Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 347 - Hezký Kluk

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

Marcus from Charlotte provides us with a novel (and overly manly) method for girth measurement. Male home fertility tests, measles vaccines, and more. PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com simplyherbals.net premium.doctorsteve.com 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. In the garretail. 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 now.

Last, with the 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 doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm Beijing, Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal, Dr. Scott. The traditional Chinese medical practitioner keeps the alternative medicine wackos 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've got a question, you're embarrassed to take to a regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 3477664323. That's 347. Who here?

Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at D.R. Scott W.M. If you're so inclined, follow Lady Diagnosis. She's not here today. at Lady Diagnosis. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.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 here with a grain of salt.

Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking about with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncers, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientists, or whatever. All right, very good. Hey, please don't forget to go to stuff. dot, dr.steve.com for all your online shopping needs. Just about every product we've ever talked about on this show. I'll stick up there.

And if there's something that you don't see that you'd like for us to do a review on or something like that, we'd just do a real brief review and maybe a paragraph. If that, we'll throw it up there. I've got a new vitamin for peripheral neuropathy, Dr. Scott. That's very exciting. Oh, cool. So I haven't put it up there yet, but we can talk about it a little bit. Don't forget tweakeda audio.com offer code fluid for the best earbuds for the price on the market,

the best customer service anywhere. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. And just in your honor, Dr. Scott, I will at this time take a snort of some Simply herbal sinus rinse. Good stuff. It's good stuff. I know everybody loves hearing that. it is good stuff if he does say so himself uh and uh if you're interested in the um weight loss program i'm doing check out noem n o m dot dr steve dot com and uh you can get two weeks free and

20 percent off and i've already lost 20 pounds and i'm on my way to losing 40 it's so bad that i can't fit in any of my clothes anymore and so i just went to scrubs instead of buying these stupid $100 pants from Brooks Brothers and then and then you know the ones that when I was really fat you know they just looked silly on me you know you know I've been friends for many many many years it's the first time I in a long time I've seen you in scrubs yeah well I like it I was I was gonna save a hundred bucks a month on dry cleaning and people are going wow you know you look pretty good I never get that when I'm wearing my regular clothes because I can't find clothes that fit me right right so i look stupid so uh in these i look halfway decent so when

they're black and uh so you can't see you know folds and things like that it kind of hides some of the bulges details yeah and uh if you're interested in getting archives of the show or premium content go to premium dot dr steve.com that's premium dot dr steve dot com so anyway what's going on with you? Just enjoying this warm weather we're having this because after last week it was so stinking cold. Now, my allergies are kind of blown up. I've been wearing up my sinus spray too, just because, yeah.

Yeah. I like your sinus spray a lot. I did spend that $89 to get a navage. And I think I've talked about on the show, but it's fine to talk about it again, I guess. It's basically, it is to a netty pot, what Pilates is to yoga. In other words, I've heard these, you know, yoga masters come here from India and then they go to a Pilates studio and they're horrified by these people, you know, using pullies and shit to pull their limbs into all these weird contortions and stuff. And so the navage is like that to the netty pot in that it uses science and suction and motors and things to shoot salient. into your nose and then suck it back out the other nose so it goes in one nostril

comes out the other and um you put saline in the top sterile saline used distilled water only and they've got these little salt pods that you put in there and uh it feels great and it's unbelievable how much crap comes out of your nose how much is each refill just out of curiosity how much how many dollars does it oh it's pennies okay because you can buy 20 of them for just a few of the pods and you have to use the pods you can't just use distilled water right so you want saline and you know it's like the damn curig you know yeah i know you got to buy those damn pods that cost 14 times what they should well and they have the refillable they do now pods that you can use with the currig but i suspect they make inferior coffee but yeah so they get

you buying these uh these little um saline pods right And then is that rain, I hear? What's going on out there? You hear that? It may be. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, I always go, it's hyper-local on a podcast that attracts listeners. Well, it's raining in our vicinity.

I'm monitoring the security cameras, and I do see rain. We have listeners in Croatia. Isn't that in something? That's pretty cool. To our check listeners, and we have a couple. Hesky weekend. Esky weekend. Hesky weekend.

That means have a nice weekend. Cool. I guess they stole the word weekend from us. They sounded pretty familiar. But I'm going to the motherland someday. My family is ethnically Czech. My mother told me that we were 116th Susquehanna Native American, and I got my ancestry.com,

and it was a total Elizabeth Warren situation. situation. Zero Native American. And then my dad told me that we were converted, forcibly converted Ashkenazi Jews. Oh, wow. And none of that in my, in my ancestry either. So my mom and my dad full of shit. And I think lots of families have this where they will tell it'll get passed down. Well, we're descended from these people and for whatever reason and it's bullshit. Yep. I think they passed down a story to make it more. Yeah, it makes you more interesting. Instead of just, you know, my family, I went to Ellis Island and tried to find my ancestors coming through Ellis Island.

Yeah. Not there. I am the product of illegal immigrants. Oh. The best we can figure, they came from the Czech Republic and went through Canada and snuck in and then settled in Chicago. Wow. And, but no, there's absolutely no immigration records of my family whatsoever. And I've gone through that whole thing, nothing.

Wow. Not on my grandmother's side, not on my grandfather's side. Wow. So you guys were. Yeah, so what am I supposed to, you know? Covert. That's crazy. Anyway, yeah, so I got an email from, or a voicemail from that guy from Ebola, virus,

or what's that Ebola map maybe Ebola something map yeah yeah anyway you can Google him but um he was saying that there was uh there were some vaccine trials going on for the new Ebola virus well i look back and back in 2015 they did a guinea phase three efficacy vaccine trial this was in the country of guinea i'm not making a joke about anthony cumia's ancestry that showed that this VSV-E-O-V made by Merck Sharpen Dome was highly effective against Ebola. And we figured there'd be a vaccine right around the corner. It didn't kind of turn out.

So three to four years later, now you can get involved in this. Cincinnati Children's Hospital is conducting a trial of two experimental Ebola vaccines and healthy volunteers are needed. So Cincinnati Children's is. is part of the international effort to stop the Ebola viruses. This is coming from WCPO in Cincinnati. A trial of two experimental vaccines is now in its first phase at Cincinnati Children's. The local hospital is one of nine vaccine treatment units funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

And what this phase does is test the safety of the vaccine and its ability to produce an immune response in healthy volunteer participants. So you would not be exposed to Ebola. what they're going to do is vaccine or, you know, vaccinate these people and then see if they develop an antibody against the Ebola virus proteins and show that it's safe. And, you know, we won't know if it's effective until you get out in the field and actually use it on people. So the strategy that they will use is the same strategy they use for smallpox, which is called ring vaccination. Whereas you don't try to vaccinate everyone in the world that's at risk, like we do with measles, mumps, and rebella, or diphtheria where we just vaccinate everybody. You wait till there's a case, so someone has to get it, and then you vaccinate everyone around them. What you're trying to do is make a ring of immunity around these people so that the virus that's in them just dies out and is never transmitted to anybody else.

Now, this requires a vaccine that works quickly, you know, generates that an effective immune response quickly. And smallpox did. That's how we eradicated it. We didn't vaccinate everyone in the world. They went to places where there were smallpox outbreaks, vaccinated everyone around them, everyone that came in contact with, and it was a very rapidly acting vaccine. And eventually, there were no more cases of smallpox. We haven't had a case of smallpox. You might Google that.

When was the last case of smallpox in the world? And, you know, they're still keeping it because, God forbid, we throw anything away for quote-unquote research purposes. So there are still smallpox viral particles in laboratories around the world, but no cases of smallpox. It's saying right here, October 26, 1977, as of April 14th, 1977, as of April 14th, 19th, 1778, no cases of smallpox have been recorded. Wow. So it's 78. That's what it says, yeah.

So 88, 98, 2008. Wow, 30 years. 30 years, yeah. That's incredible. Pretty cool. Yeah, and while you're reading it, I saw it just pop up on the news here, a patient in Philadelphia is actually being tested for Ebola. Oh, there you go. That happens.

Yeah. I think four cases in 2014. Okay. Pretty rare. Yeah, there have been several outbreaks of Ebola since 2013. the epidemic in West Africa led to more than 11,000 deaths, spread to several countries around the world. The country that seemed to handle the outbreak the best was Nigeria. They isolated those cases and got their public health departments working on it, and it really didn't spread much in Nigeria.

So they did a great job, a job that we should all look towards. when we see these outbreaks happening. So to continue, researchers are looking for new ways to stop these outbreaks and to treat people who become infected and develop Ebola virus disease, says Paul Spearman of Cincinnati Children's and lead investigator of the trial. The development of preventative vaccines for Ebola is a top global public health priority. And just a little background. Once you get Ebola, it can be spread from person to person very easily

because there's tons of body fluid, there's diarrhea, there's blood. It's horrendous. Fatality rate ranges from anywhere from 30 to 90%. And so what they're studying are two experimental vaccines, CHAD3EBO-Z vaccine. Couldn't they just give them a name? And the MVA-B-N-Felow vaccine. And previous research shows that the two together generate

potentially protective anti-abola responses. So they're looking for 60 healthy volunteers, ages 18 to 45. How old are you, Scott? Getting right to turn 51. Okay, so you and I cannot be in this child. The volunteers will be split into three groups assigned one of three combinations of the vaccines, which may include a placebo, which is fine. They'll tell you at the end, so you can't just go running off to some Ebola-infected

country and start, you know, coming in contact. with people. You'll know if you're in the placebo group. And the volunteers will be needed for seven months. We'll be monitored for adverse effects for six months after their first vaccination. And then they will do blood work and see if you created antibodies to the Ebola virus. Anyone interested in volunteering for the study should call them at 513-636-76-9699. That's 513-636-76-76-99 and if you do get involved in that study call us we would love to hear from you just kind of get a step-by-step out what they told you and what was done now there are a bunch of other sites as well so if you call that number you should be able to find one that might be

closer to you let's say if you're on the west coast all right very good you got anything dr scott not yet i'm working on no i was reading he does his show prep when he gets here he's over there enjoying him so just enjoy yourself just relax don't worry about it just take a number one thing don't take advice from some asshole on the radio all right um let's see here oh well speaking of vaccines let's do this one hi dr steve this is andy houston hey andy our babe girl was born in june and we knew prenatally that she'd have down syndrome and an av canal heart defect well we didn't know said in Nikki, she developed transient myelope proliferative disorder, which really took her life and required her to receive chemotherapy at seven weeks old. Oh, my goodness.

That means that her bone marrow just went crazy and started producing cells that it shouldn't have produced. That in 83 days after she was born and after chemo, a preliminary heart surgery, a collapsed lung, and other bits of fun along the way, we finally got to bring her home back in September. Fast forward to now, she's seven months old, and we came back to the hospital last week for her to have her heart defect repair, open heart, cardiopulmonary bypass surgery. Which is insane that they can do that. You know, it's just amazing. It really is, especially at that age. Oh, yeah.

She made it through her surgery beautifully. She's been recovering in the pediatric ICU beautifully, and all has been going well until three days ago. A doctor came into our room to tell us that another kidney the ICU tested positive for the freaking measles. Oh. See, I wonder how that happened. I saw that coming.

I saw it coming. And at seven. months old, she's too young to have received a measles vaccine yet. So right now as we speak, we've been sequestered to a tiny cramped isolation room for the remainder of her stay at the hospital. She had to receive the IVIG that a kid would confirm measles would get. And we have to wear mats 24-7 so our seven-month-old baby girl can't see mommy or daddy's face while she recovers from open heart surgery. She has to stay isolated from the public and visitors for three weeks. And on top of the stress, we've already endured through chemo, heart surgeries,

etc. She's having to be treated like topoid Mary up here as we have to stress over whether she's caught the measles or not. So my question to you, is if you please add, vaccinate your damn kids to the sign-off at the end of your show. Thank you for doing what you do.

Yeah, maybe so. Can you, just come on. Get your vaccines. We saw that. Dr. Scott is a traditional Chinese medical specialist. Some would call him an alternative medicine provider, even he, and I shouldn't even say even he, but he agrees that we need to vaccinate our kids.

Of course, he doesn't have any kids, so it's easy to him to say. But I would. I would, you know, I mean, it freaked me out too. I'm like, well, hell, what if one in a million those people are right? But I did it anyway, and because intellectually I knew that it was the right thing. And look, these things are not without risk. There's no question about that. There is some risk to everything.

There's risk to walking across the street. Hell, we could get hit by a meteor sitting here talking about it. The risk is not zero. There are, but not vaccinating your kids because you're worried about an adverse event is like, and this is very analogous, not wearing your seatbelt because you're afraid of getting trapped in your car in a car wreck. So that can happen. One in a million. It's estimated.

who get in a car wreck will die because they weren't wearing their seatbelt. One and two will die because they didn't wear their seatbelt. And I'm talking about in a, you know, in a major wreck where somebody could be thrown from a vehicle. Well, hell, even even in minor, minor, minor, minor wrecks without a seatbelt, you're at a huge risk of dying where, you know, minor wrecks with your seatbelt on, there's not certainly much, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, Dr. Steve, I was, we were talking about this case the other day in our office, you know, because that's where I went to medical schools in Houston and seeing, you know,

five cases of measles pop-up done there really is disturbing. Yeah. Because it can be prevented and should be prevented. Of course. You know. Let's see here. Among drivers and front seat passengers, seatbelts reduce the risk by 45% and cut the risk of serious injury by 50%.

That's where I was getting that one and two. Seat belts prevent drivers and passengers from being ejected during a crash. People not wearing a seatbelt are 30 times more likely to be a, ejected from a vehicle during a crash so come on come on usually that a person being a projectile's bad yeah we're not designed to be projectile no we're meat if you're meat and we tear and break easel from a 10 foot building you're likely to yeah to die or um hey it doesn't take much you know it really doesn't take that much mammals mammals mammals are really wimpy.

Yeah, I've got a, in fact, I've got a, well, I know of this case, if this lady, she missed the bottom step of going down to her laundry room. Just one step, broke her ankle so bad, they almost had to amputator foot. Isn't that something? Yeah, just one step, so it doesn't take much. So, shit, if you can do something simple, like get a vaccination that's going to save lives, you know, let's do something, do the smart thing. Get your kids vaccinated.

for HPV. Right. It's the one cancer vaccine we've got, other than hepatitis B, I had another doctor raised that. It's not specifically a cancer vaccine. Right. But chronic hepatitis B, which can be

prevented with the hepatitis B vaccine, can, or is a strong risk factor for hepatocelular cancer. So, yeah, okay, I'll give you that one too. But this is the first vaccine specifically, designed to prevent cancer and cervical cancer sucks and um you know it's um just and

when you look at at the at the CDC website they'll say well there was a X percent of you know serious adverse effects with this um they are considering nausea and vomiting as being a serious adverse effect okay and uh there's so much bullshit out of there about vaccines that it's just stunning so but look if you have a a like you know I have people we've talked about different drugs on this show and almost every time somebody will call and say I heard you talk about such and such a drug it's a bad drug you know it killed somebody in my family and that when that happens it's tragic it's horrible doesn't make it a bad drug I made it a bad drug for that person that drug may help you know scads of people sure

There is a chemotherapeutic drug called 5FU, and if you have a specific genetic deficiency, you can't metabolize it properly, and it can kill you. It doesn't make it a bad drug. It makes it a drug that we have to treat with respect, but it does a lot of good. People with colon cancer, that's their primary treatment right now, until we get into the whole immunologic thing full bore, which is coming very quickly. But anyway, so, yeah, if you have an adverse event and it becomes serious and life-threatening with a vaccine, it is tragic. But the odds to the individual are very low.

Of course, if it happens to you, it's 100%. And, yeah, I get it. You know, I do. But we still need to vaccinate our kids. We've got to drive our kids to school and we get in wrecks. the odds that you'll have a wreck driving your kid to school is far higher than the odds that your kid is

going to be seriously harmed by a vaccine. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. Enough of that. Yeah, get your measles vaccine. Look at what it's doing to this kid. Seven months old.

Poor little thing. She's fought like crazy. She's doing well. Yep. Everything. They sailed right through the surgery. And then now they're being like they said

they're the ones that now have to go to some little some isolation room because she's so at risk sure you know those are hard sounds like from her history she's going to be okay though

yep hey doctor Steve when somebody takes a sip of water and chokes on it and they say it went down the wrong pipe what's going on there how many pipes do we have

I'm curious about that this is a beautiful weird medicine question because it's you know it's it's sort of basic anatomy but it's one of those things people don't always know and you've heard it for years and you've heard it for years so there are there are um a couple of pipes down there so when you you got your nose right and if you you could google cross section of the human head and then you can see these passages it's kind of counterintuitive the nose looks like it goes up and can i can you know a cross section from the side you're looking

from the side. Yes, from the side. Yeah, okay, just to make sure people are on the same page. So if you, the nose looks like it goes up, but it really goes straight back. And so if you put your finger on your nostril and then at the bridge of your nose, and then you can just take that line and push it straight back. That's sort of where the nasal passage goes. Now, it opens up above the palate where you look in your throat you see that your little uvula right so what's the space behind that if you go above it that's the nasal passage that's where it opens up so that's nasopharynx in other words the pharynx being the back part of the mouth a very back wall so the nasopharynx joins up with the pharynx which is the back part of you know on the just past your tonsils

and on the other side of that uvula. And then that goes down into your neck where if you feel that sort of cartilaginous thing in the front called the trachea, most people know what that is. That is the opening to the lungs. Okay, so the trachea, the cartilage in the front where you see your Adam's apple

that protects that opening because our neck is kind of soft otherwise. So you've got this cartilage there. And at that point, you have to, we have air that's going into the lungs, but we also have food that's going into the stomach going past the same area. Chris Carlson. Well, yeah, I mean, they go down. So how do we keep those two things? Why is it that when you drink water, it doesn't just pour into your lungs?

Right. And there is a little device there called the epiglottis that when you swallow occludes the trachea. It's why you can't breathe and swallow at the same time. And it occludes the trick. It just kind of puts a little cap over it. Just like, what would be a good example, something that's got a flap. Almost like a teapot. Like a teapot.

Yeah, because when a steam comes out. Give yourself a bill. Like the little lid on a teapot. Because it's a little hinged thing and it's kind of flips up and down. Yeah, let's just say that you had two teapots next to each other. One was wide open. The other one had the lid on it. and you wanted one to go in the open one, you would close the lid to the teapot.

You didn't want it to go in, and then the water would go in the other one. So when something goes down the wrong pipe, what's really happening is you're aspirating. That's a medical term for stuff that's supposed to go down your esophagus going into your trachea. And into your, towards your lungs. And ending up in your lungs. So now this can happen lots of different ways. You're laughing and eating at the same time. or you're inhaling something.

I'll see this a lot, where people will, oh, I know, like you're flipping an edamomame into your mouth, you know, but instead of going into your mouth, it actually, and you're breathing, and it goes past your tongue and down into your lungs. Now, what's your lungs response to that? It's going to cough it out. It wants to get it out of there,

so you start coughing. And you get this sort of constriction of the muscles around the, trachean constriction of the trache itself and you might even wheeze a little bit and you're trying to get this thing out of there now um there are people who chronically aspirate and that's because there's a lot of muscles that need to work in concert for this to work properly and particularly when you get old and if you've got some dementia you know they stop working so well and those people will chronically aspirate some stroke patients yeah and of course sure yeah stroke patients people like

that. And they chronically aspirate. So if you feed them, if you give somebody a drink or you give them something to eat, they immediately start choking. They're probably aspirating. And that is a risk for, you know, demise in the next six to 12 months when that starts happening. Now, you can do a feeding tube in those folks. But the feeding tube doesn't stop the aspiration. It just facilitates nutrition. So if they're chronically aspirating, in other words, that epiglottis is not closing all the way. Not closing all the way. Then you will also aspirate saliva. Now, if I had the choice between aspirating saliva or aspirating a chunk of well-done steak, the well-done steak will make you cough, but the saliva will cause pneumonia. It's because mouse.

bacteria are just all in saliva and you're just constantly putting bacteria in your lungs and eventually you'll get a aspiration pneumonia we'll call it and those can be hard to get rid of you get rid of it and they continue to aspirate it just comes right back it's usually a sign of poor overall prognosis all right all right why were we talking about so we're talking about you talking about when you when you drink water and it goes down a wrong hole Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it went down the wrong pipe, and that's literally true. You've got two pipes, esophagus and trachea, and it went down the trachea instead of going down the esophagus.

Right on. Good question, dude. Yeah, now we'll have people that will aspirate because they have reflux. They'll aspirate in the middle of the night. True. And what's happening there is they're laying down flat, so gravity is no longer holding stomach contents in the stomach because they're horizontal. And so sometimes that lower esophageal sphinct well, yeah, the valve, which we call the lower esophageal sphincter, will open up. And then stomach contents will just flow up the esophagus.

And creep up gravity. And then they can aspirate those as well. So you can imagine aspirating acid from your stomach is no fun. Not good. All right. Okay. What was I going to? Good question.

That was an excellent question. All right. Dr. Steve. Yes, sir. I've been thinking about your question of how to measure my big meaty erection. Delight. And I was out in the garage the other day, and I looked over, and I looked over, and I had my hole. Please say you didn't use your circular saw.

And I said, you know what? I bet I can make me a chocolate. So it took me a piece of two-by, and I drilled a hole for every hole saw that I had. And then I'm like, yeah, I just kept on going up until I've. fit the right one. Oh, my God. And that's how I figured out how big old, big, my, big old media penis was. Thanks and have a good day.

Well, there you go. The reason we were talking about this, this was years ago. That call was actually from three years ago, and I'm trying to get through some of the backlog. We were remarking how crazy it is that circumference is hard for humans to judge. We can judge length. And apparently when our brains were developing, you know, deciding length was a survival instinct. In other words, if you can accurately judge length, you know where to shoot your arrow or throw your spear or throw your rock if you go back far enough.

Sure. How far away is that saber-toothed tiger? Do I have enough room to get into the tree before it gets me? That kind of stuff. If I'm missing. But measuring circumference almost impossible. So we were asked people, what do you think the circumference of your penis is? And they'd say, you know, like an inch and a half or two inches or something like that.

And it's way more than that. So here's the thing. If the diameter of your erect penis is, that's an inch. So two inches. Then what is the circumference of your erect penis? Five inches. well that's pretty close okay you just made that up but there's actually a formula for that

it's two times it's pie times the diameter okay is the circumference okay right so pi r squared would be the area surface area we don't care about that because you'd have to you know cut your dick in two and then look at that and then go oh well the surface area of that cut part I don't want to do that but we're interested in the circumference so it's pie times the diameter so

Well, let's just ask Alexa. We could estimate it, but I want to know exactly. Alexa, what's pie times two? This might answer your question. Pi times two is 6.283118-8530718. That was only an inch off. Did that answer your question? Yes, it did.

Thank you very much. I don't have her effects on. Let's try that again. Alexa, what's the first 15 digits of pie? the first 15 decimal digits There we go 3.1415926 5358-8-9-7993 And I got to remember to change her name

because we're driving people crazy Oh yes And by the way, if you want to listen to us on her You can say her name And then say play Weird Medicine Podcast Because we had some people having difficulty We are on Spotify and Pandora now.

Yeah, Pandora as well. Yeah, it drives me fucking crazy when I'm watching television and they say her name that. And she perks up and I'm like, just go back to sleep. I don't know the answer to that. Go back to sleep around you.

I was always thinking with all that distributed processing with these units like this that they would just wake up one day and then I realized there's no way. She's just as dumb as a brick. There's things that she knows. facts and stuff but um so i will ask her well here watch i so i have a list that's called

tv shows because i forget what shows i'm watching we watch so many things on netflix and stuff like that and i'll tell her to put stuff on the tv shows list and she gets confused even though i do it all the time right so uh Alexa add patriot to my tv shows list I've added Patriot to my TV shows to your shopping list. See? And so she puts it on my shopping list. That's not what you need. No.

And then if I, I'm not going to do it again because I don't want to piss everybody off saying her name. But if I tell her to do it to just put it to TV shows, I thought maybe that was it to stop saying list. Then she says you already have it on your shopping list. Yeah, that's weird. So that's a sign of stupidity. Yeah, they've got to work on, they've got to work on those. Well, I don't care about that. I'm just not worried about her awakening and becoming an AI that's going to set off all the nuclear weapons.

Hidject. And an attempt to cleanse the earth of carbon life. Not going to have any time. Not worried about it. All right. Okay. Oh, so, whole socket, penis girth. So anyway, how about just measure it with a, with a, this is a dude's way to figure something out.

Instead of taking a, you know, like a tape measure. and measuring it around your cock you're drilling holes in a two-by-two and then sticking your dick in it until you find one that fits it's like getting a splinter in your pecker from sticking into a damn hole oh my god that's great it's not even that it's just well what what can I use my power tools for today that don't look big enough that's great dr. Steve I've got a vasectomy scheduled in a couple weeks. Excellent, too. The doctor said that the follow-up is like an at-home, do-it-yourself sperm fertility check

where you get you jizzing this thing and then you put some kind of an agent in there and it turns like a, I don't know, plus or minus or whatever the determining factors are. I was just wondering if that's normal or if it's not or if I can get it checked some other way. but that's just what the doctor said. He's done several thousand vasectomase over his 20-year career. So I was just wondering if that's normal. Okay, so when I had mine, they made me jizz in a cup. I had to do it at work, which was weird.

And then later I found out I was in the bathroom where the lock on the door doesn't work. You think it's locked and it's not. And thank God, nobody just came barging in while I'm jerking on. Well, it's for a sperm test. It's like, sure. It's for science. Yeah, it's for science. So, yeah, I had to jerk off at work and then bring it because I wanted it as fresh as I could get it.

I'm sure it's the first time you'd ever did that thing right at work. Yeah, no, it absolutely was. But it was, yeah, mine was okay. So what they're looking for is no motiles, no cells and no cells at all. And so what this since then, what this home sperm test is, is a test that measures a single protein that is only found in sperm. And honestly, I tried to find the protein. I think it's proprietary because I couldn't get any of these manufacturers to tell me what specific protein they're testing for.

I didn't look very hard either. So if you know what it is, call in and let me know. but so what they can do is determine whether your sperm concentration is below 20 million sperm per milliliter and what they sell these for usually is people to determine whether you know if they're having trouble getting pregnant the dude will jack off in this cup and do this test and if it's low then they need to go get themselves checked out and if it's normal then the woman may have to get herself checked out. Now, that's not all there is to it.

That's not all there is to fertility, which is why these things really aren't very useful for fertility, because you could have lots of sperm, but they could all be non-motile. You know, what if you're genetically that you don't make tails on your sperm, so you could detect the protein, but they have to look under the microscope and see if they're swimming around. So it's not really very useful for fertility.

But it does look like it's pretty useful for determining, whether your vasectomy worked as long as it will give you a number of zero and be accurate. So you've got to ask what's the sensitivity and specificity of this test. If there's any wiggle room in that, I'm not sure I'd rely on it. I would want to get a technologist to look under the microscope and make sure that there's no cells there. Because this is indirect. You're measuring these proteins. and there's usually some lab error in, you know, these immunologic tests.

So it may say, well, it's low. Does that mean zero? Or does it mean low? Because if it's low, I can still get somebody pregnant. Right. So I would want to know what tests they're doing if it's the one like you buy at Amazon or something like at Amazon, you know, at stuff. Dottersteve.com or somewhere like that, I don't know.

then I would want to know how accurate it is to determining whether your sperm count is zero. Now, the urologists may have one that they use that's more expensive and more detailed and more specific. And you want one to be extremely specific or you know, you want it to be able to tell you with 100% accuracy that you have a zero sperm count.

And I'm not seeing that in the test that I'm seeing, but I may not be looking at the ones that the urologists are prescribing. So if you have any specialized knowledge on that, feel free to give us a call. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve, it's Sarah from Twitter. So I was just calling to talk about the melatonin dummies that you talk about quite a lot. First of all, I think it's hilarious. when you talk about, oh, I want to take my vitamin and a delicious gummy. Oh, it drives me crazy.

It's the marketing that adults need to be marketed to that they wouldn't have somehow the ability or the desire to take a vitamin that they think is good for them unless it tasted like candies, fresh little candies. Oh, it just makes me physically ill. Now, melatonin gommies are awesome, but I'm talking about the marketing. I'm not talking about why they're great, and we'll talk about that in just a second. I think that's hilarious. Well, thank you. But anyway, so I heard you talk about... She likes it when I get infuriated.

A few shows ago, and I don't remember when it was, but anyway, and I had a very, very, very hard time going to sleep. So I had tried, like, I mean, 300 micrograms of the melatonin pills, and I would wake up. I think she must mean milligrams because of 300 microgram. Now, there are some investigators out there that think that melatonin should be dosed at a much lower dose than we buy over the counter. But, you know, they're in a minority, but they have some evidence to back them up. But anyway, you know, I take them at like, I don't know, 9, 930, and then wake up at 6 a.m. And by the way, 300 milligrams is a huge amount of melatonin. You know, be dragging ass out a bit.

So, fast forward, and that was in high school. So now, I'm out of high school, of course, and I tried the gummies. Okay, let me throw this out there. they do make 300 microgram gummies. The ones that you buy at like the store usually are 2.5

milligrams. Right. So that would be let's see. Alexa, what's 2.5 divided by 0.3? 2.5 divided by 0.3 rounds to 8.333.

So that's the same as taking 8 of those 300 micrograms. one. So she thought she was taking a lot. I didn't realize, I got to be honest with you, I didn't realize that they sold it in 300 milligram amount. So that was, you know, she was taking a very low dose back then. 300 microgram.

What did I say? Milligram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, 300 micrograms. No, I didn't mean. Yeah. So she would have to take eight of those to get a 2.5 melatonin gummy, which may be the reason. So, but. I can take a 5 milligram gummy.

That's the same as 16 of the other things she was taking. at, I don't know, 10 o'clock, and by like 7, you know, take it at 10 p.m. by 7 a.m. You know, I'm very well-rested. You know, I'm awake and I'm ready to tackle on the day. And those gummies have been, like, the biggest lifesaver of my life. I swear by me, like, I cannot go to sleep if I don't take my mouth on a gummies. And they're really good.

so yeah just wanted to say thanks for talking about gummies and um i was the one that called about the nipple piercings so next time you're alive you shoot me a message i can call one anyway give yourself a bill you y'all have a good day oops i hit the wrong button i was trying to hit this one oh yeah so anyway so let's just talk about not melatonin for a little bit. Do you guys use it in? Absolutely. You do.

Absolutely. So did the traditional Chinese providers from a thousand years ago have some sort of Melatonin, something like that that subsequently we find out had melatonin in it? Is there anything like that that you've come across? Not that I've come across specifically, but we've used melatonin for as long as I can remember for sleep. Yeah. And it works. You know, and it's funny, I had a patient similar to that the other day.

they were taking melatonin in the capsule or form, taking it at midnight, he was taking three, 10 milligram. That's what I said. That's too much. That's way too much. I said, you know, number one, that's way too much. Number two, you take it at the wrong time because a lot of those capsules take two to three hours to kick in.

That's why I feel like crap in the morning. So just exactly what she said is exactly what I do. The five milligram, to be clear, those five milligram. gummy bears, which is what you'll see on most of the stores, you know, in the stuff. I see 2.5s. C4.5s of 5s, yep. And that's the normal dosage. And it seems to be a pretty good.

If you have to take more than that, there's something else going on. Yeah. And like I said, there are people that really think that less is more when it comes to melatonin. Let's just talk a little bit about melatonin. Your body produces melatonin naturally from the pineal gland. And it doesn't make you sleep. but in the evening

melatonin starts to rise and it gives you that feeling of quiet peacefulness and we screw it up with our iPads and stuff and blue light from TV or cell phones or iPads can interfere with the production

of this melatonin so I'm going to encourage all of you right now to go and set your blue light all of these things now have a blue light setting on them or a nighttime setting, max that out. And what that does is it turns off all the blue and it gives your screen kind of a sepia tone appearance.

But I found that that makes a huge difference for my ability to sleep at night. As a matter of fact, when I get in bed now and I get my iPad or whatever and start reading an article, and I've got that blue light turned off, I just fall asleep. I can't read anything anymore.

And I'm not taking melatonin anymore or anything. Oh, wow. So. I still think it every night. I love it. Yeah. It's changed my life, too. I'm with her.

Yeah. You know, let's talk a little bit about sleep hygiene, too. So some people will stay up real late on the weekends and then, you know, have trouble getting up in the morning on weekdays when they have to go to work. And I know it sounds like it's no fun, but you really have got to start trying to sleep at the same time every night, even if it's, within an hour. Yes. But if you're like my kids, you know, they'll go to bed at midnight and get up at six on a weekday.

It doesn't matter how much I fuss at them. But then on the weekend, they'll stay up to three or four. And then it's like, and then they'll get up at 11, and I'm in their room, you know, going, look, you've got to get up five hours earlier tomorrow. And you're going to be miserable, you know? So sleep hygiene is a big deal. If you have, let's say, a cell, or not a cell, a cable box that's got a blue light, cover that up. You don't need to see those dumb numbers on there.

Just cover it up. And any other sort of chargers that are giving off lights, cover those up with masking tape or something like that. You want to sleep in as darker room as you can get it. um if you're sleeping uh oh here's another thing don't work in bed i see kids doing homework in bed don't do that bed for an adult should be for sleeping and having intercourse and that's it if you do anything else in there because if you're working you're trying to fight to stay awake what you want to condition your body to do is when it's in bed go to sleep right so if you're fighting to stay awake while you're in bed, then you're going to condition your body that being in bed means

being awake. So, use the least amount of melatonin that you can possibly get if you're going to do it for jet lag. Take it two hours before your bedtime at the destination and do that a couple hours before the trip. So, like, if you're going to Vegas, let's say if you're coming back from Vegas. Coming back from Vegas, right. And you're doing the red eye, what you want to do, if your bedtime is midnight, your time.

Figure out when that is. So if you're on the East Coast, that would be nine. So you would take the melatonin at seven on the red eye, and then you're going to hope to fall asleep around midnight your time. So when you get back to the East Coast, when you wake up, you can stay up all day and then you can go to bed at a normal time.

And that will really, I've been very successful at avoiding jet lag altogether by doing that. Don't use melatonin if you're pregnant. Don't use it if you're breastfeeding, if you have an autoimmune disorder, a seizure disorder, or depression. Always talk to your health care provider about these things, and only use it as long as you can. Dr. Scott takes it every day. But that's just me. I stopped taking it after a couple of months, and my sleep cycle is back to normal again.

So you might want to see if you can do without it. I've always been nervous about taking a hormone for a gland that we don't understand very well. And the pineal gland is one of those. Oh, we don't understand it very well. Yes, no, I agree. I'm not telling people to do it because I do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, do as I say, not as Scott does.

Yeah, exactly. All right. Okay, doke. All right. Home sperm count. We did that. We did that. Oh, you know what?

Let's take the rest of the time to talk about fibromyalgia. Okay, sure. Because I've got a little bit of news on that. You know, it's a fibromyalgia, there are a lot of people that don't believe it exists. Well, you know, what you may not believe that the person that you know that's complaining of fibromyalgia has fibromyalgia, but it affects millions of people in the United States. It is a syndrome, meaning that we have a collection of symptoms and a criteria for diagnosing it, but we don't have a cause for it yet. They get pain all over the body with fatigue, headaches. They get increased sensitivity to painful stimuli.

They may have depression and anxiety, bad sleep, problems with memory or thinking. So you think, well, maybe it's that that's causing it. And the CDC figures that it affects about 4 million adults. The problem is there's not a blood test for it. So a lot of doctors have misdiagnosed people as having this condition. They may have other ruminologic diseases, hypothyroid. If you know, if you're going to see somebody, you need to check the thyroid. You've got to do a workup.

Right. You know, doctors miss about 60% of fibromyalgia cases and then misdiagnose 11% of the people who didn't match the criteria for this. So, in other words, they were saying 11% of the people have it that don't have it, and they're saying 50% of people, it's more like 50. I think I said 60, don't have it that do. have it. Now, it's still the gold standard. We don't have a test. So you have this list of criteria. You've got to meet these criteria to have it. The good news is for fibromyalgia

sufferers, now I'm sounding like a commercial, there's been some pretty good data with an off-label use of a medication called naltrexone. Now, naltrexone is a long-acting opioid antagonist, meaning that you can use it to reverse the activity of opioids, including endogenous opioids. In other words, ones that we produce in the brain and the central nervous system ourselves. And you can reverse its activity. We say, well, why would you want to do that? Well, because when you do that transiently like that, you get an upregulation of

of endogenous opioids, in other words, pain killers that your body produces. And this upregulation results in a significant improvement in sensitive. symptoms in these patients. There's also other pathways. This stuff works. Anti-inflammatory. The research is still going on. It's dirt cheap. It has to be gotten at a compounding pharmacy so far. It's 4.5 milligrams a day. But you've got to catch these folks before they get on narcotics for this stuff. Because once they get on opioid pain relievers for fibromyalgia, this won't work. Terrible I do. And that won't work either. Those folks are still. miserable and they'll still tell you they don't feel good and uh the opioids are not really

helping them so anyway can i add two cents into that yeah you see the clock yeah no i'll add it two cents tomorrow totally next week really next week well just no real quick other things vitamin d and increasing sleep have been shown to help fibromyal suffering yeah and probably acupuncture too yeah but never hurts it that just makes you feel good all over there you go okay very good many thanks. Always go to Dr. Scott. We can't forget, Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg, Hughes, Anthony, Coomia, Jim, Norton, Travis Tefft, Lewis Johnson,

Paul Ophcharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat, Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Safonda Cox, that's still in there. Ron, I remember, and the lady diagnosis goes, is that a real,

that's somebody's name? Ron Bennington and Fizz Watley, who's early support of this show, has never gone unappreciated. Listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk Channel. Sirius XM. Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, and Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemails 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 in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.

Thank you.