Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 377 - Thumbelina and Her 4 Sisters

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

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For three months, you just download everything. And then just cancel it. to hell with it. All right, very good. Let's see what we got this week. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. The last time, if you remember, we were talking about lucid dreaming, and we had

somebody call in about that. Hey, my name is Bill. I'm listening to a show right now. I've had a couple of lucid dreams in my life before. I thought they were really, really sweet. Look into it a little bit. You're talking about unverified

claims here's another one that I was instructed by the Google to write down my dreams which is pretty cool because like generally just you do forget your dreams over time no matter how cool they were but by writing down your dreams and creating someone of a dream book it's supposed to help you gain control over your dream body a state like that? Yeah, better terms are out there for those of mine. Yeah, I don't know.

The technique I've heard is you're supposed to imagine a door and then you walk through the door and you're in this dream scape. And every time I walk through the door, I'm still awake. So I think you have to actually be in REM sleep for this to properly work. I don't think it's going to work from, the get-go because usually, okay, so sleep architecture is a interesting thing.

The nemonic is LDR, and it's light sleep, deep sleep, and then REM sleep. And if you've got a Fitbit or any of these sleep tracking things, that's what you're kind of looking for is that pattern where you're in light sleep and then you descend into deep sleep and then you emerge into REM sleep and then repeat this process. over and over again. And REM sleep is when you're, that's rapid eye movement for those that aren't sure what REM stands for, and which reminds me, I need to tell you the story about when I met Michael Stipe at Moogfest, but that's just how my brain works. When you're in REM sleep, that's when your body is paralyzed for the most part. You know, the parts of the motor section of your brain are shut down so you don't

get up and start acting out your dreams and then your eyes are flirting around like crazy and all kinds of dream activity is going on just like what the hell is really going on in there why does this work have you ever thought about how the human brain it's insane some of the things that our brains can do and it's like what was that about why why did we evolve that ability to speak six different languages or to write things out and out and then look at them and being able to effortlessly translate that into language in our brain. For example, I'm looking at a poster of Dave Ray Cecil, who, by the way, you should check him out. Go to our YouTube channel.

Just put in Dr. Steve and Dave Cecil. I think that might get you there. Let me just see if that works. Dr. Steve, Dave Cecil, C-E-C-I-L, like Cecil and whatever. And, yeah, and it comes out, well, okay, maybe not. So that gives you the audio stuff. Let's go to YouTube. Let me try and go on to YouTube.

Can you all tell that I have ADD? Yeah, you know, it's a shiny object. Okay, so let's put Dave Cecil, Weird Medicine. Let's try that. And there you go. Not there at all. That's so... Okay.

But you can click on Dr. Steve, and then you can go there. Yes. And then click on videos. And as you go down, we should be able to see Dave Ray Cecil in studio. It's about the third one down. Let me just see if any of this plays.

Down in Cumberton. There we go, and he can hear your old pal, Dr. Steve, playing the bass with an amazing singer-songwriter. I'll just put this underneath us. Dave won't mind. Dave Ray Cecil, everybody. Okay, so anyway, so I'm looking at his poster over there that we did for an appearance that he did up here. And I just see the words Dave Ray Cecil. Now, I could, if I understood Cyrillic.

I could look at that and it would have no meaning. In other words, there's no inherent meaning to the letters that we construct to make written language. But we decide that that, you know, stick with a curve after it is a D and an upside down V with an arch going through it is an A and then a, you know, two, you know, an acute angle upside down is a V. and that kind of stuff and once we do that now when I look at it I don't do any translation nothing that I'm aware of

there's no translation going on in my brain no process there was when I was a kid I remember having to sound out those things you go like Dave is a weird one because it's got the long A but that's because there's a E at the end

so it's not Davy it's you know, D-A-V-E is Dave. And R-A-Y, it's, you know, with the Y at the end makes that a long A. It's really Rai-E, but when you say Rai-E, Ray, okay, right? So, but my brain isn't, I'm not conscious of any process being done. I just look at those words and I can see them. That's like if they've got your name on something, you can spot it, like where's Waldo out of

a whole page full of other words, you can spot your name really quickly. So it's just very interesting that the human brain works this way. And now, of course, I've completely lost my train and thought, why am I talking about, well, the human brain, it's insane. So why do we, why do we sleep in the first place? And then when we sleep, why do we dream? And when we dream, why do we dream such effed up crazy stuff? like I'll dream that Paris

I've never had any interest in going to Paris none whatsoever not on my list of things to do but I had a dream that Paris was in my backyard all along and I just didn't realize it I was like wow all these all this time I've had to go to the airport sorry I'm getting paged I'm probably going to have to stop this in a second and come right back but I had to go to the airport and fly to Paris but all this time all I had to do was go through the bushes in my backyard and I was right there you know it was this crazy stuff like that and why Lord please explain to this to me why have I never had a sex dream in my life it would be so much fun to be able to have dream intercourse with whoever but that never happens and if I ever do have a sex dream

it's not well or you know a a dream where there's sexual activity going on there's never actually um complete the the activity i'll get right up to the point where i'm getting ready to begin the activity and then i wake up or the dream shifts to something else some nerd thing where i'm you know i don't know um you know playing with a synthesizer or something because that i do think about all the time so i just i don't know dude It's the whole dream thing is crazy. I would love to be able to control it. And so I'm working on it.

At this point, what else have I got to do? You know, all my hobbies I'm relatively good at, this is a new one. I wonder if virtual reality could help condition us to have lucid dreaming. By the way, I got the Oculus Quest. highly recommended. The Oculus Go was cool. The thing I like about is you don't have to hook it up to anything. It needs Wi-Fi, but you can walk around. The Oculus Quest, you walk around in a perimeter that you determine yourself, that you draw out. And then if you stay inside that perimeter, you're in that world. The second you step out of it, it's like going through a curtain into another world, and then you can see your world. It is really cool. Porn? I had to try it. Of course. It is, it is, I'm, I had to delete it because that's something that I could have become addicted to. And because it's so real. The only thing that's missing, well, I mean, it's real in the sense that you can see stuff and it's 3D so you can move your head around. It's like the person is right there. When they come up right to your face, it's like they're right there. honestly i deleted that now what does this tell you about me i deleted the 3d virtual porn from my oculus quest but i kept uh the 3d virtual darth vader adventure game so uh it just you know at 64 it's like

what am i doing um so uh but when darth vader is right there in your face it's scary because it's like he's right there in front of you. And he's like seven feet tall, by the way, which Hayden Christensen wasn't that tall. So he must have burned his legs up, and then they had like stilts. He's walking around on stilts, which is kind of creepy, poor little feller. But anyway, so yeah, the Oculus Quest is awesome. But I wonder if that's a way that we could maybe condition ourselves to be able to control the dream state, because that's the ultimate goal is to be able to wake up in a dream.

and not be paralyzed. I've had lucid dreaming like that, the hypnopompic episodes where you wake up and you're paralyzed and the dream part of your brain is still going on, but your body can't move. And it's frightening because, you know, you feel like you're awake, but you're helpless. And those are the folks that think that they're being abducted by aliens. If you don't understand that that's a hypnopompic episode and you've never heard that term, I highly recommend that you Google it, then it can be quite terrifying. And it's absolutely real, which is why I want to be able to control true lucid dreaming

because it's so real that, you know, if you can do this, then you can do anything you want. I'd like to learn how to fly. I'd like to have intercourse with whatever dream person there is to have intercourse with. just for the hell of it. And what's weird is, and I was doing some reading about this, dream memories can become memories. Like, there are memories that I have that are memories of dreams that I had. I have a very vivid memory of a dream when I was riding horses with my parents when I was

four years old. And I was actually four when I had this dream. Maybe I was three, but I was somewhere in there. And I was riding horses with my family. which I'd never done before. So it was already absurd. And we were like in the desert where I had never been before I grew up. I mean, we were in Chicago at the time.

And I fell off my horse and my parents just kept going. It's a classic, you know, toddler abandonment fantasy. But I remember those dreams. And it was terrifying. And I have a memory of that dream. I remember what it felt like, what it smelled like. like what it looked like I was dreaming in black and white back then. So, and I remember how my voice sounded when I was calling out to my parents to come back

and get me. And I had this weird accent, which was also strange. And, but anyway, so yes, dreams can become your memories. Now, if you can't tell the difference, that's a sign of borderline personality disorder. And there are other mental illnesses where people cannot tell. the difference between something that happened to him in a dream and something that happened to him in reality. And that's really scary. But anyway, I would love to be able to control that.

So I'm going to be working on it. I'm going to be concentrating on looking at my hands while I'm in a dream and see if that will trigger the conscious part of my brain to wake up so that I can take control of the dream and start flying around and turn invisible and stuff. Times a day. Let's take another call here. Let's see. Let's see what we got. Hi, Dr. Steve, and all on the podcast there. This is Mike from Indiana.

Hey, Mike. And I sent you an email saying that I had a question about my wife's nipples. Which, of course, I'm going to rise to that challenge. Thank you. We're 65 and 64. Oh, never mind. No, I'm just kidding. I'm 64.

I'm finding I am attracted to women from anywhere from about 35 to somewhat past my age, depending on how, depending on the upkeep. Let me put it that way. And, you know, the other thing is who gives two shits who I'm attracted to matter. So anyway, all right. And she said her nipples have always been so sensitive that she could have an orgasm just from having them played with. okay that sounds awesome at this point though they're starting to lose their sensitivity or they've lost most of their sensitivity well you know and the thing is what else have they lost um that's the big question but she really misses that and we were wondering if there was anything we could do to get some of that sensitivity back yeah okay no it's a great question all all me being an asshole aside um and sexual response you know changes over time it just does And I know when I was 15, I could, oh, well, there's Big Joe.

Let's see what Big Joe's got first today. Big Joe, you're on weird medicine. Oh, I need to ask you a thorough question. Well, I've got 33 minutes to go. Will it wait, or do I need to stop the recording? Are you sure? Yeah, I'm positive you call me back. I will.

Tell the listeners, the wisdom for the day. The wisdom of the day? Yep. Just be safe. That's all I know. Well, that's a good. All right. I'll call you in 33 minutes and 8 seconds.

Okay, bye. All right, bye. All right. So, yeah, our huge. Human sexual response changes over time. I remember when I was 15, you know, I could beat off three times a day. Now I'm lucky to get one in every two weeks, so, you know, times a bitch. So things do change, but I have a couple ideas for you.

Number one, her nipples just may be overstimulated, and so they've lost some sensitivity. When you've got nerves that are very sensitive to touch, if you keep touching them, the sensitivity, the body just has to turn it down. I can't stand those high intensity signals hitting the brain. So one thing you could do is she could wear a real tight sports bra for a while so that her nipples are not moving around in her underwear even at all during the day and then hands off for two weeks. see if the sensitivity comes back. If it does not, give me a call and we'll go to plan B. I've got some other ideas on how to increase sensitivity. The other thing we need to do, let's make sure that she's been screened for diabetes

because, of course, one of the adverse effects of diabetes is that the sugar running around in our system tends to clog up the nerve endings in our, well, all over the place, but particularly in the peripheral nerves are the ones out in the hands and the feet and causes some numbness and so it could in the, you know, the very end of the breast tissue as well. That's a possibility.

There are other possibilities as well. Low thyroid, I'd get her thyroid checked. You know, if she came to me, I'd check her for diabetes, check her for thyroid. I would also check B12 because B12 can cause a thing called a peripheral neuropathy, which can manifest itself as,

decrease sensitivity. So those are the three things I'd start off with. But number one, let's just give those old nipples a rest for a couple of weeks and see if the sensitivity comes back. And then let me know one way or the other. All right. Feel free to call back 347-7664323. All right.

Well. Hey, you're going to touch your base with you. Kind of a little bit of a follow-up. uh show 375 you had your guy talking about drug screening and buying test kits off of amazon and other places okay okay what this what he's talking about was on one of these shows uh somebody was calling in 10 um wanting to pre test themselves before they had a urine drug screen at work so they went and bought a kit and every time they tested themselves even though it had been a long time since they'd done any marijuana, they kept showing up positive.

And one of the things we talked about is those kits at home are screening tests. They're not perfect. And just like an employer screening test, if they do a screening test and then you get an abnormal result, then you have to send it off to a lab to do something more specific. And that would be a thin layer liquid chromatography or a GC mass spec or something like that. So that's always the case with all screening tests. If you get an abnormal test or an unexpected result, you have to repeat it with a better, more closer to the gold standard, if not the gold standard test. And it should be more specific than sensitive at that point.

So specific tests will be negative in health. In other words, if you'll get true negatives out of people that don't have the condition. So in this case, if you have a screening test that's positive for marijuana and you haven't done it, doing that more specific test should be negative when you haven't done it. So that's what needs to be done after that. So that's where we were. In Knoxville, I'm sure they have in other places, is we test all. or something similar to that, just a little track mall store,

but they do DOT testing for drugs or A1C or pretty much whatever you want, you're paying for it. You're the only one to get the results. Yeah, and you can do that. You can go into one of these places and just demand it, and what you have to do is make sure that they don't give that to your employer. So you have to make that clear up, right? I'm the only one that can get these.

I'm not giving permission for anyone to ever see these. And that's got to be clear. And if they hem and ha, then walk out. Because the other thing you can do is just buy, you know, I told that person and kept getting the positive, just try a different test. But remember that the ones that they do, the professional ones that are done in the lab,

are usually more sensitive than those too. So just because you're negative on that does not necessarily mean you'll be negative on an employer test but what it does tell you is it'll be if it's not negative it'll be a very low level and one that maybe you can explain away

and demand retesting all right now you're screwed if you were doing it and the retesting that they do rather than just retesting a urine drug screen and say okay that's fine let's do a hair follicle test because that is will have your hair follicles will

have a record of just about everything that you've done since that follicle formed. And that can work against you. So you want to make sure that if, let's just say, you smoked pot a month ago in a moment of weakness and you've got a positive test. As long as the follow-up test is either a blood test or a urine test, by the time they get to it, you'll probably be negative again if it was a month ago. whereas if they do the follicle test, that will be positive until that follicle dies and falls out. So, all right.

Dr. Steve, this is Mike calling from New York. And, you know, on that last question, the answer, if you're at risk of getting a urine drug screen done at work, you really just, you can't finagle it. Don't try to finagle it. just don't partake. And if that's not possible for you, number one, you may have a problem, and you should seek help for that. But also, that job may not be for you. And you say, well, but this is a good paying job. Okay, well, then that's the tradeoff because they're testing you.

There's a company near me that they even said, look, even if you have a low level from CBD oil and it turns up positive, you're out of here. We don't care. So people are aware of that. So the people that work there are either doing CBD and just praying that they fall below the level, which normally they will, if it's well vetted CBD oil. Let's take another detour for a second and talk about CBD oil that you buy over the counter. If it is hemp derived, it's legal to sell, and you don't need a prescription, the problem is the FDA is saying some of this stuff that's being bought off the shelves at fly-by-night type place. is not actually CBD, or if it is, it's got other stuff that's adulterating it, and sometimes the adulterant can be THC.

In other words, it's actually pot oil that someone, you know, might be the byproduct of purifying pot oil or purifying THC from extract, and then they sell this stuff saying, oh, well, this is CBD oil, but it will push you over the legal limit. And so you have to be careful. I recommend people buy CBD oil from a pharmacy or a place that can show that their CBD oil has been tested and that it is, you know, that the THC content is less than 0.3% like it's supposed to be. All right. Anyway. Yesterday, I was at work in the men's room and a score.

And this guy came running in and he was throwing up really bad. really violent, puking, pretty horrific. A guy came in behind him, asked if he was okay, and the guy that was sick said, yeah, I never had a reaction like that before. He came out of the district attorney's off. That's so I wasn't sure. Maybe he said horrible crime scene photos or whatever.

Okay. Then later on that day, I was going to go to the rest of him again, and they stopped me and said there's a guy died in there. Oh, my God. A few minutes later, I found out he didn't really die, but he was really sick. And he was still chipped him pretty bad. They called an ambulance to come down. I was just curious what the chances are and spreading some virus from me.

Yeah, okay. Well, his audio is terrible. But so there was somebody puking in the stall next to him. When he says he was working in the stall, you know, no judgment from me, dude. I'm assuming he meant he was at work and he was in the bathroom. And somebody next to him came in and just started puking their guts out. And then there was another person in there puking that they had to take out by ambulance. So the first person thought, oh, gosh, you know, I had, I never reacted to a crime scene photo or whatever it was they were looking at.

Probably what it was is they had a pupe bug. And the way you can tell if you had a puke bug or not is if you puke more than once. So if you see a picture and you go, and that's it, it's probably not food poisoning. If you don't have diarrhea, it's probably not food poisoning. It's probably some, you know, visceral reaction to something that you saw. But if you, 20 minutes later, you puke again and 20 minutes after that, you puke again. And then for the next eight hours, you're puking every 20 minutes for the first four hours. And then every 30 minutes for the next two.

And then every eight hours after that, then that's a puk. It's a normal course for a puke bug. So he had two people, and was it food poisoning? Was it something they ate that he didn't eat, in which case there's no chance he's going to get it from them? Or is it a virus? Now, you're probably not necessarily at increased risk just because somebody puked next to you unless they splash on you. Let's say they splash on your shoe, get some puke that's loaded with virus, and you get that on your hand. and then you don't wash your hands and then you eat with your fingers.

See, a lot of things got to fall in place for you to get this. Now, if it's all over the office, though, you could get it just through what we call fomite transmission. If that virus is stable even for just a few minutes, someone gets puke or shit on their hands, diarrhea, you know, that's got virus in it, and then they touch the doorknob, and then everybody touches the doorknob, and then those that don't wash their hands adequately enough end up touching their food, you know, eating a sandwich or whether or ever, and ingesting the virus, and the virus starts to grow in their GI tract,

causing inflammation, and which causes puking and diarrhea. All of those things, again, got to fall into place, but that's a little more likely than you getting it just sitting next to somebody in a stall, unless they are just puking everywhere, and it gets everywhere, and there's nothing you can do about it. Okay? So by the time you hear this, you're going to know whether you got it or not anyway, but just sort of a general interest.

Hi, Dr. Steve, this is Chris. You were talking about artificial sweeteners, and I just wanted to bring up that arthritis is not processed by the body in the same way as most artificial sweeteners. So it really just passes right to you, and if you're on a ketogenic diet, It is probably one of the better artificial swingers, you can think. No, I don't disagree.

Rithratol is a so-called sugar alcohol. Sorbitol is another one. People who have worked in the emergency room, however, know what sorbitol is. We use it as a cathartic, meaning that you give it to somebody, and then they have voluminous diarrhea for a couple of hours. my ex-wife and I were doing Adkins a million years ago when I first started

and we were just really craving something sweet and we went into GNC and they had these zero-carb chocolate bars who were like oh God we got to try these I'm sure they'll be awful well we ate one and they weren't awful they were awesome because the erythritol

tastes just like sugar and I think we ate two of them, and then we took off to go home. And halfway home, we had to stop at McDonald's or something to empty our horrific bowels because the stuff just rolled through us like a tsunami. We weren't prepared for it. And actually, I would have known if I'd looked at the ingredients. But all I was looking at was the carb content.

It was chocolate. I'm eating it. And so anyway, so just be careful of that. Erythratol is great, but it isn't absorbed or processed by the, the body so it passes through relatively unscathed and when you have little molecules of sugar scattered throughout your bowel osmosis will demands that fluid flow into the bowel to try to dilute it out I guess and when that happens your colon fills up with fluid and stool and what's going to happen with that it's called diarrhea so you will like you will

get rid of it through the normal means in the form of liquid fecal matter. So just go easy with that stuff. But yeah, it does. It tastes great. All right. Hello, Dr. Steve. Got a quick question for you. Apparently, I have contracted what the legend has.

And apparently it's legendary also. For some reason, you're in the last few years. I've started getting that horrible smell if you rub behind my ear. I don't know if that's a gland or if that's related to what I'm eating or how it is, but apparently it's pretty close to whatever Rich Voss, the legend, says he had. So I don't know. What's going on there? Says he had.

So you're implying that he's lying. I can guarantee you he is not. So this can be several things, oil and sebaceous material, which is kind of oily residue from old skin that's trapped under the skin. So I think most people are aware that skin sloughs off over time. So if you look at it under microscope, you'll see the basal layer is very round cells with nuclei. look like normal cells. And then as it gets closer and closer to the epidermis or the outside, you know,

the part of the body, the skin that you can touch, those cells flatten out and then they die and lose their nuclei and just become keratin, basically. And the keratin is sort of like plastic-y-rubbery stuff and it will just sluff off. Well, if you have skin tissue that can't sluff off, let's say you punctured, you have a little puncture wound, and now some of these cells have been driven underground so that they're now not growing out to the outside, but they're growing to the inside. It's got nowhere to go. So what happens, it makes a cyst, and that cyst fills up with dead skin and oil and stuff,

and if it gets infected, it stinks to high heaven. But if it leaks to the outside, that stuff that's in there is just sort of, it's not rotten, really, unless it's infected, but it's just macerated, disgusting protein. and it stinks. And if you have one of these little things opening up to the back part of the ear, then you rub your hand back there and pull it out and it will stink. So you may have an ectopic oil gland that's draining nasty stuff. You may also have a cyst back there that's draining that's also nasty.

Of interest, this stuff kind of smells like a sysm. skunk so the skunk has these horrible proteins that are extruded into its scent glands and then when it shoots it out at you it just stinks to high heaven and so just imagine that but coming from the back your ear it's pretty gross all right hi uh just call and see if i could uh get some advice on depression and anxiety. Okay. I'm not into, you know, getting onto a bunch of medications or anything like that. Good.

Good for you. You know, I always find myself getting overwhelmed and even a little depressed over situations that might not necessarily even be, you know, come to pass. There are these things that I sometimes filled up in my mind. And, you know, I worry and I worry and I worry. You know, maybe somebody's angry at me. Somebody hates me. Oh, dude, I totally understand this.

And then, you know, when... If I text somebody a joke and they don't answer me right back, I think somehow that they've misinterpreted the joke and now they're mad at me. And then I start texting, I, you know, hey, I'm sorry, you know, and I just make it worse because I can't get it out of my head. And then they text me out, no, dude, I was in a meeting.

I just couldn't text you back. Everything's cool. And then I feel like a fool. It never comes to pass. I feel the relief, but it just seems like I always seem to believe that, you know, the worst is going to happen rather than the best. Oh, yeah. In this world, I can't imagine why you'd feel that way.

This is very common, and it is treatable. Now, look, if you have true clinical depression, and depression isn't sadness. People are depressed have a constellation of symptoms, including not caring about things they used to care about, not being able to, that's called apathy, not being able to enjoy things they used to enjoy, that's called anahedonia, or being incapable of enjoying things. and then insomnia or hypersomnia where they're not sleeping at all or they're sleeping too much and physical weakness and yes depressed mood or depressed affect and that can lead to suicidal ideations and some people you start feeling that way you need to get to your primary care provider or if you have a psychiatrist talk to them and you may need to be treated there are lots of screening tools that they can do in a primary care office

to just make the diagnosis, and then if you need to be referred on, that's fine. If not, sometimes they can treat it. About 70% of psychiatry is practiced in primary care offices. But barring that, this kind of thing, so if you're feeling any of that, and you didn't tell me that, just go see your primary care. But worrying about things that haven't happened is really common. And I even watched a video of a guru saying, you know, it's the height of insanity, which is not a great thing to say to people who already think they're crazy. To worry about things that haven't happened because they haven't happened.

And to worry about things that happened in the past, there's nothing you can do about it. So the old 12-step thing, you know, if you've got one foot in the future and one foot in the past, meaning you're worried about things that have already happened that you've already done, and then worried about things that haven't happened yet. So you've got one foot in the future, one foot in the past. You're in a perfect position to take a giant dump on the present. And the translation of that is, if you're worried about these things, you're missing out on your life, which you're living right now in the moment.

And so, you know, Baba Ram Dass, you know, said, be here now. Just be in the moment. Right now, look around you. None of that stuff that you're worried about is actually happening right now. So enjoy this moment. And if we, if this moment becomes the next moment and the next, and the next moment, somewhere down the road leads to one of these things, then, you know, then we'll deal with it. And of course, that doesn't mean don't pre-plan and try to plan ahead for things. Well, that's not what you're doing.

You're not making plans. You're just worrying about stuff. So the best way to deal with this on a professional level, in my opinion, is to find a cognitive behavioral therapist in. your area so um you just get on google and put cognitive behavioral therapy near me and then there'll be a huge list of people and then you you you just win you know weed them out some of them will only be doing addiction some of them will only be doing children get the one that meets your criteria you can have a licensed um clinical social worker or you can have a phd i personally have done better with Ph.D. psychologists than I have with licensed clinical social workers.

I've seen both. But I'm somebody that wants that sort of empiric model and talk about the science of psychology. And that's not to say that a licensed clinical social worker can't do that. But they tend to be more context driven, whereas the PhDs can, uh, can, uh, can, uh, can spout more malarkey, too, if that helps, you know, it helps me. So, you know, whatever works for you, you can try both, too. None of, neither of those can prescribe medication, however. So, but they can refer you to somebody who can if they think that you need it. You know, if you have true clinical depression or something like that. Okay. All right. So get that checked out and let me know how it goes. All right.

Hey, Dr. Steve, it's Calvin in California. Hey, Calvin. I was wondering, when you administer, is it potassium chloride that stops the heart, or is it calcium chloride that stops a heart? I've heard that if you do a hard push of one of those, it'll stop a person's heart. Yep. And I couldn't find an answer. See if he has a reason for this, because depending on what his reason is, I'll answer it around. Potassium chloride versus calcium chloride.

Thank you, Steve. Okay, well, he doesn't give an answer, so I'm going to assume that his intentions are nothing but honorable. Yes, it's potassium. So the body very tightly controls potassium, not so much chloride, not even so much sodium or magnesium, but tightly controls potassium because a little bump in potassium can cause all kinds of problems.

As a matter of fact, on an EKG, you can tell, of someone, well, you can get a hint whether somebody has got a high potassium or a low potassium. Most of the time, if you go around the room, you can check everyone's potassium and their pH. Those are the two.

Acid-based balance and potassium are very tightly regulated. And they'll be almost identical around the room unless they have some medical problem. In a code blue, we used to push calcium. If we weren't getting anywhere, If someone's heart stopped, we would push calcium. Honestly, it's been so long since I took my advanced cardiac life support that I don't know if that's being done anymore. I know they did away with it at one point, and then they brought it back.

So any of the EMTs out there or paramedics or ER docs or whatever might want to, you know, illuminate me on that. But so calcium generally, of course, an overdose of anything will stop your heart. but a calcium we generally give it when someone's heart is stopped, and potassium is what they use in, say, the suicide machines, like I believe Kavorkian suicide machine had a sedating element like phenobarbital that would put the person to sleep, and then it would cascade down to give him a lethal dose of potassium. I know at the veterinary clinics, they'll use potassium,

to euthanize animals as well. So it's very quick and generally painless. And I'm not saying I endorse euthanasia of dogs, but I'm just saying, I don't have an opinion on it either way. But that is one of the things that they use. So, yeah, so watch out for the potassium. Thank you.

Uh-oh. This is my son. Let's see if he'll talk on the radio. Hello, Liam, you're on weird medicine. Hey, can Andy and Mason come over? Well, you have a doctor's appointment at three, but they can after that. Where? I'll tell you when I come down. I'll be down in six minutes.

All right. Okay, all right, bye. Okay. Sorry, Andy and Mason. We've got something else we've got to do today. All right. One time, hey, this is Calvin in California. Again.

So one time I told Dr. Steve, I says, hey, there's this patient on line one who says that he's invisible. Dr. Steve says, I can't see him right now. That was really stinky. So if you couldn't understand him. And he didn't make it into a, you know, a doctor. It was just me. But, you know, a doctor gets a call from the receptionist says there's a man on line three, which doesn't make sense because he's on the phone.

What you have to have is there's a man out front and he says he's invisible. And then the doctor says, well, I can't see him right now. And then you get. So if you have any other medical. humor that you want to try out on this show, feel free to give us a call 347-766-6-6-4-3-23. I'm always up for a good joke or even a bad joke and I'll just shit on it. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Matt from Connecticut. Hey, Matt. I'm giving you a call actually about my daughter. She, for about the last couple years, she's developed these warts on her hands,

palms, fingers, things like that. We've got them lasered off, tried to get her to not touch them when they're being when they're healing things like that but she just seems to keep getting them and you know I know they're viral so you can't exactly take anything for it but I'm not sure if there's any sort of a treatment you can for it or anything that you may have run into that we can work with well okay so these are these are palmar warts everyone's heard of plantar warts but if they're on her palms they're palmer warts and they are verruke vulgari or or the This is Varuka Vulgaris, which is the common ward. These, even though their HPV, are likely not in the subtypes that cause cancer.

So that's the first thing. These things, some kids get them, some don't. I had them on my feet. These viruses are trophic. And if you don't remember what that means, it means they like to live in certain places. And I had them removed. They would stick a damn needle in my foot. and cauterized these things out back when I was, you know, 8, 9, 10, thank God my mom was smart enough not to let them do cobalt treatments on me, which back then is what they called it.

It was radiation therapy. You could radiate these things off. I would be so full of cancer right now if they had done that, I guess, because the doses they would have had to use to burn warts off my foot. I can't even imagine. So I'm glad that she made me sit there and take the torture of getting the needle in the foot and then them cauterizing. But they would always come back. When I was in college, I got a few of them. I went to a podiatrist, and he gouged them out with a curate, and they went away and they never came back.

So this has to do with your immune system. And at some point, as she gets older, her immune system will go, wait a minute, you guys are not supposed to be here. And they will go in and just wipe them out. and continuing to have them treated either with laser or with liquid nitrogen or gouged out with a curate if she can stand it, increases the exposure to the immune system, and one of these days these things will vanish on their own. We do the same thing with molluscom contagiosum, also a viral illness of the skin. It's usually more self-limited lasts about six months, but it makes these bumps that, these little depressions in them.

And if you take a sharp object like a tongue depressor that you've broken at an acute angle and run it into that core and pull out one of those cores, a lot of times that will expose the core to the immune system, and the immune system will then go and clear them all up. So it's pretty interesting. Not totally unlike the way we're going to try to cure cancer in the future by exposing the immune system to the cancer itself. because it should have recognized those cells as being abnormal, but it's not.

So if we can turn the immune system on so that it does understand these are abnormal cells, it'll go in and kill them. Go to my website at Dr. Steve.com, click on non-sudoscience cancer cures, and look at the article called the abscopal effect. This is an effect that we see rarely, but sometimes, you know, it's not unheard of, in patients with multiple, not multiple myeloma, with malignant melanoma. And we radiate, let's say, a lesion in the hip,

and then all of a sudden all the melanoma goes away. And when you damage the tumor in the hip with radiation, it opens up those cells to exposure to the immune system. The immune system goes, hey, wait, there's a bunch of these other assholes, other places in this person's body, they just go and kill it. So if we can learn to turn that stuff on at will,

we will have a generalizable treatment, at least for malignant melanoma, if not for other things as well. Well, thanks always go to Dr. Scott, Lady Diagnosis. Cody Gilmer. Cody will be here next week. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coombe, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fez Wally, whose early support of this show is never going to appreciate it. By the way, if you're still listening to this, most people click off by now. One of these days, I'm going to put a prize in here, and only a couple of you are actually going to hear it, so just stay tuned. Listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk Channel, Sirius XM, 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. Go to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy.

go to our website at dr steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap until next time check your stupid nuts for lumps quit smoking get off your asses and get some exercise we'll see you in one week for the next edition of weird medicine