Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 385 - Great Blue Balls of Fire

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

Dr Steve discusses "prostatic congestion," the One Page Baby Manual, the limits of human perception and more. stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net (Dr Scott’s nasal rinse is here!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) tweakedaudio.com offer code “FLUID” (best CS anywhere) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) freshly.doctorsteve.com (how lazy are you? Get $40 off, and don’t cook!) 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 garreted. Give yourself a beer. I've got the barrier crushing my esophagus. I've got to bolivide stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes.

I want to take my brain now. Classed with the wave, an ultrasonic, agographic, and a pulsating cave, I want to magic them. Oh, 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 paging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. No, I'm Dr. Steve.

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take everything here with a grain of salt, don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctrists, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientist, registered dietitian or whatever, right, whatever.

So about, you know, after 14 years, it's probably time I'd change that opening script. But until then, check out stuff. Dottersteve.com. You just have a few shopping days left till Christmas. don't you know, or Hanukkah or Kwanza? What is Boxing Day? It's some Canadian thing.

Is that, I mean, you take all of the stuff you got for Christmas and put it in a box, or do you make boxes for people less fortunate than yourself? I do not know. And I have Canadian friends, and I had one of them who was Lana from Canada, who longtime listeners of this show know, was trying to get health care, care in Canada and having a really hard time with it. I do get some Canadians and say, hey, our Canadian health system

is awesome. Then I get people like her saying, it's complete horseshit. So obviously it's context driven. If you have an emergency, or if you have something non-threatening that you can wait for, it's great

because it's free. But there are some people that fall in between, that really are having a hard time with it. And that's, you know, if we adopted something like that in this country, we'd have to figure out a way if it's even possible so that those folks, like Lana from Canada, we'll have her on the show at some point. And she can talk about her tale of woe. Anyway, check out stuff.doctrsteve.com.

You can go there, you can click straight through to Amazon, if you like, or you can scroll down and find all the different products that we've talked about. on this show some medical some not and uh if uh you need a stocking stuffer or something for an office uh secret santa tweak to audio dot com makes the best earbuds for the price and the best customer service anywhere and if you use offer code fluid you get 33% off this is not some BS you know get 5% off or you know 10 bucks off a hundred dollar order this is 3 33% off anything you buy. Tweakeda Audio.com offer code fluid.

And check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbils.net. He's got the nasal spray back in stock, I understand, and it is quite excellent. I need some right now myself. He's been out, and my quality of life has declined because of that. Yeah. Also, I understand that the. Noom link on my website at Dr.steve.com has been broken for several months and I didn't realize it. So if you tried to sign up for Noom and it didn't take you straight there and you got an error message,

I apologize. I don't know how it happened. I just transcribed the link incorrectly once. But go to Noom. I make it easy so you can just type it in. But if you want to click on the link, go to Dr. Steve.com and on it. Every podcast, you can click NUM. Dot, Dr. Steve.com, and you can attain your ideal body weight with me.

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try let me know what you think look it ain't for everybody I'm a lazy bastard and I love to cook but during the week you know my kids now oh you know they've got so much crap going on after school and one of the kids is in band and the other one's taking nothing but honors classes, even his advisor said, what are you doing, dude? So, you know, there's just so much going on. So it's really easy for me to just pop these things in the microwave. And it looks like lean cuisines, except there's twice as much food in there, and it's, you know, freshly prepared.

And they're really good. But now, it is microwave food, so it's not going to look like you cooked it in a pan. but it is, I'm very pleased with freshly. Dottersteve.com. And last, go to premium.com and get archives of the show for a buck 99 a month. If you use the offer code fluid, it gives you a 50% discount. And you can just download everything and then unsubscribe. Or you can go to our website at Dr.steve.com and I can send you a flash drive.

32-gig flash drive with about 17 gigs of material on it. I had another thing I wanted to tell you about. I just redid my garage. Now, if you want to do a big project at home, go to swastracks.com. Check this stuff out. This blew me away. I was going to epoxy my garage, and then I found swistracks.com.

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but I was so impressed. I said if I tell my listeners about it, you know, can you get them a deal? So Swiss Tracks. It's SwissT-R-A-X.com code Dr. Steve. Anyway, all right. Enough of that. Thank you for indulging me with all these ads and stuff.

and it does help keep this going, by the way, and I really do appreciate you. Oh, by the way, malarkey, you know, say what you will about Joe Biden, but is it really, I mean, I guess because of opium Anthony and their influence on this channel, which was a huge presence back in the day just a couple of years ago, the word malarkey was thrown around quite a bit and I think in an ironic way so when I see Joe Biden using it it's like we use that word every day I talk about Dr. Scott's herbal malarkey on every single show

so I don't see what all the hubbub is but anyway all right oh you know I don't know that I ever did this story this is a good one I think. Very interesting. You know, people always talk about, well, you know, male birth control.

Why do women have to do it? And, you know, no, men can participate in birth control. They can wear condoms. Of course, it does affect the sensation of having intercourse when you're wrapping a barrier between the skin of the penis and the skin of whatever you're shoving it in. but um you know here we go so uh yeah there is uh you know it's been you know well the the the researchers are male and so of course they come up with female birth control

well here's the answer first male birth control injection almost ready for penises Yeah, okay, so, I mean, we would take a pill. You know, when a woman uses a regular barrier, like a cervical cap, for example, it doesn't really affect their ability to enjoy the act of intercourse, but wrapping a penis in latex or some of these other godforsaken materials that they make condoms out of now, you know, to avoid latex allergy, does affect it. So, you know, yeah, we would take a pill. Why, is this just revenge?

I don't know. Now we have to, if we're going to have, you know, equal representation and birth control or men can take some. some control over this birth control thing. It has to be a shot in the nether regions. Well, let me read this article. Of course, this is from the New York Post that really prestigious medical journal. But anyway, would men endure a shot of the groin to prevent pregnancy? Indian researchers think so.

The Indian Council of Medical Research, a government funded by a medical research, He has successfully completed a clinical trial in an injectable male contraceptive, the Hindustan Times reported. The product is ready with only regulatory approvals pending from the government. Dr. R.S. Sharma, senior scientists with the ICMR, told the local news outlet, the trials are over, including extended phase three clinical trials, for which 303 candidates were recruited with a 93.3, sorry, 97.3. percent success rate, no reported side effects other than having a needle stuck in your genitals, apparently.

Product can safely be called the world's first male contracept. Well, no, condoms are the world's first male contraceptive, but okay, yeah, contraceptive medication, maybe. This birth control method, which lasts approximately 13 years, involves injecting a polymer called styrene malleic anhydride into the vast deference. Okay. So this really is a barrier method as well, right? They're injecting a plastic, basically, into the vase and just blocking it.

Effectively blocking sperm from leaving the testicles. There you go. I'll give myself one of these. Give yourself a bill. The shot, so it's not a medication, it's a barrier method. The shot preceded by a dose of local anesthesia, well, I would hope so, is designed to supplant traditional vasectomy. Yeah, so this is just basically a non-cutting vasectomy. Well, it's not vasectomy, because ectomy means cutting something away.

And vasotomy would be cutting a hole in a vase. but this functions the same way so that sperm cannot make it from the testicle out into the real world through the urethral meatis. Researchers in the U.S. have developed a similar contraceptive called vasal gel, which has not yet been brought to market. A male birth control pill also exists, although research is anticipated it will be about 10 years before the drug makes it to market, which will suck for them because you have. have only a certain amount of time that you can patent a drug and let's just say it's 18 years and you wait 16 years and it's from the time it was first synthesized I think I think that's how that works or it's first identified so now the clock starts ticking you've got 18 years and let's say you wait 17 years to bring it to market for lots of different reasons you have other

drugs in the pipeline, whatever it is. It takes 17 years. Now you bring it out. You only got a year where it's actually on patent. So that kind of sucks. So this pill, if it's going to take another 10 years, they may not have a long patent life on it. And they may just say, F it. You know, that's one of the problems with drug patent stuff. We want new drugs. We want new innovative techniques.

And to do that, you know, they have to put millions, if not billions, into some of these drugs. And, you know, they need to make their money back if they're going to be a commercial enterprise. The government can do these things, but then it doesn't have that same incentive to innovate. There's an incentive to do good things, I guess, because that's what government's supposed to do for its people. But that crazy sort of drive to innovate isn't there without a profit motive. It's human nature. So, love them or not, the pharmaceutical industry has brought us some of the greatest advances, and their motivation has been, hey, let's make money.

I don't see that as a bad thing. The polymer was developed by Professor S.K. Guha from the, Indian Institute of Technology in 1970s, insert your own Andrew Dice Clay joke. ICMR has been researching on it to turn a product for mass use since 1984, and final product is ready after exhaustive trials. So there you go. So you may see this come to market that you can have a urologist inject this polymer

into your vase deference. It's got to be done exactly. right to get it inside the tube to block the tube. And then you'll have to beat off several times into a cup, let them look at it and make sure that no sperm are, you know, wiggling past this. And then apparently it breaks down after about 13 years and then you can start having kids again. So, you know, you'll have to stay vigilant, unlike a vasectomy.

Usually by the time you do a vasectomy and they've come. chunks of your vass out and burned them and sewed them up and folded them in against each other and whatever technique they happen to be using. Once you have a negative sperm count, you can mostly forget about it. Now, there have been some people that have just suddenly had a failure and they start having swimmers again. But with this, since this thing can break down after 13 years, probably every five years you'll need to beat off into a cup and then do you catch it right when it happens that's going to be a

problem so what if you're one of these people that can break this down quickly but there's no test to know that and you break yours down at 11 years you beat off in a cup at 10 years and everything was fine but at 11 while you're waiting to do it at 15 or whatever let's say we do it every three years so we're going to do it at 10 and 13 but at 11 it's broken down you can sire a kid so you're always going to have that in the back of your head unless you are uh you know doing your own sperm counts you know right before you have intercourse with somebody it's a little bit yeah it's a little ify this will reduce uh you know if you did this to everybody in a population it would reduce their population

but it wouldn't bring it down to zero and it's 90 and what they said 97% effective yeah in the first little bit but then when you know we need to see the curve is that curve a gradual curve back down to normal in other words you start at 97% effectiveness is it 98 you know 97 96 95 over the next bunch of years you're in you know what rate does the risk of you siring a child start to rise or does it go 13 years and then boom it drops from 99 back down to zero that's unlikely in a natural process but if that's how it works then you can have intercourse you know for probably 10 11 years before you have to start worrying about it so it'll be interesting to see all kinds of things out there um let's try this one and see what we've got here oh nicely done i'm going to give you all some applause i may have done this already too cigarette smoking among u.s adults hits an all-time low 34.2 million adults are still smoking many other are using tobacco products. It's reached an all-time low of 13.7% in

2018, a decline of approximately two-thirds in more than 50 years since the first Surgeon General's report more into the health consequences of smoking. Yet new data released in today's morbidity and mortality weekly report shows that nearly one in seven U.S. adults still

smoke cigarettes. Many use other tobacco products. The marked decline in cigarettes Smoking is the achievement of a consistent and coordinated effort by public health community and our many partners, which this show is one, said the CDC director, Robert R. Redfield MD, yet our work is far from over. The health benefits of quitting smoking are significant. We're committed to educating Americans about the steps they can take to become tobacco-free. So, yes, please, I say at the end of every show, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking and get off your.

gases and get some exercise. Those are the big three for me. To assess recent national estimates of tobacco product use among U.S. adults, 18 or older CDC Food and Drug Administration of National Cancer Institute analyzed data from 2018 National Health Interview Survey. Survey measures current cigarette smoking and use for other tobacco products. So cigarettes are still the most used product and see if they looked at vaping, followed by cigars, cigarios, filtered little cigars, and e-cigarettes 3.2%. Okay, so it's not as much, you know, I think because we see these people walking around and emitting these giant clouds of smoke and people are more prone to smoke or, you know,

to vape in their car, we may be, at least I was overestimating how many people are actually using electronic cigarettes. Smokless tobacco, 2.4%. Pipes, water pipes, or hookas, 1%. I tried smoking a pipe. I did it for a while. It's disgusting. Saliva gets in there and just chewing on this thing. It's just gross. You have to clean it out. Eh. Most tobacco current product users reported using combustible products. That'd be cigarettes, cigars, pipes, water pipes, or hookas. 18, percent reported using two or more tobacco products. So those would be people who are smoking and dipping or chewing or whatever. E-cigret use among adults increased from 2.8 to 3.2%.

So that's a 0.4%. Absolute increase, but the relative increase may be much higher than that. Let's ask Echo. Echo, what's 3.2 divided by 2.8? 3.2 divided by 2.8 is 1.1429. So, see, that's a 14% increase, but it's only a 0.4 absolute increase. A reversal from the decline observed among adults during 2014-2017. I wonder if after this crap that went down with e-cigarettes and the lung disease that looks now,

like they've nailed it down it was probably vitamin E in off-brand or you know bootleg cartridges and I got into a big Twitter thing about this the thing is is that people have been using e-cigrets for many years and then all of a sudden we have this the this outbreak of lung disease And the question was, is this a cumulative issue showing that there's long-term problems with vaping in general, or was it an acute outbreak? An acute outbreak is something different because if everybody's been vaping, vaping, vaping, vaping, and we haven't seen this, and then all of a sudden we see it, and it's in the news, and several people died and a lot of other people got sick, if it's not a cumulative effect of vaping in general,

then it is an acute outbreak, which means that it implies that there was a manufacturing defect. And that's indeed what we're seeing because some of the people that got sick were young and hadn't been vaping for a long time. So it wasn't like these were all people, that have been vaping for 10 years and now we're starting to see

these adverse effects kick in. It wasn't that at all. This was, the implication was that there was that there was, something had changed in the vaping environment. And indeed, that seems to be the case that some people, I guess,

vitamin E oil, cheap to buy and you can just mix it in with the other things that you're making as sort of a filler. And that wasn't, you'd think, well, it's a vitamin should be good for you. But, nope, it was not good for the inside lining of the lungs. So the CDC, it took forever for them to nail this down. This really was just an epidemiologic problem. Epidemiology being the science of disease and how it spreads and where it comes from. So the first epidemiologist was this guy that, and I can't remember his name.

Let me see if I can find the, what he did was he tracked down cholera to a single well in London. Let me see here. Okay, so the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. A severe outbreak of cholera that occurred in 1854 near Broad Street in the Soho District of the city of Westminster, which is a delightful part of London, by the way. And it's where the St. Erman's Hotel is. And from the St. Erman's Hotel, which I highly recommend, you can walk to Westminster Abbey and you can walk to the bridge. and you can actually walk to the London Eye and the London Dungeon and also to, if you go out of the hotel and take a right, walk around a couple of blocks, you can go to the palace, which is quite awesome. So anyway, Buckingham Palace and tour the Queens Mews. London is a wonderful city to visit.

by the way. Anyway, so this occurred during the 1846 to 1860 cholera pandemic that happened worldwide. The outbreak killed 616 people is best known for the physician John Snow. Oh, you know nothing, John Snow. His study of its causes and his hypothesis that germ contaminated water was the source of cholera rather than particles in the air, which at that time was referred to as Miasmata. And he was trying to debunk that theory. So really, John Snow was the world's first epidemiologist.

The discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities, excellent, beginning in the mid-19th century. Later, the term focus of infection started to be used. used to describe sites such as the Broad Street pump in which conditions are good for transmission of an infection. Snow's endeavor to find the cause of the transmission of cholera caused him to unknowingly create a double-blind experiment. This guy was awesome.

George R.R. Martin picked the wrong name for somebody who doesn't know stuff. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go watch Game of Thrones. Yeah, let's So preceding the 1854 Broad Street Cholera outbreak, physicians and scientists held two competing theories on the causes of cholera in the human body, the miasma theory, and germ theory.

The London medical community debated between these causes the persistent cholera outbreaks in the city. The cholera-causing bacterium vibrio cholera was isolated in 1854, but the finding did not become well-known and accepted until decades later. Boy, it was really tough back then. People just had opinions, and they stuck with them.

Oh, so different than today. Right? Yeah, people are really easy these days to convince using scientific evidence that their position is incorrect. The miasma theory, miasma theorist concluded that cholera was caused by particles in the air, or miasmata, which are... rose from decomposing matter or other dirty organic sources. At least then, yeah, okay, so clean up dead bodies and stuff. That's good.

Miasma particles were thought to travel through the air and infect individuals and thus cause cholera. So they had two competing hypotheses. When you have that, you test them. That's the easiest way to do it. Let's see what kind of testing they did. Dr. William Farr, the commissioner for the 1851 London Consensus. census and a member of the general registrar's office believed that miasma arose from the soil surrounding the river thames it contained decaying organic matter which contained miasmatic

particles and was released into london air miasma theorists believed in cleansing and scouring rather than through pure scientific approach of microbiology so yeah so this is what you do you you can expose a sort of evil experiment would be to expose people to this miasma and see if they got sick and then expose people to vibrio cholera if you were one of those proponents and see which ones got sick. Or you can clean up your miasma and see if people get sick but let them drink the same water or clean up the water and see if they get better. you know, if the number of cases decrease. What this far dude, later had to agree with Snow's germ therapy theory following his publication. So in contrast, the germ theory held that the principal cause of cholera was a germ cell that not yet been identified. This was the problem with HIV as well.

I remember there were people that said, oh, there's no way a virus could cause HIV or AIDS. We didn't have HIV at the time, but they were looking for a particle. Same thing with hepatitis C. Hepatitis C was called hepatitis non-A, non-B because it wasn't hepatitis A and it wasn't hepatitis B, but then what the hell it was, took quite some time to find the actual virus that caused hepatitis C. Snow theorized that this unknown germ was transmitted from person to person by individuals ingesting water. John Simon, a pathologist and the lead medical officer for the London labeled Snow's

germ therapy as peculiar. Yeah, you dumb bastard. This doctrine, okay, this is an excerpt from John Simon. The doctrine is that cholera propagates itself by a morbid matter, which passing from one patient in his evacuations is accidentally swallowed by other persons. Yeah, it's called fecal oral transmission genius as a pollution of food or water that an increase of the swallowed germ of the disease takes place in the interior of the stomach and the bowels giving rise to the essential actions of cholera and as a first local derangement that the morbid matter of cholera having the property of reproducing its own kind must necessarily have some sort of structure most likely that of a cell even though simon understood snow's theory that he questioned its

relation to the cause of color. No, he stated it perfectly. He just didn't believe in it. So, that's fine. You don't have to believe something if there isn't proof. So what John Snow did was, um, uh, he, uh, snow's conclusions were not predominantly based on the Broad Street outbreak. As he noted, he hesitated to come to a conclusion based on a population that predominantly

fled the neighborhood and redistributed itself. He feared throwing off. results of the study. So from a mathematics perspective, John Snow's innovation was focusing on death rates and districts served by two water companies, which drew water from the River Thames, rather than basing it on data from victims of the Broad Street pump, which drew water from a well. Snow's work also led to far greater health and safety impact. So what he did was he applied mathematics and science, and he plotted out where all these things were and found the epicenter. And what was common. Well, you know, what was the common thing? He did an epidemiologic intervention where

he asked people, where did you get your water, what did you eat, what did you do, what have you been doing, you know, and tried to compile enough data to make a conclusion. Said Snow was skeptical of prevailing miasma therapy, which held the diseases such as color of black death were caused by pollution. Yeah, because, you know, they had plague, too, which we now know was caused by Yersinia pestis, which is transmitted from fleas that are on rat. So if you've got rat infested area and they've got fleas that have this, and the fleas get on you and bite you, then you could get a bubonic plague. We still have bubonic plague.

There are plague cases in the United States every day. We just call it plague because it's the same disease that they had back then when it was actually a plague. but it doesn't cause plague now because we know what it is and we can treat it. But we'll still call it plague. But it does not cause a plague, meaning, you know, this sort of overwhelming pandemic or massive epidemic. Let's see. Let me see. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, all right, this goes on and on and on. But John Snow, the father of modern. epidemiology and there you go so I can't remember why we talked about this I found a shiny object and I followed it oh yeah we were talking about cigarettes

and epidemiology of smokeless tobacco and vapes but anyway this sustained drop in adult smoking is encouraging as we work to reduce tobacco-related disease and death.

And so what we're doing is by gradually decreasing smoking, we're giving the tobacco companies plenty of time to divest themselves of tobacco and to broaden their product base so they can stay in business, get into making crackers and other kinds of stuff like that. So, all right, good. Nicely done. Thank you all for giving up the smokes. I used to smoke three packs a day. if I can quit you can quit just do it today and if you don't want to quit today talk to your

health care provider chantix is an option although crazy dreams and wackiness are so prevalent with that medication that the FAA forbids pilots from taking it but you can do it yourself I did it myself I had some pharmacologic help in the form of Zyban. Was it Zyban? Yeah. Which is just basically wellbutrin or bupropion. It's an antidepressant. Works on a different mechanism than regular antidepressants.

And it does help to suppress that addiction, you know, that addiction response. And the thing I liked about it was I just felt like I was taking something. I think I got a significant placebo effect out of it. and so I laid them down. I started taking the, well, but a week later, I laid them down, and I never went back. And I had tried to quit at least dozens of times. Studies have shown the more times you try to quit, the more likely it is you'll be successful to quit. So if you tried it once and failed, it's not a failure.

You were just practicing, just try it again. And I would get six weeks in, and then my wife would piss me off. I'd go, well, by God, I'm just going to smoke a cigarette. I'll show her. Well, I wasn't showing anybody. I was just, it was the lizard part of my brain that controls addiction saying, no, you need to smoke. And any excuse. So six weeks, you're vulnerable.

Six months, you're vulnerable. And, you know, three years, you're also vulnerable. At any time, particularly at six months, you go, well, I've got this thing beat. I could just have one. You can't. Yeah, let me just have one cigarette. I've got it beat.

I could just have a cigarette. You can't. If you have one, now it's all of a sudden it's okay, and then you're smoking again. I still have nightmares after 20 plus years of quitting smoking, where I smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in this dream, and I'll think, well, wait a minute, I forgot. Oh, geez, I don't smoke anymore. And now I feel like I'm addicted to cigarettes again, and I wake up and kind of a cold sweat going, thank God, I didn't actually do that. The craving, I never crave cigarettes anymore. I still like the smell of a fresh cigarette.

That's just years of ingrained habit of smelling them. I like the, I despise the smell of old cigarettes, though. And I can't believe I used to smell that way and allowed myself to smell that way. So if you quit today, you can immediately look at all those idiots out in the cold outside smoking because they can't smoke inside anymore and say, what a bunch of idiots and feel superior to them. That's one benefit. You can feel superior the next day. All right.

Okay. Quit smoking. All right. Let's take some questions. You're ready to take some questions? Hi, Dr. Steve. It's Luke from London, England. I was hoping you could do a recap on the one-page baby.

manual. It's been a while since you mentioned it on the air and me and my partner are due to have a baby, a boy on the 22nd of December. It'd be our first baby and we'd really like to get him to sleep through the night as soon as possible. If you could go through it, that'd be great. Love the show. Keep up the good work. Thanks. Yeah, man. Thank you. The one-page baby manual. Yes, I haven't mentioned that in quite some time. You can go to dr. steve.com or weirdmedicine.com, I think, or weird Medicine.net. Let me, heck, now I'm confused. Is it weirdmedicine.com?

Weirdmedicine.com. Just in case I decide to sell Dr. Steve.com. I keep hoping that some Dr. Steve will become famous so I could sell them that domain. Yeah, weirdmedicine.com will work. And then if you go there, there's a little box in the upright corner. It says resources. and second from the bottom is the one-page baby manual. And it's grown to about a page and a half now,

but it's one page on the Internet. And it gives you a sample schedule starting from birth to six weeks, six weeks to ten weeks, and then four months, five months, six months, and then to a year. And then it also has a synopsis. of the happiest baby on the block, which is a 200-page book that I distilled down to one paragraph. And this guy, Karp, had a really good idea, and that babies are born three months too soon, that they need an extra trimester to develop.

And so when they're born, they're used to being in the womb and that warm, wonderful, environment and we need to simulate that for the first three months and that will calm them down when they get all fussy and weird it's because they're they're used to to being in the uterus and they really kind of are craving that back to the womb thing so by swaddling them and laying the body out or the baby on their side and shushing in their ear to simulate the sound of blood rushing through the aorta past the uterus or the iliac arteries at least because you know inside the body you don't hear lub dub you hear shh as blood rushes by and swinging the baby on your lap you know just back and forth and letting them suck on something you in the in utero

they'll suck on their thumb that's this is the one time a pacifier's okay i'm cool with the fire for the first three months after that you got to get rid of it but all those things will calm almost every baby down you got to learn to swaddle that baby so one of the greatest things you can give a new parent is a pack of swaddling blankets because they'll run through them and learning how to do that properly and it you know it kind of binds the the baby's body and they just feel much more comfortable and that's that gives them that fourth trimester if you do that for the first three months and then after that just use go to baby in a bag.com and get sleep sacks those are wearable blankets if you want if you value sleeping at night when your kid kicks their

blanket off and they're too uncoordinated at four months to pull it back up they get cold and they'll cry you know that's all they really want is for you to put their blanket back on while you get them a wearable blanket and that's also a great baby gift baby in a blanket.com or baby in a bag.com, aka the wearable blanket. And they've got winter versions and summer versions. We're not, you know, they're not an advertiser. Just anytime somebody's having a baby, I'll give them one of those.

All right. Let's see what else we got here. And congratulations on the baby and good luck. Let us know how it goes. Hey, everybody. This is Foggy Otis. I went over 20 years without seeing a doctor or a dentist. and by the time I was 42 years old, I paid for that.

Neglect and denial led me to congestive heart failure, a quadruple bypass, dying in the ICU, having a defibrillator pacemaker implanted in my chest, losing my teeth, injecting insulin four times a day, constant blood glucose monitoring. Side effects from my meds, the ones that keep me alive include fatigue, hot flashes, cold chills, and stomach problems. Practically all of this was entirely preventable with routine medical care,

so don't wait until it's too late. Go see you, doctor now. And Dr. Steve knows all the details about my medical history, so feel free to ask. Okay. No, foggy. That's foggy Otis, everybody. this guy I think this is the real

dude check him out on YouTube let's see Foggy Otis plays the Grateful Dead Let's check this out I probably can't play

too much of this because of issues with Copeland down way down down down by the docks of the city Blind and dirt

Yeah, so he does, is reimagining the music of the Grateful Dead for solo ukulele. That's a heck of a niche right there. Let's see, he did Bohemian Rhapsody. I want to hear this. Let me see. Greatest pop single of all time arranged for ukulean voice. It is. That's it. Whoever was recording this was whispering close to the microphone.

That's pretty cool. Let's jump ahead. Check this out. Go Foggy Otis. It's just Foggy Otis, Bohemian Rhapsody. Too late, my time has come, says give us down my spine. That's pretty cool, actually. I kind of like this. Let me jump ahead to the quote-unquote good part. Okay, okay. Anyway, check out Foggy Outt's.

in foggy and no really the thing that I like about what he said was men particularly but I see this in women too will bury our heads in the sand and it's a pain in the ass to go to the doctor sometimes literally but you don't want to neglect warning signs because when you do that we all know look if you've got a leak in your um an oil leak in your car catching it early and fixing it can prevent a catastrophic failure of your automobile right i mean we all know this catching a colon polyp when you're 50 and you have your first colonoscopy when it's just in the polyp stage, they remove it during the colonoscopy. You're done.

You don't have to do anything else. If you wait until now you've got an obstructed bowel or you're bleeding and you have it and you've got a full-blown invasive cancer, now, you know, all of a sudden it's a problem. So early detection, prevention is key to living a long and healthy life and quitting smoke. and if you're young, checking your stupid nuts for lumps. All right, very good. I got some good feedback on the Dave Cecil thing. We're still working on that track.

When we have a completed track, I will play it for both Sirius XM and podcast audience, so stay tuned for that. Dave is an incredible singer-songwriter, and if you want to check him out right now, Let me see if you just do Dave Cecil Weird Medicine. Let me try that and see if it comes up. Dave Cecil, Weird Medicine. Yeah.

And then the first one is, is Dave Ray Cecil Live? Oh, and that's the episode. Okay, and then, okay. what you want to do is find it on YouTube so let's try that again YouTube YouTube.com Sorry I know this is very unprofessional to do it this way, but you know what

just go to my go to Dr. Steve YouTube dot com and that's not helpful either. I'll put a link on Dr. Steve.com to the YouTube video where Dave Cecil was in the

studio and you could just click on the links and listen to the songs. Okay? You know, it's just like being in court. You never want to ask a question. You don't know the answer to. And don't do a damn YouTube search on your stupid show if you don't know what you're going to

find. Anyway, all right. Let's see here. Let's take a couple of other phone calls before we get out of here. Hey, Dr. Physics, Steve, it's Calvin. And when we look at a flower, the white light from the sun shines down onto the flower, and then the flower absorbs all the colors except for, let's say, yellow. And then the yellow reflects back into our eyes, where our rods and cones and our human eye absorb that reflected light,

and then we see the flower as yellow. Right. Is there some way that we can look at the world and see what the actual world looks like instead of just the reflected light into our eyes, let's say even into the ultraviolet or infrared included in there instead of just what the human eye perceives. Is there some way to see the actual colors of stuff?

The actual colors of stuff. I love this question. It's a philosophical question. So what is the actual color of a red apple? The answer is there is no actual color. There are just wavelengths of light. That's all it is. You know, light is in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Just like radio waves, microwaves, microwaves, ultraviolet gamma rays you know gamma rays not cosmic rays but gamma rays are merely very highly energetic electromagnetic

waves or particles depending on what you're measuring at the time therefore they're all the same they're on a continuum so if you start at like you know a ham radio

frequency could be at 160 meters it could be 100 or 40 40 meters could be 40 meters long whereas a light wave can is you know measured in angstroms so which is you know nanometers and the higher the frequency the more energetic the wave is so you know ham radio frequency is like two meters very low energy but a gamma ray being very high frequency is you know a very high energy microwaves are in the gigahertz range so anyway so our eyes are just able to perceive these different wavelengths of light and if you've looked at a rainbow you can see the different wavelengths appear in our heads as

as different colors. So we have the ability to differentiate wavelength, and then the brain interprets those as colors. Now, you've got some people are colorblind. They can't see red or green, but the world to them is, you know, it has these funny shades of gray, and it's hard to explain how it looks.

You can look on YouTube and say, well, what does it look like to be colorblind? But even to them, it just looks normal. Dogs don't see color at all, you know. So they, everything to them would be to us black and white, but that's just normal to them. That's how they perceive the universe. You could have some creatures that grow up on a, say, a planet where there's red, you know, they have a red dwarf as a sun.

And they may have larger pupils and may be able to see into infrared. and they would be able to see things reflected that we wouldn't necessarily see. How would they perceive that? Well, it might be as the color red. What I see as red, you might agree as purple. The only way that we would know that that was the case would be somehow if we could switch brains for a minute and I would see how you perceive red and how I perceive red. Probably that's not the case, but there may be some subtle differences.

There certainly are people that can detect different shades of color that other people can't. Is it training or do they just have a more finely attuned visual cortex so that they can pick out those different colors? It's like sound. Sound are just compressions of air molecules. That's all it is. That leads to that whole thing. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? well it certainly vibrates the air around it but it's only sound if we perceive it as sound

otherwise it's just vibrations of molecules and uh the color red is merely uh let's see let's see the wavelength wavelength of red light see i could have asked echo that but So the wavelength of red light is 680 nanometers, so that if you have an electromagnetic wave that hits your retina, and it's 680 nanometers, it will stimulate the cells in the back of the retina that respond to 680 nanometers, and that tells the brain that's red light. and, you know, look at a rainbow, and next time you look at one, you can think about how all those different colors are stimulating different receptors in your eye and are being perceived as those colors. So there is no real, there is no reality other than our perception. There are waves, and there are particles, and, you know, even the particles that we experience are just perturbation. of fields that permeate the whole universe. There's an electron field, there's, you know, upcork field,

all these different fields interact, and when they interact, we perceive those as particles, and those particles interact with each other, and that creates the natural world around us. So, you know, the reality around you depends purely on your perspective and your perception of same, which is pretty damn cool when you think about it. So enough pot talk.

I'm recording this at 8 in the morning, so not a great time for pot talk, but I'd love more pot talk questions. Love to talk about this stuff. Well, that's take another one. Let's see what we got here. Dr. Steve, I've got a question about blue balls. I was wondering why it hurts so bad.

Sometimes in the morning I'll kiss my girlfriend. I get the old half crank in my pants, and my balls, you know, ache. Not like, you know, when I was a teenager, but is there any mechanism why that hurts so much? Yeah, so, I mean, if you're cranking your nuts, they hurt because they're on the outside and they're supposed to be on the inside. I mean, really nuts are just ovaries that produce sperm instead of eggs. And they need to be about three degrees below body temperature for whatever reason. So they got to hang outside the body and they're organs, and they need to be inside the body.

And so when you hit them on something, you have this visceral pain. And it's a different kind of pain. We all know that. Men who have gotten kicked in the nuts causes sort of. emesis feeling or nausea and it's just sort of a deep horrible pain but blue balls is a different thing altogether that's prostate congestion so congestion of the prostate is caused by often sexual stimulation and the prostate starts getting ready to inject fluid into this sort of mixer. So you've got fluid from the prostate, which is sort of milky and clear.

And then you get seminal fluid, which is, I'm not milky and clear. I meant milky and watery. And then you have seminal fluid, which is a little more gel-like. And then that mixes with the 2% of the sperm that comes from the Vazdephyrins. And you put it through this sort of blender. and when it comes out as semen. And so the prostate is gearing up for that when you get a little sexual stimulation. And, you know, there's fluid will just be generated in that area. You know, capillaries open up and hyper-filtrated water and other proteins cross from the bloodstream into the prostate and sort of fill it up.

And then you don't do anything with it. You don't ejaculate, and that prostate congestion that we feel, we perceive it as what we call blue balls, which is just sort of an achy feeling. And if you beat off or otherwise ejaculate, either through prostate massage, which is not truly an ejaculation, And when a primary care or a urologist massages your prostate and fluid is ejected from the end of your penis, it's not truly an ejaculation. It's just hydrostatic forces where fluid follows the path of least resistance. But a true ejaculation where you have contraction of the pelvic muscles and that sort of rhythmic thing and that feeling of emptying out. and you get that pleasurable feeling,

that will relieve the symptoms of blue balls. If you just do nothing, the symptoms of blue balls will also go away pretty quickly. But anyway, thanks always go to our listeners, whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. We can't forget, Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Tep, Lewis Johnson,

Paul Offcharski, Eric Nasski, Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fiswally, whose early support of this show has never gone unappreciated. Big shout out to Rob Bartlett, who was awesome on Compound Media this week. And I always love seeing that guy. What a great guy he is. Check him out at the Robbobo, T-E-R-O-B-I-O on Twitter. Listen to our SiriusXM show on Faction Talk Channel,

SiriusXM, Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand, and other time at Jim McClure's pleasure. 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. Thank you.