Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 380 - Ladies and Germs

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

Dr Steve recaps and debriefs his involvement in the "Germiest Staffer" bit, discusses cannabinoids in nature and as produced by the human body, cardiac risk, and more. PLEASE VISIT: 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) 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-ho-you-oh. Yeah, me and the garretel. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivir from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain now.

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

I'm Dr. Steve. and 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. 347-7-4-3-23. That's 347 Poohead. You're listening to us live. The number is 754-227-3-6-47. Hey, follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at DR Scott WM.

You can also follow Lady Diagnosis. She will be back at Lady Diagnosis. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff that you can buy or go to our new merchandise store at cafepress.com slash weird medicine. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your doctor. Nurse practitioner, physician, physician, physician, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctures, yoga master,

physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientist, registered dietitian or whatever. All right. Now look, holidays are coming, whatever your persuasion. holiday season. You'll want to go, and look, I make like 25 cents off of this, so I'm not pushing it because I'm going to make anything off of it. But if you go to cafepress.com slash weird medicine, you can get a Bristol stool scale mug.

We've got some that are weird medicine branded and some that aren't. And basically, the Bristol stool scale is a scale for, um, judging turds basically fecal matter so uh you know and it goes from one to seven with uh hard little balls having one number and just watery you know voluminous watery diarrhea having another number and uh it's graphical so it has pictures of it and it's hilarious as one of those white elephant gifts you work in a doctor's office, you're going to do secret Santa, or if you just want to give

somebody something gross and hilarious, go to cafepress.com slash weird medicine, and there's all kinds of feces-themed gifts that are reasonable. Another gift, and I make zero

from this, even though it bears my likeness, is the fletus flute. It's hilarious. Stocking stuffer for that naughty gift that you want to give somebody. So go to fletusflute.com for that. And just for regular stuff that we talk about on this show, just go to stuff.

Dottersteve.com. It's basically a click-through to Amazon, and it just tags it that we referred you. Or you can scroll down, and you can see just about every product that we've ever mentioned on this show that has any kind of salutary effect. And if there's something that's missing,

on there. She thinks should be on there. Email me. Just go to Dr. Steve.com and click contact. Ignore all the warnings. That's to keep the non-listeners out. Another gift idea is tweakeda audio.com. They've got the best earbuds for the price on the market and the best customer service anywhere. I get compliments on their customer service all the time. Go to tweakedaio.com and enter offer code fluid, FLUID, for 33% off. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. That's simply herbals.net.

And his Dr. Scott peppermint nasal spray is fantastic. I actually need to replenish my supply. And I think he ran out. You guys did such a great job buying stuff from him that he ran out for a while. Check him out over there. And if he's still out, just yell at him for being a lazy hippie. You know, Jesus, try to, you know, learn how to run a business. But anyway, I'm just kidding, Scott, if you're listening, you're, you're delightful.

Okay. If you want to attain your ideal body weight, as I have done for the first time since college in the easiest way possible and changed my life, really did change my life in that it's changed my relationship with food. eating so much healthier, and I feel so much better. I did it using the psychology app called Noom, N-O-O-O-M, and you can go to Noom. Dottersteve.com. You get two weeks free, and if you decide to do it, it's only a three-month thing, and it's

less expensive than Weight Watchers, and there's no points and all that malarkey. Now, there is some logging of food, and you've got a counselor you're accountable to, which is all great. That's what I needed. I needed some accountability, because I didn't want to tell my... counselor that I just ate a whole bag of Snickers bars. Check that out at Noom. Dottersteve.com.

And if you're lazy like I am, do freshly. Freshly delivers fresh prepared meals that make eating right super easy. You can use my link to get six dinners for $39 for two weeks. That's $20 off a week. Give it a try and let me know what you'd think. That's at freshly. dot doctor steve.com and my wife

and I really like it. We loved Blue Apron and we would still do that but once our kids got back in school we got kind of lazy or you know we had a lot of stuff to do and this we'd just pop in the oven or pop in the microwave

and you think well I could just go by lean cuisines. Well the food in this really is a much higher quality in my opinion and it is it seems to be more expertly and individually sort of prepared if that makes any sense

and less like it came out of a machine and there's more food in there the package is about the same side but there's got to be at least twice as much food as in like a lean cuisine because I remember when I was in residency I was just so lazy I was single

and I would eat two lean cuisines for dinner tonight but one wouldn't do it I'd have to eat too. But anyway, check out freshly. Dottersteve.com. If you don't like it, you know, none of these things are for everybody.

Can it, but thanks for at least considering it. And if you want archives of the show, and why would you? But if you do, premium.com is one way to get that. Use offer code fluid to get half off. It's only a buck 99 a month,

but so it's a dollar a month for the first three months. And if you want to, just sign up, you can just download everything. and then just cancel. That is kind of a pain. So the easy way to do it is to go to Dr.steve.com, and there's a link on the front page that says,

get all the archives on a thumb drive, and I send you a 32-gigthumb drive with 16 gigs of content on it, and it's all the shows up until that point that we've done for RiaCast. Anyway, so check that out. That's it. Let me see here. What did we have? I thought we had something very interesting.

Oh, yeah, listen to the Sirius XM show this week. You can listen on demand. I did an extended piece on auto brewery syndrome. And I did a poll recently that was very revealing to me. I did a poll on Twitter. check out my Twitter at weirdmedicine.com, where I said, well, where do you listen to this show? SiriusXM? Do you listen on demand? Or do you listen to the podcast or both? And 14% of people listen on both, which is why I'm doing this show, is very different from the Sirius XM show today.

For those people who actually listen to both get sick of hearing the same crap on both. but also 61% listen to the podcast. Now that's a big turnaround from when we first started. When we first started, we would have, you know, the estimation for the listenership of the Saturday Night virus when we first started was about 100,000 people. And now the vast majority of people, at least on Twitter, who responded to my poll, so not very scientific. are listening to the podcast. So thank you for that.

And I'll start paying more attention to the podcast, I guess. Geez, I had no idea. I wanted to introduce my new co-host. So when I need to get a laugh, I have my Halloween co-host, because I'm recording this the day after Halloween. And I'm going to put it out. So if you're listening to this on Friday, November 1st, I actually recorded this at 8 a.m. before I went to work because I couldn't do it last night.

Anyway, all right. A couple of things. I was on Howard Stern recently. I've been working on a project with Mehmet Walker for several weeks. And what he wanted to do, he called me. Because I know Shulie did some stuff for us, and I've done a couple of things. for Shulie, and, you know, Shulie and I are, I consider us

friends. I mean, we don't hang out all the time or talk all the time, but we're friendly at least, and we know each other. And they wanted to do a science experiment, and he said, hey, call Dr. Steve. So, this Mimitt kid who

has a superior IQ from the IQ test, and it shows because he really got it. What they wanted to do was swab, the staffers and their work spaces to see if there were any weird germs and to see if someone was germier than other and fully not expecting anything but wanted to do it in case something cool showed up and then they could do a bit out of it and so I arranged for a lab to do the

cultures and the we didn't do sensitivities but we did do bacterial identification and I sent him a little video showing how to collect a specimen and then send them a bunch of specimen tubes now these things they've got a swab in there you swab it and you break it off and you put it in this culture medium and it's got liquid and it keeps it alive then they put them on ice

and sent them back to me and he I was very impressed because he used a pretty good excellent technique for getting these samples and even corrected for possible biases. For example, there's a guy on that show, Richard Christie.

It was my idea to use his ass crack as a control, just as a funny control. And I'm really glad that we did that because one of the results was made funnier because of that. But anyway, and I'll get to that in a minute. But Mehmet knew that if he let Richard spread his cheeks to get the ass crack swab, that that would contaminate his fingers. So he actually did the fingers first. It seems trivial, but not everybody would think of that. So I was very impressed by him, and he got all the signs.

It was one of those things, you know, I only had to tell him stuff once, and then when we sent him the results, he was immediately able to synthesize it. So I was very impressed by him. But anyway, it was an interesting test. I have the results in front of me. You can just listen to it on Howard Show on demand. But there were a few things. You know, there's so much going on.

There's six people in the studio. And then it's, you know, it's Howard. And I still get nervous talking to Jim and Sam. I'm nervous talking to Bennington when I, you know, used to talk to them a lot in the air. I mean, I'm just a nervous naily. I'm still a fan boy. So because of all of that, it's very difficult to get out every single thing that I wanted to say. And so I thought, you know, I have my own show.

I'll do it over here. But anyway, the interesting findings were Richard. And he, there were two people were labeled as the germiest. But really, only one really should have gotten it in my opinion. opinion, but it wasn't my bit. But Richard Christie, delightful. He's made me laugh so many times and just a very nice guy and really, really funny and one of the greatest metal drummers that has ever lived. And a lot of people are not aware of that. I don't know how you can't make an awesome living doing that. I mean, I go to, when I used to go to Ozfest, there'd be, you know, what,

50,000 people there or something, some insane number. How are you not making money? But then, of course, there were 50,000 bands, too. So I guess that's part of it. But anyway, Richard is awesome. They did his ass crack. His ass crack grew three plus, three plus enteroccus fecalis. So enteroccus is a bacterium that causes disease when it invades.

Well, I'll check that out in a minute. Thank you, Ring. It causes disease in the elderly and can cause urinary tract infections. If it invades from the bladder into the bloodstream, it can cause sepsis and death. But it's a normal bacterium, you know. These things that can cause sepsis and death tend to only do it to the sickest people around, or they have some host factor that makes them vulnerable. to it. You know, some anatomic, um, anatomic defect or a genetic susceptibility to these

bacteria, because we live with them. You know, we live mostly in a symbiotic relationship with them. Um, or if there's a foreign body, foreign body, but the body does not like foreign body. So you shove up a catheter in someone's bladder, then, and leave it there, that's a foreign body that bacteria can kind of adhere to and it increases the overall count of bacteria and then if it's chafing is not a great medical word but if it's irritating and causing inflammation of the mucous membrane around there that gives the bacteria every once in a while an opportunity to invade because they'll just go anywhere where there's food so anyway so he had enteroccus fecalis he also had three plus e coli ecoli typical

stool bacterium, considered one of the nice bacteria, but you don't want it in your food, and if it gets in your bloodstream, it can kill you as well. So E. coli, sepsis is a real thing. And then four plus staff, hemolyticus, that's just normal skin staff. But, so anyway, that's what he had. So remember the number three plus enteroccus, three plus E. coli in Richard's ass crack. Well, his cell phone was, I'll come back to his cell phone because the cell phone was insane. But Richard's hand had four plus and rickokas fecalis on it.

So we'll give him a little applause for that. Now, if everybody's hands had just showed staff epi or staff hemalyticus or something like that, which are normal bacteria, there would have been. have been no bit. They would have just said, hey, everybody's doing a good job. Nice job keeping your hands clean. There's no humor in that and there's no bit. The fact that Richard's hand had more shit bacteria on it than his ass crack did led to some level of hilarity. And people said, how could this happen? I didn't really have an answer that wouldn't just have to talk about statistics and stuff.

And I said, well, you know how it would happen. You know, implying that Richard's just gross. And Richard has a kid. He's, his concept of hygiene is a little different than others. I mean, he will run four miles and then not take a shower. It just, to me, is difficult to comprehend. But, you know, our species lived that way for hundreds of thousands of years. it's only really been in the last generation or two

where we've been obsessed with taking showers and all this stuff. So in that way, but he's not gross. He's not a gross human being. But nonetheless, he had four plus enter a caucus on his hands and three plus in his ass crack. And so that's a funny result, particularly since Richard has a reputation for having an alternative concept of hygiene.

So, how does this happen? Well, this is most likely just a statistical thing. If you think about it, when you do these swabs, you're just casting a net in the ocean. So you cast a net in the ocean, one time you get a squid. Next time you cast a net in the ocean, you get a bunch of Minhaven, which are little bait fish. And then the next time you do it, you get a stingray. And that's the same thing with this. If we had had them do three serial samples on Richard's hand,

we would have gotten different results almost every time. Now, there may have been some trends and some similarities, but they wouldn't be exactly the same. And that's the case here. I think, you know, when they swabbed his ass crack, they just hit an area that didn't have relatively as much enteroccus fecalis. When they hit his hand, they had an area that had relatively

more. And that may have been the only spot just by chance that had that much enter a caucus on it. But of course they accused him of not washing his hands and he was befuddled because he knows that he does wash his hands. Of course.

These bacteria are there all the time. Not so much enter a caucus on your hands, but it can happen. You can touch a doorknob that someone else. Let's just say, for example, that Richard washed his hands thoroughly, and someone else in that office will call him Will, had taken a dump and had not adequately washed his hands and then touched a doorknob, and then Richard touched that same doorknob. Now, that is called fomite transmission.

People who listen to this show frequently know what I'm talking about. Fomite is an inanimate object that can be a reservoir for bacteria or viruses and transmit to somebody else. So if I have influenza, I cough in my hand, I touch the handle of a urinal and then walk away and someone else flushes that urinal and transmits influenza virus from that urinal handle to their hand. And now they stick their hand in their mouth. It seems torturous. But you've got 7 billion people on this world.

It happens a lot. Um, that's, that person received influenza, not airborne, but through fomite transmission. And that could have happened in this case. So, um, uh, that's also a possibility. Or it could just be statistics. The interesting thing on Richard as well is, um, they made a big deal out of, uh, the fact that there was one person that had a bacterium that I'd never heard of. They said, God, it's so rare the doctor never even heard of it.

And then this got conflated with another bacterium that was on Gary's workspace called micrococcus. Well, I've heard of micrococcus. I've seen micrococcus sepsis. And they were so freaked out by the micrococcus that the obvious joke was never really uttered by anybody. But the bacteria I'd never heard of was Pini Bacillus Pabulum, which has a funny name anyway. and Pini Bacillus Pabulum is a bacterium that is found in soil and cattle feed. And it may also be involved in the honey bee colony disease. And the only time that this thing has caused disease was five IV drug abusers

who injected honey-prepared methadone, which I don't know what that is. I don't know what honey-prepared methadone is, but it was anyway, a methadone mixed with honey and then they injected it. Don't do that, by the way. Thank you. Proven to contain pea larvae spore. So he could have gotten it from honey, particularly if it was unpasteurized, honey.

Do they pasteurized honey? I don't even know. And he said that he had just taken his kid to one of these pumpkin patches. So I'm pretty sure that's where he got it. But that's interesting. This is how these bacteria live. You know, bacterian virus has got to live, too. And he went to, presumably, went to a pumpkin patch, playing around, touch some stuff.

This bacteria got on his hand. Now he carried it into the studio. And maybe it's got to, it finds a reservoir there somewhere and it can live for a while. Anyway, all right. The only other thing of interest that I wanted to talk about was they made a, Gary, the executive producer, one dubious distinction of being the germiest staff member. And it's funny for the bit because the, you know, Memet and Howard both love to, you know, basically make Gary,

you know, put Gary in the barrel. But what he had was on his workspace, three-plus micro-cockus Luteus, okay? A very big deal out of this can cause sepsis. and death, and the narrative was that Gary had this deadly bacteria in his workspace. And when I called in, I really tried to normalize the micrococcus, and I know it wasn't that I was killing the bit. I was killing the bit, and I knew that I was, but I felt bad for Gary

because really this is something you could find anywhere. It is interesting that we only found it in that one place. but micrococcus is very commonly found in environmental plates, and I said that specifically on the air. It causes odors in humans when breaking down the components of sweat. So this is the bacterium that contributes to BO, and it's found in soil, dust, water, and it's part of human skin flora. It's also been isolated from foods, such as milk and goats cheese. Now, can it cause sepsis and death?

Yes, in the most immunocompromised people, and I'm talking people, say, on chemotherapy whose bone marrow are not producing white blood cells. So these are people with severe neutropenia. Or people, say, possibly with HIV or some other genetic predisposition to having an immune system that can't fight off micrococcus. Other than that, this stuff is everywhere

and it doesn't cause disease in normal people. But that, you know, it wasn't as funny. And the other thing that I did find fascinating, this is the last thing I'll bring up, was every single person, every person somewhere, either their cell phone, their workplace, or on their hands, had Bacillus Sirius, and it's hilarious because they're on serious XM, so they were calling Bacillus Serious Pandora.

but it's Bacillus C-E-R-E-U-S. And this is a toxin-producing anaerobic, meaning that it doesn't like living in the air, gram-positive bacteria. It's found in the environment. It's found in soil and vegetation, but it quickly multiplies at room temperature. And it is, because it's toxin-producing,

it can definitely cause disease or illness. And I was a victim of Bacillus Sirius, back when I was in medical school I went to a sushi bar and apparently the person had it on their hands and their sushi rice had set out for too long and when it hit room temperature

this bacillus serious multiplied like crazy and we all ate the stuff and then all of us four hours to six hours later and that's a hallmark of this bacterium is the toxin produces voluminous diarrhea

within about four to six hours and everyone will have it at the same time. So when we all called each other the next day, it was like, yeah, two in the morning, I was up, you know, crapping pure water for about two hours, and then it was over. And, but I remember it was so severe that I called the emergency room. I think it was just because I wanted to report food poisoning.

But Bacillus Sirius, this diarrhea was so forceful that, If I bent over and just let it fly, it would have hit a wall 20 feet behind me. Now, you've heard me use that imagery before when I was talking about doing my colon prep for my colonoscopy. It felt very similar to that. At least then you're expecting it. I wasn't expecting it after having a nice sushi meal. So it just, and this doesn't mean don't eat sushi. Obviously, I've eaten sushi thousands of times.

Since then, this was one time, but it was horrendous, and I will never forget it. And when I saw it everywhere there, it just makes you realize we don't know what's in our environment. We don't have microscopic vision, so we can't see it. If we could, we would be totally freaked out. And so they're a little freaked out up there because now they know that this stuff is out there. But it was there before it's been there. They've been on the air since 2005. It's been there for the last 14 years.

They just weren't aware of them. it. And that's true of all of us. But it does emphasize excellent hand washing before preparing food for anybody and before eating. And don't stick your finger in your mouth or your nose or your eyes because that's how you get this shit for the most part. Sometimes you eat it. Hepatitis A is transmitted fecal oral. In other words, somebody has hepatitis A. They take a dump.

They don't wash their hands adequately. and then they prepare your food, and then you get the hepatitis A virus. Love the hepatitis A vaccine. Go get it. It will prevent that from happening. It's like a puke bug that lasts for months. So you don't want it.

Go get your hepatitis A and B vaccine if you're at risk for getting hepatitis B. Okay. Anyway, enough of that. Very interesting experience, though, and I really thank Mem. met and the other staffers and Howard for letting me do that. And people say, well, what about Jim and Sam? I would do anything for Jim and Sam.

The XM 103 is still my home. It will always be my home. And I will do anything for them. They're just kind of, I'm boring. You know, I have the, if it's a gift, I guess, of having a decent command of a very interesting subject. but I myself am not an interesting person and I'm boring and I think they're just bored with me

is really what it is. Well, I mean, look, I tried to ruin the bit when they were doing, you know, I just can't help myself. I can't help myself. I didn't want Gary to feel bad and I didn't want misinformation out there because then, you know,

other physicians or microbiologists could call it and say, that doctor's full of shit. I didn't want that either. So it was hard for me to, I can, you know, do stuff in the background and then just step back. But, you know, I'm a narcissist, too, so I've got to be in there.

Anyway, we have a surprise for Cody Gilmer. If you know, Cody, he is the guitarist, one of the guitarists for a band called Indie Ghost. And please send a tweet to South by Southwest that's at SXSW, requesting them to put Indie Ghost Band. And you can tag them at Indie Ghost Band. It's I-N-D-I-G-H-O-S-T at South by Southwest this year because they've applied, but anyway, Cody is going to be a great addition to this show. He won't be here every time because he's a rock star, but when he is, it'll be very entertaining because he is a hypochondriac.

And Scott and I made some music for him. He has not heard it yet, so here it is. Born with the deviated septu hearts, had my first him aboard before I. truck and forked at every ailment from herpes to VD and my prostate exam made me have to peat Cody, Cody Gilmore the king of the hypogonry acts. Okay, so, yeah, it's not great. I, um, we'll, we might be able to come up with something better than that, but that was all Scott.

Scott came over, so I got this great idea. We're going to do this hypochondriac song for Cody, and there it is for you. So, all right, um, let's, uh, take a few phone calls. Number one, hey, Doc, don't take advice for some ESO on the radio. I wanted to let you know that I'd, because I'd, your advice and I had my testosterone levels checked and thank God it's actually pretty cool I also had PSA done that's pretty cool too turns out I do have a little high cholesterol and I just want to tell you and thank you for all the details that you talk about because it's so important for men

to take care of their life and take care of their health anyway God bless me amen hey thank you Props from West Virginia Rampsalt. By the way, Rampsalt is awesome stuff. And he is one of the few purveyors of such on the Internet. So just Google West Virginia Rampsalt. I think he may be at WV Rampsalt on Twitter, but I'm not 100% sure. And I should have checked that out before I played his call.

But anyway, yeah, and look, if you're going to call in, you're welcome to plug something. I'll either play it or I won't, but it's okay to plug your website or something. I really didn't have a problem with it. But, yeah, it's all about mitigating risk. So he's working on mitigating his risk. Got his testosterone check to make sure that he's not at risk for feeling like crap.

And his cholesterol is elevated. You know what? If you find out you're at risk for something, and then people say, well, I don't want to know, I don't want to know. if you find out you're at risk for something, you're less likely to die from it because it means you're going to do something about it. People who are at high risk for colon cancer

who get their colonoscopies every year because they know they're at high risk for colon cancer are less likely to die from it, right? It just makes sense. Now, if you know you're at risk and you just bury your head in the sand, well then, you know, whatever happens to you, you kind of knew it was going to happen.

But if you're at high risk for something, and you do something about it, that's good. So he now knows that his risk for, you know, heart attack and stroke may be a little bit higher, so he's going to do something. He'll change his diet. Maybe you have to take medication, whatever. If you're interested in finding out what your cardiovascular risk is, just Google Framingham calculator or Framingham heart risk calculator.

You'll need to know your blood pressure and one or two cholesterol, no, just one, I guess, one cholesterol parameter and they want to know your age and whether you smoke or not and then it'll spit out what your risk of heart attack and stroke is. So if it's higher than the average, you've got to do something about it because you don't want to have a higher than average risk of having something life-threatening. And it's always going to be in the low numbers, though. Let's just do mine. We'll do mine real quick, just for fun.

Let me open up another window here. Framingham Risk Calculator. There it is. Okay, there's a bunch of them. So let's go to MDCalc.com. This is a website that just has a bunch of different

medical calculators. So my age, ugh, 64, sex. Not very often. Smoker. No. I quit 20 years ago. Very good. Thank you. Give myself some applause. Total cholesterol now is down to like 175. My HDL, though, was not great. I think it was 50. And my systolic blood pressure is 110, but I am on blood pressure medicine.

which I'm hoping to get off of now that my, oh, geez, wow, at my age, there's a 20% 10-year risk of my, am I or death? Holy crap, oh, mine's half that. Sorry, I had to hit the cough button. What I am at risk for is this thing called lorrential dysfunction. If there's any speech pathologists out there, I need to talk to you. Call in or send me an email because it's happening anytime I speak for a prolonged period, and I do talks on a national level, and if I have to do a two-hour talk,

almost every time this happens to my voice. It gets better very quickly if I drink some water. Of course, I didn't bring any up here because I'm an idiot. But anyway, yeah, Google laryngeal dysfunction, and you'll see what I have. It's just a function of getting old, but there's got to be an exercise or something that I can do to make this better. But anyway, so my risk is 10.2% and the average 10-year risk is 20%. So getting old, so two things from this. Getting old sucks.

Let me put in if I was, if I were 50. Now calculate that, you bastard. Okay. Then, oh, yeah. So my risk of heart attacks going from 50. 50 to 64 doubled. In other words, the average risk for a 50-year-old is 10%, which means 90% of you won't have a heart attack

to 20% at age 60. Oh, in age 65, it's 22. Let's put in 70. Well, of course, that makes sense. That's 25. So you would think at 70, it'd be higher. Let's go to 86. Oh, 7,086.

It doesn't like that. Oh, data is not available for 86. Okay. 80. Nope. Okay. It stops around 76, 77. Just don't care.

Yeah. Data for average risk in age of 75 to 79 is unavailable. So let's just do 75. Well, you bastard. Okay. Piece of shit. Okay. Yeah, okay.

So you top out at 25%. It still means you're more likely than not to have an heart attack that year but still 21 and 4 yikes you know if I had one and four odds that I would lose everything I probably wouldn't bet everything in Vegas on a single bet on red

but if I'm let's see if I'm 25 and I have these same numbers nope data not available because you're too young okay let's say 40 then it's 4% now if I have a 96% chance of doubling up, I might bet everything on red at the roulette table. Anyway, all right.

Let me see if I've got anything else I can do real quickly. Hey, Dr. Steve. I was listening to an Iron Butterfly album last week. Excellent. And the music's pretty good by itself, but if you throw in a couple beers and, you know, maybe a little weed, that music really comes alive. I was just wondering what's happening in your brain to really, you know, transform that music into...

Yeah, the cannabis receptors in the brain are fascinating. It's, you know, why do we even have these things? You know, life on this earth is pretty efficient in the sense that... Well, let me give you an example. Beyond burgers. One of the ways they make them kind of bleed, which is something that I guess we like in meat because it makes it seem more authentic, is they put heem in it. Heem is a portion of the hemoglobin molecule.

And I'm like, this is disgusting. Are they taking cows and then extracting the heem from their blood and then putting it in this? How's that plant-based? Well, it turns out, no, there is a plant-based version of heem. And I think there are some bacteria. that produced it as well. It's like, why?

What are they doing with it? I mean, there's a finite number of ways that you can configure carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen together to make these organic molecules. So life will use these things over and over again. The octopus eye evolved separately from. Mars, but their eyes almost identical to ours. So there's, you know, there's a right way to make an eye, apparently, at least given the environmental pressures that we have on this Earth. So likewise, you have these cannabis plants that produce these cannabinoid molecules, and

molecularly, they are very similar, if not identical, in some cases, to the cannabinoids that our body produces to signal different parts of the nervous system. to, you know, to fire this neuron or do whatever. And then when we over-stimulate them with these exogenous cannabinoids, one of the effects of THC is to make you high and to turn on your sensory system so that you can hear better and you make different associations that you wouldn't normally make and those kinds of things.

For some people, they feel like it enhances their creativity. I know there are other people that think that they feel like they're more creative when they're high and they're really not when they go back and listen to whatever they did later. So, you know, that's a subjective thing. You can make up your own minds on that.

But anyway, thanks to everybody who listens to the show. Can't forget all the folks at Riotcast and at SiriusXM. Listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk channel. And many thanks go to our listeners who's voicemail

on topic ideas make this job very easy 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