Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 356 - Phatty Liver

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

Well, turns out fish oil doesn't rule as much as I thought it did last show...more on this on a future show. THIS one, however, is fully of science, medicine and weird maladies. Enjoy! PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com simplyherbals.net freshly.doctorsteve.com noom.doctorsteve.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's the two fairies' favorite dance? The floss. You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, Riotcast.com. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got subolivide stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbell, exacerbating my infectable woes. I want to take my brain out

and blast with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill. 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.

It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal. Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medical practitioner who 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 your regular medical provider.

If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. at 347-7-66-4-3-23. That's 347. Pooh-Hid. Hey, follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at D.R. Scott, W.M. Visit our website at Dr.steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Go to our merchandise store at CafePress.com slash Weird Medicine. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything 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, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, Yoga Master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory scientists or whatever. All right. Very good. These flat earthers have gone wild. This is from live science. Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe the Earth is flat. Are planning a cruise to the purported edge of the planet.

They're looking for the ice wall that holds back the oceans. Of course, they'll find it. It's called Antarctica. And it's just one big ass ice wall. And they'll get there and go, see and depending on which way they go it's going to be a really rough trip told you there's a big wall ass journey will take place in 2020 the flat earth international conference recently announced on its website the goal to test so-called flat earthers assertion that earth is a flattened

disc surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice i wonder if there's i wonder if you could get laid on this cruise not a chance not No, you don't think so. No. You think flat earthers don't have intercourse or they're not wild? No, I don't think so. They don't do crazy. They might be crazy.

You might have crazy sex. That's true. Details about the event, including the dates are forthcoming, according to the FEC, which calls the crews the biggest, boldest adventure yet. It'd be fun. However, it's worth noting nautical maps and navigation technology, such as global positioning system, work as they do because the earth is round. That's how they're going to fucking get there.

so whoever's captaining the ship is like yeah yeah you guys just go have your fun i'm going to use the earth as a globe right to get to where it is that you want to go you guys just point and they're not dumb here's the thing no flat earthers aren't dumb here's what it is maybe there are some dumb ones well there's dumb other ever there's normal people also flat earthers are people who want to be contrarian but don't want to risk anything because there's no risk now if you want to say you know start getting political you're going to get trashed on the internet and people come after you and maybe they'll show up at your house or they'll ban you from uh PayPal and deep platform you from Twitter and stuff

unfriend you on Facebook. Well, and, you know, at the very least, but the, you know, the bad stuff is you can get kicked off so you don't have a voice. Right. Whereas if you're a flat earth or not, people just go, oh, those guys are nuts. Nobody gives a shit. Right. So you can join kind of a group of people that say, no, I'm not part of your system, man, but you're not actually risking anything. Nothing.

You're risking nothing other than people just thinking you're goofy and who cares. You know? The ancient Greeks demonstrated the Earth was a sphere more than 2,000 years ago. And, of course, gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could only exist on a spherical world. That's why Bizarro planet can't be real. Because do you remember what shaped Bizarro planet was? No, I know. Really?

It was a cube. Hmm. You don't know it was Bizarro? No, I don't think so. He was like a Bizarro Superman, and he had a craggly white face. No, I don't remember him. And he would say, you know, me am smart and stuff like that. He was like, he had the powers of Superman, but he was mentally challenged.

But they came from a planet that was a cube. And that's not possible either because gravity is going to always pull things to the center. And when you're pulling everything to the center, you will make a sphere. Now, obviously the world isn't a perfect sphere. It's an oblate spheroid because of its rotation. and but if you shrunk the earth down to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than a cue ball. That's how crazy that is that the oceans are really shallow

when you think of how thick the earth is. How thick the earth actually is, yes, very good, thank you. That makes sense. So, yeah, here we go. The navigational charts and the system that guide cruise ships and other vessels around the Earth's oceans are all based on the principle of around Earth

and GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth. You can watch these things, you can track them, you can predict when they're going to go overhead based on... Why am I explaining this? I don't know. The Earth is a sphere.

Cut the fucking shit. But have your fun. It's fun. It sounds like I wonder if their thoughts are like the stranger things where there's, on the bottom side of the earth is there like the well it's like they the people who are making fun of flat earthers will show an eclipse of the of the moon i mean you know uh yeah a lunar eclipse where the earth's shadow is being cast onto the moon right and it'll show a line and then it'll have an elephant you know a shadow of an elephant you know that's holding up the disc the giant elephant

that's holding the disc up um yeah whether or not the f e ic crews will rely on GPS or or deploy an entirely new flat earth-based navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen. So have fun. What I'm hoping is that they get there and just everybody's just fucking everybody. There you go. So there you go.

It works. Let's see here. Here's an article, how flat earthers explain total lunar eclipses. Because, you know, when you see a total lunar eclipse, you can see the shadow of the earth and it's, you know, it's circular. Right. which implies a spherical, you know, that's a circular cross-section of a spherical object, two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional object.

So let's see here. Skywatchers in much of the Western Hemisphere saw the moon pass directly through Earth's shadow. Our natural satellite appears red during lunar eclipses for the same reason that sunrises and sunsets appear that shade here on Earth because sunlight is scattered as it passes through the atmosphere. Okay, according to flat earth conspiracy theorists, this astronomical phenomenon known as total lunar eclipse was actually a rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of a mysterious shadow object that orbits the sun and occasionally passes in front of the moon from our point of view here on an allegedly pizza-shaped Earth. Boy, they've got to go from their elbow through their ass crack to get to that one. Although flat earthers believe our planet is flat as a pancake, they surprisingly seem to have come to the consensus

that the sun and moon are spherical objects. Okay, so we're special. However, these theorists posit that both the sun and the moon orbit Earth's north pole. Come on, hovering directly above the pancake and never passing around to the other side. If that were true, however, lunar eclipses, as we know them, could not happen because the moon must be on the opposite side of the earth from the sun for such an event to happen.

So flat earthers fabricated a new explanation for the shell, I've seen on the moon during the eclipse. So it's this other thing that we can't see the other thing, but somehow it obscures the light of the sun. Beautiful. That's delightful. So have fun. Have your fun.

And I hope everybody gets laid, and I hope they're all laughing at us going those stupid spherical earth people. They don't know what fun is on one of these flat earth cruises. So have fun. Anyway, don't forget, please, to check out stuff. dot Dr. Steve.com, that's stuff. dot Dr. Steve.com for all your Amazon shopping needs.

Check out Dr. Scott's website at Simplyerbils.net. We've got allergy season coming, and every single person that I've talked to that has used your nasal spray from Simplyerbils.net has given me a positive report. Everybody says the best stuff

on the market. So it's got a little peppermint oil for any inflammatory activity. It's got some buffered salis. in it. You can just spray the crap out of it because it's inexpensive. How much is a bottle of that stuff? I think it's $8 and that's shipping included. But it's a big

bottle. It's a big bottle, yeah. And you just spray the hell out of your nose with that stuff. It feels good and it really works. So check that out at simplyerbils.net. If you're interested in losing weight along with me, I'm 10 pounds away from my ideal body weight. I had

a little bit of a hiccup in my journey to my ideal body weight. It's called vacation. eating and drinking. But, you know, when I got back and I had gained eight pounds, I didn't fret about it because I knew exactly how to get it back down again. I'm already back down four, so I've lost half of it in just a couple of days. Cool.

So check that out at Noom, N-O-O-M dot Dr.steve.com. If you're interested in home-cooked, well, pre-made meals, You know, we used to do Blue Apron, where they would send you the raw materials and you'd make it. Right. And then, and there was no waste with Blue Apron. Blue Apron's awesome. You can go to Blue Apron.com slash Weird Medicine and still check it out. Then I did Tara's Kitchen for a while where they do all the prep for you.

So not only do you only get the two radishes, but if they're supposed to be sliced, they come pre-sliced. And it was really kind of cumbersome that came in this big giant cooler and you had all these little trays and stuff. But it was cool. Yeah. You just dump everything together and cook it. And then I got even lazier and decided, well, what if I just had the food sent to me already made? And that's Freshly. And so Freshly is a food service that delivers fresh prepared meals that make eating right really easy.

They're all gluten-free. They're healthy meals, and they're all really tasty. I haven't even had one that I said I wouldn't have again. You can use my link to get six dinners for $39 for two weeks. So that's $20 off each week. Give it a try, and let me know what you think. So you're getting $40 off of Freshly. You go to freshly.

Dot, dr.steve.com. And then if you want archives of the show, you can go to premium.com. If you're interested in getting the whole archives for $30, I'll send you a thumb drive. You just go to Dr. Steve.com, and there's a link there. I send you a... It's exactly 16.2 gigs, so I couldn't fit it

on a 16 gig thumb drive, so you get a 32 gig thumb drive with 15, you know, 15.9 gigs free. Nice. Anyway, and it's a pain in the ass to do, so I've got to charge a little bit for those. Or you can just get it for a buck 99, download them your damn cell. Well, how are you, Dr. Scott? We both just got back from vacation. Yes, I was just complaining a few minutes to go to you that we got off. When we left South Florida, it was 85 degrees.

And when we got here to the mountains, it was 40. five degrees we got off the plane so poor little fowler oh my gosh everyone's going to feel sorry for you i can i can hear the tears but um god no much better i was in need of a couple days off i had decided you know i have we talked about this last time i have this new malady this uh polymigratory polymyalgus in other words i've got muscle pain that moves around but it's uh basically attached itself to my hips and my shoulders, and I had basically normal blood work, which pretty much makes the diagnosis of this thing called polymyalgia rheumatica, which is the only time I've ever seen it is an 80-year-old old lady, so I'm really pissed.

So I, of course, looked at all the zebras. You know, if you're standing in a field in Upper East Tennessee and you hear hoofbeats behind You're going to assume it's a horse, not a zebra. But in medicine, you know, the horse is going to be all the common things, in this case, polymyalgia rheumatica. The zebra, in my case, would be a thing called limb girdle muscular dystrophy, which is, of course, I assume that I had. And while I was at the beach, you know, I'm like, this is going to be my last beach trip. I'm going to die. And, you know, I would try to.

get up out of bed and I would have pain in my hip in what I interpreted it as weakness because you know when if you have pain you don't like to move you don't like to move no and uh but it wasn't weakness I would run it up and down the stairs just to make sure this is what I know too much stuff that's that's the problem yes and uh so I first assumed it was that and then um as I took my medication which in this case is low dose prednisone so prednisone is a corticosteroid, not an Arnold Schwarzenegger steroid. No, anabolic steroid, right? And I use that as shorthand.

I don't know if Arnold used anabolic, you know, androgenic steroids or not. But people know what I mean when I say that. Anyway, so I used this low-dose corticosteroid. Now, in high doses, these things use chronically can cause diabetes, and they can cause a thing called Cushing Syndrome. And in Cushing syndrome, you get a big sort of what we call moon face. You get swelling of the face. You can get a swelling of your upper back.

It causes kind of a humpback. And you can get elevated blood sugars and other things like that. I'm on such a low dose that it's almost physiologic. You know, it's almost just above the level that my body would make normally. Okay. And it works. And that also helps make the diagnosis of polymyelioramatic. Now, I'm still kind of convinced that it was medication.

I was taking amylopine. and it, again, the zebra is a very rare, insanely rare reaction to amylotapine, which is a calcium channel blocker. And so, you know, I assume that's what was when it, about halfway through my vacation, all my pain went away, which also makes me wonder if it isn't stress-related. I wonder what the year. But I was taking my medication. So I came home and I skipped a dose of the prednisone, and then I realized, oh, shit, it's still there.

Yeah, but did you skip your medication while on vacation? I did not. Because you wanted to have a good vacation, not be miserable. That's right. Yeah. No, I think 99% of yours, knowing your work schedule, I would say stress. Yeah. I always get better when I'm on vacation.

Oh, my gosh. But the first half of it, I was like, oh, God, I'm dying, I'm dying. It was horrible. We ended up having a really nice time in the end, particularly since all my symptoms went away. Right on. That's good stuff. Well, and plus, you know, and two interrupt just for a second, but I know you're You were out walking, getting some sunshine.

Oh, yeah, and I got a stress fracture in my right foot from walking. So that's how old I am. Well, I was walking. By the way, if you have trouble, they are not a sponsor. I wish they were. If you have trouble with sandals at the beach, I use, I found these sandals. They're the greatest damn things ever. They're called nomadic, no, M-A-D-I-C, and they're rope sandals.

Right. And I have the J.C. version, I guess, that's named after, you know, our Lord and Savior. I don't know. But they look like something some Centurion would wear or some itinerant preacher would wear, you know, 2,000 years ago, made out of the real soft rope. And they're the most comfortable things. The sand doesn't get between them and my feet. And so I walked two, three miles in those every days. On the beach? On the beach. Well, hell, there's your problem.

Well, ain't no shit. But I was so comfortable. Right. But then all of a sudden I started having a bunch of pain in my arch, and it's either I've got a falling arch or I've got a stress fracture. So it's just, this getting old shit can kiss my ass. I was going to say, you know what? I can tell you right now, because of your age and because of the structure of those

sand and the sand. Yeah, they're just flat. Plantar's fasciitis. You've got a fallen arch. Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely that. I didn't have any heel pain. It was all right in the middle of my arch.

Remember, you can get planters fasciitis in the middle of your arch and towards your toes, too, because the fascia attaches, you know, in different places. But, I mean, it's more common at the heel. Right, right, right. That's where you see 84% or something. But you know what? The sandals, and I've never seen your sandals, but the ones that I wear are called chakos. Okay. Chakos have a negative heel, and I wish they were sponsors because I have like 12 pairs of them.

Oh, yeah. But they have negative heels, and they take a lot. lot of the stress off of the arches of the feet. Yeah. My problem is if I'm at the beach wearing sandals, I can't stand anything between my toes. That just hurts, and then they fall off, and I'm curling my toes trying to keep them on there all the time, and that drives me crazy. And then the strap-on ones, the sand gets between that. And then the other thing I can do is just wear tennis shoes, but then you look like a fruit.

Like a fruit, yeah. Well, so, you know, more so than I normally do. I was going to say if the shoes, the tennis shoes fit. Yeah, so, but anyway, but I love these nomadic sandals. Nomadical, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, yeah, they're awesome. Yeah, there's something about, and not everyone loves the beach, but I do, there's something just so calming about. Oh, God, the waves rolling in and the beer. And the beers, the beer's helping sunshine.

Just laying out there and nothing to do. Nothing. And just, you know, relax. laying there, and I'm trying to find the music, God dang. I know what you're looking for. You know, and then the sexual tension. Just between you and the bar tender. Washes away.

That's right. Anyway, all right. Well, very good. Hey, check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. That's simplyerbils.net. And you can also check out our show website at Dr. Steve.com. And don't forget to listen for our podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. So, anyway, all right.

You want to just answer some phone calls? Let's do it. Let's do that. We haven't done that in a while. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. It could not be a truer thing to say.

All right. Oops. Helpify. Oh, boy. Oh, here we go. You, a piece of shit. Okay. Oh, okay.

Google. Yep. voice can kiss my eyes. I'm going to have to rename each one of these on the fly. Okay, that's cool. What am I Googling? Yeah, you talk. Talk about that story.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I found a really interesting one since it is the springtime. And a lot of us, especially in the Hillbillyville Mountains of Appalachia, we suffer from a lot of allergies here. A lot of pollen. We actually are in the allergy capital of the world. Yeah, lots of pollen from pine trees and et cetera. But I was reading and interesting. We're also in the...

This is the center of tranquility and consanguinity. There you go. Consanguinity, meaning inbreeding, so just a little. But this little research paper was describing the fact that pollen across the world is getting worse. Really? Yeah, but you can do things to make it better. Wait a minute. Why is pollen getting worse?

I don't know. That's what I was trying to find out. I hadn't gone down there yet. Hell, I've just started my show prep three minutes. for God's sake. Jesus Christ. Hey, but no, here's the cool thing is there's a couple great tidbits of wisdom here from this allergist, and they're saying the first thing you need to do is find out what allergens

are causing your symptoms. Well, yeah, no shit. Well, yeah, but, you know, not everybody thinks that they just want to take a pill. You know, they don't know what's making them sneeze or whatever, but they, so it's nice to identify it. Well, that's what allergists do if they're going to create blocking antibodies using. allergy shots. They want to know what antibodies they need to create.

Sure. So they'll, you know, they can do it a couple of ways with a blood test called a RAST test. I was always taught that those were not as accurate, although I see my favorite E&T guy is now using RAS test, so I think they've probably gotten better. The other way they can do it is to just take little doses of antigens and scratch it into your skin. Yeah, those skin breaks. That's the worst test.

Oh, God. it causes a local allergic reaction and then they'll know from the map on your back which things they need to what they need to put in your serum if your doctor suggests that ask them if there's a no fuck off you're wrong it's so much more accurate i know it's extra but it's it's painful man it thing was terrible i could i could feel when they were when they're giving me those little shots the things that i was the most allergic to when they were pulling the needle out of my skin my skin wasn't letting go and you could hear it pop Wow.

Every time it was... Oh, the acupuncturist is worried about little tiny needles. Oh, it wasn't the damn needles. It was the thing I was allergic to. And I wasn't allergic to everything, but anyway. So anyway, minimize exposure is the second thing. So, you know, unfortunately, what I have to do at home is I never open my windows. I keep my windows closed all the time and keep the air conditioner running or heater running.

Really? Yep. I just can't. I just can't have it, having windows open. Some fucking hippie you are. I know it's horrible. Hey, but once the spring has gone, I'm in a pretty good shave. Okay.

But the other thing is take a proactive approaches. And proactive approaches would be like a nasal spray. Like we have it, the simply herbal, you wash out the ponds out of your head. You can go see an allergist and have the test run, et cetera, so, et cetera. Yes, you do not have to buy Dr. Scott's stuff. It's not. It's a nasal. We're not trying to sell, you know, do an ad on here.

Although he does sell perhaps the best nasal spray I've ever used. I'm saying that as his friend, and we're not selling it, but at simplyerbils.net. But the principle you're going for is to try to wash those allergens out of there. Get them out of there. And if they're not there, then they don't have, you know, the ability to interact with the human body to try to, you know, make you feel bad. Minimizes the histimic response in your sinus. That's right. Yeah.

And then some of the new classes of medication are really, really, really good medications. So there's a bunch of great options that there. Talk about some of those. Well, you don't have to suffer so much. You know, some of the newer ones, the Flonnasal spray is really good because it's, I think it's six different histametic sites. Oh, and six is greater than one. One, six is greater one.

That ad drives me crazy. Really, six is greater than one. Thanks for informing me. But the good thing is, it is, it's not an oral, so you don't have some of the side effects you get from the other allergy medications, which sometimes do cause drowsiness during the day. So, you know, what I like to do is. is I'll mix in a spray during the day and typically an antihistamine at night

if I'm really suffering because it makes me go to sleep. I just can't take him during the day and function. So let's talk a little bit about antihistamine. So there's the classic antihistamine was always Benadryl or diphymine. Diphonhydramine. And it is a drowsy antihistamine. They put it in sleep aids.

You know, there are people that take it every night to sleep. There is some concern that taking a, lot of antihistamines throughout your life may increase slightly your risk of dementia and other problems and people who already have a little bit of dementia. The elderly particularly got to be careful of those kind of antihistamines because they can increase cognitive symptoms, you know, problems when thinking, and also in elderly men, particularly or any man that's got a large prostate, if they take a drowsy antihistamine, it can cause bladder outflow obstruction.

Yep. When I was a medical student, I remember we got called down to a patient's room, and he was 80, 90 years old, and he was just laying there wouldn't move, and he wouldn't respond. And his eyes were wide open. He was staring at the ceiling, but you couldn't get him to respond. And my intern was smart enough to, you know, check his chart, see what he'd had, and he had an IV dose of Benadryl

25 milligrams which is a pretty decent. You know that's the same thing you would take orally but IV you're getting it all at once that's kind of a big dose and she did a thorough physical exam which you should do in any situation like this and felt a midline mass right above

his junk you know up in the lower abdomen upper pelvic region and she diagnosed a distended bladder and so she put a catheter in this guy's penis and he pissed out two liters of urine and sat up and went oh shit that hurt golly so the pain from this distended bladder that was really getting ready to bust explode uh was enough to just make it so that he didn't

even feel like moving uh you know blinking or interacting with us moving his arms talking or anything. So you got to be really careful of that stuff in the elderly male. And I even think Dr. Steve, and I could be wrong, but I even think in young men too, I think I think if they take that particular medication for years, I think it can affect your prostate long term. Maybe. And I'm not saying that because I know that. I'm just saying from personal history. You know, I used to take them a lot. And I had prostate problems when I was young. I quit taking them. I quit taking them. So that's an end of one. That's just me talking. Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting. Well, anyway, so then you have the non-drowsy antihistines, like fexophonidine, aka A.kra, satirazine, which is Zyrtec, yep. And all, you know, and there's a plethora of things out there. I've had really good results with this thing called the Navage. Now, the Navage is basically, it is to Nettipats, what Pilates is to Yon. yoga okay so you know these yoga the these yoga masters come over from India and go to a Pilate studio they're horrified right to see these people hooked up to uh pulleys oh i know machines yanking them in all these weird positions and stuff like that and uh the netty pot is a very

low-tech way to wash your nose out and if you ever want to see something funny just google image nitty pots and you know we used to just laugh at these pictures everybody you look so stupid when you're doing a netty pot. And the trick with it is to turn your head sideways and you stick the pot in one nostril and you want to get good at the water coming in one nostril and then floating back out the other nostril, not going down your throat or into your lungs.

Don't tilt your head back. No, no, don't do that. And so it takes a little bit of technique. Well, the Navage has a reservoir in the top where you put saline. And by the way, with all of these, always use distilled water, even though 99-something percent of the tap water in this country is perfectly safe, you know, we could prevent a couple of cases of amoebas invading people's brains. And they love brains. Yes.

They love to eat brain tissue. And when they get in there, it's hard to kill them because you can't get, you know, anti-amibic drugs into the brain real easily. Right. So use distilled water. But anyway, you put distilled water in these little saline pods in the top, and there's a little reservoir on the bottom, and you've got two little plugs that stick in your nose, and one of them shoots water in.

The other one's got a vacuum on it, and sucks the water out. And so it's the coolest feeling, because you hit this thing, and you push it in halfway, you get the suction in the one nostril, then you push it in all the way, and all of a sudden water starts shooting in the other nostril, And you think, oh, I'm in big trouble. But no, the suction is enough that it actually pulls it out. And it just stays up in the upper nasal passage, stays above the palate, you know, the roof of your mouth, and just circulates around in there and just sucks out every bit of allergen.

There you go. Any antigens that are in there. Mucous, all kinds of stuff. It's the cleanest your nose will ever feel. And then you see all the shit down in the bottom. It's incredible what's in there. Spiders and shit in there. And it's very satisfying, very easy to clean out.

And when it's allergy season, I can get a good eight hours of relief just doing that. It's cool, yeah. Yeah. And if you want to check out in Navaj, you can go to stuff.com, and there's one. You can just look at it. Cool. So, all right. Okay, doke.

I finally have all of these things tagged up properly. So they'll play. We'll do it. All right. Yeah, just I've had cellulitis in my, my legs are the lower part of the leg. And, you know, between, you know, there weren't many options. So I've been doing the generic stuff like that and, you know, the other prescribed drugs. I'm just wondering if there's anything else you'd recommend.

Thanks. Bye. Yeah. Okay. So cellulitis is a bacterial skin infect. usually appears as a red swollen area that's usually hot and tender to the touch, and then it will spread. It's mostly painful, and it's very often seen in the lower legs because, you know,

the feet particularly, they're basically the bum-fuck Egypt of the circulatory system, and they've got very, you know, very little blood flow. And so your defenses are lower in your feet. You get a little athlete's foot or a little crack in your foot, and bacteria can invade, and then all of a sudden you're getting, you know, infection. But if you have cellulitis that just doesn't go away, I have to question the diagnosis of cellulitis. It makes me think that maybe what he's got is venous stasis instead.

So venous stasis is a situation where the veins and the legs have failed, and you're now leaking fluid out of the veins and lymphatic channels into the. legs and they'll swell. And then if you continue to not do anything about this, what will happen is the skin will stretch so much that blood can't get to it. You know, the pressure is just too much. And the skin and the tissues will start to break down and you'll get what's called stasis dermatitis. And it looks red. It looks like cellulitis. But it's not, because it's not

spreading. It's just chronically red. And the treatment for that is vastly different. We don't give antibiotics for stasis dermatitis. You can do external compression. You can do a thing called an unibut. There's all kinds of things that can be done. But the proper diagnosis needs to be made. And I think people have seen people with the stasis dermatitis before.

It almost looks like somebody is wearing a red sock below their knee, and that's exactly what it looks like. It does kind of look like his cellulitis, but it's much more looking like a sock to me. It kind of surrounds the whole calf and down there. into the foot. Yep. They'll sometimes use even steroids to just calm things down. But external compression is often the key.

Shoot, yeah. And movement and getting your feet pumping, pump your feet, get them elevated, pump your feet, and that helps a bunch. Yeah, because the way the veins work down there is they have little valves in them. And no muscles inside. That's right. And veins, yeah. No, veins are thin-walled, you know, flaccid vessels, whereas arteries are thick-walled

muscular vessels and when you get down into the legs you know gravity is trying to pull that blood you know it's got a long way to go from your feet up to your heart and gravity is trying to pull that whole column down and then it's just back pressure is trying to push the whole column up and that that battle between pulling it down and pushing it up create side tension on those veins and then enough side attention on the vein, and it'll just expand the wall to the point where the valves fail. The valves will... And now the only thing that will cause the blood to go back to the heart is the back pressure, and that's when you start seeing all this stasis and stuff.

So if you compress the leg from the outside using compression hose, and some people can get by, if it's early, if you catch it early enough, with these things called medium strength compression hose, you can buy them at most... pharmacy that sells durable medical equipment. And they just look like regular black dress socks. They're not like those crazy Ted hose that are so tight and hard to put on. And if you can catch it then, then, you know, a lot of times you can nip it in the bud. Yep.

So anyway. All right. It's a good luck, big boy. Yep. Well. Leaving a message ends just too soon. I was busy j-offing, and it just ends. I couldn't end.

What? So I guess I'll ask you a question. Okay. Yeah, I'm close to diabetic, pre-diabatic. We probably could have started this call right here. I don't know what all that pre-hour. Good day. It has a good call screening.

And they gave me pre-maybe, maybe even into it. They were never super clear, but they gave me a few medications. I don't have to prick myself. They ask for the easily just to make sure, but I don't know what they are off the top of my head. Okay, first off. If you're diabetic, you need to be checking your bunch of yours.

And you need to know what medication you're on. Yes. So let's just a little advice from your old uncle, Steve. But I've been going on an extreme diet, you know, 1,200 calories. Okay. every day because I have a cruise coming up in a month and a half and you know what I stopped taking my medication because damn it if I'm eating nothing my blood sugar should be fine okay so if we could rely on this we wouldn't need to check our blood sugars right because you can't tell most of the time when your blood sugar's elevated that's why most people who are diagnosed with diabetes are actually surprised by it so I'm okay with people doing diet control of their diabetes. Matter of fact, I would prefer that.

Most people with type 2 diabetes, which is the type where you have plenty of insulin, but your body just can't understand the signal. I think those people, many of them, can be controlled with diet alone if you'll just do it. So he's doing this 1,200 calorie diet. He just said the calorie. He doesn't tell me how many carbs it is.

It could be all rice. You know, if it's all just white bread, 1,200 calories of white bread, then that's not going to help him. It's going to make it worse. If he's doing a low glycemic index 1,200 calorie diet under the supervision of a nutritionist at the diabetes center, I have no problem with that. And I'm even okay with him coming off his medication and seeing what happens. But how are you going to know if it's working if you're not testing your blood sugar? So, that's, that's the, the issue I have. Agreed.

With his strategy. Totally great. Let's see. And all that. Anyways, I want to hear your thoughts on it. Oh, well. Okay. I know you, you don't know the medication I am, I'm on.

Well, dude, you don't even know, so. Let's say, work with somebody. You get, you get the deal. Yeah, I get the deal. So I think it's totally fine. It's a decent strategy. Lifestyle management for a lot of people. people can, if not cure their diabetes, can certainly improve it to the point where they

need minimal medication. And if you start this early, you can very often prevent yourself from needing insulin down the road and kidney failure and all these things. So I'm okay with the strategy. I just don't like the way you're doing it. So if you will at least monitor yourself and then keep a diary and then take it in, that's fine, or do it under your doctor's supervision. But you've got to have your blood sugar checked or you'll never know.

Yeah, you'll never know. If you're making improvements or not. There's no way to know. Now, down the road, they're going to want to do a thing called a hemoglobin A1C, which is probably one of the things they did to diagnosis in the first place. Hemoglobin A1C is a really cool test because it gives you a three-month kind of rolling average of what your blood sugars have been. So if you did, you know, blood sugars throughout the day and then averaged them all up and then average them over 30 days and then every day you do the last 30 days or three months.

I'm sorry, but, you know, then you get this rolling average. So a hemoglobin A1C gives you about a three-month rolling average of your average blood sugar and it'll correlate with that. And it basically happens because there's an irreversible reaction between glucose and hemoglobin where it can attach. And once it does, it doesn't go away. So the amount of glucose that's attached to the hemoglobin in your blood is proportional to your average blood sugar over the last 90 days because, or, yeah, 90 days because a blood cell lasts about anywhere between 90 and 150 days. Right. Okay, so it's a good marker. And so, you know, every three months, when you're first working with somebody with diabetes,

you can see, is it going up, is it going down, or is it staying the same? There's no fourth thing. It'll be one of those, you know? And if it's going down, then you're doing all the right things. Right on. Okay. So he needs all of this, and he just needs to talk to his provider. It's totally fine.

They'll be open to it. You know, my doc, when my blood pressure started to elevate, I said, look, I'm getting ready to go on this Noom app. Do you think we could wait to put me on blood pressure medicine? He said, no, let's just put you on it. And then when you lose the weight, then we'll try to back you off and see what happens. And I actually am kind of glad he did that because I would add yet another three months of elevated blood pressure. Because even with the, I've lost 25 pounds on Noom so far.

But my blood pressure hasn't come down that much. I was surprised. It's genetic. You know, hell, everybody, every man and my family. only had a high blood pressure. Running wide open. But I love that Noam, though. Yeah, you're doing really well.

Yeah, I'm very happy with it. Very happy with it. That's a lot of weight, yep. All right. I've still got, I've got 10 to go to hit my ideal. Oh, my God, no. Well, shit. A wicked egg allergy, right?

So food allergies in general, I'm just curious you guys' thoughts and opinions on. exposing them to, you know, said food allergy and, you know, does that actually help get rid of it? You know, I don't know. There's a lot of mixed opinions on it, so I'm curious to hear what you guys think. Well, okay, so here's the thing. There's prevention of allergies, and there's treatment of allergies, and food allergies are really kind of, you know, They're a tough one. I had a friend who had a kid who's now a pharmacist, and he all, I can't even count how many times he almost died.

They'd come home because he ate one P. He was allergic to all kinds of stuff. Oh, gosh. And, you know, when he was little, they didn't know if he was going to make it. Now he's, you know, hailing hardy and you don't want to mess with him. Somebody came in and tried to rob them, and I think he shot him. So he's doing pretty well. Good.

But, you know, more and more. So the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that food allergies and children have increased 50% between 1997 and 2011, and they affect one kid out of 13. And that's like two students in every classroom. So I know all these parents are like, well, I can't even send peanut butter to school. What was the number again on that? One in 13. Dang. Yep.

Now, that's going to be a varying severity. Sure, of course. But 90% of the allergic reactions come from eight foods, milk, eggs, peat. Peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, fish, and shellfish. So there's not a whole lot of shellfish sandwiches going into school, but there are a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and stuff. Sure. And, you know, there are a few theories, including one link to our society's obsession with fighting germs.

And this is called the hygiene hypothesis. And what the hygiene hypothesis states is that lack of exposure to these agents early in childhood can create a situation where the immune system mistakes. food protein is invading germs. And so it's not that they're not being exposed to peanuts. It's that they're not being exposed to bacteria, say, in the soil or something, that have these proteins on them that are similar to proteins on peanuts. So now when they get the peanuts, all of a sudden the body just, you know,

tries to attack those antigens because they've never been exposed to them before. And, you know, nobody knows the answer to this. That's the problem. It's still being studying, still being debated. But there are a lot of people that think that that hypothesis at least has some merit. Because, you know, we're just, our kids are being brought up in bubbles, you know, in clean rooms, basically. And, you know, I didn't let my kids just play in the dirt. Hell, I ate dirt, you know, mud pie sandwiches when I was a kid.

I remember doing it. Of course, my favorite story of my youth. was I was in the backyard of a friend's house, and everybody had left me and done something else. I was in the backyard by myself, and I started screaming bloody murder, just screaming, screaming like I was being, you know, attacked. And they all came running, and they were, what's wrong? And I went, a butterfly. Oh. I didn't.

Butterflies freaked me out because of the way they flew. Oh, okay. It was so chaotic. I didn't like it. Oh, okay. How old were you? 12, 13? Yeah, right.

I think I was three. So I had that on my side. There you go. They're also wondering if medicines like antibiotics or acid-reducing stomach medications are being overuse. But, you know, we would know if there was a correlation. Most kids are not being given acid-reducing stomach medications. Most adults are a huge number. I think, you know, for a while there,

Omeprazole was the number one prescribed drug for adults in the world. It was something. It was one of those. It might have been Xantac, one of those stomach acid reducing. So I'm leery of that one. And then, of course, climate change is being blamed on it. You know, these climatologists say that, you know, we are in the hottest decade on record. And the warmer climate may worsen respiratory allergies, but still doesn't explain.

the food allergy. So I really am on the side of the clean room hypothesis. Because we talked about before, but on the show but there's a higher risk for children that are born via C-section having asthma and having other types of diseases because

they were born in a clean room. They don't get all of the Well, we're not just squatting them into the rice field. Right, the good bacteria. So you're saying C-section? Yep. Kids are higher risk And asthma? Yep, asthma, yep.

Okay, let's just by God see this one. No, I know, I think you are. Yeah, I think you are. I think so. Cessarian section without medical indication and the risk of childhood asthma and attenuation by breastfeeding. Now, okay, now look, whatever you do, breastfeed your damn kid, if you can. Yes, and that was the second part of the story, yeah, if you can. Because, and I think I do know this study, and it's going to show that they, these kids,

that had, you know, C-sections had an increase in asthma, but that was blunted in the group of women that breast-fed their kids. Right, exactly. So let's see here. Our study found that C-section without medical indication was significantly associated with elevated with elevated asthma risk, and so it was about a 58% increase. Now, remember, that's relative risk, absolute risk, still very low. However, this risk was attenuated in children fed by exclusive breastfeeding in the first six

months after birth. And I think you can do it even shorter time than that and still get benefit from it. My littlest one back would be either severely debilitated today or may not have made it if my wife hadn't been breastfeeding. So he's five days into his life. I walk into his room to check on him in his crib and the heat, I could feel it come, you know, radiating off of him. So I, you know, I get him out of his little sleeper thing, and he is just burning up. Check his time, 105. Oh, bless his heart.

Before we even did any. Oh, and he's breathing 40 times a minute too. Right. Just happened just suddenly. So I didn't even stop, go, or collect $200. Get him in the car. I'm on my way to the hospital. Sure.

And I'm calling our pediatrician. He meets him, and he had respiratory syncycial virus, which causes croup in older kids. RSV, right? Yeah, RSV. And my wife had a cold when she delivered, and lo and behold, she had RSV. So she gave it to them. So in adults, it just causes a cold. But in kids, it causes croup, and in babies, it can kill them or it can cause chronic asthma.

But she was breastfeeding. And this kid, because she gave it to him, she had the antibodies, fresh antibodies, IGM antibodies in her breast milk. and she was able to confer protection to him through these antibodies, and the kid just sailed right through. Cool. Totally sailed right through. Totally fine.

And he continues to sell. He continues to sell. He's a beautiful child. Yep. He's a good little feller. So anyway, I think that so the risk of asthma with a C-section, obviously you don't want to do them without medical indication, to the individual's low, but that's a huge number 58% increase in risk.

But the real take home of this is that breastfeeding is good for you. So if you can breastfeed, highly recommend it. And if you're having trouble, they have breastfeeding coordinators and coaches and everything in every hospital. And we had to, you know, Tacey had trouble breastfeeding with Liam. and what we had to do was weigh him before and after just to see how much he was getting. So you would weigh him and then breastfeed, and then as long as he weighed three ounces more, then he got enough. Oh, cool. You know, so it was kind of cool.

All right. Dr. Steve, my name is Mike Lane, and I recently had an MRI, and for kidney stones. They didn't find any kidney stones, but he did say that I had a plug-old. liver for some reason i'm not really sure you didn't really give you much information but i would like to know what i can do about this and if there if there is anything that i should do with a follow-up thank you uh yeah i'm going to give your doctor on these oh um we were doing an MRI and um uh we didn't find anything in a gobletter but your but your but your liver's clogged up.

See ya. Nice. What an asshole. It calls if you having trouble. Yeah. What are you supposed to do with that? Okay. So I'm going to call your, assuming that this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I'm going to call that health care provider an asshole. I can do that. If I call them a quack, then it's actionable. True. But I can call them an asshole all I want. It's your personal opinion. I learned that from Penn and Teller. That's right.

Because they said, oh, you know, we can't call these psychics fakes, but we can call them assholes all we want, because that's just our opinion. Right. Right. What this probably is is fatty liver. Faddy liver, right. Now, fatty liver can be caused by diabetes. It can be caused by drinking. It can just be genetic.

Right. There is a condition called Alpha 1 antitripsin disorder, and people who are carriers of this. You know, you have to have two genes to have the disease, but if you have one, you can, the only manifestation, could be that you have fatty liver. And so sometimes when I see fatty liver and somebody that I didn't expect it, and I'll check, and they'll be heterozygos for alpha-1 antitripsin deficiency, which is heterozygous just means they've got one normal gene and one shitty gene. Right, abnormal.

Alpha-1 antitripsin disorder, you may not know that you have it in your family, but you could suspect it if you had a bunch of people in your family that had liver disease and or lung disease at an early age. You know, people that had emphysema and that was just really bad and maybe they died from it at like 40 or something, and nobody knew why. If you had two or three people like that in your family, you know, this is an easy genetic test to do.

It's a real simple blood test. It's not common, but I wouldn't say it's uncommon either. It's certainly not rare. And in this area where we are, there's pools of it. you know, I'll find, I've seen more alpha-1 antitripsin deficiency in this area than I've ever seen any other area of the country that I've practiced in. So, again, that whole consanguinity thing, you know, if you weren't here at the beginning of the show, that just means in-braiding. So it, it, it, it, it, it, is a, you know, you know, the main characteristic is too much fat stored in the liver cells. and we can also call that steato hepatitis

when you start seeing elevated liver function test. Stiato meaning fat and hepatitis just meaning irritation of the liver or inflammation of the liver. That can cause liver inflammation, which may progress to scarring, and then, you know, cirrhosis down the road. So if you have this, there are some things that can be done about it, and rather than just your doctor going,

well, hell, you got, jeez, fatty liver disease, good luck. Look, old buddy. Go see a hepatologist or, you know, a liver specialist. And most GI docs can handle this. Most of them are experts in liver disease. Things that can cause it would be high cholesterol, high triglycerides. High triglycerides, sure. Bad diets.

Metabolic syndrome, which is, you know, basically high triglycerides with high blood pressure, being overweight, women with polycystic ovary syndrome, if you have sleep apnea, you can somehow, I don't know the mechanism of that one, and diabetes, as I said, and all these genetic things as well. You can diet control this sometimes, as Dr. Scott said, getting more active is important. Treating the underlying problem. If you have high triglycerides, treating. the high triglycerides with omega-3 purified

fish oil. There are prescription versions of that and there's one out there now I think Vasipa it's called. Vasipa is a purified omega-3 fatty acid if I'm remembering this

right and it actually has been shown to prevent heart disease at the same rate that statins do. But only in people that have high triglycerides. So you'll get a 30% decrease in the first heart attack, and then you'll get progressive decreases in subsequent heart attacks. So, but the first line of treatment is diet and exercise,

losing weight, getting to your ideal body weight. And if you can lose 10% of your body weight, so if you weigh 200 pounds, if you can get down to 180, it helps. And they'll also vaccinate you against hepatitis A and hepatitis B, in case you get those, when you have fatty liver, it's going to be worse. And, you know, so those are the kinds of things they can do. So you want to have this followed up. Sure, absolutely.

I'm hoping this person is listening. Yes, me too. And just ask for follow up. Definitely can be treated. If your primary says, well, I don't know what to do about this, then, you know, there are no sound just like they're from Appalach. then they can always send you to a specialist and just get checked out see how serious it is what do you need to do can we nip this in the bud how far has it gotten and if it's just a little

bit of fatty liver without any inflammation yeah you can you can get this under control pretty easily with some work and it'll lead a long and normal happy life okay yep all right A kid, I became blood brothers with, hey, Dr. Steve. Amen. When I was a kid, I became blood brothers with my buddy from church. And I was just wondering, it was, you know, it wasn't much blood. We cut our hands somehow. I forgot how we did it.

But I was just wondering, is his blood still in my body? Does it work like that? Beautiful question. I love this question. And the answer is there may be some, okay. So when you are blood brothers, you cut your thumb or your hand and then you grasp them and then you mix blood. The likelihood that any significant amount of blood goes from one person to the other because the pressure is for the blood to come out not to go in, right? I mean, when you bleed, you bleed out.

You don't bleed in. So even if one or two cells are in there, well, let's just say your blood type A and their blood type B, what's going to happen when those. cells mix, you're going to get a clotting reaction. You know, that's why you can't just give blood to just anybody. And then the spleen will see that happening, and it'll it'll cull it out and destroy it. Now, could there be some molecules of your friend? Hell yeah. Sure.

There could be hydrogen molecules. There could be oxygen molecules, you know, from the water, all kinds of stuff. And those could be insignificant numbers. you know, orders of magnitude, because, okay, so salt to get, oh, I don't know what, look up what the atomic weight of salt is, but it's, I can't, I used to know this stuff by heart. That's her, she'll know. Oh, yeah. Hey, Alexa, what's the atomic weight of salt?

Salt's atomic weight is 11. Okay. So in 11 grams of salt, there are 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules of sodium chloride times 10 to the 23. So that's a 10 with 23 zeros after that. Okay? It's a huge, huge number. So if you had 100 molecules of hydrogen left over from the water that was in this guy's blood, then, you know, that seems like a large number. But, you know, we're talking about trillions of quadrillions and, you know, high.

unthinkable numbers of a molecule. So what is more interesting to me is this theory of large numbers. It is almost certain that you have at least one molecule of water in your body that came from Christopher Columbus's piss, okay? So Christopher Columbus coming across the ocean, pissing in the ocean, and through diffusion, evaporation, rain, and, you know, all these molecules working their way, diffusing through the environment,

it is likely that you have at least, at least, one molecule of Christopher Columbus's piss in your body somewhere. Now, there's, how would you mark that? You can't. No. You know, if you had some radioactive element that only existed on another planet, you could have maybe mark the water molecules in his body and, you know, go back in time, mark them, and then come forward in time and see if anybody has it.

But there's no such thing. There's no radioactive element that exists somewhere else that we can't make here. So, but just through pure statistics, you can calculate that, the likelihood. And that's the case. Now, that's true of every other person that was on the Nina, the peanut, the Santa Maria. Not only them, but every other person that lived in that time. That's how huge these numbers are. Or me, since I may have pissed in the ocean last weekend, maybe.

Yeah, those, right, those have diffused quite significantly, but not enough so that everyone on the planet has, you know, Dr. Scott molecules in them. Thanks always go to Dr. Scott. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, Lewis, Johnson, Paul Offcharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fes Blatley, who's 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, Sundays at 5 p.m. Eastern on demand.

And other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. and thank you, Dr. Scott. We'll see you next week. 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.