Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 401 - COV-SUPEREGO

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss self-isolation, and strategies for getting through this huge paradigm shift in society. Also some other stuff. PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) Feals.com/fluid (get 50% off your 1st subscription shipment of CBD!) TRIPP.COM offer code DRSTEVE (relax and get 20% off!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) DEEPDISCOUNT.COM!  (new sponsor!) 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. Yeah, me garreted. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolabovir stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and blast it with the way.

An ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm aging Dr. Steve. 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 I've got with me, my little pal Tacey, my wife,

Hello, Tacey. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the Internet. If you've got a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-766-4-3-23. That's 347 Poohead. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Or go to our merchandise store at CafePress.com slash weird medicine. Most importantly, we are not your medical provider.

Take everything you hear with the grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show. Without talking to it over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientists, registered dietitian or whatever. Well, welcome back. This is, we're in social isolation together. And, you know, I couldn't think anybody I'd rather be in social isolation with. So there you go. Me either, honey.

Yeah, thank you. There you go. That's sweet. Well, you're again. So I guess we can't, well, never mind. We can't talk about that. But don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. It's going to be a while before he's back.

So that's just how it is. People must be getting bored of this COVID-19 thing. I think they're still obsessed with watching TV, but we've gotten a bunch of non-COVID-19 questions. this week. Good. So that's good. It might get our mind off of it for five minutes.

Before we do, though, I just thought a quick situation report. We are recording this on April Fool's Day, 2020. And as of today, this is according to the WHO, we had 17,987 new cases in the last 24 hours. It sounds like a whole hell of a lot, and it is, although it's actually less than the day before when we had 19,332. Now, social isolation started, what, you know, a couple weeks ago, and think of it this way. I've used this analogy on a couple of radio shows. If we isolated every single person today and put them in a hermetically sealed environment, so that there was impossible for anyone to transmit this virus.

And somehow we got them food and why. Just figure out how you want to do this scenario in your head, but we isolated them for 14 days. All of the people that got exposed yesterday, before we isolated every single person in the world, we'll start showing effects within about five days. On average, 96% of them will show symptoms within 11 days.

And then they'll be sick for another two weeks, maybe three weeks, and then they'll be done, right? So let's, and 99% of those people will recover on average. Now, if, so what that means is any intervention that we do today, we won't see the results. We'll just start to see the results in two to three weeks. And that's why it's so frustrating. We've all been stuck in the house. We're not having friends over. Tacey's using, what is that app that you're using?

Ooh, house party. House party. We'll give it one of these. Oops. Yeah, house party allows you to still be social, FaceTime, and those kinds of things are very effective as well. I have a house party today with a surprise guest. I'm so excited.

Oh, and you don't know who it is? No, I know, but the other. the other ones don't. Okay, and that's in 30 minutes, so we'll let you go. Well, I'll do the last 15 minutes by myself. But the people listening will like that. No, you, I'm actually going to say, and I wouldn't tell you this if it weren't true. I probably would tell you this if it weren't true, but this time it is absolutely true. I got nothing but good feedback about you being here. Which I'm so surprised. I was such, I was so bitchy that day. Well, you were, you're stressed out, but so are people that are listening to this.

Okay. You know? So you're representing them. Here I am trying to be the calm voice of reason and try to give accurate information. You know, I'll have a couple of clunkers every once in a while. But given that I was a scientist before I went to medical school and I was a broadcaster before that, I'm in a sort of interesting position where I can at least try to send synthesize some of this information and do some of my own modeling and that kind of stuff.

But you are, you know, you are sitting in for all the people that are out there that are freaking the F out about this. Yes. Now, I'm still freaking out that you are in the middle of it and that your team are in the middle of it. That does not go away. That's a knot in my stomach that just won't go away. Well, we're doing, you know, all of the precautions that we can do, and the vast, although there have been a lot of health care providers who have gotten us, the vast majority still don't get it. You know, so we are planning on, I mean, it's not quite to the level of hazmat suits, but it's pretty dang close. It's N95 masks.

I, you know, face shields, gowns, gloves, the whole. thing and then sterile procedures going in and sterile procedures coming out. It's about as safe as it could possibly be, given the situation. Good. And it's amazing how people can become adjusted quickly to a certain situation. I'm used to being at home now, and I'm actually liking it a whole, whole lot, and cleaning out stuff that I never thought I would get to and getting a nap in and doing work. I'm figuring stuff out. It's, and I hope it's going good for everybody out there, too.

Yeah, it's going to be to varying degrees. I am encouraging people to take on projects like you've done. I mean, I have been looking at that effing luggage closet for years now, saying maybe this weekend I'll get to it and just dreading it. And I came home the other day and you'd already done it. And I really was very thankful for that. But anything that you can do to give yourself a sense of accomplishment, because when this thing is over, it's going to be a big-ass party.

And coming out of it saying, hey, I accomplished X, Y, and Z. If you always want to be a writer and you're stuck at home and you can't work, now's the time. And no time like the present. And if you have writer's block, the trick to that, I'm just going to give you a little trick, and you can use this for other things. you decide I'm going to write from 8 a.m. until 11 a.m. every day.

And then you sit there. And you can't do anything else. You can't play with your phone. You don't have to write, but you have to sit there. And when you do that, after a while, the inspiration to write will come only when you're sitting there. And you'll be able to write very effectively. It's a nice cure for writer's block. But anyway, you know, you want to write that piece of music.

You want to learn the guitar. There's tons of YouTube videos. This sounds trivial, but actually taking on a project and completing it can give you a sense of purpose and try to maintain a schedule, too. The one thing I haven't been able to find inspiration for is exercising. I know, me neither. But I've got to do that, so we need to encourage each other to do that. We need to do that for sure. And doing group things like that, if you are lucky enough to have a peloton and you can schedule a group to do it together, do that.

But having some accountability with other people and doing things in virtual groups may actually help with your lifestyle and getting through this craziness of having to be. I'm an introvert, so I kind of like it. All of my meetings have been canceled, and the few that I still have are all done virtually. So, I mean, I could be naked and take these meetings. Just like you are now, right? I kind of like that. Yes, absolutely. And, well, you know.

It's hard not to with you sitting there also across from me naked. So let's a little mental theater for everyone. So, yeah, the curve in Italy, they are now going up. up in an arithmetic progression rather than a geometric one or a exponential increase. And what that means is they're going up by the same number every day. So they had 5,000 new cases on March 26th and 5,000 on March 27th, 6,000 on March 28th, 5,900 on March 29th. etc. And then 4,000 last or yesterday. This again, according to the WHO. So that's arithmetic. That will make a linear curve. In other words, one that goes straight. It's not curving up faster and

faster. Okay. So an exponential curve would be one where you're multiplying by the same number every day. So a linear curve would be something like 24, 6, 8, and when we're talking about cumulative number of cases, right? So every day. you're getting an extra two cases, whereas an exponential curve would be 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, where you're multiplying by two each time, okay? And those are examples, obviously not real-world examples. And so what Italy is seeing right now is the same number of cases, not the same multiplier. And that's actually good.

So what you'll see is their new cases will begin to flatten out. If you look at that curve, the new case curve is flattening and maybe even declining. Yesterday it declined. Their cumulative numbers will continue to go up as long as they're adding cases. So you won't see that flattening of the cumulative curve until they're getting very few new cases. So that the new case has got to go down to zero. and then you will see the curve flattened like you're seeing in China right now, assuming we can trust those numbers, okay?

So that's where we are. Social distancing is having an effect. We're starting to see maybe the left shoulder of the United States' new case curve kick in, and over the next week we'll really know where we are with this. Yes, I remember yesterday when the president said things were going to get really bad in the next couple of weeks. What does that look like to you? Well, yeah, again, we won't see the effects of strict social distancing until at least three weeks.

And that's the beginning of the effects. Okay. So it'll take another three weeks maybe before you see an excellent response and these things starting to decline into numbers that we can manage. Okay. And we've got a question about this. I was going to answer it now, but I'll just wait until we get the question of why we need to do it this way. Because I've had people say, well, it's 99% of us will get better one. And we all just get it.

And, well, I'll just tell you now. With influenza, you've got a 0.1% mortality rate. And let's just say five times that many end up in the hospital. So that we can manage pretty easily. Because remember, they're not just COVID patients in the hospital right now. There's everything else plus the COVID patients. So all the people that would have been there anyway are there, plus people now with COVID-19. So it's not like these hospitals are empty waiting for us to fill them up with these patients.

There's a limited number of empty beds right now. So by flattening this curve, we can allow those patients to trickle in rather than going all at once. Because if they come in all at once, then we'll run out of ICU beds, we'll run out of ventilators. we'll be treating people in rooms that aren't designed to be treating. If we're even can get them a room, maybe we'll be treating them in the halls in the emergency room. Then there's a domino effect where the patients who have appendicitis, now they can't get in the hospital where they're supposed to go.

There's no beds. And people who have regular pneumonia or other things, heart attacks, would bring them in. There's no place for them to go. So now this starts cascaded. it's like a pump that's overprimed and it's backing up and all of these cases that increases the mortality rate that can be directly

and indirectly attributed to this pandemic. But if we can keep the curve flattened enough so that they're trickling in and they don't overwhelm the system then all the people with appendicitis and pneumonia and heart attacks can also get in and everyone can get treated and while we're waiting for an effective treatment. That's what we're waiting for.

We get an effective treatment that can keep people out of the hospital, keep them off the ventilator and keep them from dying. This thing's over the second we get enough supplies of that treatment, whatever it is. Okay? You're nodding, but this is radio. Oh, yes. Yes, I understand. Sorry.

I'm just kidding. You were fascinating. That's the first time I've I've monologued that long, and Tacey has just actually listened to what I said. So anyway, yeah, so that's what we're hoping for. Now, if we do not achieve that treatment, then we are waiting for a vaccine. And I've been advocating to do away with phase two of the COVID-19 or the SARS-C-O-V-2 vaccine, with SARS-C-O-V-2 being the virus that causes the disease, COVID-E, 19. And phase two trials are those sort of smaller trials where you're trying it out on maybe 100 people just to make sure that it's safe, but also that it works.

Well, the phase one trial established that it was safe, at least for the 40 to 100 people that you used it on. And going to phase three is a little tricky because what if this vaccine causes, you know, 3% of people to get Guillain-Barray. syndrome. We don't know that. We won't know that toward treating a lot of people. And if we do skip phase two, we may miss that. There's no question about that. But in an emergency where we're trying to save people's lives, that it may be a safe enough bet to skip straight to phase three. But I'll let the smarter minds than mine work on that. But then if we don't skip to phase three, we're looking at probably 12 months for this vaccine to come out. This is record time, by the way. It usually takes 15 to 17 years to make a, to create a vaccine and bring it to market. And, you know, so that's

where we are. So I'm concerned about the second phase of this. We keep hearing the second wave that we'll be coming in October when we have a lovely trip planned. Right. So what are your thoughts on that? Well, yeah, if we reduce the numbers and we don't have herd immunity, so let's talk about what herd immunity is. That's where enough people get it that if someone, let's say you have a thousand people and 99 of those people have gotten it. And one person gets this virus in the middle of those thousand people. The virus got nowhere to go because all those people, it tries to jump to them and their immune system just fights it off. So that one person, get sick, but nobody else does. They can't spread it to anyone. The problem with this situation

right now is that we have such low penetrance of this virus. Let me look at the, I've got the numbers right here that I calculated this morning. The number of known cases, now that's known cases. We're still ramping up testing, so that's going to go up dramatically just because of testing, is 0.04% of our population. So 140,000 people divided by 328 million is 0.04%. So there's not enough people who are going to recover from this to provide robust herd immunity because we've kept the absolute percentage of our patient, of our population away from this virus. So we could be doing this again in October? It's possible that we, let's just say that we stupidly did all this social isolation.

We get to the other side of the curve and we just go, okay, let's just all go back to work. Yeah, it's party time. It's going to just come right back, right? So what we hope is that we will have a treatment again. We have this treatment where we can demonstrate that you give it to people early in the disease. We test everybody that's got symptoms even vaguely like it at that point. Rapid testing. They're positive.

We put them on this treatment, whatever it is. If it's remdesivir or hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, whatever it is, or something new we don't even know about it. about. And it keeps most everybody out of the hospital. Let's say it cuts it down to 0.1%. Then now we're looking like flu numbers. Everybody goes back to Disney at that point. And yeah, there's a second wave of it, but it's manageable. Now, if we have a vaccine, again, then it becomes like influenza again. And at some point, this virus will become so known to our immune systems that it will cause very little havoc, but we're talking years from now.

Okay. You know, this is the virus, unless we come up with a universal coronavirus vaccine, which we are working on, they have made a breakthrough in the universal influenza vaccine just recently, and they're testing it now. If it works, influenza is done. So many idiots still won't take that, though. Well, I know. I don't ever get the flu.

Well, you by God did this year, didn't you? Yep. Yeah, well, our friend Richard David Smith, who you met, and he and his wife, Shatai, and their two lovely kids, came to our house, and on his way to California, or way through California, if I understand the story right, he got the H1N1 flu, ended up on the ventilator, did recover, and he's fine now, but he was one of those. I ain't going to get no, I'm using the wrong accent because they're not from down here. but, you know, I'm not going to get that vaccine. And now he is my number one proponent of influenza vaccine. If I get into it with somebody, I say, I just tag him on it, and he'll jump in there and give his story. It drives me bonkers.

So then we'll have that issue. Yeah, and those same people will be the same people who will be the first to line up for the coronavirus vaccine. I think. Some of them will, anyway. We shall see a hope. But the universal influenza vaccine will spell the death knell for influenza when we can get it to where it's effective enough to eradicate influenza. Now, if we come up with a universal coronavirus vaccine, this will do a couple of things. It will put a stop to SARS, MERS, and this, you know, SARS, COV, too.

It'll also do a way with all the coronavirus subtypes that just go through our population and cause common colds. So it'll be the end of about half of the common colds. That would be worth, well, I don't want to say that because. Yeah, no, that's right. Nothing is worth what we're going through now, but that would be a positive benefit for generations to come that they don't have to deal with about half the common colds that they deal with. The other half are caused by rhinoviruses, which are pachornaviruses.

Hell, let's go after them, too. Fuck all viruses. Right now, fuck all viruses. Agreed. Okay, I'm not exactly sticking my neck out with that controversial stance, but, you know, for God's sake. Let's just go after them all after this. Okay? All right, you want to take some questions?

Yes, you have... Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. 10 minutes, and I'm out of here for a house parting. Okay. Let us see here. All right. Let's take this one.

This one is a COV. Hello, Dr. Steve. Mike from Georgia here. Hey, Mike. I appreciate your reason and impartial analysis of health care. Diagnostic and overall health care services. Thanks, pal. My questions today are on what is being reported from the COVID-19 situation,

And specifically, the overall diagnosed cases that are overwhelming hospitals and what are the reported total recovery population. Today is March 26th, and looking at the state of Georgia to simplify this. Let me answer this thing about recoveries. That is the least important metric in this because 99% of people, on average, are going to recover. 80% of people over 80, probably. It may even be better than that. and 99.1% of all people who have no risk factors, everybody else kind of in between. So when this is all over, we'll test as many people as we can for antibodies,

and we can then calculate, particularly if we don't want to test the whole country, we can do a representative sample and then use statistics to determine what the total number of cases were. and we'll know how many deaths we had as long as we are classifying them correctly and that we're not classifying just people that had COVID-19 in their system on autopsy who may have died of a heart attack

but classifying people who died from this they subtract the one number from the other and that's how many people recovered. Period. That's how you do it. Right now, the only way to do it is to go back three weeks find the new cases, and then come forward three weeks, look at the deaths, and try to use statistics to get a ballpark figure of how many people have recovered. But the answer is, most everybody is recovered that's gotten this.

And it's not an interesting statistic. What's really interesting to follow is number of new cases, because that's going to tell you what's going to happen three weeks from now. Okay. All right. Make sense of the issue. As of this week, it was reported that Atlanta hospital systems are now full to the COVID cases. Based on John Hopkins' map I was looking at, reported cases in the state show about 1,400 total, 330 within the counties of Atlanta.

Are hospitals unable to account for that number of new cases, especially considering that not all 330 are likely in a hospital? And it's a strain on the system, truly bed space, available supplies, masks, gloves, ventilators, or strain on medical professionals for the increased patients. And then secondly, questions about the John Pappton's map is the very low number of total recovered patients. Again, as of March 12. Okay, so I kind of answered that. Don't worry about the number of recovered patients on those maps because they may. be using statistics, they may just not even be inputting data to that. Because we're not getting that data particularly.

We're getting new cases and deaths. And then from that, you can calculate cumulative patients and all kinds of things like that. And you can extrapolate some information knowing the typical duration of this illness. But I have not heard that Atlanta hospitals are overwhelmed at this point. Right now, throughout most of the country, we've got plenty. of ventilators, but during the next two weeks, that will tell the tale. And what we're trying not to do is allow the system to collapse backward, as we talked about, where there's so many COVID patients in the hospital, the patients with other

illnesses that could be life-threatening aren't getting treated. So we'll know more about this in the next couple of weeks. And it's, there was something else that he had and that he asked him. Oh, yes. No, it's not that 300 patients can overwhelm the system. That's not the case at all. You have to remember that about 15% of people who get it may end up in the hospital. That's just a real rough number.

So the vast majority of people don't even get sick enough to go to the hospital and seek treatment. And the total mortality is, as we've already discussed, around. 1% at this point, maybe 1.4% on average, and different for different risk groups. So it's the ones that end up in the ICU on the ventilator, and they're there for 24 days. That's the problem. So you get somebody today, well, what if you get 10 people tomorrow? And they're all in the hospital for 24 days. Well, then the people that come in the next week, there's not enough room for them. So the key to this, again, is flattening that curve by self-isolating, washing your hands,

staying six feet away from people at least, and doing all the things that we've been talking about. Okay, so on, you know, one of my highly scientific websites, Facebook, that has been, I've seen this story keep going through. It's gone through on a couple of times, and I've just marked that person, I'm snoozing people like crazy right now, so I just snooze them for 30 days because I don't want their scientific evidence and all their...

Or their lack of scientific evidence. Yeah, for example, like last Friday night, when we were 12 feet away from our neighbors having wine, and they were on their driveway, and we were on ours, and they were like, no. They were drinking their wine, and we were drinking ours, they were going to their bathroom. We touched nothing. We were, yeah, and at least we were. at least 12 feet away from each other. And no one was symptomatic. No one was symptomatic. And they're like, no, that's not allowed.

That is irresponsible. And I just don't. I want to be socially responsible. Of course you do. I want to do that. But then I'm also a human being. And we're social animals. And we're social animals.

And I just think, you know, And the picture on the story is of these teenagers who are sitting on top of their cars like 10 feet apart from each other talking in a circle. And I just find, I just, I don't know why that article drives me so nuts. I find it just really, I don't want to, I just think it's offensive. I mean, not that I'm easily offended. I don't want to be one of those people, but it's irritating. Irritating is the right word. It's just obnoxious that.

Well, people love right now, particularly on the internet, love to make other people feel bad and this sort of virtue signaling and I know more than you do kind of thing. And I think those kids that are 10 feet apart from each other on the roof or in the back of their pickups or whatever and they're not interacting, they're not touching each other and none of them are symptomatic, I think that's reasonably, that's pretty responsible actually. because they're trying to social distance, but they're trying to also be social. And what we did the other day was, I think, perfectly responsible. We all agreed ahead of time, this is how we're going to do this. I brought the Sonos units that are battery powered and set them at the type of the equidistant triangle, you know, equilateral triangle. So I was the only one that touched them.

They didn't touch them. again they were on their side we were on our side of the we were in our driveway they were in theirs they didn't come into our bathroom and vice versa it was impossible for us to transmit anything particularly being asymptomatic

now there's this thing in the news that oh a sneeze can be detected 27 feet away that is one of those honker sneezes and that is under laboratory conditions, again, not taking into account wind and that kind of stuff. And if anybody would have sneezed last Friday, it would have been over. It would have been so over.

Okay, we'll see you, you fuckers later. But we, there is this thing called the inverse square rule that the farther away from something you get, for example, a light bulb. the intensity of light decreases with the square of the distance. So this would also be the case for a sneeze. So although it can detect maybe a viral particle at 27 feet in a laboratory conditions that doesn't mean that it's infective at that point, and you have to have a certain number of these viruses in the first place. The cardboard study, I talked about,

this on my last COVID sit rep, which if you're interested, go to YouTube and just search for the laugh button. And you can see I'm doing weekly COVID sit reps. They're not the greatest yet, but I'm going to get better at them. I'm worried about saying the wrong thing. So I'm scanning every word 12 times before it comes out of my mouth and my vocal crutches have gone insane with this. But the information there is pretty good. And I went over the reason that they did the study where they were looking at cardboard. It wasn't to see if you can get it from an Amazon package. It was just to compare it to SARS, the original SARS, because they had data on how long they could detect it on cardboard. Okay, Stevie, so I have to go. Okay. But I just

wanted to ask. I'll give you one of these. Thank you for being here again. And we would have done the whole thing. I would have been here the whole thing. He just had an emergency at work. Yes, I know. Okay. She's well aware. She's well aware. So, but I just want to ask you guys if you are prayers, just pray for him and all the medical professionals out there who are in the middle of this. Yeah, and if you're not, send money. Oh, that'd be fabulous too.

So thank you, guys. Yep. Hey, thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for tolerating me. Do I turn it off? No, no, I'll take care of it. You can just take off.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Tacey. She's a good. Let's take a minute to talk about a new sponsor to the show, deepdiscount.com. A great site to buy movies, TV shows, music, and so much more at really great prices. You know, people who listen to the show kind of know this. I'm a weirdo. I love Shakespeare. I started when I was about 40. I said, oh, my God, what have I been missing?

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Thanks, Deep Discount. Thanks, Deep Discount. I heard that somewhere. I'm not sure where I heard that from. All right, let's do a COVID-non-COVID question. Hey, Dr. Steve, it's Stacy Deloge. Going to let you know. Oh, wait a minute.

I need a Stacey Deloche alert. I don't have that, so we'll just do this instead. Citrusat. Citrusat. Citrusat. Citrusat. Citrusat. All right.

Ladies and gentlemen, Stacey Deloge, lest I not acknowledge him. Socially distancing, 144 megahertz or two meters apart. Oh, okay. So he's a ham radio operator, so am I. And two meters is roughly six feet, and that is the wavelength of a radio wave at 144 megahertz, which would be, by the way, the two meter ham radio band. So that is hilariously not funny. Only the three nerds out there that are ham radio operators got it.

So let's run that back and start. Daisy Delo. I'm going to let you know, I am socially distancing 144 megahertz or two meters apart. I taste something other than the coronavirus on show number 400. Congratulations on 400 shows. Well, I was on the podcast. But you were talking about removing the spleen with a blood disorder. got me to thinking, what

do you not need to survive? What do you have this redundant or a backup? Ooh. Spleen, you know, one kidney, no golf lighter things such as that you could still be okay with.

Hell yeah. Something other than the coronavirus. Thank you. Oh, she's not here. That is an awesome question. So what organs can you live without? Well, he mentioned one, which is the

spleen. You don't want to get rid of your spleen too early in your life. The spleen is just basically a giant lymph node. So if your liver is under the rib cage on the right, the spleen is under the rib cage to the left. And you can feel it if it gets enlarged in certain syndromes like cirrhosis and other things that cause splenomegaly or enlarged spleen. And this spleen is an awesome organ and it protects you from certain types of pneumonia and other infections when you are younger and then when you get older, sometimes it causes some problems with red blood cells eating up your red blood cells in certain cases. And there are, you know, just some certain syndromes where the spleen can actually become a problem. And when it is, you just remove it.

It's very thin surface is easy to rupture, so we'll see ruptured spleen and people with motor vehicle accidents where they get blunt trauma to the abdomen or the upper abdomen and the lower thorax. It's just really easy to tear and then it bleeds and it's a problem. It has to be removed. You know, the liver also plays a role in recycling red blood cells in their components. and there's other tissues in the body that can take over so you can live without your spleen. This one will surprise you. You can actually live without your stomach.

It's not fun, but you could have your stomach removed, and then they'll attach your esophagus directly to the small intestine. And if you do things properly, you can eat a diet along with some vitamin supplements and stuff that you can live on by doing that. that way. So that can be removed. Reproductive organs would be organs like testicles, ovaries, uterus, and those kinds of things, those can be removed, and you can live without them. If you remove your ovaries, you'll end up with low estrogen level and go through menopause pretty much immediately and may need medication. And people who've had their testicles removed for

whatever reason may need testosterone replacement. Your gallbladder, people have their gallbladder removed all the time. The gallbladder is a little bladder. It actually is a bladder that lives under the liver. So it's in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, right under the rib cage, and it helps to squirt bile into the intestine when you have fatty meals and stuff like that. and that bile does a lot of interesting things that we can go into some other time. But if you remove the gallbladder, you still secrete bile.

It just won't happen intermittently. It'll just sort of leak in over time. And some people can tolerate that, and other people can't. GVAC was one that had his gallbladder removed and couldn't tolerate it and had to take medication for a while called Questran, a bile sequestering resin. In other words, you take this resin and now it will take up the bile

and that will prevent the diarrhea that people can get from this post-coly-sostectomy syndrome. So that's pretty easy. Your appendix, we all know that you can live without your appendix. It's just stupid. It has some effect on the immune. system, but it's, for the most part, a vestigial organ and can be removed. Now, all the paired organs can be removed as well. You can live without one lung.

If you've got enough capacity in the other lung, you can live without one of your kidneys, as long as the other kidney has the ability to function. So, yeah, great question. All kinds of stuff you can live without. All right. Let's see here. So just wondering, this is the time of the year that allergies start acting up and we get our runny noses and scratching throats and we hit the pursuit of that. What do we do now? Do we go to the doctors and just assume it might be coronavirus or what? Thanks.

Yeah, no. Also a great question. I have the same problem. I have seasonal aspects. allergies, and right now they're at their peak. And so when I'm walking around, people, you know, thank God I haven't sneezed in public yet. But if I did, if I were to sneeze in public, people would absolutely assume, and rightly so, that I shouldn't be out in public because I'm infected. So I am loading up on my, on my Allegra and using my Flonase and trying to make. sure that I'm not displaying symptoms when I go out because I don't want to freak anybody out. So it's just, you know, one of those things.

And just the criteria for testing people right now for SARS-COV-2 is fever with dry cough, progressing to shortness of breath. When we get more and more tests, we're going to be a lot more liberal about testing people. And again, as I've mentioned on previous shows, there are, and by the way, I have a mini show on the website talking to the folks that are bringing out one of the antibody tests and is also on demand on Sirius XM at the Faction Talk, Weird Medicine on demand channel. So if you want to hear that, it's just 15 minutes. we talk about the ins and outs of antibody testing. So if you think you had it in January and you recovered, this antibody test is for you. And you can see if you have antibodies to it that show that you have a resolved infection.

There are two kinds of antibodies, IGM, which indicates a recent or current infection. And then IGG antibodies, which stands for Immunoglobin G. and IgG antibodies indicate a more remote or resolved infection. And we can, we'll be able to test for those very soon. I've got a case ordered, and I know there are health systems have ordered, you know, tons of cases of these. So we'll let you know. All right. So, yes, that is going to, once we're testing more people, then if you've got allergy symptoms, you're worried about it, you'll get tested.

But they say, no, you're fine, or you had it three weeks ago, go home and quit worrying about it. Or gosh, you know what? These mild symptoms you're having are actually COVID-19, you need to isolate yourself. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Tony calling in. Had a couple of questions after listening to your last podcast on Sunday. Number one, how does this outbreak of the COVID-19 compare?

to SARS from 2003 and the H1N1 from 2009. And number two, are you surprised or impressed with how fast the world medical community has come up with potential symptom, reducing medicines, and possible vaccines? Yes, it's incredible. We're going to learn so much from this. We just need to survive it. So I want all of you to survive this. to come out with a vaccine in less than a year, assuming that that's what happens is record time.

And to start from a novel virus, one we've never seen before, because you say, well, you know, they do with influenza every year. Yeah, that's easy. Well, it didn't easy, easy, but it's relatively easy because they've been doing it for a long time, and they're just making a vaccine to the different proteins that the influenza mutates to every year. year. This is a novel virus. Humans have never seen this virus before. That's why our immune systems having such a hard time with it. And for them to isolate the spike protein, sequence it, which happened within the first few days, really. It was within days. And then have this protein that we can then turn into a vaccine, go through phase one trials, which we're in right now, and get it out to

the public within a year is incredible. So that's going to happen, and we just, after that, need to be working on this universal vaccine. But SARS broke out in a similar faction to the SARS-COV-2, and these things are all hyped up, cold viruses, basically, that have just become deadly. And SARS first infected humans in a province in southern China, according to the Center for Disease control, and it infiltrated 29 countries, and they had

8,000 confirmed cases killed nearly 800 people. So that's about 10% mortality. So it was apparently harder to transmit than this one, but it was more deadly. Now, you look at MERS in 2012,

spread to 27 countries with only 2,500 confirmed cases, but 866 deaths to date. So let's just ask Echo. Echo, what is the, what is, how do I ask this? Never mind. Okay, let's try this.

Sorry, I don't know that one. Echo. How many percent is 866 compared to 2,500? Sorry, what was that? All right, I know, I didn't ask that right. Echo, what's 866 divided by 2,500? This might answer your question. 866 divided by 2,500 is 0.3464.

0.3464. So, wow. So it's about 34% mortality, okay, but it was very hard to transmit from one place to another. So thank goodness, MERS did not evolve into something that's so easy to transmit to other people. And if you think about it, it makes sense the more lethal a virus is, the harder it's going to be to infect a lot of people. Ebola is so, so lethal that it really has a hard time getting out of its area. So it's in the virus's interest not to kill a lot of people. It's in its interest not to kill anybody. But these viruses always have to have to work this tightrope.

between being transmissible and being able to reproduce a lot of, because that's its only drive is to just reproduce. So if it, I think the viruses figure, and they don't figure out anything. It's just a machine. But if they were able to figure anything, they would balance between, I don't want to kill a lot of people because I want to be able to transmit this to as many people as possible. H1N1, which you talked about, there were 762 million cases of that, with 284,000 people died. That fatality rate was very low for influenza.

It was about 0.02%. And the annual influenza virus is anywhere between there and 0.1%. With the 1918 pandemic, having a. death rate of about 10%. Now, that was a different time, so we don't know if that same virus attacked us now, what would happen? Well, we're pretty immune to H1N1 after a couple of swine flu epidemics in the 70s and then again in 2009. So it's unlikely that that particular virus, if it came through again, would wreak the havoc that it did in 1918. All right. Well, I hope that helps. You know, only time will tell what the final numbers are going to be with this

coronavirus. And I'm really hoping for a treatment so that we can all get back to work an effective treatment. But, you know, that's just a pipe dream at this point. But there are people who are way smarter than I am working on this day in and day out. And if we've got any chance to get an effective treatment, we will have the answer in about two to three weeks from now. I'm hoping the Phase 3 Remdesivir trials will be giving us preliminary data, and we should have some good non-aedictotal data on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin within the next couple of weeks as well. Now, when I say non-aecidotal evidence, what I mean is we have a lot of evidence of people saying, well, we tried it on 300 people and they all got better. They said,

These are not controlled trials, and there's bias involved. There's, you know, if I say something worked for me, I think everybody understands this. That's anecdotal evidence. It worked for me. Can't generalize it. Well, if I say it worked for me a thousand times, it's still anecdotal evidence. It's just a thousand anecdotal reports. So this is the same kind of thing that can happen.

We've talked about this long, long time. ago, that if you send out a placebo, let's say we sent out a placebo to a thousand people, and let's say there's a placebo effect of 10%, whatever, we'll just make up a number. So we send it out to 1,000 people, 900 of them say, this is BS. It didn't do anything. 10% of them go, hey, that really helped me. Then you put on your website only testimonials from the 10% of people that said it helped you, Now you have 100 testimonials on your website.

This stuff really helped me. Look at this. Here's another one. You scroll, scroll, scroll, testimonial after testimonial, saying it helped them. This is how you can get screwed up with anecdotal evidence. So I appreciate the fact that there is a doctor out there that claims they treated 300 people and they all got better. That's great. 99% of people are going to get better anyway.

So, you know, you've got to treat a whole lot of people in a controlled system and use statistics to be able to prove that you help that other 1%. And once we can do that, I'm all in. I mean, I'm all in now. I'm very enthusiastic about our prospects to find an effective treatment for this that will prevent deaths and hospitalization. and allow us to go back to normal. But I am in no way going to ever say that we have it until I see the evidence.

And you wouldn't want me to, because what if I'm wrong? What if I get all excited and say, hey, we've got this, and it turns out to not be that. Well, you would have every reason to be pissed at me. So I don't want you guys to be pissed at me. I want you to be healthy. I want you to be happy and I want everyone listening to this to survive this thing so we can enjoy the roaring 20s that are coming

because it's going to be a big ass party and if I miss it because some jackass coughs in my face and I die from this I am going to be pissed as hell so let's all do our part and every person that's socially isolating is doing their part to save lives to save other people from entering into the hospital system and possibly dying. So good for you.

Thank you for your service. And we will be, you know, strutting our stuff pretty soon. All right. Well, listen, we can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg, Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, Lewis, Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy. Dennis Falcone, Ron Bennington, and Fizz Wattley, who early supported 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. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap, and check out the COVID sit reps on the laugh button channel on YouTube. And don't forget to use stuff.com, stuff.com, stuff.com for all your Amazon needs, and premium.com.com if you want archives.

And noom.com.com if you want to attain your ideal body weight with me, although I'm struggling a little bit right now just from stress eating. But Noom is helping me with that as well. 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.