Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 369 - More Stupid Human Tricks

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

Ways not to cool off your nether regions in the heat of the summer, how to avoid Hepatitis A, a poorly constructed medical article, and more! stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net (Dr Scott’s nasal rinse is here!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) tweakedaudio.com offer code “FLUID” (best CS anywhere) bet.doctorsteve.com (Bet DSI! Try to beat my kid!) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. I need to touch it. Yo-ho-ho-ho-ho. Yeah, me garreted. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivir from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out and blast with the way.

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. Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history broadcast radio.

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It's like 12 years old. Most importantly, you can get a Bristol stool scale mug and you can rate your turds while you're sitting on the pot drinking coffee. So I guess that's something. 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 over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncture, yoga, master, physical therapist, or whatever. All right, very good. Hey, don't forget to go to stuff.doctrsteve.com. That's stuff.com for all your Amazon shopping needs.

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And that's also on our website at Dr.steve.com. you just click a little thing and for 30 bucks I'll send you a 32 gig thumb drive with all the riot cast podcasts up to now and it's like 300 and some plus there may be some extra stuff in there if I you know accidentally throw in an interview with a you know flash brown or a prostitute or something because I've got some of those are in in in p3 files that are stuck in there so um and that's at dr steve.com Anyway, all right, so let's see what we've got today. Last week we had Rich Voss and at this thing called Friends of Allendale. Long-time listeners of this show know this is the third year we've done this. We had Tim Dillon the first year. And then we had Vic Henley.

And this time, the legend Mr. Rich Voss. And we had the biggest crowd that we've ever had. This amphitheater, it's an outdoor amphitheater, will hold 1,200 people. So even when there's 400 people there, it doesn't look like there's very many people there. I've got some pictures that sort of gave you an idea of the scale of this place. It is huge. And the amphitheater dips way down as it goes toward the stage. So the closest people can get from the stage is about maybe 30 feet away.

So it is kind of a weird thing. But the acoustics for an outdoor amphitheater are amazing, and it's a beautiful property. The people who run Allendale Mansion, you can look it up, it's A-L-L-A-N-D-A-L-E. It's in a little town near the Weird Medicine Studios called Kingsport, Tennessee. And honestly, you know, we got Knoxville on one side in Asheville, and what? Hell. I mean, that's it. Nashville, four and a half hours away, this area has been starred for comedy.

We have some local comedy, but as far as bringing in people like Bobby Kelly, Shulie Agar, Vic Henley, Jim Florentine, that caliber of people, we've not had that in this area. So that's my commitment. I don't make any money at it. Don't make any money on this radio show either. I just want to do it just because. I first did, got Florentine down here because I heard him on Opie and Anthony a long time ago talking about how comics get shit on on the road. And he said, yeah, you know, you have to eat off the comics menu and it's a plain hamburger.

And he was complaining that the comedy club owners, you know, would limit what they could get for free because they're afraid they're going to somehow eat into their profits. and I know what they charge. You know, they've got a two-item minimum and all this kind of. They're making plenty of money, and I know what they're paying the comedians, too. And it really hurt my feelings to know that friends of mine who should be treated like the rock stars that they truly are were being treated like shit like that. Oh, and I went to a comedy club. I'm trying to think of the name. Oh, Side Splitters.

It was Bobby Jules' place in Knoxville. It was a fun club. But, you know, they put them up in like the, it's right next door to a crack house, and they put them up in these crummy hotels. And, you know, that hurt my feelings, too. And so I decided I'm going to bring my friends down or people that I highly regard and treat them right. We'll put them up in a decent place. So we have a, you know, a four-star resort here. You know, three-star, depending on your start.

But it's a really nice place. It's a resort. It's a Marriott resort. And, you know, it's got a swim center and a golf course and, you know, all the amenities that you would ever want. And we don't have a whole lot of prostitution around here. So there's that. I guess that's a downside maybe for some people. I don't know.

And we put them up there. lady diagnosis to drive them around. And those of you who have not seen lady diagnosis, she's quite striking. She's, you know, supermodel, you know, aging supermodel, but is supermodel nonetheless. And she drives them around. And we take him out to eat to a nice restaurant. Now, Voss was the first one. He's like, I don't want to go to some steakhouse. I can get that at home. Let's go get some Tennessee Barbecue. So we took him to a place where he couldn't understand a damn thing anybody was saying. Because, you know, it's the same language, but it's not, really.

I used to laugh when I'd see Honey Boo Boo Boo on TV and Mama June, and they'd put subtitles under them. And I'm like, why are they putting subtitles under them? They're speaking pretty normally as far as I'm concerned. But I guess that's not the case in the rest of the country. I do know podcast listeners for the longest time. We're trying to figure out what my mother-in-law was saying. Let me just play the opening, and I'll get back to this, play the opening from the podcast because people have trouble understanding what my mother-in-law is saying here.

Hang on. We're missing contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners. Let me run. What did they wrong in? You know, your old house is like another. All right. Now, anyone from south of the Mason-Dixon line understands everything that she said. It's like, I'm going to give you a sentence that you can, that's a fun fact, a good party trick, that is perfectly understandable in Appalachian English, but it has no corollary to regular English that people outside of this area speak.

Let me run through this, and I'll stop it as we go, and then we can decipher what Big Joe is saying. Weird medicine contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners. So she's saying weird medicine contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners. It's not, you know. Oh, now, wait a minute. Well, sorry. Oh, I'm pushing the wrong button. Contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners.

So you hear me go, let me write that down. It's way down in the mud. But that's, I'm saying, let me write that down because she just couldn't get it right. What did they wrong then? Then she says, Hardy, Har-Har, what did I do wrong then? Then she says, you know, y'all's house is like an oven in other words it's hot up here so anyway now now that you know that let me play it one more time and now you'll understand it and you've learned a little bit of

appalachian English all right here we go and then I'm going to tell you that sentence that's a good party party trick we're missing contains mature contents that may be offended to some listeners what did they wrong then You know, y'all's house is like another. The master of the non-sequitur. What'd I do wrong then? You know, y'all's house is like nothing. When I come home, there's Big Joe's most negative person I've ever met,

whenever I come home, there's never, you know, hey, how'd he do? You know, if she happens to be here, hey, Steve, how are you doing? It's always, your backlights are out. So it's always some disaster. When I was gone on vacation, she was house-sitting, which is very nice. Of course, I paid her a lot of money to do it. And I bought three weeks worth of dog food, and she ran out of dog food in seven days. So what did she do?

Instead of calling me and saying, what should I do? Which I would have said, go buy this brand of dog food. and I'll reimburse you. She went to the grocery store and bought this cheap-o off-brand. The cheapest, I mean, I think it was like $0.35 a can and fed it to my dogs. And that night, they shit all over everywhere. It was diarrhea everywhere. They were spraying the walls.

I mean, it was insane. And she just called me up and said, well, you got a mess to clean up when you get home. It's like I do. Anyway, poor old Big Joe. I guess I've told enough. Big Joe stories on this show. If you want to hear her and all of her glory, go to Dr. Steve.com or Riotcast.com or download the Weird Medicine app and listen to Episode 100 where we did the Big Joe dating game.

And it was full of Big Joeisms. By the way, Big Joe thinks ricotta cheese is actually literally, well, called retardo cheese. She brought us a big lasagna. It was very nice, nice thing to do. She's a good grandmother. Brought us a, you know, I brought this lasagna and I made it with that retardo cheese. She's not trying to be funny. She thinks that's what it's called.

My wife was at McDonald's with her, and, you know, they have these McDonald's frappets now. And my wife was standing in line with her mother going to get a coffee at McDonald's, and this guy was standing behind the two of them. them talking to his friend, and he goes, I heard they got these new coffee drinks here. I wonder what they're called, and my mother-in-law is going to school him, and she turned around and said, it's called a floopy, and I order one every day. So can you imagine every single day she comes through this line and says, I'll have me one of them flupies, and she drinks one every day.

Of course, she's grossly overweight. She looks like a basketball on top of a bigger basketball. And then she's drinking these drinks that, you know, or at least 500 calories, maybe more to start out her day. But now she's got this guy calling him a flupy. So these poor people and the, you know, the cashiers and the takeout line or the, you know, whatever that line is, whatever the fuck you call it, you might say, well, here comes that flupy lady every day.

Well, anyway, that's Big Joe. So we took Voss to a place where everybody talks like Big Joe. He couldn't understand the thing that they said. And, yeah, he got a barbecue. And this place is – I'll give them a plug. It's called Phil's Dream Pit. And it's between this Kingsport and Johnson City, Tennessee, and that's this guy's dream was to make barbecue. And he makes some of the most incredible Tennessee barbecue I've ever had.

plus he has the sauces for different areas. So if you like Texas barbecue, you can approximate it. North Carolina barbecue, you can make a close approximation with that as well. But it's fantastic. And Voss really like that. And so he gets to the venue. And, of course, I put some stuff on my Twitter. I put a couple of videos up there if you want to see him.

And just look at my timeline. It's at Weird Medicine. And, you know, he was shitting on the venue. But he had a great time. they loved him and all the things that people say about rich i've never seen him live i've seen him on video and i always knew he was a good comedian but you know opie when he'd be shitting on voss um anthony would be shitting on voss norton but they all said you can shit on him in real life because he's hilarious and it's fun to do

but he, there are very few people better than him on the stage. And as far as being quick, it's amazing how quick he is with the crowdwork. And then how easy Norton can just trash in the studio. I don't, I think it's part of the schick. But anyway, his crowd work was impeccable. And we had a storm and, you know, there was light and he could, you know, it doesn't matter. matter. It was really good. It was good. But we had to cut this show maybe five minutes short because we were all going to die from lightning strike because they were getting closer and closer. It was like, have you ever seen that movie, the Spielberg version of War of the Worlds at the beginning where they had those weird crazy storms when the mother ship was putting the aliens in the tripods? That's what it was like. It was kind of like that. But he made the best of it. it. And it was a great show. So when we have these again, I hope, and there were quite a few

O&A and quite a few weird medicine listeners there. It was great seeing everybody. I'm good to my word. If you come say, hello, I'll buy you a beer as long as you're not, you know, an alcoholic in recovery or, you know, not legal to have beer. But it was just, it was loads of fun. We will do it again. And I'll keep you in the loop. So anyway. I would be very interested to see if he says anything on his podcast about his time in Tennessee. There were two fans who listened to this show, and so they'll hear this, but they usually, I guess they don't drink a whole lot of beer, and they got wasted, and they would not leave him alone, and he was so funny. He tolerated it, and I even apologize. They apologized afterward, too.

He said, oh, God, I hope we weren't too up. You know how you have one of those nights where you just wake up the next morning and go, why was I so annoying? Well, anyway, but I apologize to him. I said, I didn't know if you wanted me to, you know, intervene or he said, no, no, no, it's just part of it. And they were fine. They were just fans. So he really does appreciate his fans, too. And they were very nice.

They were very appreciative of his work. They just wouldn't shut the fuck up. But anyway, and Matt, you know who you are. All right, I've got a few news stories for you and then a bunch of voicemails. And then next week I've got a special show for you, so don't miss that. This one I've been seeing a lot on my Twitter feed, and I've seen it a lot in my news feed. Doctors are urging women not to put popsicles up their vaginas to cool down during summer. Now, who did really, I guess popsicles are shaped like things that you could put in the vagina.

I guess somebody was thinking that's a cool idea. It's not a good idea because, well, for a lot of it, let me read this story, and then I'll comment on it as well. It says, naturally, as many of us do, we like to cool down, but either going to a place that has the air conditioner at full blast like the movie theater, take a trip to the pool, this is not a good medical site. Let me see if I can find one that's an actual news story. This is someone's comment on it. I'm sorry. Let me see. Scarymommie.com.

Oh, let's see what they have to say. Oh, here's one. This is a UK site. Dr. Urges Women not to put ice lollies in their vagina. I didn't know in the UK they call them ice lollies. Here we go. No, and this is just. another comment. Anyway, it's too cold. It's too cold. The mucus membranes of the vagina are not prepared for something that is actually 32 degrees. And don't forget, ice is only 32 degrees when it's in equilibrium with water. In other words, if you put ice cubes in water, the overall temperature will be 32 degrees until all the ice melts and then it will start to rise.

so ice itself can be colder than 32 degrees it can be so cold that if you jam it up your vagina you can actually freeze the mucus membrane and part of it may get frostbitten it may sluff off so do not do this if you've got to cool the inside of your vagina for some reason and i don't even recommend this but use you know a distilled water douche at room temperature because room temperature is still going to be colder than body temperature. And do that, but I don't even like douche it. Okay. So please don't do this.

The other downside to it is you are inserting a solid that turns into a liquid that's just basically sugar water. And what does yeast love? It loves sugar. Bad bacteria love sugar. The lack of bacillus that's in there. like sugar as well, but you run the risk of contaminating the vaginal flora with bad bacteria and things that are going to eat this sugar and ferment it, and then you get gas and weird smells and stuff like that.

So please don't do that. Okay. All right. Sorry I didn't vet that news story any better, but I could say it better than them anyway. All right. This is from medical news today. Protein discovery could lead to new hearing loss treatments. A new genetic study in mice.

Once again, mice get all the good stuff first. It's identified two proteins that help organize the development of hair cells that pick up sound waves in the inner ear. Now, this is a big deal because until now, so you've got this thing called the cochlea in there. And it, if you, it's curled up like a snail because it's so long that you got to, you know, otherwise it'd stick into your brain. So it's got to curl up, and in there are these hairs at different lengths, and it's a resonant cavity. So sound waves hit the tympanic membrane or your eardrum and vibrate those little, the hammer anvil and stirrup. And then that vibrates a little oval window. and then those sound waves from that vibration of the oval window will travel however far they travel.

So smaller sound waves will go, well, they go farther or less far? Okay. Well, anyway, they go based on the frequency, they'll vibrate these different hairs, right? So high frequencies will vibrate the high frequency hairs, low frequencies. All of them, including the low frequency. he hears. And then the brain can turn that into sound. Well, what we perceive as sound. I think you all, all of you understand that the world around us isn't the way we see it. I mean, it only is to the sense that we, in the sense that we perceive it. Yellow isn't yellow. It's just whatever it is, 560 nanograms of, you know, wavelength of light, whatever the right wavelength is. And, you know, When those wavelengths hit our eye, they trigger cells in the retina that are resonant to those frequencies. And then that sends a signal to the brain and says, well, this is yellow or this is green or this is blue.

But they're just different frequencies of light. There's nothing inherently yellow or blue in those. If we had eyes that could see ultraviolet, then it would skew, you know, a different way. Or if we had eyes that could see infrared, you know, you'd need big giant eyes for that. So that's why the, you know, if the grays are true and they've got those big giant eyes, maybe they come from a, you know, an ancient world that's, um, uh, orbits a very dim red dwarf. And therefore, they would need eyes that could, that could see infrared. You know, whatever. But so, and the same thing is true with sound, these vibrate, they're just vibrations in error.

And then our brain transmits this into, you know, circuits in the brain that will then interpret that as sound. And then we, when you hear my voice, if I construct my words properly, you can understand them. but they're really just vibrations of air molecules. So when you have loud noises, so people that have been around heavy machinery or they've been shooting guns, Anthony, without hearing protection, and things like that, then they can lose the hairs in that sense sounds. And once you lose them, that's it. If there's no vibration, there's no signal to the brain, there's no sound. And if you lose just a band of those, you'll have hearing loss in that band of frequencies. And that can, again, happen with machinery or other things like that.

So finding the proteins that help organize the development of hair cells that pick up sound waves in the inner ear, if we know that, and we can regenerate these damn things, we can bring back hearing for people that have been rendered deaf or have difficulty understanding sound because they've lost acuity. You know, you can hear overall sound, but not have the resolution. It's almost like you've got a picture and it's pixelated. You know, if your vision was reduced to a pixelation, you'd have trouble recognizing things. You still can see, but you wouldn't be able to recognize things. This is the same thing that happens with people with certain kinds of hearing loss. They can hear sounds, but now all of a sudden they have a real hard time understanding spoken word

and that kind of stuff. So they can recognize a doorbell, but if they're in a party and someone's talking to them, they can't understand them. So this could be a huge step forward. This is incremental. You know, they found the proteins in mice. Now they've got to figure out can they manipulate them and can they make them grow hairs. And then they've got to figure out a way to do it in humans and they've got to figure out a way to do it safely. And then, of course, they've got to figure out a way to monetize it to make it worth their while.

So this is something that's coming. Until then, we've got the cochlear implants, which take the place of that. That sends an electrical signal to that nerve that says, oh, look, this hair is vibrating when it really isn't. We're just fooling the brain into thinking that it's vibrating. So, all right. There we go. The end of endoscopy. If you want to read about an anesthesia-free endoscopy, go to my web,

website at dr steve.com and just put in colonoscopy and that article would come up back when I was really enthused about doing the podcast or not the podcast I'm very enthused about doing that and the show still when I was enthused about the website though I wrote this big long article about how I had my colonoscopy without anesthesia so if you want to read that it's there it's one of the few articles that I wrote I did one on female ejaculation versus coital incontinence and I've got one about a Ebola and something else in there. So you can just click on Steve's blog or you can just search around. Just click around in there. I've got some interesting things in there. And then obviously all the podcasts are in there. But that may all be in vain in the future because breakthrough research showcases an innovative imaging technique that uses ultrasound to provide in-depth images in a non-invasive way. Now, I'm skeptical about this.

there was a time when we thought that we could do endoscopy by using computerized imaging. What you would do is basically take a CAT scan and then have an algorithm that would recreate a 3D image of the inside of the bowel. And then you could just kind of in a virtual way, just kind of work your way through the bowel. Be cool to do it in virtual reality, do it in 3D and stuff. And then you could look at tumors, maybe touch them in. mark them and it would mark it on the on the film stuff like that be really cool that hasn't panned out too well you still have to prep because it's hard to tell the difference between a turd and a polyp or a cancerous tumor in something like that so let's see what they have to say about

this obviously endoscopy currently one of the most common methods for medical imaging okay medical imaging i guess yeah if you're taking video it's it's a form of imaging it's sort of direct imaging. Its uses include diagnosing conditions that affect the lungs, the colon, the throat, and the gastrointestinal tract. And during an endoscopy, medical professionals, and hopefully medical professionals, insert an endoscope, a long, thin tube with a strong light and small camera at the end into a small opening, such as the mouth or a tiny incision that a surgeon makes. now an innovative discovery may put an end to endoscopy altogether. I love this. This is already sounding clickbaity, and it may put an end to endoscopy altogether.

Maysem Chum Jamsamsamchar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Oh, that's what you want. So it's not an MD. But we have to have electrical and computer partners. I mean, MRI imaging was first developed by chemists and physicists. Well, physicists for chemists to look at molecular bonds. I used NMR. We called it NMR back in the day, nuclear magnetic resonance, to look at organic molecules.

It's a cool way. If you've got an unknown molecule, you can throw it in there. And basically what it does is it puts the high. Well, it puts the whole set of molecules in a very strong magnetic field, and then you inject microwaves. And what happens is in the magnetic field, the hydrogen atoms that are attached to all of these carbon atoms will start to rotate together and they will precess, just like a top. You know, a top kind of spins with its axis spinning around the room. same way here, and these things will precess, and then when you add microwaves at a certain sweeping frequencies, the hydrogen atoms will flip,

and this is all quantum stuff, so I'm using sort of classical terms for this, but they'll flip. Basically, what they're doing is they're absorbing a photon of microwave wavelength of energy. And they will flip. And then when they release that photon back again, they'll kind of resonate. And they'll bounce back. And then they'll grab another one, bounce back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

And then that signal, you can read that secondary signal. And you can tell by the energy of the microwave radiation and then the energy that they're giving off what those hydrogen atoms are attached to. And it was a really cool way of determining that. the structure of a molecule. What's really cool is that you can then turn around and image things with that. You put the whole body in a strong magnetic field, and then you do the same. They sweep through with these microwaves, and as those hydrogen atoms start giving off their secondary photons, you can detect them, and then you can create an image from that, and that image is amazingly almost photorealistic.

It's really neat. and way less likely to cause a solid tumor than, say, a CAT scan, although they've gotten better with that because the CAT scans now use very low amounts of radiation, but still. So the MRI is really cool. Well, anyway, why am I telling you this? Oh, now I lost my train of thought because I'm so fascinated by the physics of this whole thing. So anyway, let me go back. An innovative discovery may put an endoscopy altogether. They devised a non-invasive ultrasound imaging technique that promises to replace the endoscope.

And they, oh, I know why I was bringing this up, because these two knuckleheads are computer engineers, but we need them because MDs or MDs, most of the time they're not computer engineers. So you've got to find a way to turn this data into imaging, and that's a computer application. Back in the day, they were mainframe computers. Now you can run most of these things on a PC, which is quite amazing to me. They detailed their novel technique in the journal, Light, Science, and Applications. So what we have to do now is let gastroenterologists, who are pretty savvy in imaging, do this and see if it's actually acceptable. and see if we need to shift our gold standard from direct imaging with endoscope and go to indirect imaging. And they're going to be hesitant to do that because, number one, there are some gastroenterologists,

that's all they do is do endoscopies all day. They don't want a new technology that's going to take that away from them unless, of course, they can make a bunch of money off of it. So you'll have the radiologists going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is awesome. and then the endoscopist going away, this is bullshit. And there's, you know, some political stuff. In the meantime, the patient's kind of caught in between because really what we want ultimately is what's best for the patient, right? And which one of these is going to catch tumors better and will reduce deaths from cancer or other things that you're looking for with these things? and is going to be least invasive for the patient.

So let's say they're both equal. And this one's less invasive and less expensive. That's what we're going to go for. But proving that something is better than the gold standard is hard to do because you're always comparing it against a gold standard. So you can do it, but it's more difficult. Anyway, okay, so their biological tissue being a turbid or dense and opaque medium limits the possibilities of optical methods.

specifically the tissue is made of large particles and membranes and restricts the depths and resolution of optical imagery, especially in the visible and near-infrared range in the near-spinal. Well, yeah, okay, that's why we don't use those kinds of imaging techniques from the outside. But the new technique, however, uses ultrasound to devise a virtual lens in the body instead of inserting a physical one. The operator can then adjust the lens by changing the ultrasonic pressure waves inside the medium. and so take in-depth images that were never accessible before using non-invasive means.

Ultrasound waves can compress or rareify the medium that they penetrate, and then what they do is they bounce back, and by detecting that bounce back, you can make an image out of that. Light travels more slowly through compressed media and more quickly in rarefied media. Well, who cares? We're not talking about light. They were able to create the virtual lens by causing this compression rarefaction effect, As the ultrasonic waves propagate through the medium, they modulate its density,

and hence its local refractive index. I'll explain what I need to when I'm done with this jargon. The medium is compressed in the high pressure regions, resulting in a higher density while it's rarefied in the negative pressure areas where the local density is reduced. Okay, so that makes sense. You know, there's going to be more resistance and compression in the areas. where there's higher density. It makes perfect sense. As a result, the pressure standing wave creates a local refractive index contrast.

Okay, so what? Come on, tell us what you're going to do with this. We used ultrasound waves to sculpt a virtual optical relay lens within the given target medium, which, for example, can be biologic tissue. Therefore, the tissue is turned into a lens that helps us capture and relay the images of deeper structures. Well, we do this with ultrasound already. Now, how are you going to show me the end? inside of a colon, though, to see if there's a turd in there or a polyp.

Let's see. What distinguishes our work from conventional acoustico-optic methods is that we're using the target medium itself, which can be biological tissue to affect light, as it propagates. What the hell are they talking about? This in situ interaction provides opportunities to counterbalance the obstacles that disturb the trajectory of light? What in the hell? They're saying here simply by applying it on the surface of the skin,

healthcare professionals could obtain images of internal organs without potential side effects and unpleasantness of an endoscopy. Well, they have not sold me on this one bit. This seems very preliminary and sort of proof of concept. and I don't know why they're talking about sound waves and then turning around and talking about light. So either this article is very poorly written or they haven't gotten anywhere. Anyway, hang on a second. I'm going to explain why I read you an article that I didn't know what the hell it was,

but I've got to get this on here. Tacey, you're on weird medicine. Yeah, that's what I thought. So she just hangs. It's just a coincidence that she calls every time. I wanted you to kind of see how we as physicians have to look at this stuff. And when we first read an article and walk through it, I've done this on, I used to do it on, we had a, well, where was it? Oh, it was opi anthony.net.

I answered questions over there for a while. And then Ronfez.com. I did it there. And now I'm on Reddit at Reddit. D.R. Steve. And every once in a while I'll take an article and then just parse the sentences and just show you how an MD or a DO or a PA or NP thinks about these things as they're walking their way through an article. And I am very unimpressed by this. I'm going to have to see a lot more. And again, this sounds like some physicists came up with something, sort of like when they had chemists come up. with cold fusion and all the physicists were like, I don't think so.

And it turned out to be bullshit. Now we have an electrical engineer coming up with a medical technique that doesn't seem to make any sense to me whatsoever, so we'll see. By the way, get your hepatitis A vaccine, particularly if you live in Florida, it says hepatitis A is a viral disease that used to be fairly uncommon in the United States. This year, however, cases of hepatitis A have escalated. to a worrying degree. This month, Florida, is declared hepatitis A a health emergency.

Hepatitis A, as you would imagine, is a disease that affects the liver and can occur when somebody drinks water, eats food that was contaminated by the fecal matter of another person infected by hepatitis A. So a lot of times this happens when people who handle food have hepatitis A and it causes diarrhea and they shit and then they don't wash their hands. effectively, and then they touch your food, and then you get it from that. You could also get it through unprotected oral or anal sex. It triggers symptoms similar to those of the flu, and it can be mild.

You might just think you had a puke bug that lasted a little longer than you thought, and then all of a sudden, one day, maybe a week or two weeks later, you get yellowish skin and you get jaundice. And that's when it becomes on the radar screen of your local hepatologist. And throughout Europe and the United States have been recently very few cases of the disease, and it's preventable through vaccination. In the last year, however, various regions of the United States have witnessed a steep rise in the number of hepatitis A cases.

And the state of Florida has declared a viral disease, a public health emergency. So there were 2,586 new cases of hepatitis A, of which of which 72% required hospitalization. So that's a big number. Let's see how many of that is. Let's ask Alexa. Alexa, what's 72% of 2,586? Is she there? Alexa, are you there?

Yes, I'm here. I listen once I hear the wake word. Okay. Alexa, what's 72% of seven... Shit, never mind. This might answer your question. No, no, no, no, no. Alexa, stop.

Alexa, what's 72% of 2,586? 72% of 2,586 is 1,000. 6861.92. Okay, so a lot of effort for nothing. A lot of patients required hospitalization and 65 new cases

occurred in the past two weeks alone. So that's a steep increase from the year before when there was a total of a total of 548 cases. Motion detected at the front door. Yeah, that will be someone is at the front door. All right. Well,

Okay, let's just say hello. I told them to just come in, and let's see if they'll do it. This is fascinating. It's very professional. Here we go. Let's go live. Oh, I don't know if this is going to work. There we go.

Hey, man, just come on in. Just come on in, come up to the third floor. All right. All right. Yeah, so it's a steep increase from the year before when there was a total of 548 cases. So let's figure this out. Alexa, what's 2586 divided by 548? 2,586 divided by 548 is 4.719. Yeah, so it's almost five times more cases than they were used to.

And the Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Scott Rivkees, said, I'm declaring this a public health emergency as a proactive step to appropriately alert the public to the serious illness and prevent further spread of hepatitis A in our state. And it's unclear why the cases of hepatitis A have increased at such an alarming rate. But officials are looking into the matter. Health emergency will allow them to invest more money into testing and treatment of the disease. Hepatitis A is a two-step vaccine, you get one, and then I think it's six months later, you get another one. Just talk to your primary care. This is a disease. Nobody needs to get this.

And as the cases are increasing, it increases the need to get yourself vaccinated. And I've never heard anyone complaining about this vaccine, you know, being caused. causing any adverse events. Let's see what the adverse events are with the hepatitis vaccine. Hepatitis. And you can just go to the CDC. Somebody did bring up that the CDC does own the patent for some vaccines, and that therefore they may have a conflict of interest.

I looked this up. The vaccines that they hold the patent on that they actually sell are for orphan. diseases for the most part, very rare diseases that no manufacturer is going to do any research on. You know, the federal government does some things for vaccines that they don't do for other industries. So for the vaccine industry, they've created a fund. Yeah, and I hear this one from the anti-vaxxers, too, where they've created a fund to pay off vaccine adverse event.

Okay, because there are going to be some. Nothing is 100% safe. And but they are generally safe, and these adverse reactions, though they can be tragic, are exceedingly rare. And the benefit to society far outweighs any risk. But the reason that they have this vaccine, it's not some vaccine payoff fund. It's not some secret thing. It's just Google it and find out all you want to find out about it. It's not secret.

The government is doing it because if they didn't do it, these vaccine manufacturers would just throw up their hands and say there's more profitable stuff out there. We're not messing with all these lawsuits, particularly the frivolous ones. So they've given a buffer to them so they can just make the vaccines, get them out there, and get people protected. So let's see what the adverse events on hepatitis A. So hepatitis A, vaccine preventable, communicable disease of the liver caused by hepatitis A virus, usually transmitted person to person through fecal oral root. And by the way, this was on my boards recently. The most common vaccine preventable disease, if you're going to, say, rural Costa Rica or something like that,

they're going to recommend that you get hepatitis A in addition to things like yellow fever and things like that. It says it usually resolves within two months of infection. Most children less than six years of age do not have symptoms. or have an unrecognized infection. So there's some benefit to being little. Antibodies produced in response hepatitis A infection lasts for life and protect against reinfection. So if you get it once, you won't get it again.

But the best way to prevent it is to get vaccinated. And I'm just looking for adverse events on this. Eh, I can't. Yeah. I could have prepared for this better, too. So anyway, just look it up. How about that? Do you do some research.

Look it up. The adverse I had it, the Schingrichs vaccine kicked my ass. The hepatitis A vaccine never knew that I took it. So they will be mild and self-limited. Okay, let's take a couple of phone calls while we're still here. And Cole is here. It's Cole, right? Yes, sir.

And I'll get you on Mike here in a second. You'll be on the next show. But, yeah, that's your mic right there. So, you came to the Voss thing. I did. Oh, can you turn your mic on? There's a little switch there that says on off. You're pretty smart little feller.

Pretty fart smaler, as we say in Tennessee. You got it? I got it. There you go. So you were at the boss thing, right? Absolutely. What'd you think? It was good.

Yeah. And did you get to talk to Voss afterward? A little bit afterwards. Yeah, see, he was great. He's great. He's awesome to his fans. I was telling everybody there were two people at Meadowview that had a few too many. and they were just all over him and he was just trashing them

and half the time they weren't even aware of it and I kind of apologized to him after he said no they're just fans they're fine you know he's totally cool yeah well my mom told me she's like this guy named like Voss something is coming oh yeah she's like you know you're where you got married I was like okay cool and I was like wait who was it and she said Rich Voss I was like okay okay I know the gentleman.

I said, we can go indulge in there. Did you bring friends? Well, my wife, my pregnant wife, and my mom, I just moved back. Okay, cool. I'm back to the area. Cool, but you're an old school opium. Oh, yes. Yeah, yes.

And that's one thing that I noticed. I was like, I know exactly who he is. Yeah, there were a few of us there. And he was just great. I mean, it was such a great show. and people love to shit on Voss, and he'll block him online because, you know, people in the studio will trash him.

Like Patrice used to just love to trash him. It's fun. Yeah. But, you know, so the listeners start thinking, well, we can do that too. And when they do that, you know, he just blocks, which I think is hilarious. Yeah. But in person, he was just delightful. He was.

And we got to hang out with him for a couple of days. And I really feel like, I mean, Rich and I have talked for years, but now I feel like now we're actually friends. Maybe, but he would probably dispute that. But, you know, it was just really cool having him here. Yeah, it was fun. I was actually very happy to see him. Yes.

Yeah. And the crowd, that was the biggest crowd we've ever had there. That amphitheater holds 1,200 people, so it never looks like there's a lot of people there, but there were about 400 there for this. Yes, absolutely. So it was a pretty big event. I mean, I know we can get more. A cramped load of people that had no idea who he was, but, you know, every year it's gotten bigger and bigger, so it's pretty cool.

Yeah. And the friends of Allendale that run that thing want to have people there other than just their regular bluegrass crowd. Exactly. And that was what they wanted. They used to do bluegrass four Thursdays in a row in August, and they just get the same hundred people. You know, so we've got four times the crowd now that they've gotten. And there's people that have never been to Allendale before. They just want people to enjoy it.

That's why they make it free. You know, they have the funds to, you know, to pay the comics their going rate and take good care of them and all that stuff. Funny thing is, right down next to the Portopodies, I got married right there. Oh, really? Yeah, so just to left the Portipotty. There were Portopiotties there. I didn't know. We got to use a real bathroom, but anyway.

Because we're fancy. Well, I have no time to take phone calls. So next week, what we're going to be doing is we're going to have Cody Gilmer from Indy Ghost on, and his girlfriend's coming out, a weird medical thing happened to her. And then we'll talk to Cole some more, and then we're going to do a crap load of phone calls that I didn't get to this time. Thanks always go to Dr. Scott, who isn't here. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Lewis, Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Eric Nagel, Rowan. Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fes Mottley,

who's early support of the show, has never gone unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk Channel, SiriusXM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand, and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.