Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 395 - More Stupid Virus News

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

We'll try to keep up to date on the Covid-19 outbreak but breaking news, antimatter exists. And it was predicted by a mathematical equation with no experimental evidence whatsoever. PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) Feals.com/fluid (lab grade CBD products!) TRIPP.COM offer code DRSTEVE (relax and get 20% off!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) 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've got diphtheriae, ho, ho, y'alloh, yeah, me garreted. I've got diphtheriae crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivir stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart bow, exacerbating my infectable woes. I want to take my brain now, and blast it with the wave, and 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 a 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, now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve, and this is a show for people who had never to listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-766-4-323. That's 347 Pooh Head.

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Wow. What a difference a week has made. I did the Opie Radio podcast last night. out of the blue because of the coronavirus thing. And so, you know, that was cool talking to the old Ope. If you remember, he was the one that Greenlit this show in the first place. And, you know, I've never been on this new show of his. So it was cool.

We talked for about an hour. And I thought there are maybe people that are listening to this that don't listen to podcasts or whatever or listen to that one. So there's a lot of interesting information out there right now. So I think for the next few weeks, we're going to be hitting the coronavirus thing pretty hard. So one of the things that came up was pandemic versus epidemic. So if something is endemic, it's always in a population. The example I use is obesity.

Obesity is endemic, particularly in the United States. And so that's a disease that exists permanently. in a particular region or population. You know, malaria could be considered endemic in some parts of the world. Then an epidemic is an outbreak of disease that attacks a lot of people's or a lot of people at about the same time

and may spread through one or several communities. That's an epidemic. And then a pandemic is when an epidemic spreads throughout the world. Well, there's more to it. than just that. And so the World Health Organization provides a pandemic alert system. This was primarily created for influenza.

And so that may have something to do with why this is not being used right now, the way I would think that it would have been used. But I've got an article that we're going to read about why the WHO, at least as of this recording, has not declared COVID-19. 19 a pandemic. Now, the virus is called SARS C-O-V-2. So severe acute respiratory syndrome, COV, meaning coronavirus, too, meaning this is genetically related to the

original SARS virus that hit, what, a decade ago, primarily in Asia. And they decided to call the disease COVID-19. So that It would be, you know, coronavirus disease 2019. That's basically what it is. It's nothing that mysterious about it. So, but the World Health Organization has this influenza pandemic alert system, which you could use for other diseases as well. And phase one is low risk, and phase six is full-blown pandemic. So let me go through the phases and see what you all think.

So phase one is where there's a virus and animals. that's caused no known infections in humans. So if they'd been aware of this coronavirus in the snakes or the bats, wherever it came from in Hunan, China, that would have been phase one. If they'd been aware that those animals were getting ill. And then phase two is where the animal flu virus, or in this case, animal coronavirus has caused infection in humans. And phase three is when you have sporadic cases or small clusters.

of the disease in humans, and human-to-human transmission, if it exists at all, is insufficient to cause community-level outbreaks. Then you have phase four where the risk of a pandemic is increased, but not certain. And then phase five is just kind of, well, you know, it's whenever. It's kind of a dumb phase. We could just take that one out and make this a five-phase system. Phase 5 is spread of disease between humans is occurring in more than one country or one WHO region. And then phase 6 is where there are community level outbreaks in at least one additional country in a different WHO region from phase 5.

And then at that point, a global pandemic is underway. Now, this is for influenza. We don't have a coronavirus pandemic thing. And they can just say that. Look, that scale is just for influenza. So this is from a new scientist, which is a pretty good online and print journal. It says, prepare for a pandemic, says the World Health Organization is the global spread of COVID-19 soars by the hour. It's not a matter of if, but when, says U.S. health officials.

Yet, so far, the WHO refuses to actually call COVID-19 a pandemic. Well, why? And the answer may lie with what kicks into gear when we deploy the P word. Countries have pandemic plans that are launched when one is declared, but these plans may not be appropriate for combating COVID-19, and the WHO doesn't want countries to lurch in the wrong direction. So this sort of bolsters our idea we had a minute ago that they're not wanting to use that scale because that's an influenza scale. What they're looking for there is something like the. 1918 swine flu that came through and became a global pandemic that killed at least one to three percent of the world's population.

At that time, it's estimated 10 percent of people actually got the virus, which means 90 percent didn't, right? And of those, 10 percent did not make it. Now, this was in 1918 before Tammy fluzo-Fluza and before a vaccine. ventilators even and modern health care. So we don't know how much that had an impact. And we won't know until this stuff sweeps through again and we see if we can do a little bit better. But, you know, when you've got 10% of the world's population getting it and 10% of those dying,

that's 1% of the world's population died. I mean, 99% of people didn't die, but, you know, it's tragic for the 1% that did. And that's a huge damn number. You know, let's see if I think, let's see what the population of the world was in 1918. What was, I could ask, echo, I guess, the population of the world in 1918. This makes great radio when I'm typing stuff in. See, I don't have a Travis or what used to be a Sam Roberts. Now he's, you know, a fancy man.

World War I claimed 60 million lives, influenza epidemic that slept. The world 1918 killed 50 million people. One fifth of the world was attacked by this deadly virus. Well, that doesn't tell us what the world population was. It would be hard to calculate from that. Okay, so let's go back. Here we go. I'm looking right now at a world meter.

And in 1918, it doesn't say it goes back to 1900. 1.6 billion in 1927, 2 billion. So let's just say 2 billion, okay? So one, oh, golly. Okay, well, it'll be more dramatic if she says it. Echo, what's 1% of 2 billion? 1% of 2 billion is 20 million. 20 million people.

20 million people. And you go, well, 99% people didn't I? Well, but 20 million people did. That is a huge dang number, you know? So this was going to be pretty interesting to see what happens next. Okay. So the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the COVID-19 virus already meets two of its three criteria for a pandemic. It spreads between people and it kills.

The third is it has to spread worldwide. The virus is now in 30. countries in counting on nearly all continents. Those are just the ones we know about. So how much more worldwide does it need to be? And epidemic experts say there are no global criteria. There used to be for flu pandemics, but the WHO abandoned them. Oh, okay.

Well, shit, it's right here on their website. Isn't that interesting? Okay. How do I get back to that? the WHO abandoned them when it was criticized for declaring a flu pandemic in 2009 that triggered expensive countermeasures. Oh, God forbid you spend money trying to save lives in some countries which were deemed unnecessary.

You know, we deem these things unnecessary after the fact. That's the problem. So what you don't want to do is not do it and deem it necessary after the fact. and you haven't done it. So, you know, stop criticizing them for being overly cautious when it comes to one of these effing viruses, please. So that bruising could be one reason the WHO seems anxious to avoid the P word. Now, past getting trashed for something doesn't stop you from doing the right thing. But now they're saying there's a more important one.

There are two kinds of response to a growing pandemic. The first is containment. As cases appear, you isolate each person and then trace and quarantine their contacts. That worked for SARS and the 2014-to-2016 Ebola outbreak. But the second is mitigation. If containment only slows the virus, eventually you get community spread and people are infected without knowing how they were exposed, so you can't quarantine all contacts.

All you can do is slow the epidemic, so it won't peak massively and quickly overloading health facilities. You close schools, you cancel mass gatherings, oh no, no Coachella, as China did. I would be kind of sad about that, I guess, as China did, or as Italy is now doing, shut down whole cities when they have community spread. Flu skips between people so quickly the containment is really kind of a non-starter. Pandemic plans are mostly designed for flu, including those of the U.K. and the U.S., and they go straight to mitigation. They don't even mess with containment, even though we do do a little containment. I know when I got influenza a couple of years ago, I was quarantined for seven days.

Of course, my family came and went, so they were just taking the virus everywhere. They didn't get it. So pandemic plans mostly, okay, the UK plan suggests containment only if a new pandemic flu hasn't learned yet. but to spread as fast as normal flu, which is interesting. So you have these viruses. How fast do they spread from one person to another? How easily are they spread? Could you just cough on somebody and they get it?

Or do you have to be in close proximity to them and cough on them multiple, multiple times? Or do they have to touch something that you touched? That's called fomite transmission, where you cough on your hand and then instead of sterilizing your hand, you go run to the bathroom while you grab the handle and that mucus containing all those lovely viral particles

is now all over that handle. And if the virus can survive like that for a while, the next person that grabs that handle to go in the bathroom can get those viral particles on their hand. Now, if they push or take a dump and are disgusting and don't wash their hands and you know who you are, they may then go eat, which is making me physically ill, just thinking about it, and get those viruses in their mouth or their eye or their nose, and now they've picked up the virus, and that's called fomite transmission.

So how easy is it to transmit? What's the incubation time? Are there asymptomatic carriers? In other words, there are people walking around that don't know they have the disease and they're spread, it like crazy before they actually get sick. And that's the dangerous thing because, you know, you've got people running around giving people the virus. They don't even know they've got it.

And then how lethal is it? How lethal and, oh, and what time period are you transmitting virus? Is it through the whole time from the day you get exposed? Or is it much later and right before you become symptomatic? So all of these things are important to how very. a disease like this can be and how deadly it can be. So in this light, statements from the WHO start to make sense. It's not either or, said the WHO director Tedros Adnombois this week.

We must focus on containment while doing everything we can to prepare for a potential pandemic. David Hyman, he said David, who led. the WHO's fight against SARS says you need both containment and mitigation Bruce Alward of the

WHO just back from handling an international mission to China reports that it used full on mitigation stopping travel, keeping people inside, shutting down the huge city of Wuhan in Hubei province, which had community spread,

before control efforts even began. As a result, the epidemics stopped climbing, and new cases are falling steeply. So this containment strategy seems to be working, at least in these communities where it started to spread. Everywhere else, China stopped a community spread from developing by contact tracing and quarantine, reminding everyone to wash their hands, there you go, and monitor their temperature. Some places also use mitigation measures, such as canceling public gatherings, school and work as well. You don't have to do that for real long. You just do that until the cases start to drop, and then you can open back up again most of the time.

The key, says Aleward, was tailoring the approach to local circumstances. So that's right. If you have a one-size-fits-all strategy for this kind of stuff, you'll never get anywhere. Or you will be less effective than if you tailor the response to the situation. Now, I will tell you this, that I will tell you this, that I will be less effective. read an article just recently where they were able to sequence the spike protein of the coronavirus. Now, the spike protein is the protein, looks like a little, like a shark's tooth, that attaches

to a human cell, the outer membranes merge, allowing this virus to then just, you know, bloop its DNA into the cell, that DNA now takes over the nucleus and starts making copies of itself. And, you know, the ribosomes are now transcribing copies of viral DNA instead of the DNA that you need to keep your cell operating. And then you just, you know, eventually just all these viral particles come shooting out of this cell and ready to infect more cells. And as long as you make a valid immune response to these, you can eventually block those viruses from infecting further cells and then you clear the disease and then you've got lifelong immunity to that particular set of antigens on those coronavirus surfaces.

But in the meantime, you're coughing out the mucus that has these viral particles and you're giving it to people. And it looks like there may be fecal, oral transmission of this too. So somehow this damn virus gets into your turds. And if you don't wash your hair, well, yeah, I mean, do that. But if you don't wash your hands, great after eliminating your bowels or evacuating your bowels and then you prepare food for someone or you shake their hand or whatever, you may be able to transmit it that way. So this seems to be the WHO's concern. Call this a pandemic, and countries will apply blanket measures designed for the flu.

And people think it's like SARS, so you do things that way, or it's a pandemic, so you run and mitigate. Alward said during a press conference in Beijing, if we only approach it with a binary SARS influenza mentality, we're not going to have the agility of approach that we've seen in China. It's going to be fundamental to beating this on a global scale. Well, it makes perfect sense to me. Good for the WHO for having a somewhat nuanced approach, and I'm glad it's not just that they got beat up before when they did this before. However, the thinking seems to be binary.

The head of the CDC Center for Respiratory Diseases says the U.S. will use containment until it gets signs of community spread. Then the strategy will change. Meanwhile, the WHO seems to have a third problem with the P-word U.S. using the word pandemic now, doesn't fit the facts, but may certainly cause fear, said Tedros. I asked about the WHO's reluctance to call to pandemic. W.H.O. spokesperson, Tarek said it's important to focus on actions and not on words. Well.

Give yourself a bill. True, but words do matter. Reluctance to tell the public the truth. Okay, now they're editorializing for fear of causing panic as plagued responses to other disease emergencies. Notably, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Britain. Well, we could talk about that one for a little while, aka Mad Cow Disease. Risk communication experts warn that not telling the public that containment will not prevent a pandemic but might slow it, risks greater shock over what comes next.

Okay, well, you know, words do matter. And I'm actually quite impressed that the WHO is taking this sort of nuanced approach to this. So, you know, we'll see how this goat plays out. You know, here's one where, you know, our president said, well, you know, when it gets warm, that'll be the end of the, this. virus. And so I'm wondering if that's true because, you know, there is disease in Italy and I think in Australia as well. It's pretty warm in Australia right now because it's mid of their summer. Uh-oh, I've lost my mouse. Okay, there we go. Let's see here. Will the COVID-19 outbreak caused

by the new coronavirus fade as the northern hemisphere warms up? This has been suggested by some researchers, and repeated by some political leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump, but we simply don't know if it's the case. Of course we don't know. We don't know anything about this virus. We're learning really fast, and they have a DNA analysis of it. Oh, and let me go back before I continue on this. We were talking about the spike protein.

That's the key to making a vaccine. So now we can, we have sequenced it. We can make it in the lab, even. We can take that DNA, put it into bacteria, have them just spew out the spike protein, and see, and then inject it into people and see if when they make a immune response, of that also blocks them from getting the COVID-19 disease, which is caused by what? What's it caused by? Caused by SARS-C-O-V-2. Very good. You've been listening.

Give yourself a bill. So, Trudy Lang at the University of Oxford says, we absolutely don't know that. Keep asking virologist colleagues, and nobody knows. How would they know? There's no way to know. So when you hear people say the weather will warm up, it'll just disappear, that's an unhelpful generalization. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a supposition. It's not really a generalization, is it?

That's the wrong word. Or a hypothesis. The heat, okay, so renowned virologist Donald Trump said on the 10th of February, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus. A lot of people think it goes away in April as the heat comes in. Well, there are people that think that, and that is true. He isn't the only politician to make that sort of claim. Of course, we don't care about what politicians say. I am very interested in what scientists are saying.

It is thought the virus can survive for up to four days on social. surfaces. And what is that called when it survives on a surface and someone touches it and sticks the finger in their nose and gets the disease? Did I hear you say foamite transmission? Give yourself a bill? You are absolutely correct. You guys are good. So some research, including Paul Hunter at the University of East Anglia, UK, do think the new coronavirus won't survive for long and warmer conditions. One extreme scenario is that it will burn itself out sometime in the summer, says Hunter, the other extreme scenario is it will reduce in the summer but will come back again in the winter and become what we call endemic that it will spread pretty much

everywhere. However, if it's less infectious and warmer conditions, there's a greater chance of it spreading in the southern hemisphere as conditions they're cool. Of course, we see that right now with influenza, don't we? You know, influenza just kind of circles the globe, doing its thing in the southern hemisphere in our summer and in the northern hemisphere in our winter and mutating like a piece of crap that it is. But we're going to get you influenza.

Very soon we will have a universal influenza vaccine that will not be reliant on guessing what the different proteins it's going to mutate on its surface over the next few months when they're trying to make these vaccines. So it's sort of like handicapped. capping a horse, you know, they do everything right and still get it wrong. So the universal vaccine is coming. Let's see if there's anything interesting on the universal vaccine right now.

Universal vaccine influenza. All right. And again, fascinating to have me doing this. Oh, now there are some studies that are just coming out now. universal vaccine placed on ectodomain of matrix protein 2 of influenza A. Let's see what kind of response they got. Okay, this is a mouse models. We show adaptive, adoptive transfer of wild type AM into guise, restores protection by passively transfer.

Geez, boy, this is a dense study right here. And this is a murine study. So they did this in mice in the dry. Journal of Immunology. Of course, this is 2017. Let's see if we can find something a little more up to date. Here is a page on universal influenza vaccine research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This is a key focus of NIA-I-D's influence. She's just... All right.

Key focus of NIAID's influenza research program and develop a universal flu vaccine or a vaccine that provides robust, long-lasting protection against multiple subtypes of flu. Rather than a select flu, such a vaccine would eliminate the need to update and administer seasonal flu vaccine every year. Yeah, you could just get a flu shot as part of your kid thing and be done with it. So flu viruses are classified by two proteins on the outer surface of the virus. There's hemagglutinine and neuraminidase, and those are the H and N. So you hear H1N1, so that's hemaglutinin 1, neuraminidase 1. That would be sort of, you know, like swine flu.

So there's 18 different H types and 11 different N subtypes. Viruses can be further broken down into different strains within those subtypes. For example, there are various strains of H1N1, and the H protein also called HA, enables the flu virus to enter a human cell. It's made up of a head and a stem. Ooh, sort of like my favorite body part. Seasonal flu vaccines fight infection by inducing antibodies

that target the H.A. head. This region varies from season to season, which is why flu vaccines might. must be updated every year. However, scientists discovered the stem typically remains unchanged, making an ideal target for antibodies induced by a universal flu vaccine. Because there's got to be something that makes flu flu, right? If it mutates too much, it no longer becomes influenza.

So we want a universal flu vaccine that would be at least 75% effective and protect against, you know, both group one and group two influenza A viruses and have durable protection that lasts at least a year, and you would hope it would be lifetime and be suitable for all age groups. So in February of 2018, they released their universal influenza vaccine strategic plan outlining the Institute's research priorities. And so they've got, you know, so there are some leading vaccine strategies and can candidates already. They're studying various strategies to create a vaccine that elicit antibodies targeting the H.A. stem. For example, they designed an experimental

vaccine featuring the protein ferretin, which is involved in, you know, red blood cells, which can self-assemble into microscopic pieces called nanoparticles as a key component. Now, this is cool. The vaccine showed promise in animal testing as being, evaluated for future trials in humans. Damn. So we're doing some nanoparticle miss. You know, these little things are really what we're fighting as a little machine. Viruses aren't alive in the sense that they don't respire.

They don't reproduce the same way that we think of things that are alive. But they are little self-replicating machines that go in and hijack another cell's mechanisms and then make copies of themselves. Why? I don't know, you know, it's the virus has got to live too. You know, they're just able to do it. It's a natural selection thing where they're just able to do it, but that's not life. It's a shitty form of proto pre-life.

They suck. And I hate them, but there is a possibility that we have viral DNA in our genome and that's actually caused mutations that may have been beneficial to humans. And it is kind of fascinating to think about. We'll look that up in a minute, too. You know, what the hell? In another approach to a universal flu vaccine, NIAID, scientists developed a vaccine incorporating four subtypes of the H protein into one vaccine. It's made from non-infectious virus-like particles that stimulate an immune response

but cannot replicate or cause disease. Those have been promising as well. So they've got phase one and two studies of universal. flu vaccines strategies that include investigational DNA-based vaccine, followed by a licensed seasonal influenza vaccine, which is considered a booster to improve the potency and durability of these seasonal flu influenza vaccines. So now they're into phase two clinical trial by universal influenza vaccine called M001, this vaccine, which was developed and produced by some company.

I'm not going to say their name. out of Israel, it contains antigenic peptide sequences shared among many different influenza strain. Well, that's interesting. So what are these different phases? So let's do phases, because I don't want to get this wrong, of a clinical trial. And just remember that they're in phase two of this influenza vaccine, which doesn't sound very sexy, the vaccine that they're doing to me. So, let's see here.

So phase two studies test the efficacy, in other words, how effective the drug or the device is. The second phase of testing can last from several months to two years, involves up to several hundred patients. Most phase two studies are randomized trials where one group of patients receives the drug, and a second control group receives a standardized treatment or placebo. So often these studies are blinded, which means that neither the patients nor the researchers know who has received the experimental drug, or in this case, vaccine. So this is what called what? Let's see if you guys are paying it.

Yes, double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Give yourself a bill. So then you've got phase three studies where they do several hundred to several thousand patients, so they scale it up to large-scale testing. You can go on for several years. And they look at more thorough understanding of the effectiveness of the drug, the benefits, and the range of possible. adverse reactions.

And then they also, once they finish phase three, they can request FDA approval for marketing of the drug. So they're looking at safety as well. And then phase four studies are post-marketing surveillance trials. So these are studies that are done after this stuff hits the market, looking at high numbers of people taking whatever this drug is and making sure that it was as safe as they thought it was when they started. All right.

Anything else? Yeah, that's about it, right? I know I felt like I was getting off on something interesting, and I guess we talked about it all as well. Let's just take some phone calls. If you guys have questions about, look, I'm going to update you on this until it goes away. Right now, what do you do?

Avoid places where this stuff is in the community. If you get a fever, get, you know, because look, influenza, hadn't gone away. Influenza is sort of the devil we know. There's been 30 million cases, 300,000 hospitalizations, and 30,000 deaths of influenza already this year. So that's a tenth of our population, right? We've got about, what, 400, just under a 10th. We've got 450 million people in the United States right now. I don't know what the population of the United States is. Let's find out. Echo, what's the population of the United States right now? The population of the United States is about 326 million.

Oh, I thought it was more than that. Okay, I thought it was 350 million a while back. Okay, so about just under 10% of people have gotten it. And of those, we're looking at, okay, well, let's see. Oh, it's like a half of 1%, maybe, or maybe 0.1%. Echo, what's 30,000 divided by 30,000? million? 30,000 divided by 30 million is 0.001.

0.001. Okay, so times 100 is, okay, so like 0.1%. Yeah, so this influenza is not, I mean, look, 30,000 is a huge number, and that's tragic when it happens, but a 0.1% mortality rate is pretty low, considering We've had some as high as 10%, maybe even higher. So the COVID looks like it's more around 2 to 3%. Although somebody made the point on Twitter, which I can't argue with, that we have incomplete numbers because they're counting people who are just now getting the disease.

They haven't had the chance to go through the disease all the way to see if they live or die. So that number may be higher than that. So we'll know very soon what the mortality rate of this virus is as it comes through. So, all right. So, yeah, don't forget about influenza. It's never too late to get your influenza vaccine. If you hadn't done it, shit, go do it. You know, one less virus you've got to worry about.

You may still get the influenza syndrome, but you'll be less likely to get it. you'll be less likely to be hospitalized because of it and you'll be less likely to die from it. So, all right. OK-doke. Well, how about some dick and nut stuff that we haven't talked about any of those delightful things today? Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right.

Here we go. Let's see what this feller has to say. Hello, Dr. Steve. Hey. I am a 40-year-old male. And I make my own milk. I just squeeze my nipple really hard and a little bit of milk comes out and then I drink it. So, of course, I'm kidding about that.

I'm trying to actually avoid growing mantis is what I'm calling about. I make my own milk using almonds or cashews or soybeans. I make it at home. And I'm interested in soy milk because it actually lasts longer as compared to almond milk. And it tastes better, provided that the only. ingredient is soy and water as opposed to just almonds in water, et cetera. Does soy milk make you grow mantis, as everybody on the Internet likes to say? Thank you.

Okay. So I want to answer the first thing first. Male lactation is not normal. It's not normal. It can happen. It can happen with enough stings. of the male nipple. Production of the hormone prolactin is what you need to induce lactation,

so it really doesn't occur under normal conditions in male, so it requires a lot of stimulation of that nipple. So there are some drugs that can be used to increase lactation, and people who have been, who are recovering. from starvation because the glands that produce the hormones recover faster than the liver, which breaks down the hormones. So they get these

high hormone levels, which is just a crazy thing. You know, so galactorea is the term for that. It's not really male lactation. And I would just

take two seconds and get that checked. You can have a testosterone Deficiency, where you have male hypogonadism or low testosterone, and you can have galactorea. It can also happen if you already have gynecomastia or man boobs. And if you have testosterone deficiency, of course, you may have a lack of sexual desire and some other things like that. So I would probably get that checked out. But it can be totally benign as well.

Now, soy milk. Soy is rich in these things called isoflavones, which are basically plant-based molecules that have estrogen-like activity. There have been cases of gynecomastia associated with soy product consumption. As a matter of fact, this is an article from endocrinology practice from 2008 called an unused. usual case of gynecomastia associated with soy product consumption. In this, a 60-year-old man was referred to the endocrinology clinic for evaluation of bilateral gynecomastia, aka man boobs, of six months' duration.

He reported erectile dysfunction and decreased libido. So you're already thinking something's wrong with this guy's testosterone. On further review of systems, he reported no changes in testicular size, no history. I wouldn't know if my nuts change size. not like I'm fondling them every five minutes. No testicular trauma, no sexually transmitted diseases or headaches. Visual changes. Why are they wondering about that?

They're wondering about a pituitary tumor. No change in muscular mass or strength. Initial laboratory assessment showed estrone and estradiol concentration to be fourfold increased in the upper limit of the reference range. So estrone and estradiol are female hormones. and they must have had a high suspicion to have done those tests. These were, I'm assuming, were follow-up tests. Subsequent findings from testicular ultrasonography,

computed tomography of the chest. This guy had the whole workup, abdomen and pelvis, and positron emission tomography. Okay, so they did a PET scan, so positron emission tomography are looking for metastatic cancer is what they were looking for. All of these things were normal. It is interesting, by the way, that we use positrons. That's antimatter.

Positrons are positively charged electrons. And that is antimatter, truly antimatter. And they make it in these just minute quantities by actually synthesizing a normal matter isotope that breaks down. And as it's decaying, one of the things that casts off are a positive. positively charged electron. And 50 years ago, maybe it was 50 years ago, we didn't even know what the hell any matter was.

And then this guy, Dirac, has this equation. And I'm just going to digress for a second because this is effing fascinating to me. He has this equation that he's working on. And in it, he had the square of the electric electron charge. Okay, and you can quantify it into a number. And in this equation, there was the square, and to solve it, you have to do the square root, right? So if you have 25, what's the square root of 25?

Well, you're going to say five, but you're only going to be half right, because it could be five or minus five, right? Because minus five times minus five is 25, negative times the negative is positive. So the square root of nine is not three. 3 and negative 3. I mean, it is 3, but that's only part of the answer. So the square root of the negatively charged electrons charge, I'm sorry, the square root of the negatively charged electrons charge is going to output a negative number, which is the normal charge of the electron, but also a positive number.

And he's like scratching his head going, what in that? You know, there must be something wrong. He went through nothing wrong. He finally says, look, the math is telling me there's a positively charged electron out there. It wasn't until, and I can't remember the dude's name, that discovered the positively charged electron in a cloud chamber. Because basically it was an electron that came through the cloud chamber, had all the curved in a magnetic field the same way an electron would, but it curved in the opposite. direction and they said damn it we have discovered the

positron and now 50 some years later we're using it in you know as a routine thing people have PET scans every day it's insane to think about and what's really insane is the math

show how is it that our universe is so well described on a certain level by mathematics that you could have some dude, just doing some math and math in a way, and then he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, there must be a positively charged electron, and it was there. He discovered it, not by doing an experiment, by fucking around with mathematical formulas.

Einstein didn't do a single experiment to do special or general relativity. they did experiments to verify it. But it was all done in his head thinking about how the universe had to be. But he had the ability to not take things for granted and assume that when he's on a rocket chip going 99.999% of the speed of light, that when he flashes a flashlight in front of him, that he's going to see that flashlight if he had a mirror, weigh the hell out there and bounce that beam, he would measure 186,000 miles per second as this beam of that beam. Well, how's that possible when he's going 185,000 miles per second?

That's because there's a principle in physics that says that the speed of light will be measured as the same by all observers, regardless of their frame of reference. And when you understand that, then you understand that that guy sitting on that rocket ship, shooting this beam of light out, has to measure that beam of light going 186,000 miles per second. And the only way that that's even remotely possible is if time has slowed down for that person, slowed down so much so that this beam that's going, actually retreating from that person. you know, a foot a second, if you could measure it that way, if you were an independent observer looking at it and watching it, you know, outpaced that rocket ship by just say, you know, one foot every second, that it had to be. You know, the independent observer sees that.

Both of these people are going, the light's going at the speed of light, the person's going at 99.999 percent of the speed of light. But they're so slowed down because they have to be to perceive this light beam exiting their flashlight at the speed of light. And from that, everything else follows. Causation is preserved because things can't go faster than the speed of light. And then when you start saying, well, how does this work in a gravitational field? And then now you have general relativity. And that took a lot more.

The math of general relativity is pretty dense and hard to understand. The math of special relativity is actually pretty simple. And when you understand that it just had to work that way, it's fascinating. But Einstein was the first one to figure that out. Now, you say, well, how did Einstein figure out that light curve? in a gravitational field. Well, this is how I did it, using a thing called the equivalence principle.

And the equivalence principle is if you're in a box and you're accelerating at 10 meters per second per second, which is the acceleration due to gravity, you cannot tell. There's not an experiment that you can do that says, I can tell

I'm not in a gravitational field. So if that's the case, if gravity is just acceleration, then if you opened up a hole in the side of that elevator or this box that's traveling. And you shot a beam of light into it. Of course, it would hit

the beam of light would hit the hole at one place, but as this thing is continuing to accelerate, the beam of light would hit the far wall a little bit lower, right? Because the box has had a chance to move

in the time that it came in through the hole. Now, because the speed of light is so fast, it would be hard for you and I to perceive that. But if he was going fast enough, you could see the beam actually curving as it comes in because it's coming in the left side of this box, and then the box is accelerating, you know, forward. And so the beam is actually hitting lower on the opposite side, on the opposite wall. And now Einstein goes, well, hell, if that's, if it's happening in that box,

And it's indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field, then that same beam of light would curve the same amount in a gravitational field that had the same acceleration attributed to it. And from there, my friends, stemmed general relativity. All the rest was just figuring out the math. How in the hell do you figure this out in 3D space? And from that came the prediction of black holes, which we have now taken a picture of.

We've seen things orbiting the black hole in the center of our galaxy. That's a cool video. Go do that. Go right now, as soon as you're done listening to the show, do a YouTube search on stars orbiting the central black hole of the Milky Way, and you will see some shit that will blow your mind. And it's absolutely incredible. And all of this from a thought experiment about a guy or a woman or an animal or whatever,

traveling in a box, going through space accelerated at 10 meters per second per second and trying to figure out if they could tell if they were in a damn box or not. Now, can we tell that we're not boxes in a sim, you know, that our, Our brain is actually in a vat and being fed these stimulations that right now your brain is in a vat and you are perceiving me talking to you through your serious XM radio or through your podcast player or however you're listening to this. That's a whole other discussion for another day, my friends, one in which we will call pot talk with Dr. Steve. So let's get back to this article. Boy, that was some digression. So they did this PET scan and everything was normal

and because the normal findings from the imaging evaluation, this guy went through the million-dollar workup. Oh, this poor bastard. The patient was interviewed again, and he described a daily intake of three quarts of soy milk. Now, come on. I should give them the whole full boo. This guy had this giant workup,

and this was sitting there the whole time, and they just didn't take a complete history. So they make this thing. Oh, we did all of this. And so we interviewed him again, and then we found this out. He should have found this out the first time. After he discontinued drinking,

soy milk, his breast tenderness resolved, and his estradiol concentrations return to normal. So they said this is a very unusual case of gynecomastia related to ingestion of soy products. Healthcare providers should thoroughly review patient's dietary habits, really, to possibly reveal the ideology of medical conditions. So they're going to school us on that after they put this guy through, you know, $20,000 worth of testing.

And now they're schooling us. Hey, you people make sure you ask your patients about whether they're drinking soy. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Who are these clowns? Well, I don't know that they're clowns. I was in 2008. They weren't, we'll say they weren't thinking about it.

So they're saying it's quite unusual. And I'm just going to go to PubMed.gov. Let's do that PubMed.gov. And let's do soy and gyneco mastia. Okay, soy ingestion. We should probably do nutritional soy. Let's put in nutritional. Okay, and gynecynchomastia, so let's just see real quick here.

Okay, got nothing there, so let's just do soy and gynecomystia then. Okay, four articles. Soy protein formula in children, no hormonal effects in long-term feeding. Well, yeah, think about this. There's soy formula where it's, Some kids who are, you know, cows, milk intolerant or other formula intolerant, they'll put them on soy. And also, don't forget, there's billions of people on this earth that's primary protein in their diet is soy. And they seem to do okay.

So dietary soy protein containing isofloids. God. Okay, I'm giving myself another one of days. This has not been a good day. I am not firing on all four cylinders. I only got four hours sleep last now. I'll give myself that, but not really much of an excuse. Dietary soy protein containing isoflavonoids does not adversely affect the reproductive tract of male.

Oh, what in the hell is this? Cynomologous Max, macaques. Okay, it's macaca fascicularis. That's their species name, maca, because they throw their maca if you're at the zoo looking at them through the glass. Let me see. Okay, here we go. Soybean isoflavone exposure does not have feminizing effects on men, a critical examination of the clinical evidence. Well, that's what we want.

Thank you. That's what we're looking for. The objective was to critically evaluate the clinical evidence, and when not available, the animal data, most relevant to concerns that isoflavone exposure in the form of supplements or soy foods has a feminizing effect on men. So what this design was was a midline literature review and cross-reference of published data. So this is one of those where, you know, I just really want to get published, but I don't feel like doing a study and going through the Interventional Review Board, which, by the way, I totally understand. I'm doing a study on virtual reality for anxiety relief in the chemotherapy suite. And holy crap, you wouldn't believe the stuff you've got to go through to try to get a human study approved.

And so I've got to take all these classes and all this stuff. It's like, geez, you know, I've got 100 articles in the medical literature. But no, because this is a clinical study, I've got to do this. So anyway, so I do understand that. But that is sort of a cheap-ass. way of getting published. But anyway, because you're really, you're just reviewing other people's work. But it says here, in contrast to the results of some rodent studies, findings from recently

published meta-analysis, that's where they take a bunch of different studies and mush the data together and then analyze it. Subsequently, published studies show that neither isoflavine supplements nor isoflavone-rich soy affect total or free testosterone levels. Similarly, there's essentially no evidence from the nine identified clinical studies. that isoflavone exposure affects circulating estrogen levels in men. They have no effect on sperm or semen parameters, although only three intervention studies were identified.

None were longer than three months. So that's good that they told us that. So it may be there, but if it is, it's in the time needed to detect that difference is longer than three months. findings from animal studies suggesting that isoflavones increase the risk of erectile dysfunction are not applicable to men because of differences in isoflavone metabolism between rodents and humans. Can you imagine doing a study on rodent erectile dysfunction? I mean, how odd? What do you do?

I mean, do you have to go down there and manipulate them to see if they get a rod? It's horrendous. Anyway, so they said the intervention data indicate that isoflavones do not exert effeminizing effects on men at intake levels equal to and even considerably higher than typical for Asian males, even. You know, we're talking about a population that eats a lot of soy, you know, in their diet. So there you go. So the data does not support that hypothesis. So I'm going to say you're okay drinking your soy products. Thanks, always go to Dr. Scott, even when he isn't here.

And Cliff, Andrews, Cody, Gilmer, a lady diagnosis. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coombeah, Jim Norton. Oh, we can't forget Jenny McKinney, Travis Teff, Lewis Johnson, Paul Opscharsky, Eric Nagel, Rowan, Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, Fez-Waley, who's early support of this show, has never gone on, appreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM, Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. And many thanks to you all, our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com. 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. You know,