Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 404 - Covid Schmovid

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss "the new normal," scheduling when there's nothing to do, the psychology of exercise, how Remdesivir works, and more. 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. In the garretid. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Toboliviris stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out and blasted with the way.

an ultrasonic, agographic, and a pulsating shave, I want a magic pill for 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. 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 with my wife Tacey. Hello, Tacey. Hello, everyone. 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 to a regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-7-66-4-3-23.

That's 347 poohead. Tacey doesn't like to say it anymore. 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, where you can get a Bristol-stool-scale mug. and rate your stools while you drink your cup of coffee in the morning. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt.

Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking to it over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physicianist, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory scientist, registered dietician or whatever. Or whatever. Hey, don't forget to check out feels.com slash fluid. and stuff dot Dr. Steve.com for all of your Amazon needs. We started a sort of COVID-19 toolkit on there, and I'm interested in any thoughts you all might have on other things I could put on there.

Just stuff that Amazon has. I didn't put toilet paper on there because they didn't have any. What about paper towels? We need to start thinking about getting paper towels. Yeah, okay, we'll do. so the paper products thing still kind of baffles me and the manufacturers keep saying it's not a supply problem it's a demand problem well then that's a supply problem

because every time we go to the store it ain't got no supply so some lady yelled at me the other day you got too close I did you should know better well I do know better but it was the first time in in six weeks they had toilet paper. And we both, I was turning right and she was going straight. And so we ended up kind of in the same place at the same time. So I let her get ahead of me. And then we were approaching the toilet paper. And I saw there was, it was full. The shelves were completely full of toilet paper. And I went,

oh, thank God. And we both had masks on. And I was just going to sneak in behind. her and grab one. And she said, do you want to go in front of me? And I'm like, no. No, it's okay. You go. And she's like, well, fine. Then get back. And she just waved me back. I'm like, lady, I pose no danger to you, but she wasn't wrong. She didn't know that you were a health care hero. That's right. So anyway. So, yeah, so I got posted for not social distancing. It's hard to remember. Well, when you, yes, when you get all excited about a roll a toilet paper, it is hard to remember, because that's really what was, that's all I could think of was in my head was just toilet paper, toilet paper, toilet paper, toilet paper. It's idiotic. What a, what a

world. I know, I know. If you had told me that there would be a shortage of toilet paper and plaquinell, two months ago, I would have thought you're a dang nut. I still think you're a dang nut, but anyway. Don't forget, tweakedaio.com, offer code fluid. for 33% off the best earbuds for the price and the best customer service anywhere. And if you want to attain your ideal body weight with me, go to noom. Dottersteve.com.

Noom. dot, Dr. Steve.com. You get two weeks free and 20% off. You've decided, well, I mean, what else you got to do? Yeah, if that's what you're doing, this is the time for Noom because it is a psychology app. It will actually help you cope with this, too, I think. It really has helped you. It's, it's been amazing for you. And, and like I've said before,

it worked for me. And, um, you know, you just chose, you're just choosing not to mess with it right now. And my new stuff stays with me. Every time I, I eat bad stuff. I know exactly what I'm doing. But no, newm is great. Yeah. And, um, and that's it. Oh, check out Dr. Scott's website at simply herbals.net. I think he's getting a little stir crazy over there. He keeps sending me recordings that he's never it doesn't matter it's fine but I think he's going a little stir crazy and he's coming up with songs he wants us to do and I they you know I know he doesn't listen to the show so I can just say this they're they're unrecognizable I don't know what the hell he's sending me so all right well let's see what we got yeah you don't like saying the poo head

thing huh no I'm over it well I think we should change the phone number. It's stupid. Well, on the live show, we have 754-227-3-6-47, and that's 754-22-p penis. That's stupid, too. Or 754 bare nip. Isn't that a weird thing that it would be both of those things? Yes. That is strange, isn't it? Anyway, well, how are you doing this week? I'm okay. I'm okay. Well, see y'all next week then. Goodbye. I'm out of breath from coming up two flats of stairs. And I've lost some weight, and I think it's muscle mass because I've not been exercising.

Yeah. Now, my wife, for people who don't know her, is a workout MF. I mean, she's the strongest person, I know. And if she wanted to beat my ass, she could do it handily. Because, I mean, you work out four or five times a week, right? Used to. Well, okay. Let's say this is a normal time.

You work out four or five times a week. And, I mean, you're pumping iron and doing cardio and the whole thing. And your teacher or your coach, trainer, is like this sort of world-ranked bodybuilding dude, right? Yes. He's unbelievable, this guy. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, it's, what you're doing is sort of like, I mean, is it like, how would you compare it to CrossFit? He calls it Chris Fit because that's his name.

Yes. He says CrossFit. He says it's kind of dangerous because, you know, you're not really watching the movements or the technique as much as you should. Well, I'd say some of the CrossFit people would argue with that. Oh, they would definitely argue with that. It's a big, if you're into CrossFit, you are into CrossFit. And so, look, I've got no qualms with CrossFit. As long as you're exercising, I think that's, you know, awesome.

I don't care how you do it. But, you know, everybody's got their own opinion about things. And it's two different worlds and they don't like each other. Well, I just don't understand the psychology of this whole thing because we had a recumbent exercise bike, and it became a rack for my clothes mostly. Yes. And then we said, oh, well, we're not using it. Let's get rid of that, and let's get this Nordic track, S15I or whatever,

that's got the screen on it. And then we'll actually use it because you can tool around turkey, That was my thing, I was going on this tour of different mountain trails in Turkey. And it's cool because it goes up and down as the terrain goes up and down. It's really cool. And now it's become a coat rack for my clothes again. What in the hell is the psychology with that? I'm not ready to give up on it.

We should be using it every day. No, I'm not either, but I'm not using it like I should. Well, I feel like for me, I have to be on so many WebExes and I have to. to be up early and add on, and I have to be on WebEx's throughout the day. So I don't want to get sweaty and then be on a WebEx after I work out, so I would have to get up too early to do it. And then I don't want to do it later in the day because I start drinking now at 4.30. So there's really no time to slot it in.

Yeah, I am. Right, right. And we're talking 15 to 30 minutes, so obviously. Yeah, the average thing is, what, 20, 20? five minutes. Yeah, obviously we could slot it in. We just choose not to. But then I would be sweaty looking on a WebEx.

Look, these people on these WebExes, you wouldn't believe it's gone to shit. And so, uh-oh. Keep going. That's fine. And so I don't want to be that. I want to feel somewhat normal in this crazy, ridiculous world. And I want to look like a normal person. I want to look like I'm.

going to work, just in yoga pants. Right. So that's been important to me to, that's part of me staying normal. I think having the schedule has helped. I take a lot of inspiration from your ex-boss. I can say his first name. His name was Jody. And he had an office in his house.

And it drove his wife a little crazy because he would get up every day. and if he was working at home, he'd get up, take his shower, shave, do the whole thing, put on his suit and tie, and go up to his office. And then she'd come up and say, hey, can you go, you know, to the store and get, and he's like, no, I'm working. And I really respected that because he was given the company what they needed, and he was working, he was just working at home. So since I started working at home, I get up and do all the same stuff that Jody did. I get up and put my work clothes on and I come up to my home office and do my work up here because we're doing a lot of telemedicine and stuff. And I think about him every time because I really think that that makes huge difference because it'd be so easy if you're working at home to just lounge around in your robe and, you know. Oh, yes, and that too.

Oh, my God. And not work, you know. but having that schedule has helped keep me sane, I wonder if you've had the same experience. Yes, that's part of the, me getting up and getting ready. Yes, that's all part of it. And I don't know, it's going to be rough going back to exercising when this is over. It really is, and I know the weight loss I've experienced is whole muscle man. Well, it's going to be rough.

rough having to go to meetings again. Yeah. I basically, in one of these people, meetings is a necessity, but it's not one that I enjoy. And unless I'm running the meeting and I can be the center of attention because you know it's all about me. But other than that, they suck. And it's been great. Every meeting I've had has been canceled. And the few that we have to do, we're doing by Zoom, which is great because I can do it from home.

You know, like I said. No, no, no, no, no. Okay. So. God. So I cannot believe that I married this person. And, and honestly, I thought he was normal. Oh, really?

Really. I knew he was quirky. But if you guys could see his office, then you would really understand what a freak he is. Okay. Well, let's see. I don't mean in a sexual way. I just mean in every aspect of life. Well, let's see where you came from.

Let me see. Here's your mother's intro to our podcast. Here must contain mature contents that may be offended to some listeners. Do you want me to say you saved me? What did they wrong in? You know, your house is like another. My God. Okay.

Wait a minute. I think I just thought of. something that we could do. Let me see here. This is, yeah, we didn't have the ability to download a bunch of phone calls this week, although we do have some. I'm going to just do a quick imprompt to search for, oh, look what I found. Okay, this is from 2012. God, has it been that long? Let's check this out and see if we can play it. See here. Uh-oh. Are you getting me to sound like a hillbilly?

Come on in and set a spell. It's time for Big Joe's monthly visit. Oh, God. And welcome back. It's Big Joe's Monthly Visit. Hello, Joe. How are you? Just fine.

You've been doing anything interesting since last time we met? No. Okay, good. I did hear that you had a peeping, Tom in your neighborhood. They think we've got one. Now, what's he doing? Apparently looking through windows.

Like I said the other night, if he wants to look at this fat body, he can look at old ones. Maybe he likes them big boobs. Big boots, big belly, big gut. That's prophetic. We were talking about some of your recipes that you had. and we were wondering about your chili recipe if you could tell us a little bit about your chili recipe Steve makes fun of my chili but it's good chili I mean it it's for hot dolls and you make it out of two cups of water a pound hamburger fry it and get it real all the grease and stuff off of it

and a small tube of that chili corn carne and he makes fun of it but it makes the best hot dolls So first you start with chili. Yes. So that's the first, the way she told it today, it was the third ingredient. But the main ingredient in your chili recipe is chili. But you add hamburger meat and chili powder and salt. What cracks me up is the first time you told us this recipe and we were making fun of you and your boyfriend was making fun of you.

And he brought this lemonade. And we're in the mountains, and I'm like, man, this lemonade's really good. And I said, Johnny, how do you make this? He said, well, first you start with that lemonade did you get at the store? And here he was making fun of you for having chili be the first ingredient in your chili. Well, I don't care who makes fun of it. When we have hot dog sales, it sells like cocktails. We've made $3,000 in just one week over that hot dog chili.

Well, let's play Big Joe trivia. Oh, yeah, right. All right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you some trivia questions, and you answer them best you can. Are we doing a show? This is stupid all the reason. We're listening to me. All right. You ready? Question number one. What is the name of the coffee drink that they sell at McDonald's?

Oh. Floppy. I mean, I take it back. Oh, Tate, Steve. It's okay. She order one every day. Yeah, let's see if we tell the story in here. If we don't, we'll tell the story.

Jeopardy, there won't be a buzzer. Flopé. There you go. Flopé, exactly right. Okay, we should probably tell the background story of that. You were there with her. I was there with her, and this older gentleman, we were standing in line, and he said, what do you call it?

And she goes, it's a flupy. It's a flupy. And so I had to correct her, Mother, no, it's a Frape. So now it's a Flappy, and now she orders it. And this has been nine, ten years, and she goes through the drive-thru every day and orders a floppy. Well, didn't she turn around to the guy and say, hey, it's called a Floopy, and I order one every day? Yeah. And you're going to just imagine these people in the drive-thru going, well, here comes that Flupy lady again.

And it's not make-believe people. That's for real. I don't know if I can restart this. You're probably thankful. Yeah, I mean. We got the Big Joe's fried baloney t-shed. We'll save that for next time. You think about that.

This isn't Jeopardy. There won't be a buzzer. Are we really still listening to? Floppe, exactly. Is that bad? Well, shouldn't we talk about a pandemic or something like that? I probably still aren't saying it right. Okay, all right.

Anyway, so, yeah, I'm the weird one, but, you know, I'm not sure why you're so normal, to be honest with you. Well, I don't feel normal, so. You're listening to Weird Medicine. And though you will try to always get it right, The beauty of life lives inside of you And I hope someday you find it too Tacey, do you feel stress Of course I do

Or have anxiety or chronic pain Or trouble sleeping at least once a week Why, yes, Steve Well, you're not alone, many of us do You know, I have a little bit of work stress given that the situation that I'm in health care and do go into the ICU. And, you know, we all have stress right now. For our own reason, this is a stressful time.

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You're listening to Weird Medicine. Yeah. Do you have pandemic things you want to talk about? Because I'm pretty much over it. I've got to be honest. I mean, I'm over it, too. I just have a few things that I thought was interesting. Sure.

I've been reading a bunch of articles. And they were talking about how you should keep a tracker of where you go. I think that's a great idea. I'm not doing it because I'm not going anywhere. You actually are doing it. I mean, Google is tracking your every movement, and so is your Life 360 app. Oh, that's true. That's true.

So I did read how Apple and Google are working together on a tracking device so that if someone test positive, they can report it. And people that you've been near, if they have signed up, you know, anonymously. of course for this tracking device. Well, hopefully. Yes. I know people never believe that. They will get notified that they have been, you know, within a few feet of someone who has tested positive, and it's all voluntary, and it's all anonymous.

So, like, say if you got it at Kroger's or whatever, or if you were in contact with someone at Kroger's. It's Kroger, not Kroger's. That's from my other side of the family. So if you were in contact with somebody, it would not say, oh, you got it from someone at Kroger's on such and such a day. It would just tell you that you were in contact with somebody on one day. And I think that's really cool. I don't know that there would be so many conspiracy theorists out there that would never sign up for anything like that.

But I think that would be a great thing. And we could get back to normal life of people. Are you familiar with the Tile app? Tile is a little device that you attach to, say, a piece of luggage. And if your luggage gets lost, it only will communicate through Bluetooth. So you wonder, well, how in the hell is that work? Because if I'm, you know, on the other side of the country, how does tile work? Well, what it does is other people with the Tile app who come close to your,

piece of luggage, it will register. And if you've registered, that thing is lost, it will tell you anonymously where it is. It doesn't say who found it, but it will tell you where it was last seen. Okay. So it's a pretty valuable thing. I remember we lost something, and I started getting notifications from the Tile app that my, whatever it was, it was a carry-on, I think, had been located somewhere. and that's where it was. It was pretty neat.

Yeah, that's cool. I see this as being the same thing. You'd have sort of a token, and it would be attached to you only through your side, through the client side. And when you come into contact with somebody, you'd have a digital token that'd be exchanged that would not be traceable to you other than when this thing was activated. it could look at all the tokens and notify the people that they had come in contact with this person. And then you've got to decide, well, was it a contact that puts me at risk for contracting the disease? For example, if this was a real thing, mine would be going off every five minutes because I'm in the hospital seeing patients with COVID-19.

And when those people reported to this thing, my thing would be going off. But I'm always protected in that environment, you know, so I wouldn't necessarily be at high risk. But, you know, if you went to the bunny ranch and hung out, and then all of a sudden that person proved positive, and you'd been in that environment less than six feet away for longer than 30 minutes, you may be a candidate to ICE. isolate yourself. So without good contact tracing, we will not be able to go back to anything close to being normal anytime soon until we have either a vaccine or a treatment that works. The big news this morning was that the fall season, the winter season, is going to be worse than what we're dealing with right now. Well, they think so. They don't know. What they're

looking at is the influenza. The influenza pandemic of 1918 came in three peaks. Okay. And so they're assuming that it'll get worse in the fall. And they're probably right, but they don't know. Oh, that's going to mess up another trip. I know. But the thing is, is that if, look, let's just say remdesivir show shows early intervention is effective. Okay, now right now it's IV only. I don't know if it can be made into an oral drug. Remdesivir is a really interesting drug because remember this is an RNA virus. So RNA is a type of genetic material that uses ribose instead of deoxyribose. That's all. It's, that's, that's, that's, that's That's just the backbone.

Ribos is a sugar, and then these four base pairs will attach to the sugar, and then this thing can attach to other molecules just like it. And it makes codes. So you've got four base pairs, and the codes go in groups of three. So if you have, I don't know, aline, urosil, and thymidine, you know, so it would be A-U-T, That may be a code for a specific amino acid. And then you go through this strip and it's got all these different codes and you build proteins off of these molecules, right?

That's how the virus makes copies of itself. Now, what remdesivir is is it looks just like alanine or I'm sorry, adenine. and it's like if you have that alanine base pair and kind of keep saying that adenine base pair with the ribos this looks just like it except it's not and so when you when this stupid virus incorporates this drug into its copy of its genetic material it causes the signal to stop and it just cuts off the the production of RNA. So are we over the plequineal thing now? Well, I mean, we don't know.

We'll see. But anyway, let me finish talking about this because it is kind of interesting. And if I'm okay, if I'm not explaining it so it makes sense, tell me, because it's hard, it's kind of hard to explain without visuals. Talk to me like I'm five. I'm attempting to do so. So just put it this way, when the RNA virus is trying to reproduce itself. this inserts itself into that string and causes the string to malfunction. Okay.

Okay. That's the easiest way I can explain it. And if given early enough, you can stop the virus from reproducing and causing a lot of damage. If you wait until people are dying, it's almost too late for most people. we want to be able to have a medication that can stop people from progressing to that severe or critical phase. So let's just say now that Remdesivir can do that, that if you get someone that's mild, you bring them into the office, you give them a couple of IV doses, knocks it back, and everybody goes back to work. Then we're back to normal again until we have a vaccine. because the main concern with this is people dying and people ending up in the hospital to the extent that the hospitals are completely overwhelmed and now nobody can get into the hospital and get an appendix treated or pneumonia or just regular urinary tract infection stuff.

So you asked about hydroxychloroquine. I don't know where we're at with that. we've got data and it's all anecdotal data. We've got anecdotal data that says it works great. We got that French, the French researcher Didier Raoul that says, oh, you know, I've treated 300 people, I've treated 1,000 people, and they got better. But if I tell you something works for me, if I take vitamin D, I feel better, right? That's anecdotal evidence. I can't generalize that to the rest of the population.

And so if I tell you it works for me 300 times, it's still anecdotal evidence. It's now just 300 anecdotes, right? So that's what we're getting, as we're getting, this group over here says it doesn't work. They tried it in the VA or whatever, but there are no controls. They just tried it. They went back and looked back to see how they did. So it was a retrospective review and showed that it didn't seem to help. Matter of fact, some of the people in that group were sicker.

Maybe they were sicker before they gave it to them. Maybe that's why they gave it to them because they were sicker. So none of that stuff's been controlled. Then you got Didier, Rayo in France, who's doing it and just sort of giving it to people with no controls either. And I'm always suspicious any time someone says hydroxychloroquine in their group of 50 people that they saw toxicity because, you know, your mother is on this stuff. She's talked about it. tons of people, hundreds of thousands of people are on this drug for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and stuff. And yes, there is some toxicity, but it's extremely well tolerated.

So I have issues with, I just have issues with everything right now as far as the research that's being done on hydroxychloroquine. I just want a controlled trial that's randomized and blinded, that's where they're giving it to people early when they're first detected and see if it keeps them out of the hospital. Yeah. That's what we need. And until then, we can't say anything. You can treat it. You know, you can give people this stuff if you want to.

If you're a physician, you can, or any kind of licensed health care provider, NPP, whatever, you can write it for any purpose you want. Once it's approved, off-label use is perfectly legal. But we don't know what we're doing. You know, with that. And I'm very disappointed at the lack of just sort of critical thinking about this particular drug. But anyway. Okay. I also saw where it is not necessary, according to the FDA, to wipe your groceries down.

Good. Which is something we were half-ass doing anyway. Yeah, there was, right. Yeah, we just sort of did it to make us feel better. Yeah. I haven't seen a single case of transmission anywhere that was, from food or from, say, something somebody picked up at the grocery store. Now, if you pick up something and someone just hawked a lugy on it and it's full of

coronaviruses, yeah, then if you don't wash your hands, you may pick that up from that. But that's about the extent of it. Okay. And so everything's starting to open back up. I've heard you talk about phases. That's why we were talking about that because, yeah, unless we have contact tracing, we're not going to get anywhere with this. That's why I was talking about the medication.

Go ahead. Yeah, let's talk about the phases. So what are the phases of opening these states up? Sure. So what Dr. Burks and the rest of the task force came up with was the sort of three-phase reopening plan. And to move to a phase, you have to have two. two weeks of declining numbers or declining percentage of numbers compared to the number of tests you're doing.

That sounds weird, but you could have cases going up because you're testing more. And so you don't want to exclude people just because they're testing more. You're penalizing them. So, but if you see the percentage of positives to negatives decreasing. Right. So first you did 100 people. Now you've tested 1,000 people, but now, but 20% of them are positive. And now you test 10,000. And you've got more cases, but only 5% of those are positive. Then that's a net decline, right? So you have to have those. And there's more to it. I'm giving the Reader's Digest version. Plus, you have to have a health care system that is not currently overwhelmed. And this is the, you have to pass through this gate for every single phase. So phase one would be people pretty much are still staying in the house, but some of the venues could open to limited availability with some pretty strict social distancing measures.

And then if you do that and two weeks later, you're still showing a decline, then you can go into phase two. And each phase just has more liberal stuff. You know, bars start to open up, gyms start to open up, schools can open, I believe it's in phase three. But after each phase, you have to be able to demonstrate this two-week decline. And that phase could last six weeks. And then all of a sudden, at the last two weeks, you show a decline, then you can go into the next phase. Okay.

So we can't even go into phase one until we've shown that. You're listening to Weird Medicine. Hey, Tacey, 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, including tabletop games, at really great prices. I'm talking classics from back in the day, hard-to-find titles, and new ones, too. The best part is the prices are incredible, and the choices. are virtually endless. Look, we're all doing our best to say inside,

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Out this week? Our favorite movie of 2020, I think. So far, yep, absolutely. The gentleman from director Guy Ritchie comes back to basics underworld comedy about an American expatriate Mickey Pearson who's looking to cash out of a highly profitable marijuana empire. It sounds dumb. It's not. That movie was so much freaking fun.

It was fun. Just flat out fun. So many twists and turns and you're really rooting for the good guys and you really kind of despise the bad guys. He's also a bad guy. You know, it's just... Yeah, he's sort of an anti-hero, but he's a badass, and his wife's a badass. And it's got some of our favorite people in it, too.

It absolutely does. It's got Mary from Downton Abbey. Matthew McConaughey. Yes. When did he become America's greatest actor? I don't know, but... He's one of them. He and Woody Harrelson went, when did that happen?

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You're listening to Weird Medicine. As far as new cases are concerned, we are, if you go look at our COVID sit rep, it's on the laugh button channel on YouTube. I'm doing, you know, 15 minutes on where we're. We are as far as the numbers and any new research that's come out in the past week. And I'm doing technical analysis on the numbers. And we're showing that the number of new cases has crossed under the 20-day simple moving average, which means that if this was a stock market analysis, we would be thinking about selling

that stock pretty soon because it's getting ready to decline. It's actually in the process of declining. So from what you've heard, are states going by your little phase system? Well, it's not my little phase system, but they're supposed to. Okay. And, of course, the states have the right to do whatever they want to do. And Georgia, I understand, is going to be opening to, very limited. When we say opening, it's not like it's going to be everybody back to work and business as usual.

Vulnerable people are still going to have to stay isolated. until we get a much more robust system for contact tracing, and even then they've got to be careful because they can't afford to get it, and this is very contagious. Now, there have been some data out in California where they're doing widespread testing in certain counties, suggesting that the number of people that have had the virus

is much larger than we thought. I have some issues with this, however. I don't know what kind of test they're using. If they're using an antibody test, there are antibody tests out there that may cross-react with other coronaviruses. And you and I have both had at least a dozen coronaviruses in our life, probably more. And if you have a test that cross-reacts with antibodies for other coronaviruses, then it's just because you have a positive antibody test doesn't necessarily mean that you're immune to this. virus. We don't even know that yet. You know, it's so new, we don't know. So one way for them to test this, and I'd like to see them do it, is to use, there's tons of blood samples all over this country that are in labs that are just being stored. Test, your test against blood tests that were drawn before the pandemic hit the shores. You know, do something from July of 2019.

and if your test is showing up a bunch of positives, then you can say that's the number of cross-reactive coronavirus cases. If it doesn't cross-react at all, then all of those tests will be negative. Okay. That makes sense. They need to demonstrate that. And then I'll feel a little bit more confident about this. The other reason that I'm skeptical is because if you look at the Diamond Princess, which was the cruise ship that Dr. Hoplin, who we had on our show, was on.

And if you want to go back and listen to that, it's at Dr. Steve.com or iTunes, and all of those shows are free. They're not behind a paywall right now. And it's called Diamond Princess Physician Speaks Out or something like that. Of the 4,000 people on that ship, only 700 got it, right? And so that's a penetrance of only 17% on a basically a tin can where everyone was interacting with everybody else, pretty much. And of those people, only 46% were asymptomatic. So 700 tested positive, and 46% of those were completely asymptomatic. Now, we have an aircraft carrier that also had infections on it.

It had very low penetrance rate as well. And of those, 60% were asymptomatic. Now, those were generally young, healthy people. Diamond Princess was older folks. So you figure that it, so you had 40%, 46% of older folks were asymptomatic, 60% of younger folks were asymptomatic. So you figure it's around 50, 55% asymptomatic. Well, that's one for one.

That's not 10 to 1. or 1,000 to 1. So I'm concerned about the data that says that there's this huge asymptomatic rate in this country. You know, explain the disparity there. I can't explain it yet. So we just need to test freaking everybody to the extent that we can. And then we'll really know something, you know. Was there something else?

No. That's all I have. Of the 712 people who tested positive on the diamond princess, 13 have now expired. So that is, well, I'm going to need Echo to help me with that. Echo, what's 13 divided by 712? 13 divided by 712 is 0.083. Okay. So about 1.8.

percent for fatalities on the Diamond Princess, and that was generally an older group of folks. Okay. All right. You have any others? Because I've got a couple of questions that we can throw in. Nope. Let's do it. Okay.

All right. I like your ad, too, taste. Please. Casey, check this. Oh, hey. I'm good. Oh. Did we do this one before?

Cool. Good. I was just listening to some BS. Maybe not. Some other fuckers we're talking about maybe treating things. Yeah, first off, we can't hear him. And I missed the joke at the beginning because he was interacting with us. He was talking to you.

But he was calling about high altitude pulmonary edema as a cause for the respiratory failure that we're seeing, as opposed to acute respiratory distress syndrome. So I'll talk about both of those. In acute respiratory distress syndrome, you use high oxygen and high pressures on your ventilator. And when they do that with the folks with COVID, there are some pulmonologists say they seem to be getting worse rather than getting better.

And so some have posited that what's really happening is this virus is causing hemoglobin and oxygen in the bloodstream to decouple so that the red blood cells can't carry as much oxygen anymore. So now it's starting to act like someone who's at the top of Everest. And, you know, they're not getting enough oxygen. And so you treat them different. It's a much gentler approach. And so I think research has yet to bear fruit on this one to see if that's really the right

approach. But we should know something about this pretty quickly. Well, I think I've heard you talk about how you're not sure that they're treating these people on respirators correctly? Well, yeah, so many folks who end up on the respirator are not doing well, that some pulmonologists are hypothesizing that there may be a different approach to take, and that's what we're talking about, and we don't know the answer yet. Okay.

Some people think they know the answer, and they may be right, but I want to see the research, because I'm being very cautious with this virus, particularly. particularly because first you hate to trash what people are doing or have them lose confidence in what we're doing because some of it is absolutely right and we just don't have the data to demonstrate that yet. And some of it may be absolutely wrong or at least not wrong could be done better

and we don't have the data to demonstrate that right either. When I was in medical school, it was malpractice to put people on congestive who had congestive heart failure on beta blockers. Beta blockers are drugs that decrease the contractility of the heart and decrease blood pressure. And that was malpractice. If you had someone who died of congestive heart failure and you would put them on a beta

blocker, you were going to get sued. In 2020, you're going to get sued if you didn't have them on a beta blocker. And that just shows how medical science progresses. They were right with the data they had at the time. but they're right now with the data that we have now. And so we always have to continue to advance and stuff that we used to do look stupid today. I mean, there's going to come a time

when all the chemotherapy that we're doing that has undoubtedly saved people's lives that we're going to look back on this and say it was barbaric because now we have this immunologic approach to cancer. But it wasn't wrong. It was just what we had and we did the best we could.

and it did save lives, but we could save more lives doing it this new way in 2030 or whatever, you know. So that's just the state of medical science. So we'll know more soon. I don't know that we did this one. Somebody with it. And then I get fit. Did we do this one? Hey, Dr. Steve, how are you?

I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for keeping us all updated. My question is, can mosquitoes actually transfer? We did that one. Okay, yes. The answer is we have no evidence that that is the case and no reason to think that it would be the case. To transmit a virus, a mosquito actually has to be infected by the virus. And it's not just that they stick their schnaws in there and pick up a couple of particles and come to you and then deposit them.

They need to have enough viral particles. And to do that, it needs to multiply in their system. And they don't have the ACE2 receptors that humans have, so they really just can't be infected by it. So they can't transmit it. All right. Let's try this. Hi, Dr. Steve. I'm just wondering that if Corona, this Corona thing is a virus.

It's called coronavirus. Correct. Does it have the same properties as like HIV or herpes where you can't really cure it? So if you get corona virus or COVID-19, I think everyone, these medical fucks are trying to call it. No, no. COVID-19 is the disease that SARS-C-O-V-2 the virus causes. Are you essentially walking around with it for the rest of your life? I'm just hoping you can help me figure this out.

It's like flu like that? Is flu virus? Yeah, you medical fuck, tell us all about it. Thank you. I'm always find myself going, well, that's a great question. And I get pissed off every time on TV shows when they have a question to answer. And the doctor always says, oh, that's a great question. So I'm really hesitating.

It takes every ounce of my being to not say, well, that was a great question. Well, that was a great question. It's fun, Steve. You can say it. It's, I know it just annoys me. Yes, coronavirus is a virus, hence the name. And it is like other viruses, in that it's not really alive. It requires a living host to multiply.

So to what end? There is no end. The only end is to multiply. These are little nanomachines that invade living cells and hijack the mechanism inside the cells to make copies of themselves. and then kill the cell as the new viral particles emerge and go out and do it some more. That's it. And then our body mounts an immune response to these things. And one facet of that is to make antibodies.

So we make antibodies. They're proteins that can attach to the virus. And then there's a couple of things that can happen. There's a complement cascade. It's just a sort of a toxic cascade that can degrade the virus. There are, the antibodies can signal white blood cells to come in. Hey, this thing needs to die, and then they come in and kill the cells. And you develop this immunity.

So you start off with early antibodies are called IGM. And those are the very acute phase of the virus. and then the IGG antibodies, which you've probably heard about, are basically the body's immune memory. And they'll be around, and you can detect those in the bloodstream. So, sorry, I ain't got crony. I got the dang allergy, so. So when your body clears coronavirus, it clears it for good.

Now, you may be susceptible to another coronavirus, later, or you may even be susceptible to this one again, that we don't know how long your immunity is going to be good for. Now, herpes is a different thing. So you've got a herpes simplex, and you've got varicella, which is also a herpes virus, which causes chicken pox. So both of these viruses can live inside nerve endings called ganglia. So when you have this infection, a few.

of those viral particles will get into your nerve cells and work their way back into these ganglia. These are these groups of nerve cells. And they'll just sit there. And then when you're stressed out, the herpes virus will come out either on your lip or your genitalia or your finger if you have herpetic witlo. Or you'll get shingles, which is recurrence of chicken pogs. So the difference between shingles and herpes is just, it's shingles recurrence of chickenpox. Yeah. Shingles causes recurrence of chicken pox or signals a recurrence of the chicken pox virus and herpes, you know, is herpes. And they cause the same sorts of lesions, right?

The blisters, painful blisters. So shingles comes out when. your body is stressed. The hypothesis, yes. Or your immune system gets trashed by something. I mean, I had shingles, and, you know, I'm always stressed out, but I don't feel like the time that I had on, I was any more stressed than usual. Right.

And sometimes they just see an opportunity, and it's like, here we go, you know, through the breach. And most of the time, you'll only get them once, but some people get them more frequently. But you never get rid of those viruses. They hide behind the blood-brain barrier so your immune system can't get to them. That's why. If they could, they would just kill them. So they hide in there.

And then when they come out and manifest on the skin and you start shedding virus trying to infect other people, that's when your immune system takes over and tries to shut them down. And how often do they come back in the same place? With herpes, it's almost always the same place. Well, what about with shingles? So if, well, most of the time they don't come back. So if they do, often they will come back in the same place. Now, you can get disseminated shingles.

And that's when you get, it's basically like a recurrence of chicken pox, except that's going to be in someone whose immune system is really got a problem. People on chemo or people with lymphoma or things like that or just, really, really sick elderly folks. And instead of the shingles coming out one place, they'll just be showered with viral particles all over their body. And that's a really serious complication when that happens. Now, I've heard that a lot of...

Chickenpox for kids, no big deal. Yeah. I've heard a lot of patients with coronavirus, it's taking a long time for their lungs to recover. Yeah. Is that true? Seems to. particularly if they have an abnormal CT scan or abnormal chest x-ray, they get a viral pneumonia.

Okay. And it's a combination of things. It's the virus attacking the cells, but also the immune system going in and trying to kill the virus. So you've got this battle going on and that manifests as inflammation and you can see changes in the chest x-ray. And, of course, that's just not going to go away overnight. Okay. Yeah. All right.

All right. So he was asking about another virus as well, and I can't remember. Oh, he said flu. Yeah, influenza is a virus. And when you get infected with it, all of the things that we, that cascade of things we talked about happen. You know, it multiplies in the cells and then it sheds your shedding virus and the immune system goes in to kill it. And you will eventually kill that strain. The problem with influenza is it mutates so quickly that we're not immune to influenza.

the next time it comes around. So will the coronavirus need a new vaccine every year, or do we even know? We don't know, but probably not. They're really just sort of a finite number of coronaviruses out there. So what we're hoping is this thing won't mutate and that our immunity will be long-lasting. We may need a booster if it's not long-lasting. Okay. And that's the problem with influenza.

It just changes. So we're trying to develop a universe. universal influenza vaccine. And when we come up with the universal influenza vaccine, we'll only need one and probably a booster every once in a while, and that'll be the end of that. Just like we have one measles vaccine, but we need to get a booster every once in a while. One tetanus. Of course, tetanus is a bacterium that's a little different, but one tetanus vaccine every 10 years, and you just need a booster. You don't need a different vaccine because it's not like tetanus is mutating to the point where we need a different vaccine.

vaccine every time. Okay. All right. A little virus lore. Okay, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. I know what that is. Okay. Let's see here. Okay. Hey, Dr. Steve. I had a question for you. I went to the doctor just for a regular checkup on the art.

and he said that I had an enlarged aortic root of 4.8 centimeters. He said to watch it for six months and come back in and see him. I was just wondering your thoughts on that since six months with an enlarged aortic root doesn't really sound real special to me, so anyways. Thanks for the show. Love to listen and talk to you later. Thanks. So, yeah, the aortic root would be the aorta, which is the large artery coming out of the heart,

as it's coming out of the heart right there. And he has an aortic aneurism or a potential aortic aneurism. They recommend those for surgery around five centimeters, particularly if you're six feet taller, older, or taller. If you're under six feet tall, let's say, or I'm sorry, if you're under like five feet seven, then they would recommend surgery at, you know, at 4.7 centimeters. What do you say it was? Four centimeters? I can't remember. Well, it was scary sounding, though.

That was literally just a second ago, and I've forgotten it too. But anyway, so they do this based on your height and the diameter. And most folks that have these don't have to have surgery. But if you do, it's something that they pretty much do every day. Okay, anyway, you got anything else? Nope. Yeah, I think we're done for this week. A little disjointed this week.

We've had so much to do, believe it or not, we're sitting at home, but we have a ton to do. And show prep suffer a little bit this week. But check out the COVID sit wrap on the laugh button channel on YouTube. And check out our website. at Dr.steve.com, riotcast.com. Share these shows with your friends if you find them valuable at all.

And thanks for being here, Tase. You're welcome. We do more actual conversing during this one hour a week than we do the rest of the week. True. Which I kind of like. I do too.

And you sort of are forced to laugh at my jokes when you're in here because you're trying to, you know, not make the show or make me look bad. So I appreciate that. Thanks always go to my wife, Tacey, who's quite delightful. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Lewis Johnson, Paul Offcharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone,

Matt from the syndicate, Ron Bennington, and Fez Wattley, whose support of this show has never gone unappreciated. Thanks to SiriusXM for putting us on and listen to our show on the Faction Talk Channel. Serious XM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. I'm going to try to talk Jim into letting us do some live shows during this time because what the hell else we got to do on a Saturday night. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemails 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 wash your hands get off your asses and get some exercise

see you in one week for the next edition of weird medicine bye everybody need to take my own advice on that exercise