Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 403 - SARS AINT JUST A CATALOG Y'ALL

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Update on the peak; Hydroxychloroquine update (sort of); was the lockdown too severe? What happens when the next wave hits? Tacie asks all the questions for you. Also some dang nut calls in...   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-ho-de-ho. Yeah, me and the carri-de-old. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Zabola vows stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain now.

Blast with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want to magic pills for my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I'm aging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal Tacey. Hello, Tacey.

Hello, everyone. Well, you're doing the Dave Landau impression. Am I? Hello, everyone. No, anyway. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the Internet. You've got a question you're embarrassed. It's called Parallel Thinking, Tase.

It's fine. 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 347-766-4-33-23. That's 347. Poohhead? Who had? Indeed. I don't know if I like saying that.

You might need to quit asking me that question. Okay. It's my way of humiliating the person that I have in the studio. You've just... Isn't it being married to you enough? Humiliation. Ooh. I kid.

I kid. I'm sorry. Just read the script, Steve, and shut the F up. Okay, visit our website. or 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 providers. Take everything here with the grain of salt.

Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking to over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctress, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory scientist, registered dietitian or whatever. All right, very good. Hey, don't forget to check out stuff.doctrsteve.com. If you go to stuff.com now there is a brand new tools for coping with the social distancing section quite close to the top. And check that out.

It's a work in progress. I'm just throwing some stuff up there. I found some contactless thermometers that actually are in stock at some places and alternatives to turlet paper. I got a bidet and some flushable wipes and some other stuff like that on there. So check it out. Stuff. Dot,doctrsteve.com. And please don't ever forget tweakeda.com.

Offer fluid for 33% off your order are the best earbuds on the market for the price and the best customer service. anywhere. And Noom. Dot, Dr.steve.com, if you want to attain your ideal body weight like I did. And I was having a little bit of trouble, and I kind of got back with the program on Noom and getting my mind straight again, and my weights right back down where it was. So I'm feeling pretty good about that, although every once in a while I just go, oh, what the hell with it?

I'm just going to eat, you know, which is actually okay on Noom. I do that like twice a day. Well, okay. So we all deal with this stress differently. But numbe.com gets you two free weeks and 20% off if you do decide to do it. And it's only a three-month program. There's no points. It's not a diet.

It's a psychology app. And check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. At least go over there and say hello to the poor little feller. He's been sending me MP3 files of songs that he's been recording in his little studio that he wants us to play when this is all over. So there's a couple of good ones in there. Good. All right. Very good.

I don't know if we're ever going to go back. I kind of enjoy having you here. I don't know if I'm ready to commit like that. I already made one commitment with you. That was enough, right? Yeah. It's kind of like those people who renew their vows. Idiots.

Yeah, that is dumb. Would you ever want to do that? No. I think it's bad luck, first of all, and I think one contract is enough. I do too. and I don't think, I'm not sure what, someone's guilty when they're doing that. Well, in the situation, yes. Someone's guilty and, we need to remove our house.

And, yeah, I just don't get it. And I don't, we don't like really, I mean, this sounds stupid coming from two people who are on the radio. But we really don't like calling attention to ourselves either. at least not in real life. No, I really don't. Just like, you know, oh, look at me. Mm-hmm. You know, oh, they're so in love.

Shut up. I remember that one time I was watching all those wedding shows, and you said, do you want to get married again? And I thought that was the funniest thing. I could see the sweat on your forehead. But no, I just like to watch people pick out wedding dresses and people complain about other people's weddings. That was very reassuring. as I'm sure it was very reassuring when I told you when we were initially dating that you will never have to worry about me asking for any butt ass play.

Yes, but it wouldn't matter if you asked for it or not. You wouldn't get it. Of course. Give yourself a bill. Yeah, I think that's a lot of people that's reassuring. I think there are some women that would be a deal breaker, but anyway. I think for some women, that would be, yeah, they, yeah. Well, if you ain't going to give me that, the hell with you.

Yeah, I'm good without it. Get off me, Daddy. You're crushing my cigarettes. It's so gross. But, you know, if you guys do it, you know, whatever. Yeah, no, no, no, no judgment in that regard. Simply not interested in any way. Yeah, everybody's different.

Yeah. Okay, well, that's very profound and very open-minded of you to say. Yes, I know. All right. So I want you all to check out our YouTube channel. Well, it's not our YouTube channel. It's the laugh buttons YouTube channel where we're doing COVID situation reports. And by me, I say I mean I.

But it is a weird place to do sort of a serious pandemic update, a YouTube channel called The Laugh Button, but it turns out that Matt from the syndicate, Matt Kleinschmidt, who owns Riotcast Network also owns the Laugh button channel, and he asked me to do some videos over there. And there's some very encouraging signs. I'm doing technical analysis on some of these numbers. But now, if you're not aware of what that is, the swing traders out there particularly in the stock market.

we'll know what technical analysis is. It's where you look at lagging indicators and try to predict trends. And there are a couple of tools that are really simple. I mean, it's not any kind of genius or anything, but I just looked at the graph of the new cases in the United States, yes, using WHO data, but if you look at it, it's not that different from the Johns Hopkins data. And that's when I started when I was naive in the beginning. and so I'm just sort of stuck with this database that I build up, but it's good enough.

And it started looking to me like a stock chart taste. And so I applied some technical analysis using simple moving averages, a five-day simple-moving average, and a 20-day simple-moving average. And I chose those two numbers because five days is the average amount of time from infection to having symptoms. 96% of people will show symptoms within 11 days. And then 20 days is about the average length of the disease from infection until you start feeling better. So even then, those two numbers are kind of arbitrary.

But when you look at those, when the five-day moving average crosses under the 20-day moving average, that's a sign of a significant trend downward that you may not see in. choppy kind of up and down data, you know. And that's what we would call in swing trading a strong cell signal under certain circumstances, which leads you to believe, well, no, it indicates that we're in a downward trend. And I'm starting to see these things now. So I explain that in some detail on the COVID sit rep from this last week, which was what taste? What was Sunday? 15th. Oh, I have no idea. We're recording this on April 15th, so 14th, the 12th. So it would have been the situation report from April 12th, 2020. And, you know, the problem with us doing these

shows in the middle of this pandemic is there's not much replay ability for these shows for six months from now. You know, if we take a vacation, they usually go in the vault six months and pull one out. We need to flag all of these COVID shows as no replay shows. I just realized that. But anyway, but yeah, it's looking like we are getting into territory where we're starting to decline in new cases. So you will see deaths continue to rise for probably 20 to 24 days. and then they will start to taper off as well because they lag behind. New cases, they don't die the day that they're diagnosed. You know, it takes anywhere from 11 days to 24 days before that happens.

And hopefully, and we've got some calls here talking about things that may result in decreased deaths overall if we're learning how to treat this disease better. So let me just throw out a couple other bits of news. Didier Raoul, the French investigator that published the first data on hydroxychloroquine azithromycin, is now published an abstract of over a thousand patients that he treated with hydroxychloroquine on azithromycin. And the one thing that we can take from it is he said that he didn't. see cardiac toxicity. The problem is, in this abstract, it doesn't say how they measured that.

Also, there are no controls. So he said 98% of people were, quote, unquote, cured. Well, I mean, if the death rate is 1%, I don't know that that reassures me. Yes. You know, so I want to see the data, and we need to see hard published data in controlled trials. Listen, I'm all ready to be all in with hydroxychloroquine, but we need more than anecdotal evidence. And if I tell you something worked for me, that's anecdotal evidence, right? And we all agree that's the worst kind of evidence. And if I tell you it worked for me a thousand times, it's still anecdotal. It's just I've told you that a thousand times.

And when you can also cherry pick data. I don't know if you and I talked about this. But if I send out, let's say I have a treatment, let's call it, well, I don't know, just some treatment for fatigue, let's say. And it has a 5% placebo effect, as all things have some placebo effect. So I send out a thousand of them to people, and it's basically a sugar pill. but it has 5% placebo effect. So how many people will send the survey back saying that they got a good result from this then? Yes, I'm asking you a math question.

Oh, I wasn't paying attention. Sorry. All right. It would be 50 people. So if it was 10%, if it were 10%, it would be 100 people, right? and if it's 5%, which is a reasonable placebo effect, it would be 50 people. So 50 people send you back a survey saying, yes, I had an excellent result from this. And then you only publish those 50 results on your website.

Well, it's page after page. They've got 50 pages of testimonials from people saying this stuff works great. Okay. It's worthless. us. So that's why we really need controlled trials. You take a thousand people and you treat them with the medication. And if you feel that doing a placebo-controlled trial is unethical, that's okay. You can match your thousand people with easily find a thousand people that didn't take the drug. And just look at the outcomes. Things that you can measure. If you've got data on viral clearing in the control group,

great. Well, you can compare it to yours. We did viral PCR levels on all these patients and it showed clearing at 50% faster rate. And if it's statistically significant and you can make a good case for that, then you can say it. In this group of mild patients that we treated, 26% of them went to the hospital. In this group that we didn't treat 50%, something like that. If it's statistically significant, then you can make a claim. None of the studies that have been published so far, including D.D.A.R.R.O.'s abstract, have anything like this in it.

So there are studies ongoing, but they take longer. They do take longer, and people are in a rush, in a hurry, and panicking. Yep. So a couple of things. I just want to make sure and be reassured that what we're doing by this social distancing and staying the hill at home all the time. And shutting down the economy. And shutting down the economy is worth it.

Because I see all these commentators everywhere, you know, reminding people. about H1N1 and how it was such a big deal, but, you know, now nobody remembers it. Yep. We said that early on in this, that we were talking about this coronavirus, and everybody just sort of blew off H1N1 in 2009, but go ahead. Okay. And then also comparing this to the common cold and how it's really just being used to be weaponized against President Trump, and I don't want to get political, but I do.

want to make sure that what we're doing is, is for a good reason. And, you know, I keep seeing things that talk about how the flu is a big deal and kills more people and nobody cares about that. So why in the hell are we at home? I mean, are these people just misunderstanding things? Is what we're doing really necessary? That's, that's what I'm, you know, I'm just kind of starting to doubt it. I mean, I'm in week five of quarantine. Yeah. So. Getting a little stir-crazy. Yeah, I just want to make sure that it's... You actually did something humanitarian for all mankind the other day just so you could get out of that.

Just so I could get out of the house. I wore a mask the whole time in the grocery store. I came out, took my mask off off. Well, tell people what you were doing. Well, but I want to tell this story. So I had this mask on. I was being very good. And I came out, I took my mask off.

And immediately before I disinfected my hands, I wiped my nose. and rubbed my eyes. So now apparently I have it because I touched everything in the grocery store. But, you know, there's, I have a friend who runs, he runs a food-based charity. And he said the need was significant now because all of these hourly, you know, based employees have lost their job. And so just everything's, the need for food is on such a rise. And, you know, he said, can you help and well okay yeah i've really got nothing better to do and and and and so we did it and we're going to continue to do it and um all they're wanting really and i'm sure everybody has a place like this in their area just high calorie food that's what it's all about right now is just high calorie

food getting calories into these people who really just don't have a way to afford food or you know are on the verge of losing where they live, you know. So that's what we did. And it's really kind of, I don't like to be somebody who does a good deed and talks about it. I really just wanted to say it's really hard to not touch your face and to do things you're not supposed to do when you're not used to it. Easy to not touch your face when you have a mask on. Yeah, but as soon as you take your mask off, then you touch your face. That's what I did.

Right. Because your nose itches. And I don't know how people wear glasses and masks at the same time because I couldn't see in the grocery store I didn't have my glasses on because they kept fogging up. Oh, well, I can tell you that because I have glasses and I wear a mask every day. When you first put it on, you have to conform it to your nose and it might take two or three times to get it right. But once you do, yeah, then when you breathe, it goes out the side and it doesn't fogg up

your glasses. I mean, it was, yeah, it was just, it was very exciting to be out, and it was just very hard to remember to social distance and very hard to do the right things. Oh, I've got one person on my team, and he's a delightful person, but he is one of these close talkers, and I'm constantly like, dude, you are invading my space and by space, I mean, he's, you know, right on top of me, and it's, you know, our space is now expanding. it's now we really sort of have this feeling it's amazing how quickly we've gotten used to the idea of being six feet away from everybody else i'm used to the idea i'm not used to the practice yeah yeah i'm out in it more than you are so but to your question h1n1 originated in the americas it could have been south of the border that's one study suggested that but it was in the americas uh between april 12th 2009 and a year later, there were 60 million H1N1 cases. There were 275,000 hospitalizations, but only 12,000 deaths, which is why people didn't freak about the H1N1 pandemic, although we had a listener, Barry the Blade, who started our trucker duty a bit on this show years ago.

He died. And our friend Richard David Smith, I believe his ventilator episode was related to the swine flu pandemic as well. He is the owner with his wife, Chetai, of hyperphysics, the energy drink for nerds. I also hear, you know, that the media is just controlling this. I just, I don't understand what their motive would be. Right. So, well, let's talk about real numbers then. Let's get ECHO to give us the answer here.

Echo, what is 12,469 percentage? No, shit, I asked that wrong. Echo, never mind. Okay. Did she light up? I wasn't paying attention. Echo, what percent of 274304 is 12,469? 12,469 is 4.5469 is 4.546% of 274,304.

Is that right? It's 4%. Okay, it seems like it would be less than that. Okay. Well, anyway, that can't be right. Let me get out of dang calculator. I should have done this before the show. I'm sorry.

Oh, this is very professional. I'm well aware of that. Okay. Okay, one, two, let's just do 12,000, so I don't have to say all the numbers divided by 275. Okay, no, she was right. It's 4%. Can that, oh, that's hospitalizations. No wonder.

I'm a damn idiot. So it's 4% of the people who were hospitalized. But of the cases themselves, okay, 60 million. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Echo, what percent of 60 million is 12,469? That's the question I meant to ask. 12,469 is 0.02078% of 60 million. Okay, so this was an incredibly low percentage of people that died compared to the number of cases.

Now, COVID-19 deaths are estimated. We first thought it was 3% of cases, and now in the United States, you know, one, 1.5%. And that's not counting asymptomatic cases. Those are people that we know of. So let's just say it's 1%. So 1% would be 10 times more than the usual influenza death rate, which is 0.1%. And it would be, gosh, a whole lot more than the swine flu pandemic.

So what did she say the percentage was, 0.02%? Is that what she said? I don't know. So 0.1 divided by 0.02. So it's five times more, if that's what she said. Hell, I've already forgotten. So we're doing this because of the deaths. So, yes. So let me finish on that particular thing.

So we are talking about if 60 million people got swine flu and if 60 million people, let's just say that it got the same penetrance into our country as swine flu did, then you're talking 600,000 deaths. And for every one of those deaths, you're talking five times that many people were in the hospital. So times five would be three million people in the hospital. We've got 100,000 ICU beds in this country. So it goes back to just not overwhelming the hospital system. Well, if all of those people came in at once, which of course they wouldn't, but let's say that they came in over a short period of time, then you're talking about people. in the halls, in the, you know, stacked up in the emergency room being treated in the halls of the hospital.

And then this stuff backs up like a pump that's been overprimed in that now you, you know, hospitals right now aren't full of just COVID people. There's people with heart attacks, stroke, congestive heart failure, regular pneumonia's, appendicitis. Now none of those people can get into the hospital. This is the sort of catastrophic scenario that they were trying to avoid by shutting the economy down. Now, when we reemerge, people say, well, it's just going to come right back. We're going to be right back.

There's another, there is another way to do this. And if you're prepared, you can mitigate in a completely different way. And the way to do that is using the Singapore model, I think. This is my opinion. The Singapore model is you treat this like a sexually transmitted disease. And when you find somebody that's positive, you go and track every single person that they've come into contact with. And if you have an abundance of antibody tests or an abundance of tests, you isolate all those people they came into contact with and then you test them. And if after five days they're not showing IGM antibodies, which IGM are the rapidly produced antibodies by the body,

then they can go back to work and go about their business. If they do, then they have to stay isolated until they're clear. And so there will be a lot of people that are going to go, well, this effing sucks. Because I was just the person that handed this person their happy meals at McDonald's. And now I've got to go isolate, but yes. But see, Singapore's got sort of a different government and a different populace. And I think it may be a little bit easier to do there. But if we could do that model, most people can be at work.

Most people could be at school. They're screening people when they go to school. And if anybody is positive, they're isolating them and their family and all of their contacts. But schools are still open. Restaurants are still open, that kind of stuff. And they've got an incredibly low death rate from COVID-19, assuming that their numbers are accurate. I don't have any reason to think that they're not. So there is a way out of this, even if we don't have an adequate treatment and even if we don't have a vaccine.

Now, if we do get an adequate treatment, let's just say hydroxychloroquine. I'm just going to use it as an example. We prove that it actually prevents people from going to the hospital, sort of like influenza vaccine and Tammy flu does for us now for influenza. helps prevent hospitalizations, helps prevent deaths. If we could get it down to influenza numbers and say we'd knock it down by 90%. We all go back to work the next day, assuming that we've got enough drug to give people when they get sick. But we have to have tests that show we're treating people the second that they get sick

instead of waiting until they're at death's door before we treat them. Because then they're in this whole cytokine storm thing that we've talked about before, and hydroxychloroquine angle cut it in that situation, which is why that one study showed that it didn't provide any benefit because they waited until people were almost dying before they gave it to them. Well, I feel like I ask this question in a different way every week, so I'm going to try to stop. No, ask, if you're asking it, I'm guaranteeing you

that people out there are asking the same question, And not everybody listens to this show every week. They'd be crazy if they did, to be honest. Agreed. You're listening to Weird Medicine. So let's take a minute to talk about a new sponsor to the show, deepdiscount.com. It's a great site to buy movies, TV shows, music, electronics, tabletop games. It's insane.

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one great price at deepdiscount.com. Support our sponsor and own your passion. thanks deep discount You don't say thanks deep discount Thank you deep discount So some other rumors I've heard about the virus It's mutated into a more deadly strain

I hear it's a joke And we should ignore it and go back to regular life Or it's mutated into a more deadly strain what are your thoughts on that i mean i i believe that's not true most of the time viruses when they mutate mutate to a less deadly strain why because if you kill somebody if you're a virus and you kill somebody you can't transmit your genetic material anymore from that person from the minute that they die and uh that That's why Ebola, that's one of the hypotheses anyway, why Ebola just hasn't taken over the world because it kills people so fast and at such a high rate that it just can't transmit itself to enough people.

And there aren't asymptomatic carriers of that that we know of, at least not in the beginning part of the disease. So you can isolate those people pretty quickly and isolate the people around them that have come into contact with them. most mutations that happen with a virus are actually harmful to the virus itself. They make the thing not work. It's very unusual for them to have a more effective mutation, but if you're, you know, you're talking about an almost infinite number of instances, there will be some mutations. Yes, these things will mutate, and then we'll have to fight another one. But, you know, you brought up this concept of coronavirus,

being a cold. Well, it is. Colds are picornoviruses, or a.k-a. rhinoviruses and coronaviruses. Those are the majority of colds that are out there. And they do mutate around so they can infect you again. And most of the time, you just mount this immune response to it that causes you to cough and snot your nose and stuff like that. And then it's gone. You give it to a few people and you're done with it. And so that's where that comes from. Coronaviruss are colds, and this is a cold that it's just killing people, you know, because it's mounting, some people's bodies are mounting an insane response to this, to this virus. Another rumor I've heard are patients who have recovered. You know, you hear about patients

who recover, but they test positive again. Are they able to, um, transmit the virus? Another, you know, and I yell at the TV because every time there's a doctor on and they ask, someone asks a question, they say, oh, that's a great question. I get so sick of hearing that. But that is a great question. There are people out there. They've been few and far between, but there have been a few that have tested negative a couple of times.

And then all of a sudden test positive again. And there are a couple of hypotheses about this. One is that the tests that they're using on these folks, sometimes the polymerase chain reaction tests can have a false negative rate as high as 20%. So that means if you take 100 people that all have the virus, maybe only 80 of them will show up as being positive. So retesting is always a smart thing to do in a situation like that. Well, if you've got a 20% false negative rate,

the odds of getting two false negatives in a row, is 4%. So it's non-zero. It's unlikely. Ninety-six percent of the time the second test will be positive, or one or the two tests will be positive. But the odds of getting, as I said, two negatives in a row is 4%. So you can see this happen. And then the third test is positive. It looks like that, well, it went away and then it came back. But actually, it was a always there. The question is on these people that are testing positive after they've tested negative or been negative for a while, are they reinfected? Or are they just detecting residual viral RNA in the nose? Because we're not really detecting virus. The test can't tell whether you can be infected by it. It just detects the viral genetic material. And if you've broken up all those viruses and they're non-viable, you could still detect the viral RNA and say, well, this is a positive test. So the only way to know if those particles that they're detecting are actually

virulent would be to grow them in viral culture. You know, you put them in a petri dish with a bunch of cells and see if they multiply. And they're not doing that. So it's very interesting. No one No, it's the real question I've been asking about these people that are showing up positive, are they getting sick? Because if they're not getting sick, it doesn't really matter. It really does matter. Can they transmit it to other people? And that we just don't know the answer to yet. Okay.

Another one I have to assume so. Is eating garlic or taking vitamin C can help keep the virus away? Oh, now the vitamin C, now they're doing some studies on high-dose vitamin C, giving it intravenous. intravenously to people who are really sick, and there have been some claims that there's some positive results from that. But I've seen no evidence that taking vitamin C, nor taking garlic or any other supplement like elderberries actually prevents you from getting the disease. The thing that can prevent you from getting the disease is not being around people who are sick and washing your hands and not touching your stupid face.

Which is hard. It is hard. And so you're pregnant. I am? Well, surprise, I am. No, I'm just kidding. Oh, boy. Can you imagine?

Pregnant women can transmit the virus to the baby. Sure. Well, you're well aware of this. Yes, I did that with our youngest. You had a cold. It was a terrible cold. And it turned out it was RSV. They would not treat me because they were afraid it would hurt the baby in utero.

Nothing to treat. Nothing to treat. It was a virus. Still upset. about it. Well, had the baby, and then the baby got sick as shit. Yeah, five days later, he had a temp of 105. But a little plug for breastfeeding, you saved his life. Because you had had the virus, you had IGA antibodies in your breast milk that you

transmitted to him. And that saved not only his life, but also saved him from certain serious sequelae that we often see in newborns that get respiratory syncytial virus because if you remember the nurses were like shaking their heads when we brought him in oh he's got you know he's really really sick we don't know and if he does survive he's going to have horrible asthma and that kid is as hail and hearty as any kid possible but you saved his life by having by breastfeeding him all throughout that and for that i give you one of these thank you very much All I wanted was a little cough syrup.

Couldn't get that. Well, that's a whole different thing. Anyway, so, and last thing I would like, I saw on. So breastfeed, everybody, as long as you can. If you can. But now, listen, there are some people who can't, and it shouldn't be a competition from woman to woman. I had a friend who could breastfeed, and it was easy for her.

It was a joke for her. and she really made me feel like I was less of a human because I just was not producing milk. She said that to you? I mean, she said, what did she say? No, I mean, she was just like, oh, it's easy to taste. Just, you know, just do it. And then here I am pumping every 30 minutes. Here we were pumping.

Resting for 15. No, me. And then breastfeeding for 30. I mean, it was a nightmare, and so I just don't, I hate that competition between women. So if you can, breastfeeding is good. I'm just going to throw this out there. I remember you being asleep and me, you know, it was horrible. Pumping, putting the pumps on you and cataloging all the breast milk.

And it was, yeah, you were producing maybe an ounce extra every time. And you remember my niece? Yes, she was a milk cow. We went to her house. Tell that story. So she's giving us all the stuff she doesn't need anymore for her child. And she had a double freezer downstairs, and she opened it up. And it was just a freezer full of breast milk.

Nothing, but it was gallons and gallons and gallon. And I just looked at her and said, what are you? That's exactly how I remember it, too. And, well, it didn't, it didn't turn out that way for me. So, um, although, uh, the second time, it was a little, it seemed a little easier. And it was easier. It did save his life. So if you are a woman and listening to this and if you're shaming a friend because she doesn't seem to be able to breastfeed, that's naughty.

Yeah. And if you feel ashamed. Yeah. It just sometimes, you know, we had, I remember with our first, you would feed him and then we had to weigh him before and after. just to kind of gauge how much he was actually getting. And the doctor handed me a can of formula and said, just do this. I mean. But, you know, even a little bit helps.

And the little kid looks like he's a little Ethiopian baby, starved to death in his pictures. It's really, it's pitiful. He was cute. He looked like a little alien. It was a cute little skinny thing. But anyway. He still is. So, and last thing I have that I found on Facebook that kind of,

really freaked me out this morning was it said, you know, how those marked safe from little Facebook posts. I found one that said marked in danger from massive government overreach and crippling national debt. And that's why I get so freaked out about all of this, you know, the economy just being dead and us staying at home and people saying it's not necessary. And that's why I keep asking you questions. Yep. Well, where we were at the time, I don't think there was any choice. Now, when we emerge from this, we don't have to go back to this, I don't think, if we're smart about it. So we'll just see how smart we are.

And again, any treatment that comes out, and Remdesivir trials are coming down the pike as well, and I'm going to have to give it to Gilead Labs, the creators of Remdesivir. They did this for, they initially developed a... hoping it would be a good Ebola drug, but it wasn't. But it showed some activity in MERS, you know, the Middle East respiratory syndrome. Yeah, syndrome. And it, but there were so few cases of it, they really couldn't prove anything. So they've got tons and tons of cases now.

And I read an article that said that the remdesivir, when it comes out, it's going to be like nine bucks a dose. Oh, that's good. They could jack that up. I mean, what was that guy, Schrelli or Schrelli or whoever? I mean, you know, thank goodness he's not running this corporation because it, or, you know, or maybe it is you have to take a million doses, but still, you know, it's $9 a dose. And I'm very proud of them for not jacking up the price on this stuff.

And making it available for compassionate use as well. So those trials, it's in stage three. or phase three trials right now. We should have numbers on that very soon. All right. You want to take some questions? Yes, I'm sorry, everyone, that I just need to take care of my paranoia. And then we take questions.

I guess that's how this shows. Well, no paranoia in any of these questions whatsoever. Okay. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. Let's see here. You're going to see how much like everyone. else you are, to be honest.

Uh-oh. Okay. It would be a help of if I started. Hey, Dr. Steve, how are you? Good, man. I'm doing pretty good. Hey, good. Thanks for keeping us all updated.

Oh, how are you? Thanks. My question is, can mosquitoes actually transfer COVID-19? Is it possible, let's say, bite somebody with it, and then I get fit next. What's the possibility? Oh, I haven't thought of that one yet. Well, and I'm biting my tongue. not to say great question on all of these, okay?

That's something to worry about tonight. I'll have to write that down. You don't have to worry about it. There's zero evidence that mosquitoes have the receptor required to transmit this virus. So in humans, it cleaves to an ACE to receptor. And for this to be receptor-free, in other words, for the mosquitoes to be able to do this without having receptors, We'd have to have a condition called viremia, meaning that the virus would have to be floating around in our bloodstream. And it's not really doing that.

It's sticking to mucous membranes and causing inflammation and then causing – and then you swallow it, and it ends up in the GI tract and things like that. You don't really have this massive viremia that is required for a mosquito to suck up viruses from your arm and then – deposit them in my arm. And they don't have the receptors. So so far, there's no evidence whatsoever that this is a mosquito-borne virus. And as a matter of fact, I'm not aware of any coronaviruses that are mosquito transmitted. So that's good. All right? Okay. Okay, good. Probably still going to worry about it, though. Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Phil in Tampa. I'm calling because, you know, ever since this outbreak happened with the COVID.

I've heard from everybody I've known in my life that they have never seen anything like this before in their lives. I'm only 33 and I certainly don't remember, you know, maybe H1N1, but never to this extent. So just come on and see, you know, maybe has there been a story in your professional career that was your first I've never seen anything like this before, whether it was a disease or a patient, something crazy, you know, maybe something funny could share with the crowd. And that's all. Oh, well, yes, but it's not funny.

The one thing I saw for the first time and hoped to never see again was the worst death that I've ever experienced. And this was a person that had an aorta esophageal fistula. And what this is is a communication between the aorta, which is the large high-pressure blood vessel that comes out of the heart and their esophagus, okay? And so this person had an esophageal cancer, ate through their esophagus and started eating into the aorta. And when it finally accomplished its task, the person sort of stood up and opened their mouth and four pumps, all of their blood came shooting out of their mouth against the wall,

splattering against the wall 10 feet away. And they keeled over, and that was the end of that. So, yes. Where was this? That was in medical school way before you were even born. Did they have symptoms? Yes. Well, they had, yeah, they had symptoms of, you know, esophageal pain.

This is an extremely rare, rare once-in-a-lifetime type thing, and most people will never see it. I just had the misfortune of seeing such a thing. Yeah, it was awful. Dudley and Bob, whose show I've been on several times, Dale Dudley out of Austin, Texas. asked me what was the worst death I ever witnessed, and I told them that story, and they keep asking me, well, what's the second worst?

And I can't come up with anything. I mean, that was just so insanely awful that any other thing I've seen has been, not even comes close to that. So they're all just sort of bunched up at the bottom. But anyway, yeah, you know, no one has seen this before that very few people that are living. My dad lived through the pandemic of 1918,

but he was two years old. He was born in 1916, and he died several years ago. So there are some people around that probably lived through that H1N1 pandemic. I just want to throw out, Google the plague of Justinian. This was in 541 AD, and then it came back and forth and back and forth for almost 200 years. It was a pandemic that afflicted the Byzantine Empire and particularly constant. Stantonople, which is now, I guess, what Istanbul, right? 25 to 100 million people died from that.

And that was equivalent to half of Europe's population at the time of the first outbreak. So it didn't kill that many people all at once. It was over a couple hundred years. But it completely just caused upheaval. You know, back then they had no idea what germs. were or how to avoid getting sick. And it was caused by Yersinia Pestis, which is the same organism that caused the black death. And this organism lives in fleas that live on rats, and then there you go.

And back in those days, we were living with rats all the time. and the fleas would jump over, you know, bite people, and then the black death would occur. Now, why it went away? Hell, I don't know. It was a pretty successful plague. So it just kind of petered out on its own. It returned until the 8th century, and they had a major effect on European history, as this one is going to have with ours. But it was way, way worse than this.

been much worse plagues in the past. But they were to our ancestors, so really, who gives a shit? This is us right now. It doesn't really make you feel better that there were worst plagues in the past. All right. Let's see. Do I have – oh, no, I've got a good one. This is COVID-related, but less horrible.

They're doing okay and everybody else. That's Stacey Deloche, everybody. Lest I not acknowledge that it's him. That's for the one Twitter guy that yelled at me that said, I hate it when Dr. Steve takes your questions and doesn't acknowledge you. So God forbid that I don't acknowledge. Stacey Deloche, everybody. All right, all right, all right.

I had a quick question. I was listening to you there on, and you were doing another podcast with a guy out of Long Island. Anyway, talking about the virus and all the different possible cures for it, how would you go about volunteering to be in the trials? Okay. You know, if they're going to try to come up with some way to prevent the coronavirus, can somebody just volunteer to take the injection to see if that's the worst? Yeah, so you absolutely can. and if you want to volunteer for the vaccine trials, you can do it right now. And here is the address.

It is vaccines at NIH.gov. That's November Indiahotel.gov. Vaccines at NIH.gov. Or you can call 866-833-L-3-LIFE. And the other place that you can go, if you want to enroll in a clinical trial, is clinical trials.gov. And then you just put in COVID-19 and click to filter by those that are recruiting, and you can see what's out there. And if there's something that interests you and you meet the criteria, there may be some things for asymptomatic people. There may be some vaccine trials out there.

If you're sick or you know someone that's sick, there may be a trial out there for them as well. So check that out. Clinicaltrials.gov. All right. Excellent. Excellent question. All right. I'm sure this one will be similar.

I haven't talked to you in quite a while. It's been, I think, several months. And I apologize for not getting back to you. And he said that I would contact you. And it was about that thing we talked about where, you know, I think I agree 100%. And I think you're saying it means a lot to me. And if you just give me a little bit more information along that line, I mean, I don't think that necessarily I have to follow. Have you ever heard that Richard Christie phony phone call where he calls Tradio and says, well, I got an item for sale and it's an item and it's a really nice item?

I was wondering if I missed the question. possibly those other things, side of, side of this, some of the little ones we had kind of the bullet marks by, I think those would be, those would be, those would be kind of advisable. And anyway, I don't want to keep a lot of your time here because I know you're a busy man. Okay, we got a minute 23. Let's see if this goes anywhere. You got a lot of messages on this machine, and I probably don't want to listen to one that is overextendedly long, and I apologize that from the get-go, but I just like to say, if you don't mind, If I could say, if I got five seconds, I'd be in five minutes here, I'd like to tell you a few things about myself. Okay. I'm angry, Chris Crossofferson.

I'm not going to, folks, as you can quite imagine. But anyway, I do have to have the same name, same moniker as it were, and, you know, whatever you want to. Sobre K.A. that is my name. Anyway, let's not go any further than that. Let's cover the base. I want to tell you about a little bit about myself. I was born in Kentucky in 1940s. And, you know, I'm kind of getting up there

And you're closer to your age bracket And, uh, anyway, uh, you know, I followed yourself for years and I think the reality of it. I think, I don't know if you remember me or not, but I have communicated to me several times on your program to send him requests for information dealing with anal hemlocks and other things in the imagination. But anyway, let's not go into that time.

I'm not sure you don't want to go out of claptrap or a long-winded discussions about things that aren't really germane to you know, the reason why I call. You know what I'll do is I'll just, I'll put the whole phone call at the end of the show. How about that? How long is it? It's like five minutes long. Chris Christofferson, that's his nom de telephone.

That was one euphemism he didn't use. All right, so we'll do that. But, yeah, thanks for being here. And I really enjoy doing these shows with you. Is it done? Yeah, no. I mean, we're still talking. Oh, we're still talking.

Oh, well, you're welcome, Steve. Did you think I just said that to you? I thought it was a little odd. No, but I would say that to you, honey. I do enjoy doing these with you, and thanks for being here. Oh, you're welcome. Because I got nowhere else to go. Well, we can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Matt Kleinschmidt, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton,

Travis Teft, Louis Johnson, Paul Offcharski, Eric Nagel, Rowan Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone. Ron Bennington and Fez Watley, whose 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 5pm, Eastern on demand, and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks go 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 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 tase thank you Hello there, Dr. Steve.

I haven't talked to you in quite a while. It's been, I think it's about several months, and I apologize for not getting back to you. And he said, and I last said that I would contact you. And it was about that thing we talked about where, you know, I think I agree 100%, and I think you're saying it means a lot to me. And if you just give me a little bit more information along that line,

I mean, I don't think that necessarily I have to follow through on everything we talked about, But possibly those other things, the side of this, some of the little ones we had kind of the bullet marks by, I think those would be, those would be, those would be kind of advisable. And anyway, I don't want to keep a lot of your time here because I know you're a busy man, and you've got a lot of messages on this machine, and I probably don't want to listen to one that is over-extendedly long. And I apologize that from the get-go, but I'd just like to say, if you don't mind, if I could say, If I got five seconds, you give me five minutes here.

I'd like to tell you a few things about myself. Okay, my name is Chris Christofferson. I'm not going to, folks angry as you can quite imagine. But anyway, I do happen to have the same name, same moniker as it were, and, you know, whatever you want to go, Sovereke, and A.K.A. that is my name. Anyway, let's not go any further than that. Let's cover the basis. I want to tell you about a little bit about myself.

I was born in Kentucky in 1943, and I'm, you know, kind of getting up there. and you're closer to your age bracket. And anyway, you know, I followed your show for years, and I think for reality of it. I don't know if you remember me or not, but I have communicated with you several times on your program, sit in a request for information dealing with anal hemorrhomes and other things in that nation.

But anyway, let's not go into that. It's not here or there. I'm sure you don't want to hear a lot of claptrap or long-winded discussions about things that aren't really germane to, you know, the reason why I call here in the first place. And Dr. Steve, I'd just like to say, it's narrowing it down to one question. If I could ask you one question, if you don't mind, if you could answer this, you would help me so much. I can't tell you how much it would help me.

If you would just maybe take five seconds and think about the question I'm getting ready to ask you and tell me this, tell me in your best judgment. And I tell you what, it may just sound like you may be thinking yourself what difference does it make, what do I say? You know, well, in this case, it's going to make a lot of difference, Dr. Steve. It's going to make a lot of difference. It made myself understood here. Your decision, your choice of words here is very important. So let me ask the question. If you don't mind, I want to proceed here.

And cut to the quick, because I know your time is valuable. Yaddy, yada, yada, I'm sorry, yeah, exactly. I keep paraphrasing here. But anyway, Dr. Steve, so, you know, the question is, the question is, the question is, the question It is. What is your...