Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 355 - Fish Oil Rules After All!

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

Fish oil was cool, then it sucked, now it's cool again. Also CBD, turmeric, cruel anti-vaccine advocates, chemicals vs drugs, dealing with non-responsive provides, and more! Please visit: stuff.doctorsteve.com simplyherbals.net freshly.doctorsteve.com tweakedaudio.com offer code FLUID 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've got diphtheriae, ho, ho, y'ho, yeah, me garreted. I've got diphtheria, crushing my esophagus, I've got Tobolivide stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain now, blast it with the wave, and off. ultrasonic, agographic, and a pulsating shape, I want a magic mill all my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane, and if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane.

I want a requiem for my disease, so I'm paging Dr. Steve. Dr. Steve. Yo, de, yo, take a careful. Yo, ho, ho, do to learn a brain. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical shows. and the history of broadcast radio and the longest running show on this channel. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal,

Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medical doctor, gives me street cred with the wackle alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. I was just going to let you talk on the phone, and I'm just going to get this show started. This is a show for people who'd never listen to a medical show on the radio. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider, if you can't find an answer anywhere else.

Give us a call at 3477664.4.766. 4323. That's 347. Poohead. Thank you. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news, and stuff you can buy that I can't mention contractually. 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 the show without talking to over with your doctor. Nurse practitioner, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist or whatever. All right. Very good. well um how are you doing doing good no i'm sorry i was on the phone my um my little house she said my little baby chewy was something like she was choking on her food so oh yeah is that normal no but she's she heard her little silences are as bad as mine oh yeah you know she only weighs about eight pounds and so she snorts and sniffs and carries on some oh okay

yeah i was talking telling her what to do but it's it should be all right So what did you tell her to do? High liquor. What? No, no, I told her just to keep an honor. What the fuck? Liquor, hi, me. I got it.

Oh, I was going to give you a boo, but. Boo. I'll do it. Anyway. No, chichu, she'll be all right. She just, my little, my sitter is very, very overly sensitive. Let's just be like that. Yeah, yeah.

And it's okay, though. Yeah, no, I get it. I'm daddy. I mean, my mother-in-law is same way. Well, Steve. I'm always her coughing. Well, or... I don't know.

I don't even want to talk about it. Anyway, hey, don't forget to check out stuff. com for all your Amazon needs. Stuff. Dot, Dr. Steve.com. And I may even have some, like, a promo codes and stuff coming up. Amazon sent us out a thing that there may be some

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tell them old doc Steve told you hello. Simply herbals.comnet is Dr. Scott's website. Soon to have some kind of CBD concoction on there. Nume. Dottersteve.com.

That's N-O-O-M. dottersteve.com if you want to follow along with me and lose some weight and change the psychology of your life. That's really what it's about. It's a psychology app. And I am now at the lowest I've weighed in as long as I can remember.

Oh, yeah. I can't remember. You ever been this then? No, no, no. No, no, I'm actually no longer overweight, according to the BMI charts, although I don't put a whole lot of truck in that. But I am four pounds away from my ideal body weight, which is where I want to go. But I hit my new load today. I'm finally under 160.

Wow. I started at 188. Wow. Yeah. All right. So I'm happy with that. So if you go to Noom. Dot, Dr.steve.com, you get two weeks free.

Just try it out. You get 20% off if you do decide to buy in, and it's still, even without the 20% discount, it's still $10 a month, less than Weight Watchers. And I think it's superior. You get a counselor, you get a group session that you can use if you're not, and a group counselor plus a weight tracking thing. The hot coach. Yeah, they seem to really do that.

And if you want to track your weight statistically, send me an email, and I will send you an Excel spreadsheet that you can put in and you can get a 20-day moving average, smooth moving average, to see what your weight's actually doing. Plus, I've got these Bollinger bands that we use in technical analysis in the stock market. And I said, you know, that curve looks like a stock curve. I put these Bollinger bands on there, and all that is is two standard deviations from that smooth moving average, or simple moving average. And it makes these little bands above and below the curve, and if the actual weight curve will bounce around, like if it's going down, it'll bounce against the bottom band, and if it's going up, it'll bounce against the top band. So it kind of amplifies what's really going on, so you can tell, hey, is my weight really going down even? And though I just gained five pounds because I ate a bunch of sausages last night or whatever. All right.

Yes. Now, the other thing, we have done Blue Apron on the show. And I loved Blue Apron because you'd get things and you didn't waste any money or waste any food because if you needed two radishes, they would send you two radishes. If you needed an ounce of some weird esoteric vinegar. they sent you one ounce of it so there was never any waste i like that i love that part took about 20 30 minutes to do and we still am our big fans of blue apron then i got lazy and said well i don't want to prep any of this stuff anymore i'm going to get terra's kitchen so tera's kitchen they do all the prep for you so if you have to chop or slice those radishes they just send you two sliced radishes so they've

done all the prep all you got to do is put it together and heat it up and then i got even more lazy and said well hell um let me just get the food sent to me already made so freshly um everything is gluten-free it's all healthy but it's delicious and you can stack it based on how many uh you know which proteins you like or you can sort it by caloric um uh value nothing's more than like 600 calories So, and the lowest one, I think, is about $3.20. So it's a healthy way to eat, and it's just good, and the food is excellent. And if you want to try it, you can get $40 off. They deliver fresh prepared meals that make eating right super easy.

You can use my link to get six dinners for $39 for two weeks, and that's $20 off each week. And give it a try and let me know what you think. go to Freshly, F-R-E-S-H-L-Y dot Dr.steve.com. And if you try it, let me know what you think. They're kind of like lean cuisines, but there's more food and it's way better. Yeah, I'm looking forward to trying it. Yeah, it's awesome. And then don't forget, if you want archives of this show, go to premium.com.

For a buck 99 a month, you can get archives of this show. You can get any premium content that we happen to put up there. and it's a great way to support the show for very little money. And if you use Offer Code Fluid, you get half off for the first three months. All right? Cool. Do you have this CBD stuff on your website? I don't yet, but I'm going to have it on there soon.

You're going to. Yeah, as soon as I can get my, my IT guy to put it on there. It's a wonderful, it's a wonderful concoction of CBD oil. This is not a commercial, by the way, but this is, I bring this up for a reason because I'm taking it. it. Yeah, it's something I use a lot, but it's turmeric and some ginger root, and it's a pretty good formulation for all anti-inflammatory stuff. CBD likely has, if people don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about cannabidial,

you can buy it over the counter in almost every state in the union, maybe every state now, as long as it's derived from hemp. Right. So if it's hemp derived, hemp has, you know, it's like males. and females. Males have a lot of testosterone, a little bit of estrogen. Females have a lot of estrogen, a little bit of testosterone. The marijuana plant, cannabis sativa, has a lot of THC and a little bit of CBD.

Right. So you can get CBD out of it. You know, if you want to use the whole plant, you get the THC oil and then separate it, you know, separate out the CBD. so you get both. Which isn't always very easy. No. And expensive. And that is not legal to sell over the counter in, at least in states where marijuana is not legal.

I think in Tennessee it is, they can have up to 0.03%. As long as it's hemp derived. So the setiva derived CBD oil is actually a scheduled drug now. So it's Schedule 5. You can get it. You have to have a prescription. for it, but if you want to get it from the hemp derived, you just go, we've got a, you know, an Amish store called Yoters, and they sell it.

So, you know, when Yoters is selling it, it's gotten pretty mainstream. But it turns out the FDA has looked at some of these and some of the things that are being sold as CBD oil or CBD or whatever, don't even have any CBD in them. And some of them have more THC than they're supposed. to. So if you're going to buy this stuff, you want to go someplace where you can feel comfortable that they've vetted their supply. Because the people are selling it, they may not be ripping you off.

They don't know. How do they know? They don't have GC mass spec vision. So they can't tell when they, you know, somebody sells them to this stuff and it's supposedly CBD oil. Now, I'm pretty sure I could tell from the taste of it, whether it's real or not. Sure. I love to do a taste test of different ones because I got mine from a pharmacy that vetted the supplier very thoroughly, and they have analysis of what's in there.

And this has 0.3% THC and 99.7% CBD oil. So why am I taking it? Not for some fad bullshit, but I woke up one day with all – and we talked about this a little bit last week. I woke up one day with all of my proximal muscles hurting A.F. And, you know, muscle tenderness, pain when I moved my limbs. And it was keeping me up at night. I mean, that's how severe it was. And so I had a bunch of blood work done.

All of it was pretty negative. Well, all of it was negative. Good. Stone cold negative. So the diagnosis of polymyalgia rheumatica was made. Polymyalgia rheumatica is a disease of old ladies. I normally see this in elderly women, but clinically that's what I got. Right.

Now, it may be related to the amylotapine I was on, which by the way, well, I have another story about that, but it was Norvask or amelotapine for blood pressure. Because all of a sudden, now my blood pressure is going up. So at 60, before 63, I wasn't on any medicine except some lifestyle stuff, like for heartburn and shit like that. And now, hell, I've got, I'm on an anti-hypertensive, and now I got polymalgia rheumatica. For now, we're going to fix that. Yeah, yeah. So, Dr. Scott gave me this CBD oil, or CBD, it's a powder.

It's a powder with turmeric. Yep, and... Some ginger, ginger root. I think there's ginger in it. There's black pepper. Black pepper. You know, they say black pepper increases the bioavailability of turmeric. That's why it's in there.

Interesting. It helps with it. You know, so you can use less of it and stronger. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a great product. You know, Dr. Steve, the companies we have are absolutely what we feel at top-notch. It's all pharmaceutical-grade stuff. Yeah.

And I think it's important that you go to somewhere where you can trust those people. Yeah, just one of these CBD shops that are popping up. I'm not a fan. Me either. You know, and they may have wonderful people. Wonderful intense, but the truth is, but the truth is they, you know, they probably have a magazine. They're looking through and flipping through and picking out these oils.

It looks cool. That looks cool. Or this may be the least expensive or they can buy them both from the best price or whatever, you know, which is, you know, they're just trying to do their best. And so, yeah, make it sure. That's not regulated. So unless the FDA pulls them off the shelf, which they will do from time to time, that's how they caught that.

guy that was selling herbal cockpills, you know, for erectile dysfunction and found out he was putting my agrient. I know. It's the most bizarre. It's like, damn, come on people. So they'll pull these things off the shelves to kind of at random and then test them. And they should.

Yeah. So check out, when you're going to buy it, just find out how they vetted it. You need to have an analysis from, you know, a licensed facility that's qualified to analyze these things. And If you don't know yourself.

Third party, ideally, a third party doing the vetting. If you don't know how to judge that, then go to a pharmacy where the pharmacist is relatively academic and is into all this stuff. And then they'll do all the vetting for you. But, yeah, I've been very happy with it. I'll tell you, last week I felt like absolute dog shit. And this week, so far, so good. I feel pretty good. And I told my doctor, I said, we've got to get this wrapped up.

I'm going on vacation now. next week. Hell, there was a time during this. I thought I was literally dying. I said, I've got lymphoma, or I've got ALS or something. Well, even though I know that ALS doesn't present with pain, it presents with weakness. And just to make sure I didn't have ALS, I ran up stairs at work, you know, for the last two weeks, instead of taking the elevator just to prove to myself that I didn't have leg weakness. Hey, one whole fly the stairs. Well, you know, but you've been a second. Well, if you have No, I know. I'm just being sick. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do that. No, I know. I know. But anyway, no, I'll go up two and three flights of stairs. Do we go to, one to you and two to me? Yeah, that's right. Oh, in the office. I'm talking about it in the hospital. Oh, awesome. Sure, sure, sure.

But anyway, so, yeah, so that's my CBD talk right now. I'll let you know. I am also taking other things. We took me off the blood pressure medicine that I read a thing that said rarely it can cause this. and put me on a new one, and my blood pressure is doing okay. And I'm also on low-dose steroids, which is the treatment for this. Now, I'm not on enough steroids to cause my face to puff up, but polymyalgia rheumatica is treated with just a very low-dose supplementation of steroids. And nobody knows what causes it, what the real path of physiology is, why low-dose steroids work, but they do. Well, I was looking, of course, you know, and that's why I'm a huge.

each proponent of the turmeric. Certainly with the CBDLs. Yeah, talk a little bit about why turmeric is, or a turmeric, as you say. We have turmeric, turmeric, or is kirkuma, kirkumalongos. That way can probably agree on the scientific. But it works very similarly to the Advil's anti-inflammatories that you would get either over-the-counter or prescription medications like a steroid. There's been a number of studies showing that the turmeric has great efficaciousness for inflammation and works as well as steroids.

Epicaciousness. You're making up words now. Efficacy. Efficacy. Efficaciousness. That's Chinese. Hey, but it works as well as steroids in many, many instances. You know, I think there's a place for all these medications.

Certainly short-term use of steroids good. Long-term, not so good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the problem. I'm going to, I will have to take it for a couple of years if this diagnosis holds. But not if we get it under control with my stuff. So that's what, yeah, it's, but we'll have it on our website and people will be able pick it up from us, so that'll be a good thing.

But, you know, Dr. Steve, I was just looking and thinking about, I saw this article earlier today, it's talking about how PTSD can affect the prevalence of chronic diseases. And I thought that was kind of an interesting topic. Yeah, I just saw that. Well, like what? Well, it's talking about how... I would figure PTSD causes stress, which then causes issues with chronic disease. Yeah, this one particular study talked about the symptoms of 84 people who were diagnosed with PTSD following, 39 of which were actually involved in a terrorist attack.

Yeah. Forty-five of which went through another traumatic event, and they found that those patients had much higher prevalence of neoplasms. And the females had even a higher rate of the neoplasms than the males, which was kind of interesting. But the men had increases and changes in circulatory and metabolic problems. Did you have statistical significance on that? No, it didn't get that far down to the study. I bring that up because you got another story about statistical significance. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was pretty funny. We'll get to that for all of our empiricists later. Yeah. I'm just looking up this curcumin stuff. It says, okay, so curcumin affects this enzyme called cyclooxygenase, but it also affects an enzyme called lipooxygenase. And there's the role of those two enzymes, particularly Cox II in inflammation, has been well established. So that's why our non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents will affect Cox 1 and Cox 2. Let me see.

It says here the curcumin selective transcriptional regulatory action of Cox 2 and dual Cox slash locks inhibitory potential. This naturally current agent provides distinctive advantages over the synthetic Cox-Lox inhibitors, such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. So I would be really interested to see, since these work on the same mechanism of inhibiting these enzymes and affecting prostate glandins, do they have the same effects on GI bleeding?

Because if they don't, then I'm really surprised that some company hasn't figured out a way to make synthetic turmeric and sell it at some exorbitant price. Sure, make a prescription. And Dr. Steve, I've never seen anything as far as having it affect the stomach. Now, you know, in Chinese medicine, that's one of the reasons we actually used it initially was for gastritis.

Hmm. Yep. Yeah. Or as I like to call it, a rebellious stomach chi. For gurd. Gerr. But it is, it tends to help suit the stomach actually. Sure.

Well, I know. Now, that's me saying. Not research. It's okay, but non-steroidels will, too. When I had my abdominal pain, I could take a non-steroidal, and it would make my pain better, which told me that it probably wasn't acid-related, but it did make that, you know, it did improve that. I'm going to find out curcumin and GI bleeding, see if there's anything that's been done on that. I'm looking on PubMed.com.

Yeah, you know, and a lot of those insides are wonderful medications. You know, it's just like anything else if you take too many of them. They can possibly have some. Wow. Listen to this. Curcumin, a component of turmeric, effectively prevents dichlofenac, which is a very powerful non-steroidal, induced gastroenteropathic damage in rats. Now, that's interesting.

So even though it works on the same mechanism, it seems to be protective rather than damaging. Cool. I'm just looking at this current gastroal, God, what is this? this journal, it just says Kerr gastroenterol rep. So I don't know. Okay, it's current gastroenterology reports. That's what it is.

Cannabis, just to bring it all together, cannabis and turmeric has complementary treatments for inflammatory bowel disease and other digestive diseases. So it says here, cannabinoids are well-established modulators of gut motility. That's good. You've got to have gut motility.

If you don't, food will pool in your stomach like P.A. John, and you get gastroporosis and you feel sick all the time because food isn't moving through your GI tract. And it's ill-ching and pain. Yeah, yeah, and visceral pain have demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties. Clinical trial suggests there may be a therapeutic role for cannabinoid therapy in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, nausean vomiting, and GI motility disorders. Wow.

Cool. Um, which, which makes me want to say if, you know, unless if you, if you don't have any allergies to, to turmeric, maybe taking that in addition to, because you know, Dr. Stephen, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of times if you give someone an insid or Dioclofenac, you know, orally might tell them to take it with food. Yeah, that doesn't upset the stomach. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I'm hoping that, um, the, um, or the thought would be maybe taking a little bit of this turmeric along with, with, with, with your prescription medicine. May be a good idea. Evidence suggests that the use of cannabis and turmeric is potentially beneficial in inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. However, neither has been compared to standard therapy and IBD, and thus should not be

recommended as alternative treatment yet, is what they're saying. When we do have that, now when was this published? Let me see. This is this year. So when they do have that data, look, it's insane that this stuff is illegal. you know, particularly cannabis. Yeah, I understand we live in a society where we don't want anybody to have fun. They just work harder and get paid less.

But as medication, why would I, for example, why would I withhold a drug from a hospice patient that's been proven to make them feel better, you know? Makes no sense. It makes no sense whatsoever. So I'm still all in on legalizing that particularly. Just, you know, selfishly, just give it to us for hospice patients. We'll start there and then you can see if it's going to cause a problem. And it won't. Right.

And it's like we tell the hostas patients all the time. We will do anything to make you feel better and don't be concerned about, you know, being addicted to things or side effects. We want people to just feel better. Well, we do want them to be concerned about side effects, but I know. Well, yeah, I'm sorry. Apologies, not side effects, but being addicted to something. We want them to be happy and feel good. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sorry. No, I was terrible. No, I'm just talking with you. Here's a good story. Her son died, and then the anti-vaxxers attacked her. So it says not long ago, a four-year-old boy died of the flu. His mother under doctor's orders watched his two little brothers like a hawk, terrified they might get sick and die too. Grieving and frightening.

It's just horrible. Grieving and frightened just days after. son deaths. She checked her Facebook page, hoping to read messages of comfort from family and friends. Instead, she found dozens of hateful comments. You're a terrible mother. You killed your child. You deserved what happened to your son. This is all fake. Your child doesn't exist. So she closed her Facebook app. She received a text message from someone named Ron. Expect more like this, Ron Moore. Expect more. And the attacks were from those who oppose vaccination. This mother who lives in the Midwest, doesn't want her name use. Okay.

Interviews with mothers who have lost children with those who spy on anti-vaccination groups reveal a tactic employed by anti-vaxers. When a child dies, members of the group sometimes encourage each other to go on that parent's Facebook page. The anti-vaxers then post messages telling the parents they're lying and their child never existed or the parent murdered them or vaccines killed the child or some combination of all of those. okay

nothing is considered too cruel just days after their children dialed mothers say anti-vaxxers on social media called them whores the C-word and baby killers you know god damn it cut the shit

you are I know this isn't probably policy for whatever organized anti-vaccination groups this is more like that Westboro Baptist Church kind of stuff, but you are not helping your side when you pull this shit. Nope. If you got some science on your side, bring it on, and we'll look at it. If you can show me that one of these vaccines is harmful or the risks outweigh the benefits,

I'll be with you 100%. But this kind of shit is not even not acceptable. It's immoral and it's evil. Yeah, evil. So her other two kids probably survived because they were vaccinated, you know. The influenza vaccine, let's reiterate this, it's very valuable. It decreases death from influenza. It decreases hospitalization.

You may still get it, but you're less likely to die or end up in the hospital. And it will reduce the incidence as well. particularly if that year they picked the right strain to vaccinate you against. But none of these things are perfect. We're just talking about mitigating risk. So wearing your seatbelt does not prevent you from dying in a car wreck. It just decreases the risk of you dying if you're thrown from being thrown from the car. Yes, it increases your risk of dying in the car if your seatbelt malfunctions and your car catches on fire,

which happens about one time in a million, whereas when people are thrown from the car, they die about one time in two. So, you know, we're just mitigating risk. Not smoking doesn't prevent heart attacks or lung cancer. But it certainly decreases the risk significantly. So, you know, these vaccines decrease the risk. And, you know, there are tragic cases where the vaccine fails or cause. is some... Someone was allergic to it.

They didn't know that before. Yeah. And those are tragic also. They're very tragic. It doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. And you're still, those, the risk to the individual is extremely small unless it happens to you and then it's 100%. And then it sucks.

But, you know, I kind of gritted my teeth when I had my kids vaccinated because I even though intellectually, I know it was a good. exactly the right thing to do. I know the numbers, everything, and I still kind of cringed a little bit. Back of the... Because, well, what if? But the odds or the risk of something bad happening from vaccinating my kids is totally dwarfed by the benefit they get from not being susceptible to polio and measles, which my friend

in kindergarten died from measles. I had a bunch of kids in my school, because I'm old, that had polio, you know, and were in wheelchairs or crutches or, you know, whatever. People don't remember that. I'll guarantee damn to you, not a single one of these anti-vaxxers has ever seen a case of diphtheria. If they did see it, they would absolutely vaccinate themselves. And do they vaccinate their dogs? Are they against that too? Because rabies is fatal.

If you get bit by a rabid dog, unless you get vaccinated, right then you will die. So, well, they're going to not vaccinate themselves in that situation? What if their kid gets bit by a rabid bat? Are they not going to vaccinate the kid? They're just going to let it die? Because it will die. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So I just, I don't get it. I understand. that humans look at the least likely thing, and that's the thing they're afraid of. We were bred that way genetically. And here's why. We've talked about on the show before. If you're a caveman,

and every time you see the grass in the savannah moving, you assume that it's a saber-tooth tiger, even though 99 times out of 100, it's just the wind, and then you run up a tree, you're going to be less likely to get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. So back in those days, paying attention to the less likely thing was beneficial. Right. Now, it's no longer the case because we live in a different world.

And when we stop doing things, now that we know probabilities and those kinds of things, I mean, what if the odds were that if they ran up the tree, the branch would fall and they'd fall and break their neck? If that even happened, you know, if it's 99 times out of 100, it's not a saber-toothed tiger. If that happens two times out of 100, they've doubled their risk of dying by jumping into the tree. So, you know, likewise with not wearing your seatbelt because you're afraid of getting trapped in the fire, and likewise with not getting vaccinated for diseases that can kill. you. I am concerned. There's a vaccine I'm not thrilled with, and that's the chicken pox vaccine. For the most part, chicken pox is a lifestyle modifying disease for kids. They're

uncomfortable. They look goofy with all these pock marks and stuff all over them. Have to stay home from school for a week. They have to stay home from school. But most of the time you don't die from it. It can't happen. but my concern is that they're giving them a killed virus that prevents them from getting chickenpox but what happens if immunity fades later in life and all of a sudden we have these adults who are now getting chickenpox now if a kid gets chicken pox it's really no big deal but if an adult gets it it can it can be really life-altering you know it can be extremely symptomatic they can get orchitis where they're um well that's more with mumps but uh let me look up adult chicken

oh yeah i've never seen an adult with it have you no but we might start seeing them i agree now that this generation has uh grown up with not getting chicken pox but being all right let me see oh now i know um uh if a woman who's pregnant gets chicken pox that can be fatal to the fetus sure yeah it says chickenpox is highly contagious disease caused by the varicella zoster virus the same varicella virus that causes shingles later in life that's one thing you know if this vaccine works we can eradicate shingles which would be one which would be awesome it can cause itching tiredness and a fever but the hallmark of the disease is fluid fluid filled blister like rash rash shows up on your stomach back and face okay so let's

talk about adults. It can cause complications like pneumonia, encephalitis. That's an inflammation of the brain. Even cases without complications are more disruptive for adults versus children since adults typically have more daily obligations and that kind of stuff. So anyway, particularly in pregnant women who aren't already immune to the disease, they can transmit it to the fetus and it results in birth defects or fetal death. So what we need to determine over the next decade is does the immunity from the original vaccine fade and should we give these people booster vaccines as adults?

That's the one I'm a little freaked out about. The benefit and the risk are kind of equal for me on that one. Now the Gardasil or the HPV vaccine, awesome. It's hopefully one of our only cancer vaccines because cervical cancer sucks, particularly if it goes undiagnosed, if it goes too far and spreads to other parts of the body. It can, well, it's basically a terminal illness at that point with the technology we have now. When it's caught in the cervix itself, it's totally curable right then and there. So you want to get your pap smears done on the schedule that the U.S.PSTF, you know, the organization that sets schedules for preventative screening and get it done. If you haven't had one in a couple of years, go do it.

Assuming that you now, if you have a bunch of normal ones, you can spread that out some, but your OBGYN or your primary care will talk to you about that. Right. that know your history. But as far as the anti-vaxxers attack, you all just stop it. Quit being stupid. Yeah. All right.

Last one, and then we'll answer some phone calls. You know, we talked about the Norwegian fish study where people who ate a lot of fish didn't have heart attack, so the American response to that was, we'll put all these fish in a vat and render them down to the oil. and then we'll take a pill and then decide we can eat whatever the hell we want to eat. And everybody was really high on this until they did some studies that showed that fish oil actually didn't prevent heart disease.

Now, as science will do, when I was training in the 80s, beta blockers were malpracticed to give to people with congestive heart failure. Beta blockers a type of blood pressure medication that decreases the contractile. strength of the heart. And so it was felt like if you have congestive heart failure, which is a pump failure, that that would be malpractice to give them that. And so if people died with congestive heart failure while on a beta blocker, you know, you could get sued for it. Now, of course, we've learned because science that it's malpractice not to have them on a

beta blocker because actually makes the heart fit. It makes its job easier. Right. More efficient. And, yeah, so, you know, things change. Now there's a new study that purified fish oil derivative of prescription drug, of course, called VASEPA, is more effective at preventing cardiovascular events than previously thought. Well, hmm. The drug lowered the rate of these events in high-risk patients, including strokes, heart attacks, and deaths from cardiovascular disease by 30 percent.

Holy shit. Okay, that's about the same as a statin. You know, statins will decrease heart attack and stroke about 30 to 35. Now, remember, there's number, so this is good, because we may have an alternative. Scott just hears the word statin. He starts fucking freaking out. You've got to listen to what I'm saying. This is fish oil has the same efficacy as the statin, so we might be able to transition

people off the statins and get the same benefit. Because we've talked for years that nothing but statins decreases the risk of heart attack and stroke to that level. I can't take statins anymore. and I'm a former smoker and now I got freak god fecocta

hypertension and so now all of a sudden I'm at higher risk for having a heart attack than I was and I've been looking for something and this might be the shit right here

that's cool that's awesome let me see this is better than previously thought because the study authors took into account not just first cardiovascular events as before but also

second third and fourth events that is a hell I might get my doctor to put me on this stuff according to these latest data on cardiovascular episodes Vespa is slashed first events by a quarter

second and third events by more than 30% and later events almost by half and they say by treating a thousand patients for five years they could prevent 76 coronary revascularizations

42 heart attacks 14 stroke 16 hospitalizations due to unstable angina and 12 deaths Jesus. So let's add all those up. Alexa, what's 76 plus 42 plus 14 plus 16 plus 12? The answer to your calculation is 160. So 160. So Alexa, what is 1,000 divided by 160?

1,000 divided by 160 equals 6.25. So the number needed to treat. assuming that these are all different people that somebody didn't have a heart attack and also died so I'm assuming they separated these out I could be wrong the number needed to treat is about six do you remember what the number needed to treat

for a statin is it was it's 300 now that's in our right we we did a numeric thing that came out to 300 because we made the numbers easy but for statins it's like 90 okay so yeah okay I'm sending

this to my primary care, and I'm going to get on it. This might be, so this is a prescription drug derived from a single omega-3 fatty acid isolated from fish, and that may be why this is more beneficial than just fish oil, because fish oil might have only had, you know, 1% of this stuff. And there's a gazillion different types of fish, too, Dr. Steve. That's right, that's right. It may be one specific fish. Like, I'm taking the creole oil, which I think is actually very helpful.

Well, what are you basing that on? Just anecdotally, just how I find. I'm not saying the research is there to support. I'm just saying, just in case. Well, that's what whales eat and, you know, they do okay. Yeah, they've swam whale. They'll have long lives. This is excellent.

Yeah, hell. And, you know, my wife gave me this and said, well, maybe you could get on that. And I was like, oh, fuck, no, that, I was more polite to her than that. But in my head, you know, this stuff is just for people with high triglycerides, but I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to change. I'm sending this stuff. But here's the thing with you, Dr. Steve, your triglycerides aren't tissue, are they? No, no, no, no. Mostly because you have a great diet.

You don't eat a lot of things that, you eat a lot of sugars that convert. Yeah, no, I don't do any of that. But normally the fish oil derivatives have been used to reduce triglycerides. And there's reasons to do that other than cardiovascular disease. You're preventing pancreatitis and stuff like that. And liver stress. Yeah. So, but this stuff actually reduces all, all.

cardiovascular mortality so I'm in because you know my kids are only 13 and I don't want to have a damn heart attack and die if I can avoid it I got to do something I got kind of freaked out when I was taking a cardiac risk test and I was like oh shit you know I used to have none of this and now I've got several of these so all right cool you're ready to take some phone calls do it we'll do it number one thing don't take advice from some asshole on the radio all right thank you my friend Absolutely right. Uh-oh, well, it would help if I potted up the PC. Hang on.

Hey, Dr. Steve, it's Brian from New Hampshire. Hey, Brian. I heard a commercial where they referred nicotine as a chemical. What's a difference in a chemical and a drug? Oh. I thought nicotine was a drug. Yep. Thanks.

Love the show. No, it's a great question. So a chemical is defined as a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially, and or relating to chemistry or the interactions of substances studied in chemistry. So if you have a big Venn diagram, you know, the circular diagram that you remember from school, and let's say it's the set of all flowers. right so the set of all flowers and if you had the set of all chrysanthemums that would be a circle fully enclosed by the set of all flowers it would be enclosed on all sides now it might um wait a minute where's that coming from oh it might impact or you know touch the side tangentially but it'll be fully enclosed so all chrysanthemums are flowers but not all flowers are chrysanthemums right right so all drugs are chemicals but not all chemicals are drugs okay sure so drug let me see how they define drug because i'm going to assume that that's going to have something to do with a physiologic effect so a drug a medicine or substance which has physio there you go bingo give

yourself a bill give that to myself physiologic effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body okay so a drug is a a special instance of a chemical. Okay. Okay. So that's your answer. Semantics. Both of those are correct. Right. All right. Good question. Yeah, that's a good one. Oh, come on.

Volume. Talk a little bit about Bluetooth and is it dangerous. It seems to be that some people are thinking it is out there. So we're all wearing these earbuds and our ears and everything. So thanks a lot. Take care.

there have been please say no I know I know I know please they know um

yeah there's there has been some data that is suggested very peripherally that there may be

some danger and so they recommend that instead of holding the phone up your ear use hands free and use your speaker phone and stuff

but there's nothing really been nothing definitive. Let me Electro let me just this is a podcast, not a serious XM show, right?

No. I mean, yes. Hang on. I meant to bring this up earlier and I so Bluetooth, on the other hand, when we have these earbuds sticking in our ear, that's a little bit more of a concern because that electromagnetic field

is right there on your, on your, next to your head. Now, we know that various bands of electromagnetic radiation caused, you know, bad health effects in people. There's ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation, and that's based on the capability of a single photon to ionize oxygen or break chemical bond. And so ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, those are all ionizing. And then radio waves are non-ionizing. And so, you know, if you have sufficiently strong electromagnetic radiation, it can cause electric currents that can create sparks.

And, you know, they can, and this is just radio waves, you know, basically electromagnetic fields, and they can ignite flammable materials and gases and stuff like that. Now, low-level exposure, the World Health Organization began a research effort to study the effects from the ever-increasing exposure of people to electromagnetic radiation sources. And after 30 years of looking into this, science has not confirmed a health risk due to, to low-level fields. There are gaps in the understanding of the biologic effects. I looked up when I was, you know, researching this.

I couldn't find really anything that was definitive in humans, like causing brain tumors and stuff like that. That was the question was, can it cause brain tumors? I'm looking for anything on Bluetooth in here, not really finding anything. So, you know, millimeter wave scanners and airport and personal area networks, they were radiation levels in the millimeter rave length represent the high microwave band or close to infrared wavelengths, really nothing there yet. Radio frequency fields, I know the ham radio people have to be careful of radio waves in there. and they've got to be able to demonstrate at the FCC if they've done something about radio waves.

And there is this thing that may have had something to do with the people in Cuba since 1962, the microwave auditory effect or tenetis, you know, causes changes in your hearing. Sure. Ringing in the ears, yep. It's been shown from radio frequency exposure at levels below significant heating.

Studies during the 1960s in Europe and Russia claim to show these effects on humans, especially the nervous system, but those studies were disputed at the time. So, okay, here we go. In 2011, International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified mobile phone radiation is Group 2B, which they define as possibly carcinogenic, which is different than Group 2A, which is probably carcinogenic, or Group 1, which is carcinogenic. That meant that there could be some risk of carcinogenicity, so additional

research into the long-term heavy use of mobile phones needed to be conducted still haven't found anything and it says the WHO concluded in 2014 that no adverse health effects had been established as being caused by mobile phone use so there you go and uh i i really i don't know that they've studied bluetooth significantly so um you know just with anything else just use things wisely and don't overdo it. I think the risks are outweighed by the benefits of Bluetooth. Now, the, like the Apple ones where the Bluetooth transmitter is in your ear or just peripheral to your ear, you always wear that thing where the Bluetooth transmitter is actually around

your neck. So that at least keeps it away from your head because Bluetooth is very low-level radiation. Or when it shoots into my hot tube. Yeah. It's like it. All right. Oh, man. Well.

And some newly uncovered fertility issues. Hi to Dr. Steve. I'm going through the process of finally addressing my low testosterone and some newly uncovered fertility issues. This is the first time I've really engaged with medical providers outside of routine checkups or minor illnesses. Sorry, dude. The problem I'm running into is getting the providers to stay on top of things.

For example, I'll receive a test result notification in their app and then never hear from the doctor's office. Or I'll send a message and never hear back about something that's going on. It just seems like no one is interested in helping. I know they're busy, but this is a major university medical system with a statewide presence. It's not a mom-and-pop clinic. Do you have any tips for making sense? Yeah, that may be the problem.

You're in a big health system with a lot of moving parts, and sometimes you'll do better with the mom-and-pops. Absolutely. And I'll say that with pharmacies, too, although, you know, I love CVS and Walgreens and Walmart and stuff, but they are corporate, and there are times when the mom and pop organizations, if you've got something odd, you'll have continuity if you, um, oh, boy, hear you talk. Well, I was going to say, I'm a big fan of the mom and pops in both pharmacies and health care, because you do typically have better access to the providers, if it's your pharmacist or your. nurse practitioner or whomever it is that you're dealing with you know the big ones typically they get to know you you've got continuity because it's usually the same person you have a

personal um affiliation a relationship with these people you know when you when you go into some of these really massive places you're a number you know and well and they'll have different people and different you have a you have a whole room full of people that are looking at results and emailing these two were calling you and you know a lot of times dr. tv you know as well as i do we don't get the messages from from those people to say like such and such had this or that or You know, and then we've got 100 people. Let me tell you how physicians do this, particularly in the electronic medical record. When they get lab reports back, they'll get all these messages to check these values.

And if they're normal, you'll just skip over. Yep. Now, you're relying on the patient looking at it themselves at this point. Now, if I've got somebody that's worried about a lab test, we have a thing where we can send. a result report to them and it says this was here's your results and these were normal and they at least feel like I communicated with them you know and particularly if it's abnormal we'll call them but if they're relatively normal or they don't remember why they did it because they won't a lot of times because there's no context you know in the old days we would get

it with their chart you could look at the problem list on the chart now you're just getting all these blood works and you know those look okay to me and you just click on it and move on to the next thing. So the first thing I would do is complain to the office manager because the office manager is really in charge of corraling the doctors and the nurse practitioners and the nurses to give you customer service. And if you don't get satisfaction there, I'd go somewhere else because that's really what needs to be done in a situation.

The way you can vote with your feet and your pocketbook in a situation like that. But let them know why. You don't have to be a turd about it. You can just say, I'm going to have to move on because I don't feel that you all are staying on top of my information. And that might help them in the future. Yes. Yeah. Make some changes internally.

Which always pisses me off when I complain about stuff and then I move on somewhere else. And then the next thing I hear, they're incorporating all those. In my old practice in Vermont, we were on call every other night. It was my partner and I. When I went there, there were supposed to be three of us, and so we'd be on every third night and every third weekend. But then one of them quit, and they didn't replace her. So it was just the two of us. So I kind of felt like I bought a pig and a poke because they all knew she was going to retire.

So we were on every – and we were 40 minutes from the nearest hospital, which we had to go to. And if at 2 o'clock in the morning, somebody called us, and they had an emergency. I had to go to the office, which was in the middle of town, open it up, see them, and then, And if they needed to be admitted, I needed to go down to the hospital whether it could be two in the morning. But then I had to work the next day. I didn't get the next day off for anything. And so I begged them, can we just get a deal with one of the groups in town and let them admit for us? Or, you know, at least temporarily admit, then we can come down and see them the next day.

But, you know, can we have some sort of call arrangement with them? No, no, no, no. We need to do this because we were getting subsidized partially by the town. hall meeting. You know, it was in Vermont, so they had town hall meetings. Okay. And we would ask them for money every year. And they would give it to us. So, you know, we kind of both felt if we're going to take money from the town, we need to give them the service. But really, no one expects anybody to do, we did, house calls. We did. I did all the hospice care because there wasn't even a home health agency there. So I'd go to people's homes and do, you know,

their end of life care. And, you know, this, sometimes I'd have to get in the back of an ambulance at one or two in the morning and ride with somebody to the bigger town down the road because they were, you know, had respiratory failure or whatever. So no, no, no, can't do it. So eventually I took a job down here in Tennessee and I said, I'm leaving. And, you know, they hired somebody else and guess what? they as soon as they hired that guy they got a deal with the um with the other group and it's like you assholes i i would have stayed right well you know why do you do it for him you won't do it for me and i've been here three years taking call every other night that's a long damn three years

and then my partner would do two week vacations i'd be on call for two weeks straight and i got called every single night yeah i know the dispatch people hated me because i was so stressed out i was not always as nice as I should have been right that's a long long three years that's a hell of schedule it was good training for me though I saw every damn thing we were doing codes you know code blue out on the middle of the permafrost yeah it's crazy all right well 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 off Charsky Eric Nagel rolling Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley, whose early

support of this show has never gone. Unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand. And other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. And go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time.

Check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses, and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. See you. See you.