing your relationship with food through psychology. Oh, wow. Okay. So what's the biggest difference

between that NUM and anything else you've ever tried? That it's really based psychology it's like you know if you because my wife when before she did it all the things that she said were all things that they covered in different segments of the newm thing so you have an app and every day there are articles that you read and little quizzes that you take and then you get on your group you have a group and then you like you take your assignment and you put it on It takes you 10 minutes a day.

It's no big deal. But the articles will talk about thought distortions, like, I can't do this, or I always fail, or, you know, I can never eat that food, things like that. They say, that's all, those are all thought distortions. We need to get rid of those and start changing the habits. And habits take certain number of weeks. Sure they do. So this, you know, it's $10 less than Weight Watchers, and I think you get more out. of it. Plus, instead of dealing with points, they just deal with calories. And that's a lot

easier. I went to Cheddar's today, and I was looking at their salads, and they just had them posted in calories. Well, I know what my caloric requirement is for the day, and hell, some of their salads would have put me over the edge. I mean, well, they've got Caesar salads with pasta in them and this and that and all kinds of stuff that run the caloric value up. And And, you know, so it was really helpful to me, whereas if I had been on Weight Watchers, no flies on Weight Watchers, it's very effective. Sure, very effective, yeah. One of the only system, commercial systems out there that's been scientifically validated to be effective. But I believe Noom will be another one.

They, you know, I wouldn't have known how many points any of those things were. Right. How many calories are you taking into, on a day list? Well, my goal is $1,400. Okay. So I was probably eating 2,300 before, and I usually come in under that, you know, because, you know, I'd say, I want to, I'm really taking it seriously. And then what I would do, this is the, this is what an idiot I am. And I would go, like if I went to Cheddar, they have those Wisconsin cheese bites.

I'd eat the whole thing. That's like 1,800 calories right there. And then I would eat a meal. Sure. Or, and I was compulsively eating, they call it fog eating, is one of the things where I would just eat and just be, not be aware that I was doing it. Right. And so I am now acutely aware of what I'm putting in my mouth. Have you not been around me enough all these years to know mindful eating?

No, I know. Well, I am mindful, but I wasn't, like, if I was cooking, I'd be distracted cooking, and then I would just be shoving a bag of chips in my fat face. Sheveling is the word. And then wondering why I was fatter and I've ever been in my life and just shoveling shit in. Halloween, well, I'll just eat four. Well, then I go back and, well, I'll just, you know, I was shit. Let me just take a whole handful and that'll be all I'll eat. That'd be another five.

By the time I was done, I would have eaten a whole bag. Okay. Now, one of the incentives on this is my group, not my group leader. Well, my group leader is too, but I don't correspond with her as much. but my individual counselor, her picture is like this crazy hot one, right? And it's not like I think I've got a shot with her or anything, but I don't want to disappoint her by telling her that I ate a whole bag of Snickers, you know? So I just don't do it.

Since I started this because of the accountability, I haven't done anything. Wow. So I'm trying to get them to be sponsors of this show because it's something I can actually believe in. Right on. 14 pounds. That's a lot for you. Yeah. Yeah, I feel good.

I mean, people have noticed, and I'm going for another 14. I want to get down to my ideal body weight, which is 155. Seems low for you. No, it's not. I got a lot of shit you can't see. That's cool. And you'll add an inch to your penis. That's right.

Add a penis of inch length, an inch of penis length through Dr. Steve's formula, which says you gain one inch of penis for, every 35 pounds of weight that you lose. So I'm looking forward to that. I might even just shave it all down so you can see it in all its glory. Not you, but when I say you, I'm talking, you know, using that as a neutral pronoun. But anyway, all right, you ready to answer some questions? Let's do it, Doug Steve.

Hey there. I was wondering what you guys would think of, because you're talking about things that can be measured in science. And I'm wondering, you know, like about energy fields, what would you come up? with, like, you know, things like the idea and feeling of love or inspiration or something on those lines. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So bioenergy fields and love fields and inspiration, how do we measure these things? So what we were talking about is people who perform some sort of, quote, unquote, alternative modality. Let's say therapeutic touch. That's a good example. So therapeutic touch is a misnomer because you don't actually touch the people. You wave your hands over them and they supposedly feel better. And if you talk to the practitioners that do this, they'll say that they're modifying, some of them will.

They're modifying the patient's bioenergy fields. And I just challenged people. Let's measure those fields because you can. because they don't exist. And there are field, we have a lot of field equations in physics that describe the model that we use to explain things like electrons and gravity or, you know, the Higgs boson, those kinds of things. It's not the particle that's interesting.

It's the field. Because when you see an electron, it's actually a perturbation of the electromagnet. magnetic field that permeates all of existence. And when we see the Higgs boson, what we're really doing is perturbing the Higgs field that imparts mass to small particles. And we're just seeing this perturbation of that field, and so we can see it expressed in our universe as a particle. Now, one thing that's kind of interesting, if you want to take a little bit of a little,

a quick diversion and talk about the Higgs field. People say, well, the proton and the neutron, they get their mass from the Higgs field. Actually, it's not 100% true. The gluons, sorry, the quarks that are inside the proton and the neutron because they are not fundamental particles. They are particles made up of three quarks. And these quarks are interesting because they have fractional charge. So you may have a two-third plus a two-third and then a negative one-third charge. So four-thirds minus one is three-thirds, so that will give you a plus one charge.

And you can also do combinations of these where you end up with a neutral particle that has no charge at all. So, and so the Higgs boson, or the Higgs field will impart mass to those particles, but they're tiny. It's tiny mass. The majority of the mass of the proton and the neutron comes from relativistic mass, and it's because the strong force is so strong that the binding energy is so high. to keep these particles to get to the quarks together and then to bind those the proton to other neutrons and other protons and stuff when they should be repelling each other at least as far as the protons are concerned all of that energy that's caused to hold these particles together is actually what imparts the vast majority of the mass of the proton and the neutron through and we can judge that mass energy equivalence through Einstein's E equals MC squared. And as long as the particle is at rest, that will apply. If it's moving, then you have to add other factors, you know, to that equation.

But when it's at rest, the, oh gosh, the momentum part of that equation goes to zero, because if it's at rest, there's no momentum. And then E equals MC squared falls out. So anyway, just fascinating. But so we have these fields and we know they exist. You can't just go in and go, well, let me measure that, the permeating electromagnetic field, not easily anyway. So we can certainly measure electromagnetic fields at waves very easily. Matter of fact, you're doing that right now if you're listening to me on the radio.

radio because radio waves consist of electromagnetic waves, and they're at right angles to each other. And you may be aware of this or you may not. If you move an electrical field, you will make a magnetic field. If you move a magnetic field, you'll make an electrical field. And so as the magnetic field increases, right, then you'll get an increase in the electromagnetic field, and these things will be out of phase with each other, and then as the one increases, the other one will increase, and then they'll decrease, and so as the electrical field increases, then the magnetic field will decrease, and then vice versa, and they'll just propagate

to infinity, slightly out of phase with each other, but in a very massive. mathematically describable way. So anyway, and that was Maxwell's genius. You know, of all the geniuses of the world, James Clerk Maxwell ranks up there. And, you know, his equations look so simple on the surface, but they were very subtle at the time. And he just through pure mathematics figured out that light must be an electromagnetic wave because he calculated that his electro-max, he, Maxwell did the first grand unification where he unified electricity with magnetism.

They knew they were related. They just didn't know how. And he unified them to a theory of electromagnetism. And when he did that, he saw that there would be this wave that would propagate through space. at the speed of light. It just worked out. It was exactly the speed of light. So he said light must be an electromagnetic wave.

And of course, since then, we've learned some more interesting things that actually light can also, if you do the test right, can appear as a particle called the photon. and that has both wave and particle-like properties. And it just depends on what experiment you set up, whether you measure them as wave your particles. Anyway, so where the hell was I? See, this is what I need Dr. Scott here to get me reoriented to what I was talking about. Oh, bioenergy fields. So not aware of any bioenergy fields, never been measured.

No physicist can develop a machine to measure these things. There are people that say, oh, we have, yes, oh, no, but we do. We have things that will measure bioenergy fields, and they're just put volt meters and stuff. So, yeah, we have voltages in our body. Our heart works on an electrical principle that was developed long before James Clerk Maxwell Well, figured out what electromagnetism was. And so there is electricity in our nerve cells and our muscles. All of these things work by moving charged ions from one place to the other, and we would detect that as electricity.

But as far as an intrinsic bioenergy field, no such thing. That's why we can't measure it. That's why when people say they're modifying your bioenergy field, you know that they're just making it up. Now, I do not disagree that things like therapeutic touch make people feel better. And people don't like, for whatever reason, it's become a pejorative term, their modality, whatever it is that their favorite thing is where they're practicing medicine without having to go to medical school or osteopathic school. They don't like it when we say it's a placebo effect. That's not a pejorative term. The placebo effect is exceedingly powerful, so powerful that we must subtract it from every study on any drug or anything that we do has to be taken into account.

So the placebo effect is very powerful. I have postulated in the national medical literature that we stop calling it the placebo effect if people don't like that. and call it the cryptogenic therapeutic effect, which means it's therapeutic, we just don't know how. By the way, there are placebo negative effects, too. People will have adverse effects from the placebo as well. They'll call that the nocebo effect. But, you know, so if you test for adverse effects for a drug,

you have to take placebo effect into account there as well. So anyway, very interesting. but that's why we don't talk about bioenergy fields on this show because no one has ever been able to demonstrate them. All right. Dr. Steve, what's up, man? Have the new year. Hey, man, thanks.

So I've been hearing a lot about the carnivore diet lately, and I really wanted to give the shot. I originally heard about it through Chris Bell. Then this guy, Dr. Sean Baker, I listened to a couple things with him. Even this Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, supposedly follows it really strictly. My question is, why do vegetables not sit in to this diet? We've been told basically forever that broccoli, brussels, sprouts, green, you know,

like healthy greens are almost vital to our health. So these guys that follow the diet strict, they pretty much eat red meat and drink water. so if I wanted to give a shot cutting out stuff like broccoli like stuff that's supposedly healthy it's scary to me I guess and I basically just wanted to know from you the science if you will

behind that and how it can quote unquote be healthy without having healthy vegetables thanks a lot man I appreciate yeah thanks man it's a great question look I always get on the nutrition

particularly the ones that are just very dogmatic and will only discuss the party line and nutrition. And if we knew what the right diet was, the best quote unquote diet for everyone, if there was one, we would know it. And if we knew it, we would tell you. And the reason that we can still argue about this stuff is because we are omnivores and we can eat a lot of different kinds of diets and do okay with them. Now, there is some evidence that the vegan lifestyle offers some benefits.

There is significant amount of evidence that the Mediterranean diet offers some benefits in some realms. There's also evidence that the low-carb diet offers some benefits. I did a PubMed search on zero-carb diet, which is what the carnivore diet. is it zero carbohydrates and could not find any medical literature on long-term benefits, effects, or anything. If I look, and so until I see data, I feel like this is a diet that is rife for malnutrition. And I'll tell you why. And if Sean Baker's listening, he can call in and we can discuss it.

There is a lot of – there are a lot of beneficial molecules and atoms in things like green leafy vegetables that you will not get from just eating meat. Now, look, we have sharp canine teeth, and we also have sharp canine teeth, and we also have. have flat grinding teeth, which tells me, and there is evidence to this effect, that we evolved as a species as omnivores. So carnivores have sharp teeth. Look at a kitty cat. And herbivores tend to have flat teeth for grinding. And we have both. And, um, so simply eating meat and becoming a carnivore removes fiber from your diet it removes certain vitamins and other minerals from your diet

people will lose weight I've seen people that did quote unquote the Adkins diet who were just eating meat and bacon and mayonnaise and stuff. And by the way, Dr. Scott's joined us. Hello, Dr. Scott. Yeah, how did Dr. Steve? Oh, you got some reverb on you from last week.

Oh, from last week, yeah. So I've seen people do that, and they will lose weight. They'll lose all kinds of weight. And they lose weight, in my opinion, because they become malnourished. So if this, Sean, a baker dude can give me some data that will convince me that this actually makes sense, I'm going to continue to advocate lean animal protein and green leafy vegetables if you want to do

a diet like this. Because no one can tell me that, you know, a spring mixed salad with grilled chicken on it and, you know, some vinaigrat or whatever, is unhealthy. You just can't do it. Now, if you're a vegan or, you know, a strict vegetarian, then, okay, then we can argue all the meat is a problem. You have to substitute it for something else. Dr. Scott is not a vegan. He is a pescatarian.

Right. So he's not a complete nut. But, no, it's, you know, the vegan diet does have some medical benefits, no question about that. I have seen fat vegetarians who eat a lot of potatoes and a lot of pasta and stuff. I've also seen malnourished vegetarians that don't get enough protein or aren't getting certain vitamins and minerals that they're missing by not eating any meat, too. May I add a little. Of course.

What we're talking about is the person called in about the carnivore diet. Yeah, it's kind of funny what you're talking about, though, Dr. Steve. I was reading a book the other day, and they were talking about, why they did research on why some apes in captivity, they just fed them strictly the vegetarian diet could not reproduce. And what they figured out was that when they started giving them animal protein, 6% of their diet, they could reproduce. And they started doing some research.

It was pretty cool. I had no idea. Was it because of excess of estrogen from certain legumes like soy and stuff like that? Or was it something else? To a very minuscule degree, but the big thing was what they found was that in the wild when these animals are eating leaves and grass and stuff, they're also getting some little bugs and they're getting some little worms. They're getting little animal proteins. It is only about 6% but that kicked it in. I'm 100% agreement with you.

I like lean meats, you know, lots of veggies. I mean, there are people that advocate high fat diets, but when I'm a hundred percent of food. But when I see, this is what pisses me off, I'll see in the medical literature, let's say, you know, the high-fat keto diet. The ketogenic diet does not have to be high-fat. A lot of people choose to eat more fat, and there are those proponents out there that say, you know, fat's not the enemy, which it isn't. But there's plenty of fat in lean animal protein already.

There's plenty. You're not missing out on any. significant essential fatty acids by eating lean animal protein. I think people just like to eat a lot of bacon. Well, it tastes good. Well, you get a big old rib eye and the big old chunks of fat in there. Wrapped with bacon. It's so good.

There you go. That's perfect. So, yeah, and they've done studies on fat in candy. Like they'll have chocolates and one will be low fat, high sugar, and one will be lower sugar and higher fat. And people will pick the higher fat one every time. Right. Now, this Sean Baker, this doesn't mean anything. This is from everyday health, and so I didn't have time to do in deep research, but he's an orthopedic surgeon, major leader in the carnivore diet movement, and he authored a book released in 2018, titled The Carnivore Diet.

Apparently, his medical license has been revoked. I don't know if that's true. I saw that he had a YouTube thing saying, here's what happened to my medical license. I don't know anything about it. It said the New Mexico Medical Board ordered the voluntary and permanent surrender of his medical license in 2017. But that may have nothing to do with the validity of his claims for the carnivore diet. Carnibor diet. Yeah, if you're interested in looking more, just go on YouTube, he's got a YouTube thing going on where he explains all that.

So, but I, yeah, I'm cool with low carb. I'm cool with ketogenic diet. There are some known benefits to ketogenic diet. I could find no literature whatsoever on zero carbohydrate diet. And it just kind of goes against my intuition, although some things are counterintuitive, but it also goes against my knowledge of nutrition when it comes to what's in all the other stuff that we eat. So, yeah, I just, I, I can't recommend it. It doesn't mean it's bad, and I'm not saying he's an asshole or anything like that.

I'm just saying I don't have any evidence that tells me that it's somehow better than a ketogenic diet that has a lot of green leafy vegetables. Right. Adkins' original diet was not an all-meat diet. It was a diet that was rich in green leafy vegetables, broccoli, spinach, spinach. you know, lettuce, that kind of stuff, and lean animal protein. So, all right. So there. There you.

I just don't know. No, I do know, but I don't, I don't have evidence to back up my claim either. Now, if we get a bunch of people who are doing it and then we see that they're dropping dead or their cholesterol is going up or who knows what, then, yeah, maybe. Right. But maybe we could make some claims to the adverse. It doesn't sound sustainable, though. That type of diet to me just doesn't sound sustainable. Yeah, well, people have trouble sustaining ketogenic diet, too, sometimes.

Oh, heck, yeah. You know, so, all right. Dr. Steve. Yeah, man. Why do I get different blood pressure readings between my left arm and my right arm? And when should I be concerned if the numbers are addressed? different and what does that even mean drastically different like how many points systolic etc should they um beautiful question be not the same um can't wait to hear the

response on air thank you oh we can't wait hey good i hope it wasn't one of those i'm getting back to you three years later phone calls because there are a bunch of those now he's got the blood pressure of 280 in one arm and and right right right and his other yeah uh when you're The thing is, when you're doing it yourself, you may get varying blood pressure readings because if you're right-handed, you may be a little bit more facile putting the cuff on with your right hand onto your left arm, then you are your left arm onto your right, and particularly if you're doing it with a stethoscope. So have someone, an independent person who knows what they're doing. So get a professional.

Do not do it in one of those machines at CVS or Walmart or wherever. you want a human being to do it with the stethoscope in their ears. In a situation like this, even the machines that they have in the doctor's office aren't accurate enough for us to tell whether there's an issue. So you really want somebody to do it with their ears. Now, 10 to 15 millimeters of mercury, that's how we measure. And, you know, it's like, well, it's just a dial. Well, in the old days, we used to have these glass tubes. And you can use water.

You can use any fluid that has a downward, you know, the gravity is pulling it downward. And but we used to use mercury because it was heavier and you wouldn't have to have a tube that was 22 feet tall. You know, you could measure this in millimeters. So, you know, whatever pressure it takes to move that column of mercury in this glass tube up 22, you know, It's X number of millimeters. So a normal blood pressure is like 120 millimeters of mercury over 80 millimeters of mercury. Okay. And the whole over and under number has to do with when you first hear the sounds when you're listening with the stethoscope.

So the way you do, I guess we probably ought to talk about it. So you put a cuff and the cuff's got to be the right size. Right. If you're a big fatso, then you've got to use a thigh cuff because it's got to. be wide enough to get good compression, because if you use too small of a cuff on a big fat person, they're going to read abnormally high. So the cuff's got to be the right size. And then you put a stethoscope over the artery in the antacubital fossa, or the other side of the, you know, where the bend of the elbow is.

Right. And you pump this thing up while you're looking at the dial or this column or this column of mercury. And then you start to let the air out. So you pump it up high. Right. $200.2.20. Now, if you can hear blood pressure, if you can hear pumping there, you've got a problem. So you've got to pump it up even higher.

You've got to pump it up until you can't hear anything anymore. Because it stops the blood flow. That's right. You've got to stop the blood flow. Then you're going to hide up. And then you start to let the bleed off very slowly, the pressure in the cuff. And then you're listening while you're watching the dial, and you'll see the dial start to descend. And,

if you start hearing sounds around 140 and you'll hear boom boom boom uh and if it starts around 140 that's your top number and then you go down until you don't hear it anymore and then that's your bottom number right then that needle kind of starts to bounce around a little and you got it you have to do it a bunch of times in medical school we had to do it tons of times before we started getting accurate readings and then after a while it just becomes second nature so uh yeah you're averaging that out because if that needle is bouncing, you got to average, where did it? Was it in the middle when it hit? Right. So it might be 1.45 and then down to 130, you know, 135, so that'd be 140. So anyway, so we measure that. And getting a reading consistent from side to side, given that it takes you a minute to go to the other side, your blood pressure can vary up and down. You know, five millimeters of mercury, maybe 10, you know, throughout the day when you stand up, it drops and then comes back up again, may overshoot.

I mean, it's not something that's real constant. So that may be the problem. So the most accurate way to do this is have two people who are proficient at it and measure it at exactly the same time. But that's not really necessary. What we're looking for is a difference of less than 10 to 15 millimeters of mercury. If it's more than that, then you start wondering, does this person have hard? of the arteries on one side or the other. They have what's called peripheral vascular disease.

You know, there's some other issue that there's maybe a blocked artery in the arm. Do they have diabetes, things like that? But anything less than that's no big deal. What this guy sent me was his, or he sent me his numbers, and they were really within two or three millimeters of mercury. So I think he's okay, but I said, just go and get a professional to do it. then you'll know for sure. Yeah, if you have blocked arteries in your arms,

if you have... Fluid, too much fluid, like lymphidame or something. Yeah, where it's not able to accurately... Right, they could push through. Absolutely. Now, there's a thing called coerctation of the aorta, where you'll get a narrowing of the aorta. This is often congenital, so they'll diagnose this when you're born with it,

a.k.a. or if it develops as you get older, what you'll see there is you'll get different blood pressures in the upper extremities than the lower extremities because the pressure up above is normal or high because the aorta is able to pump to the arms and all that stuff. And then as you descend and you get this narrowing of the aorta, now the pressure is going to be lower below that,

and so you'll get a very low reading below the waist. And so, yeah, we can do thigh blood pressures. So we can do ankle blood pressure, as a matter of fact, to determine if someone has a peripheral vascular disease, meaning narrowing of the arteries in the hands and feet, we do a thing called an ankle brachial index. And what that is is basically the ratio between the blood pressure and the ankle versus the blood pressure in the arm. So, all right. So just get a professional person using their ears to do your blood pressure on both sides and see. what you get. If it's greater than 10 to 15 millimeters

of mercury difference, then that bears further investigation. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. I'm calling from Buffalo, New York. I had a question for you. I'm 53 years old, and I'm seriously considering getting no bisectomy.

Excellent. I don't really have a question about the procedure. My issue is that I have health insurance, but I have a $2,500 dollar co or deductible, I guess. So they will cover the vasectomy after the $2,500. Is there anything that you know of? I suppose being in New York, it would be a regional thing,

but about getting vasectomies like on a cheaper, I guess less expensive. I do see a couple things like MD save or something like that, where they offer one for $636, but you have to go to Illinois or someplace for it. I was just wondering what your opinion on those were. I guess it would vary, you know, in the doctor and everything, but I didn't know if you had come across anything where there's something like a flat rate type thing or something. Any information would be great.

I appreciate it and love the show. Okay, man. Hey, thanks. Highly recommend the vasectomy over the bilateral tubal ligation for women unless the woman is having a C-section and her gut is already cut open. Because when you do a bilateral tubal ligation, ligation, which is where you tie the fallopian tubes of the woman to keep her from getting pregnant, you have to go through skin and then subskin and then the peritoneum and get actually

into the abdominal cavity, parentneum being the lining of the abdominal wall. And it's a pretty invasive procedure, requires general anesthesia or at least spinal anesthesia. So whereas of azectomy, I just did mine in my urologist's office. You know, it's. it's local anesthesia. A little teeny incision. Yeah, my urologist, who's a friend of mine, who I've known since he was in medical school, forgot to tell me to prep my nuts. So I go in and he's like, oh, you didn't prep.

Well, nobody told me to. I didn't know. So he gets out this pink daisy razor. And he puts me up in what we call dorsal lithotomy position, which means that like you're getting a paper. pap smear, and he takes this dry daisy razor and starts dry shaving my nuts sack. You just scritch, scrit, scrit, skit, scrit, skit, skit, skit, while he's going, yeah, so how'd you like Pacific Grill last night?

You know, it was just really kind of unnerving. The procedure itself is pretty easy when they prep it. It's cold, and when they numb you up, it feels like they're sticking a needle in your nut sack for about a half a second, and then it's gone. A little burn, a little burn. little burn from lytocaine and that's it yeah it's it's all done and well until after the lytocaine wears off but um the proceed and and don't fall for this no scalpel technique thing they still use a scalpel it's just not they're not calling it that they use scissors with a razor's edge on it

and so they're still cutting into your nut sac same way they do with scalpel that is a marketing bullshit trick okay it's still it's effective like any of anything else, and it's effective marketing, but they still cut your nuts sac. And then they go in and, you know, dissect out the vass deference and cut it, burn it, ligate it, do whatever they got to do, fold it in on itself, and even then sometimes the damn things will reconnect. You know, this statistic blew me away. 33% of men never go back to get their sperm count done after they've had the vasectomy.

that's insane if you go through all this trouble just give them a damn sperm count at least make sure you're good yeah I agree yeah because we had somebody on our Reddit on the subreddit if you are interested in looking at that

it's you know Reddit.com slash R slash Dr. Steve and we answer medical questions over there he never got his check to his wife got pregnant and he was wondering if it was some sort of And it's like, dude, you know, if you didn't get checked, you can't really say you didn't have sperm. You know, he went and got checked after the fact.

So, but anyway, it probably was malarkey, though, because he had zero sperm count. And when he went back, but you can't say it. Oh. You know? So it's a tough one. But now regarding the question about payment. Yes. Okay.

Yeah, let's talk about that. So that's the procedure. It's an in-office procedure. It takes almost, you know, less than an hour to do. And you walk out of there and you get, oh, by the way, let me recommend one thing they don't recommend. Get a catcher's cup. You know, a jockstrap with the hard plastic cup. That saved me because I could go to work. I couldn't bump into anything. I could even, you know, hit it with my fist and not have any pain. And don't think you're so tough. You can go back to work like I do. did i was like i'll just go back to work because i felt great when the when the lydicane wears off you will feel it and it does not feel good but it's just it's not horrendous and it's just for a few days if everything goes well so a little bit of rest a little bit of eyes yeah yep yep yep and he gave me a whole bottle of percassette that i ended up thrown away because i think i took one of them which is a whole other issue we can talk about the overprescribing

of pain medication after some of these procedures but anyway So payment, call them. Say, I'm cash. Look, if you're a cash paying patient, they may make you a deal. Exactly, because that cuts a lot of the time and overhead off. Oh, yeah. They know they're getting paid for a procedure. They don't have to argue with the insurance companies. Because you're deductible, you're going to be cash paying anyway. There's no vasectomy is going to cost $2,500. No. So if it's the beginning of the year and you've got a $2,500 deductible, you're going to be paying cash. So just tell them I will pay cash. Now, then when they agree to a number, say, I want this applied against my deductible.

Exactly. Now, that doesn't mean they have to file it. They can give you the form. If they're pissed, you know, because now they've got to file it, just let them give you the form. You file it yourself. Yeah. And some people have health savings accounts. You might be able to use an HCA kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Or HSA, rather. Yeah. So, yeah, I would at least call them and make them a deal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'll get closer to the mic.

Yeah, make it a deal. There you go. That's perfect. Yeah. So do that. I would say 500 to 750 is the range where you're going to have to pay most places. And call around. Now, I don't want a damn discount vasectomy.

I don't want discount fashectomy. And I don't want a discount vasectomy. So make sure it's a urology office. There are family docs who will do vasectomies. If you're going to go to a non-urologist, You've got to ask them how many have they done, what's their success rate, and what do they do if there's a complication? Who do they refer to? Yeah, and if you're in a city where you've got a medical school and where they do residencies, especially, you know, urological residency.

Yeah, you could get that cheap. You could get that cheap. And, you know, they've got to learn somehow. You've got to learn, yeah. And they'll have supervisors in there. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And if there's a problem, then the attending will fix it.

Attending will jump in, sure. But, yeah, so you have lots of options. I really think you can get in for way under $1,000 bucks on this one. Me too. I'll put it for less than that. Yep. Hi, Dr. Steve.

I'm wondering about a blood test that my physician could possibly give me in order for, I'm trying to eliminate foods in my diet. Some foods give me indigestion, upset stomach, bloating, loose bowels and stuff. and I've seen a couple blood tests that you can buy at Amazon.com that take five drops of your finger-picked blood

and you're supposed to get a report back. And I'm just wondering if that's okay enough or if a physician can have a better blood test. Okay, okay. You can do that. There are now genetic tests that will, that purport to tell you what you may be sensitive to food-wise.

I don't think that's necessary. And Dr. Scott was shaking his head, too. There's a thing called an elimination diet. Absolutely. And what it sounds like is you either have irritable bowel syndrome or you could be lactose intolerant. There are other sugars in foods that you could be intolerant to that your body can't break down.

So you get bloating and diarrhea and gas because, the bacteria are breaking it down and fermenting them. Gluten sensitivities. And it could be a gluten sensitivity, so you could have celiac disease, or you could have something that's more serious like an inflammatory bowel disorder. So I think the easiest way to do this is to do an elimination diet, where you just back off to a really bland diet until your symptoms go away and then you start adding things back one by one till you figure it out.

Now, what were you going to say? I was going to say exactly the same thing. No, no, but what I was going to say is I would suggest start with what I would guess would be the most likely culprit, which are really grains, you know, glutons. Start there, you know, just start with eliminating breads and, you know, cereals that have have glutons in them. And that may do it all by itself. Yeah, and gassy vegetables are ones like broccoli.

and beans and stuff like that. Now, you could try another approach. You could be lactose intolerant. If you drink a lot of milk or eat a lot of cheese, you could just try taking lactate before you eat. If that makes your symptoms go away, lactate is an enzyme. It just replaces the missing lactase enzyme in your stomach.

Then you got your answer. You were lactose intolerant. Yeah, just don't drink milk, you know. You could try Beno. Beano is another set of enzymes that will crack undigestable sugars in things like beans and cauliflower and broccoli. And if that fixes it, that was the answer. And so you can either avoid those things or you can just take beano with every meal. But if you want to do something a little more scientific, I would do the elimination diet.

And talk to your primary care about it because if you have a lot, celiac disease, they can test, yes, they can test you for that. There is a blood test for the antibody. Gastroenterologists will go down to a biopsy of the duodenum and the mucus membrane there and they can see sort of specific pathologic changes. If none of this works, then you need to see a gastroenterologist because it may not just be irritable bowel syndrome. You could have an inflammatory bowel disease like ulcerative colitis or you could have Crohn's disease and that needs to be diagnosed by them and that needs to be treated. Right.

Yeah. If you have untreated ulcerative colitis, it does increase your chances of getting colon cancer down the road. But knowing that means you're going to be less likely to get it because you're going to get it treated. Okay. So you can try fiddling around with this stuff and then just make sure at some point you get checked.

Okay. Eliminate. Eliminate first. Save your money. But my problem, and by the way, there's all kinds of stuff for irritable bowel syndrome now that are very effective, including IBEGuard, which is kind of expensive, but it's intercoded peppermint, and it's anti-inflammatory at the level of the bowel. It's got some decent data behind it. There's a medical food called interagam. It's about 90, it used to be 50 bucks a month. It's up to 90 bucks a month.

month now. That's what I'm on for my irritable bowel. I only have to take it about once a week, once every two weeks at this point. Wow. And it's antibodies that actually go in and bind toxins in the bowel that, and it binds them so they can't come in contact with the bowel wall. And if they can't come in contact, they don't cause inflammation and you don't have irritable bowel syndrome, or at least the symptoms of it. So that's something that you could consider as well. All of these are best dealt with under the workup and supervision of your primary care provider. And if they need to refer you to a gastroenterologist, do it. But don't live with this.

You don't have people who are listening to this that have similar symptoms, you do not have to live this way. There's a treatment out there for you. We just have to nail down what the cause is. Right. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. On my scrotum, I have what I could best describe as a small kind of microcalcalfocation that is about two millimeters in diameter, and it seems to be in the subcutaneous tissue.

Damn. Give yourself a bill. But, you know, every time I... I grab it or I feel it. I'm just getting concerned about it. Anything that you can tell me about that, is this a normal type thing? Or what can I expect? And I will say that it does appear white in nature.

And like I said, it seems to be in the subcutaneous issue. Okay. No, I think he nailed it. It's a scrotal calcification is the most likely thing. If it's not growing and it hasn't grown for years. it's almost zero malignant potential. These things generally are benign. There are some people that get bunches of them.

It's called scrotal calcinosis. I encourage you to Google that because it's pretty outstanding how these people's scrotums look like they've got a bag of marbles in there. And most of the time these are subcutaneous, meaning that, you know, it's under the top layers of skin. since it's bothering him though you know a lot of people they just have it and it never changes it doesn't bother him a urologist could remove that really

easily or they may go ah it ain't anything and reassure you that you don't have to worry about it all right all right you got anything Dr. Scott I like it I had a couple of medical news stories but we'll save it for next time we did too many

can't do too many medical questions. We did okay. Hey, don't forget stuff.doctrsteve.com. That's stuff. dot, doctor steve.com. For all your Amazon needs, it really does make a huge

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You don't have it anymore unless you've signed back up in the last little bit. And to incentivize you to sign back up, because I screwed up and accidentally turned the premium membership off and deleted everybody's accounts, use offer code fluid for that, and you'll get a huge discount on the first three months. It's already cheap. It's a buck 99 a month. You get access to all the archives. If we can get back up anywhere close to where we were before, I promise to put some interesting premium content in the premium channel. But until then, you have all our previous premium episodes, plus you have all the archives of all of our shows from Riotcast Rules on. All right, very good.

Thank you for doing that. It's premium.com. Thanks. Always go to Dr. Scott. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos. Hello, Bob. Bob in Florida. Hugh Jassel

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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, exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.