Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 383 - Toxic Fume Update

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

The true story behind the toxic fume story, other things were fascinating at the time, but danged if I can remember anything about this show. enjoy!   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. Yeah, me garret. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola fives dripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart bow, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain now.

Blast with the wave, an ultrasonic, agographic, 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 to requiem for my disease. So I'm aging Dr. Steve. Do you. Make a careful.

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We're going to talk about flu vaccine and sex headaches and all kinds of crazy stuff. and check her out at patreon.com slash chrissey that's C-H-R-I-S-S-I-E-M-A-R-R-R-R dot com or whatever. Patreon.com slash Chrissy Mayer. Check her out on Twitter as well, and I think she's got, you know, and she's young. She's got all the social media you young kids have, don't you know. Check out stuff. Dr.steve.com stuff.com for all your online shopping needs.

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weeks. That's 20 bucks off each week. Give it a try and let me know what you think. It's not for everybody, okay? But if you like it, it's awesome and it is absolutely convenient. And then if you want archives of this show, why would you? But if you do, go to premium.com and you can just use offer code fluid. You get a deal. If you're interested in getting a flash drive with about 17 gigs of content on it and you know that leaves whatever 32 minus 17 is was that 15 15 whatever i don't know 15 gigs of uh i'm supposed to be smart you know i have an iq of 165 and i've gotten to the point where it's really hard for me to do math in my head anymore but that i think that's more of a function of uh drinking and um of being 60 almost 65 years old so anyway you just you get

dumb um anyway uh where was i don't even remember so don't worry about let's see what we got on the show today uh oh well listen what a coincidence Tacey, you're on weird medicine. I thought you were recording of four. Yes, and... Okay, okay. It's always just such a coincidence. It doesn't matter when I'm recording

that she calls, happens to call me. You know why that is? It's not like she's stalking me and knows when I'm recording because that's impossible. Nor would she have the... energy or the desire to know what I'm doing. But that's how many times a day she calls me. So that's just what that is.

All right. I'm so sorry. Hey, I wanted to do an update on the Boston chemical accident. So we now know what the chemicals were. We talked about this last week. This is a really sad story. And it was, and this is from Burlington or Boston. or Boston

CBS and it says the employee who died after a chemical incident at a Buffalo Wild Wings Restaurant in Burlington has been identified as 32-year-old Ryan Baldera of Lawrence

and this guy kind of a hero in the sense that, well he is in the sense that he went in to help somebody else with a problem and ended up losing his life over it. Valdera is a general man He jumped into help with another employee using a common cleaning agent known as Super 8 on the kitchen floor suddenly became nauseous. That is not a word.

Sorry. Nauseous isn't a word. It's nauseated. Things can be nauseous. Things that have the capability of making you nauseated are nauseous. Look it up. Journalists. Okay. As a matter of fact, you all don't believe me. I know you don't. My old boss in Londonderry, Vermont, that was one of his pet peeves as my medical students would. And he was British, very proper, but hilarious dude and very, very smart.

And I remember one of my medical students was presenting to him. And she said, yeah, yeah, this patient. It's nauseous. Of course, she was from the, you know, the northeast somewhere. And he was like, that's not a... Well, I can't do a British accent. But anyway, in his British accent, you know, that's not a word.

It's nauseated. Okay, so... Uh, okay. The pro... Okay, so here we go. Because people have been musing it incorrectly, it's become part of the lexicon. So it actually is a...

God, dang. In the latest... Shut up. In the latest dictionary, nauseous is now afflicted with nausea. That was not the case. The correct... But, of course, that's English.

So these words keep changing as we use them incorrectly. Um, and, and this is, uh, well, I'll take a second to talk about the, um, uh, uh, euphemism treadmill, too, but, um, okay, so the correct definition is causing nausea, offensive to taste or smell. That smell was nauseous. Okay. So, um, God, that's dictionary. Let me find a better dictionary. And see, then you got complete competing dictionaries.

Okay, let's just see. Okay, Miriam Webster will agree. And if I'm wrong, yeah, it's number one is causing nausea or disgust, the nauseous smell of rotting garbage. Thank you. Okay. Okay, here we go. Now, here's an article about it. It says those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only to mean causing nausea

and that it's later affected with nausea, meaning as an error for nauseated, are mistaken. Well, all right, I guess I'm wrong. current evidence shows these facts nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea okay so because it's commonly used that way does not make it correct for example ironic doesn't mean oh what a weird juxtaposition you know ironic is when you say something and you mean the opposite sarcasm is a better synonym for ironic or sarcastic.

Okay, but anyway. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous when being referred to as being affected with nausea. Okay, so it's still controversial, so they're saying it's incorrect, but, you know, where is their authority? This is just from some damn thesaurus article. So, yes, current, if we're going to define English based on how we use these words, then, yeah, ironic just means weird juxtaposition of things. You know, since we all understand it, I guess I'm just being a dick. Let's talk a little bit about the, okay, so I'll take back the boo that I gave to the journalist because apparently it is accepted to say nauseous. euphemism treadmill i brought this up so back in the day there were words that were used medically

that were acceptable so definition let's just use moron of moron okay well now moron is a stupid person but there was a medical definition that's okay now miriam webster made me laugh medical. Let's look for the medical definition of moron. And, okay, I'm finding it under the Wikipedia for imbecile. So the term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability as well as a type of criminal. The word arises from the Latin word imbechilius, meaning weak or weak-minded. It included people with IQ of 26 to 50, which was between idiot, IQ of 0 to 25, and moron, an IQ of 51 to 70.

In the obsolete medical classification, ICD9, which in 1977, these people were said to have moderate mental retardation or moderate mental sub-normality. Now, all of these words that I just used were turned around and used as pejoratives. So people would, you know, hey, you idiot, hey, moron, hey, retard, and then even subnormal. Well, he's a subnormal piece of shit or whatever, you know. So these words became pejorative. People started using him that way. And since the meaning now shifted where idiot before was a person with an extreme. low IQ. Now, when you called somebody an idiot, meaning it in a pejorative sense, it reflected

poorly and was offensive to people who were actual idiots. So those terms had to change. And so now we may call, or even mentally retarded, was subject to the euphemism, mill and that became a derogatory as well and so now we'll say you know whatever the intellectual disability or whatever so all of these things are now under the the stratus of intellectual disability and then you may stratify them again by IQ if you're using IQ or just their functional ability okay and and that seems much less easy to then turn around and turn into something that you're yelling at somebody in a pejorative way. So that's the euphemism treadmill.

Words become that are medical terms usually that then become pejorative terms, that then become changed into a euphemism to make them less offensive. Midget is another one of these, although the little people community have used you know, embrace the term dwarf because that's a medical term. Midget used to be a medical term as well. There were midgets who were dwarfs, and then there were midgets who were proportioned, and there were proportional dwarfs, and achondroplastic dwarfs, and the proportional dwarfs were also considered midgets.

Well, that term is no longer acceptable. It is offensive, and to the little people, community, and therefore, you know, it was also subject to this euphemism treadmill. So, all right. So nausea. Okay, so let's get back to this story. Sorry, I got, oh, shiny object. You know, if they had known what ADD was when I was a kid, I would have done so much better

in school. I mean, I ended up doing okay. As an adult, having ADD in the job that I have actually good, because I can hyper-focus when I need to, and I can also. So, you know, do multiple things at once and be, and things catch my attention, which is good when you're trying to make a diagnosis on a patient. You want little things to catch your attention and you dog them to the end because that's good for diagnosis. You don't want to be blowing things off and big picturing everything. So it's good for me now.

It was a real struggle back in the day when I would make 99th percentile on these, they were Iowa basics at the time. They were the standardized tests of the day. I would get 99th percentile on the Iowa basics and then be making C's and Ds in school. I drove my parents crazy. And so I was labeled underachiever, which underachiever means lazy ass. And so I just got in trouble all the time. My teachers, I remember Miss Johnson in the fifth grade, what herodin this person was. And just minimized me.

I don't know how I didn't just end up doing drugs. Well, okay. Well, I did do that. I don't know how I didn't just grow my hair long and wear my shoes until, well, I did all that too. So anyway, yeah, she messed me up. I blame it on her. Miss Johnson in the fifth grade, kiss my ass. Of course, now I'm 60, so I would have been, what would I've been in the fifth grade?

I would have been 10, right? And she would have been 30, so she was 20 years older than me. So she's 80 something now, so she's, if she's still alive, she got, she's already suffering, so I don't need to make her suffer anymore. But, yeah, that did, you can really eff a kid up. And the anti-intellectual bias at that time, like the kids' books were boring to me, so I wanted to go into the adult library, and they wouldn't let me. And my mother had to have a library card, and she wouldn't do it.

So I was kind of screwed. So I remember I would take five or six books out about stars that were in the kids' library, and I'd go, I'd walk all the way the hell home. It was, you know, I don't know, 12, 13 blocks, and I'd read them and then want to bring them back and get more books. And the woman, I remember, she had to be a high school student, but she seemed like, well, she was a young woman. And she's like, oh, no, you can't bring books back the same day. She just didn't want to mess with it. Instead of going, wow, you read all of those in one day?

Let me show you where the physics books are or whatever. No, you can't bring them back in one day. So, anyway, just go F yourselves with the way you treat kids that don't fit the mold. And that was definitely me. And I still don't fit the mold, though I'm kind of like Zellig. That's why I'm like Zellig, you know, if I'm always trying to fit in wherever I am. and usually unsuccessful. The only place I can fit in is, well, I don't know where that place is.

Anyway, all right. Don't worry about it. I'm fine. I'm totally fine. Don't worry about me, none. All right. Let's get back to this. Baldera, the general manager, jumped in to help when another employee using a common cleaning agent,

known as Super 8 on the kitchen floor, suddenly. became nauseous. Fire officials say the other worker accidentally mixed a second chemical called scale clean that caused a reaction. So remember last time we talked about what my hypothesis was, was they were using sodium hypochlorite, which is bleach, with some acidic thing. It could be ammonia. It could be another acid.

And then releasing not only chlorine gas, but other like chloramine and other noxious gases and in small amounts most of those gases are irritating but not deadly but in large amounts particularly when they replace the oxygen in the air that you're breathing it's really bad and they're very caustic too i got one whiff of chlorine gas when i was a kid playing around in the basement mixing bleach and ammonia together because they were there and you know what happens when you do this and uh uh i i got one I saw it bubble up, and then I took a breath, and it felt like knives. I was inhaling little tiny knives, and I had to run out of there, and then I was okay.

I coughed for a while, and I was okay after that. But that sucked, and I can't imagine being stuck in a place where you're breathing that more than one inhalation. It would really be bad. So it says it was two products, were on the floor, came in contact, caused the chemical reaction that made everybody sick. Burlington Fire Chief Michael Patterson. said. Baldera died after being rushed to the hospital. 13 additional people, including employees and patrons, were also hospitalized. Baldera was a beloved husband, father, son, brother, and cherished uncle, nephew, and son-in-law to his close-knit family and friends.

His family said in a statement. That's just devastating. He had an asthma problem, and he was using his asthma inhaler outside when he started feeling his symptoms. So that probably contributed to it. OSHA has been notified. The restaurant has been closed for investigation. Now, where is the thing about the stuff was containing hypochlorite? Let me see if I can find another.

Okay. Here we go. Thursday evening, staff member inhaled the fumes of chemical solution, hypochlorite. And I guess that scale stuff is, is acidic, and when they used the hypochlorite together with that, it released chlorine gas and probably chloramine. And I read another article, this isn't the article that I originally read, that said that there was a bubbling when it happened,

and that's the release of that gas. And if you're ever mixing or working with cleaning chemicals, don't mix them read the label there should be a safety data sheet on these things and it'll tell you what you can mix them with and what you can't and anything containing bleach should be used by itself not mixed with anything else and it's a great cleaning agent and you know we use it in our pools and you can buy little spray bottles of bleach and right next to it is the spray bottle of vinegar or ammonia. So I see people all the time. They'll spray with one, then spray with the other.

One's got to completely dry before you use the other one. And we're going to save some people from being exposed to this horrendous gas. Okay. And then, you know, if you mix chlorine with sodium, which sodium is also incredibly reactive. My chemistry professor at Case Western took a chunk of solid metallic sodium and it was either sodium or potassium. It doesn't matter. It'll do the same thing. And he threw it into this pond apparently in the quad at Case Western. I've never been there, but there's some pond. And when it hit the water, it made such a violent reaction that it exploded. There was an explosion. And, and,

And the chunk of sodium flew up into the air and fell back into the water where it promptly exploded again. And this will do this over and over again until there's a crust of, you know, usually sodium chloride or sodium hydroxide, probably more likely sodium hydroxide on the surface of the sodium that kind of encapsulates. It stops it from being reactive anymore. you can store this stuff under oil but you can't let it come in contact with water and you know sodium's one of those has a very reactive electron shell and it's looking for for electrons it's positively charged and it'll take them wherever it can get them so anyway so you take sodium highly reactive

and chlorine highly reactive and you put them together and you get sodium chloride which is awesome it's salt it's delightful and that's where the word salary comes from as a matter of fact fun fact because apparently the Roman soldiers part of their pay was to be paid in salt which is funny to me they're surrounded by ocean seems like it'd be pretty easy to make salt from the salt water there's a process for doing that and but they were paid in salt anyway all right sea salt very fancy Um, let's, um, take a couple of phone calls here.

We'll save those for next time. All right. You ready? Here we go. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. Absolutely true.

Hi, this is Dylan from Kansas. Hi, Dylan. I was calling to talk about a injury. I had a work involving a vice hand. spinning and hitting me in a testicle and now I found a lump on my testicle. And I'm not sure if it was there before or afterwards. And I'm curious to see if I should go get checked. Okay, so Dylan had a trauma to the junkle area.

And now when he goes down there checking it out, he feels a lump. And let me see, did he say where it is? Did he say it's on the testicle or in the scrotum? It's involving a vice handle spinning and hitting me in a testicle. hitting me in a testicle, and now I've found a lump on my testicle. Okay, he's saying it's on the testicle, so that's key. So a lump in the scrotum usually is going to be a cyst of some sort. It could be a hematoseil, I guess.

That's a word. I just made that up. There might be such a thing. That would be a cyst that's filled with blood. You can get a hydrocile, which is a cyst that's. filled with what? Did you say water? Give yourself a bill.

It looks like water. It's not, but it's, I mean, well, it's got water in it. It's ultra-filtrated blood, and there's a significant component of water and blood. And that's a cyst, usually, of some of the lining tissues, and you'll, it can be, caused by inflammation or maybe a little trauma or sometimes it just happens and you get this fluid filled cyst and you can tell if it's a hydroceal usually by taking a pin light and putting it behind the testicle and then looking and if that hydroceal glows like ET's finger then it's it's most likely clear fluid still should get it checked out now this guy he doesn't

know if it was there before if he could say yeah i check my nuts every week week, which you should be doing, if you listen to this show, I say at the end of every show, I'm not kidding when I say, check your stupid nuts for lumps. If he had checked it every week and it wasn't there and now it was there, you could say, yeah, definitely it's from the trauma. If, however, you don't know if it was there before. That means it could have been there before and you only discovered it because now you hurt yourself and now you're checking your nuts.

So get it checked. the provider that you go to will feel your testicles and feel inside the scrotum feel around. Could it be an epididymus? An epididymus is a normal structure. You've got to have it if you're going to get sperm from the testicle into your spludge. And that's where sperm mature. And it's at the upper back side of the testicle. If you're examining it, you know, if you make a little C clamp and feel around,

around the back of your nuts at the very top on the back, you'll feel this squishy thing that when you kind of give it a little bit of a squeeze, it's, oh, it feels kind of like that feeling when you get kicked in the nuts. That's your epididimus. Right around there is you can have an appendix testes, an appendix epididium. You can have an epididimal cyst. There's all kinds of little things on that backside there.

A lump that's on the scrotum doesn't move. If it's firm, it feels like maybe there's a piece of terrarium gravel or anything else stuck to the surface of the testicle, that should be checked out. Could be trauma, could be a little hematoma where you got knocked. Blood is released from little capillaries, and it's under the lining. All these things have a lining over them, and if you get something between the nut and the lining, then it'll make a lot. a little pump knot or punk knot if you're from here or a pown if you're from tennessee that's what a corn pown is is a dome-like shape of corn bread okay that's a pown so you can get a pown on your back it could be an abscess big abscess dome-like abscess any dome-like thing is a pown anyway you get a

pown on your nut and it could just be from that blood well there's no way for you to tell and there may not be any way for your provider to tell just by feeling it so they may order an ultrasound just to look and see what it is. So, yeah, get that checked out. It's my same rule with blood in your stool. If you see blood in your stool for the first time, get it checked out.

If they tell you, yeah, it's just a hemorrhoid and it's going to bleed and you see blood tomorrow, then you don't have to worry about it. So, all right. Thank you. Hi, Dr. Steve. This is still in Tampa. I want to call you real quick.

Excuse me, give you a thank you, really, and give you a quick update. You and I had texted back and forth some time ago. I was taking Alexa Pro for anxiety, and that tanked badly, and then I switched to Prozac. And I just want to say it really meant a lot to me that you reach out to me and ask me how Alexa Pro was going sometime after I told you. I just, it really makes a lot that you took the time to do that. So I want to thank you for that. Okay, well, thank you. And I'll play the rest of your call in a second.

And I appreciate the feedback. When you all call in a voicemail, as long as you don't call from a blocked number, I'll try to text you back. Now, I get behind sometimes. There are people out there that, you know, five years ago sent in a voicemail, and I never got back to them. I've got about 100 voicemails. and everyone's, if you called in four or five years ago,

someday you will probably get a text from me saying, hey, sorry, I'm getting back to you five years later. How's that rectal bleeding going? Because I really got behind pretty bad there for a while. I've more recently been staying up today. But I'll try to text you back. He was impressed by the fact that I emailed or I texted him back some weeks later saying, hey, how did the Lexapro go?

thinking that I was thinking about him the whole time or, you know, or, you know, that I, you cross my mind at all, what really happened, and I hate to blow this up because I'd much rather take the props for being a cool guy who, uh, who cares about my listener, but I do, but I just can't keep all this in my head. Um, if, what most likely happened was he texted me back. And when I went back in three or four weeks later, I saw that I had a text message from some, You know, I'll always answer them. And I read the thread and I just said, hey, how's it going with the new medication? So it looks like I'm very thoughtful.

In fact, I'm just kind of going through my messages. But, you know, I guess that's more than some hosts do. And so I'll be happy to take the accolades for that. But, you know, this is my job, in my opinion, is to if you guys reach out to me to answer you back if I can. And if I ever haven't, I intended to, and just call me or email me or text me again, and I'll try to get back to you. Now, I don't give advice in the sense that, well, you should take this, this, or this, but I can give you information that you can take to your primary care provider and, you know, have them write whatever it is or see if they agree with my assessment. Anyway, see if there's anything else on this. I just have the project as well.

I had a bad reaction to it, too. While it wasn't as bad as Alexa Pro, you know, Dr. Steve, I just don't think it's for me. During counseling, my counselor said that maybe I was trying to medicate for anxiety that only happened, you know, that was infrequent, and I was medicating for every day. So I've decided it's not for now. A lot of people have known it's been proven in me, my personality, appetite, things like that. Okay, good. so he brings up a couple of really good points one is should you take something every day for something that only affects you every once in a while and I think the answer is no for most things for example migraine headache get a migraine headache once every six months it's severe but it only happens once every six months should you take something every day in an attempt to prevent that

well how would you know if it's even working because if it's every six months that means you could probably go eight nine maybe even 12 months without having one every once in a while just by chance so it'd be hard for you to know that it was actually doing anything unless you went three or four years and went wow i haven't had a migraine and they'd have to be pretty damn severe to justify taking something every day for that it'd be much better in a situation like that where it's not lifestyle altering to any significant degree if you have a migraine every six months to find a regimen that will abort the migraine when it happens rather than trying to prevent something that's that infrequent.

So he was having infrequent anxiety but he was on Prozac and the adverse effects were worse than what it was doing for him. So the risk in his situation was greater than the benefit. So he went off of it and he found that his appetites better

people find him to be more engaging, and I'll bet his ability to have normal sexual Congress with the partner of his choice has improved as well. So, yeah, these medications aren't for everyone. And if we all, if there was one perfect medication, we'd only need one medication. There's blue million antidepressants on the market because everybody's different, Everybody's internal neurochemistry is different. Everybody responds differently to these medications. The receptors are situated differently or in different number and concentrations, that kind of stuff.

So it's really important to remember that. And if you get on a medication and you're just getting worse, talk to your provider about it. There may be a solution that may include just stopping that medication. So very good. Well, I'm glad you're doing better. all right i'll help it by pot a month i've been on a certain med for the last probably year and a half that's supposed to help my a1c for my diabetes and supposed to reduce the risk of having a heart attack and what's they've been on for a year and a half last six months or so i've had a itch on the

right side of my testicle and everything and soap it down every day in the shower and everything else But I'm watching the commercial, which I generally ignore for this stuff. And it kind of caught my attention because one of the side effects was a yeast infection. Is it possible for a male to have a yeast infection? Just curious. Thank you. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you can get a fungal infection of the skin.

You can get a yeast infection of the skin. Yeasts and fungi are basically the same thing. They're just different forms. You know, a yeast is the single-cell version, and then the fungi are, you know, have hyphy. These are little branches. If you look at them under the microscope, they look like trees or vines. You can absolutely get it. And I don't know that it's the medication that's causing it.

It's the diabetes itself because you've got more sugar in your, or glucose, in your sweat, in your body fluids. And therefore, on your skin. and that's food for these things. And so they love it. And, you know, if you have a medication and a statistically significant number of people while they're studying this medicine get hit by a bus, you kind of almost have to put, you know,

4% of people were hit by buses while on this medication as an adverse reaction. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but that's, it's kind of true. So yeast infection may, have been on there because people with diabetes are more likely to have fungal infections of the skin just because of the amount of sugar that's being secreted in their fluids. So, yes, you absolutely can. And you can treat it the same way, too.

So you can just go by monostat. If you really think that's what it is, you can do this test. You go by monostat over the counter and you just rub it on your balls for two weeks. And if the itching and all that stuff goes away, then you kind of made the diagnosis. If it doesn't, go see your primary care provider. Let them do a scraping, and they'll look at it under the microscope, put some potassium hydroxide on it. Potassium hydroxide is a strong base. When you do that in solution, it will destroy human skin cells.

So they just kind of disappear, but it will leave yeast and fungal forms intact. so they'll stand out. You can see them under the microscope at that point. So it's pretty cool. All right. All right. Well, hello. Oh, I am a...

Okay, let me start this one over again. I'm an idiot. Here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve. I got a little anecdotal thing for you. So I had a friend who was taking spray on magnesium. You know, you sprayed on your skin. in a little bit before you go to bed, and it's supposed to help you sleep, I guess.

So I tried it, and I used the exact dosage recommended on the bottle. You spray a little bit on the inside of your size. I guess this way it doesn't get all over your sheets and rub off. And then, you know, you go to bed and let me tell you something. This stuff gave me the wickedest most vivid dreams, and it felt like, you know, let's say I slept seven and a half hours. It felt like a full seven hours of dreaming, where I felt like I was tossing and turning, although I was asleep the whole night. So it just felt like I never was able to get out of this dreaming state. And when I woke up, I did it maybe five times, and I never felt rested because I felt like my mind was just churning all night.

So I just want to know if you've heard of this at all. Yeah. Yeah, magnesium is known, particularly in alternative circles, for enhancing sleep. And there is some evidence for it. There is, the hypothesis is that magnesium increases REM sleep. So you've got, if you look at a normal tracing of sleep, the nemonic is LDR. So light, deep, and REM. And so the normal sleep cycle, although.

hardly anyone does this stereotypically textbook fashion is you have light sleep and then you go into deep sleep and then you go into REM sleep and then repeat and then light deep REM and then there's a lot of REM sleep right before you wake up as well that's why you wake up in the morning sometimes you've been dreaming that's why my kid can't wake up in the morning because he's deep in REM because his sleep cycle's all effed up and no alarm clock will wake this kid up so there's So I'm looking at one sort of alternative article, and then we'll look at a PubMed article about this. But let me see where this thing says a magnesium is a natural sedative that helps muscles relax, says Leslie Corn, PhD, a behavioral medicine clinician. Really? She's not a clinician. Oh, she's an M.P.H. What the hell is that? Is that a master's in pharmacy?

Again, I'm not sure the term clinician is properly used here, but anyway, specializing in integrative therapies. Okay, so integrative therapies are, you know, like Dr. Scott, when he works in my clinic and does acupuncture on a patient with cancer pain, then that's sort of integrative medicine where we're integrating an alternative, quote, unquote, modality with sort of traditional. Western allopathic medical thing so that's what she does she specializes in things that have no data and integrating those into a practice where it's data driven that's sort of the cynical way of looking at it but that's what it is that's why people take magnesium supplements if they have trouble sleeping okay that's great that's not data that just means that you know culturally, people are taking these things. In fact, older adults with insomnia who took 500 milligrams of magnesium daily for eight weeks,

slept better, dozed off faster, and were less likely to wake up too early compared to those that didn't the mineral. Okay, didn't take the mineral. A study from Iran found. Okay, so where's the citation for this? Of course, there's no citation. You know, I think even if you're doing a goofy website, you should cite your sources. So let's go to the medical literature.

Here's magnesium supplementation improves indicators of low magnesium status. Well, yeah, of course. And inflammatory stress in adults older than 51s with poor quality sleep. So what they were looking at is a baseline assessment of body mass index, diet, blood, and urine. And sleep quality. One group was given 320 milligrams of magnesium a day as a magnesium citrate. The other group, a sodium citrate placebo. that so they're even controlling for what the acid that it's hooked to so citric

acid you know if you pop off one of the hydrogens and stick a magnesium on there you get magnesium citrate so they or you can pop that hydrogen off and put a sodium there and then you get sodium citrate so they were even controlling for the acid which I like this design so far so magnesium citrate in one group sodium citrate in the other for seven weeks. The final assessments were made in five to seven weeks, which were combined for statistical analysis. Okay.

Let me see. Based on food diaries, okay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Come on, you bastards. Okay. Magnesium versus placebo supplementation did not significantly affect serum magnesium. Well, that's interesting when all participants

were included, when only the 37 participants with serum magnesium concentrations that were low were analyzed, magnesium supplementation, but not the placebo, increased serum magnesium contract. Well, no shit. So what they're really saying is that if you have a normal magnesium and you take magnesium, it doesn't affect anything. But if it's low, it'll bring it to normal. So that's good.

You know, I said no shit, but it's a subtle point. But so what? magnesium supplementation versus placebo decreased plasma C-reactive protein. And that's interesting. So in people who had elevated C-reactive protein. So I have an elevated C-reactive protein because of this autoimmune BS that I have. So maybe I should start taking that. So C-reactive protein is a measurement of total body inflammation.

So it's elevated, you've got inflammation somewhere. It doesn't say where it is or what it comes from, just that you have it. These findings show that many individuals have a low magnesium. Okay, so this doesn't say anything about sleep. Okay, because dietary magnesium intake did not change during the experimental period, another factor, possibly a placebo effect, improved sleep quality, which resulted in increased blah, blah, blah. This factor prevented.

Shit, this study is not telling us exactly what we want to know. But anyway, let's do magnesium. Okay, but you can follow along with me. I'm taking a minute to do this because I think it's good that you see how you find out these things. I'm doing magnesium supplementation and sleep quality in PubMed.gov. So it used to be PubMed.com. Then it was PubMed.org. And now it's PubMed.gov.

This is the National Librarians of Science resource. It's got every peer-reviewed and some non-peer-reviewed articles in the medical literature for the last X number of years. There are some journals that don't make it. Some of those are either the lower quality or lower readership or they were open access. And I guess you have to pay a fee to get indexed if you're one of those. I'm not 100% sure about that. If somebody knows the answer to that, let me. me know. Okay, okay, here's the effect of magnesium oxide supplementation on nocturnal leg cramps.

Now, that'd be a good one. We got five minutes. Hell, let's just take the last five minutes to look up magnesium supplementation. This one was randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. Nicely done. And it showed oral magnesium oxide was not superior to placebo for older adults experiencing nocturnal leg cramps. so there you go so magnesium probably isn't the best supplement for that you know what is good

tonic water tonic water is quinine quinine water and quinine decreases nocturnal leg cramps pretty significantly so you can do a half a cup of tonic water with or without ice and lime and that

should decrease the number of episodes that you have of nocturnal leg cramps anecdotally I can say it completely made mine go away. All right. Let's see here. Really not a lot of studies on magnesium supplementation

and sleep quality. So let me just do magnesium supplementation and sleep and see if something comes up. Okay, micronutrient inadequately in short sleep. No, I don't want to do that one. You know, this is the issue

with this kind of stuff, isn't it? So this woman in this thing is popping off on how great magnesium is for sleep, and yet there really isn't a lot of data out here. Okay, here we go. The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in the elderly, a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Thank you for doing good science, at least structuring it properly. And this is, oh, this is that Iranian study that she was looking at.

This is from the Faculty of Nutrition and Food Technology in Tehran, Iran. Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia, such as sleep score, sleep efficiency, sleep time, and sleep onset. Latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, so it's good for everything. And likewise, insomnia and objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, and elderly people. So what did they consider elderly? I'm going to assume that means over 60, so I fall into that, and they gave them 500 milligrams of magnesium or placebo daily for eight weeks.

Then they did questionnaires of insomnia, severity index, physical activity, and sleep logs and stuff like that. They tried to control for caffeine, and then they controlled for all this stuff, so they found no significant differences between the two groups at baseline, which is good. They didn't have to control for anything. thing as compared to the placebo group the experimental group brought about statistically significant increases in sleep time with a p value of point zero zero two which is pretty damn high that i mean that's awesome so um we'll say point o five is statistically significant which means one time in 20, that this could be chance. So this would be two, and let me see, so that's five.

That's two and a thousand. So it's one in 500 that this could be by chance alone. So that's pretty darn significant. Sleep efficiency with a P of 0.03, which is statistically significant. and a concentration of melanin and serum renin went up. These are sleep hormones or hormones that are elevated in sleep. And the resulted in significant decrease in this ISI score. So that's good.

Yeah. So I might try that, get back to you. I don't see a downside of supplementing with 500 milligrams of magnesium at night for a few weeks just to see if it helps. That's kind of cool. So I'm very interested in following that up. Let me see if there's anything else. I would like to see this particular article repeated. So that's the thing.

With medical science, not only do you want to structure your trial correctly, but you also want to be able to show that your findings are reproducible. So I endorse this idea with one case. caveat. It hasn't, to my knowledge, been endorsed yet or reproduced yet. Therefore, I can't endorse it wholeheartedly, but it is very interesting. Oh, I guess we're out of time. I can't forget from, wow. Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Kumi, a Jim Norton, Travis Teff, Lewis Johnson, Paul O'Charsky, Eric Nagel,

rolling campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley, who's early support of this show, has never gone on. I appreciate it. Appreciate Jim McClure's. support over the last couple of years and listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk Channel, CIRSXM 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, 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.