Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 410 - S#$% and Fall Back In It 2

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss quarantine fatigue, unique treatments for severe allergic reactions, insane surgical ideas, 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!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. I need to touch it. Yo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. Yeah, me garreted. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolabovir stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my infertable woes. I want to take my brain now, blasted with the wave,

Ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm paging 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 delightful wife, Tacey.

Hello, Tasey. Hello, everybody. Oh, she's doing her Dave Landau impression. No, I'm not. That's what people say when they say hello. Oh, oh, that's where he got that. Hey, this is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider.

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Sue them. And premium.com will get you archives of this show for a buck 99 a month. Or you can go to Dr. Steve.com and send us 30. bucks there's a link on there and you can get a thumb drive and i've got a whole bunch of new thumb drives with just for you 17 gigs of crap on it which would be every podcast that's ever been done on riot cast network and uh you get an extra what 15 gigs of free space you can use to put your own prawn on or whatever you want to do and then check out dr scott's website at simply herbals dot net well how you doing this week i'm okay this

week. Are you? Mm-hmm. Well, yeah. Yeah. I'm used to my little mundane life here where, yeah. Really? I mean, I guess.

Well, I'm looking at some COVID-19 news. Oh, good. Twelve states see rising COVID-19 hospitalizations as Arizona asks hospital to activate emergency plans. So here we are. You know, a lot of us thought this thing was over. It's not over. It can be mostly over. Or let me say substantially over is probably a better word.

But with all the states opening up and the rioting and all of the recent events. Well, the lack of physical distancing would just say that. Yeah. Yeah. That remains to be seen. We are recording this. Is it wrong to say rioting? No, no, no.

On June 10th? Well, no. But I'm just looking at it's a judgment on it. I get it. I know. I'm not either. I'm looking at it from a medical perspective. So it's the lack of physical distancing that's going to cause a problem. It's not. Oddly enough, most of them that I saw on the news had masks on. Yes. Which, you know, if you're going to be doing naughty things, wearing a mask is probably a smart thing to do.

And, you know, what's funny is, you know, I went to the bank today to transfer some money around. Three months ago, if I had walked into the bank lobby wearing a face mask that covered, you know, they would immediately have loaded up bags with the blue dye and sent me on my way. And I'd be going, no, no, wait, I just want to make a deposit. And so, but now if you go in there without one, you know, you're a pariah. So it's very interesting. Interesting how things have changed in just three months. But we're recording this on June 10th. So as far as the demonstrations and all those other activities are concerned, remember, it takes five to seven days for the majority of people to develop symptoms,

96% will develop symptoms by day 11. So you're talking 10 days from whenever this started, you know, which was last week sometime. So, yeah, we're about seven days in, are we at this point? Yes, and it's not just about the lack of social distancing. I mean, it's also about just people being everywhere all the time. Well, right, right. I just wonder what the results are from that. It almost seems to me, if you listen to the news and you watch the numbers that it's actually

worse now than it was when we were all on the download. But, you know, that's just what it seems to me. Who am I? I don't know. Well, and it may seem. that way. You know, that was, I think it was, oh, who was the comedian? If it was Brian Reagan, but he was talking about how he's watching the TV and everything's mayhem and horrible things happening. And he looks out of his window. It's like, it looks okay from, you know, to me.

He just hear crickets. So there are hot spots of activity. There are hot spots of viral activity. Sometimes those two things go together. But if you Google, Let me see, RT, which is the calculation of how many people, the effective reproduction number of any particular virus. And I'm going to RTLive.com right now. Uh-oh, it's not coming up. Oh, see, this is what happens when you improvise while you're in the middle of doing a show. Let me see if I can come back to that. But it's RT.

And what it shows is that even the state with the highest reproduction number, in other words, you expect the highest number of people to, maybe I'm on Safari, that's the problem. Let me just do this in Google. The highest number of people who are being infected by any one person, okay? So the R0 or the RT number, this, yeah, here we go. Okay, so in Chrome, it looks pretty good. It looks right now, let me see what the highest state is. Ten highest states are right now, oh, no, ten largest states. I want the ten, come on.

Yeah, really, sorry, everybody. I have a theory. Do you want to hear it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so my theory is that things aren't better, but people just can't stand it anymore. That's my theory, that they got as much. quarantine as they could get out of us. And they've had it. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you may, you may, you may, you may be right. And I know there's, there is some of that for sure. So, so let's look at the, are the, the effective reproduction number of different states, okay? So, remember, if you have an, an, an R-O or R-T, whichever nomenclature you want to use, of two, that means every one person infects two people. So you have one person, so you have one person, so you have one person, gets it, they infect, so he infects two, those infect four, and then eight, and then 16, okay?

And then 32 and 64, et cetera. So that is geometric increase where you're multiplying by some number every day, okay, by some number that's greater than one. And when you have an R0 or RT that's greater than one, you should see a marked increase in number of cases over time. If it's less than one, then you will see a decrease in cases. And if it's exactly one, one person gives it to one person. If you have 20,000 people who have it, they're going to give it to 20,000 people. So every day, you'll have the same number of cases, right? Okay.

So the cumulative line in a case like that will be linear. There will be a line going up from left to right, and it's just a straight line always going up, because the number of cases will continue to increase, but it's by a linear relationship, the same number every day. Whereas if you look at that cumulative line for a place that's got an R0 of 2, you'll see a curved line that's curving up steeply. Okay, that's that geometric progression. So anyway, the state with the highest R0 right now is South Carolina,

which is where we're going to be pretty soon. But it's 1.09. In other words, one person gives it to 1.09. So if you have 10, well, let's see, 100 people, then they'll infect 109 people. Okay. Those are risks I'm about to take. Well, and that's a really low number. You know, that's nowhere near getting into that geometric progression that we're talking about.

And we're not going to be near people. We're going to go down there and stay in our house. Well, that's right. Not our house, but the house that we. Well, it's our house while we're there. Yeah, for that time. and um hawaii for example has an r0 of 0.53 so you will see over time cases going down decreasing until they get vanishingly small now do you are you aware of the states that if you travel to you have to quarantine after i am not well don't you look that up while we're doing this well because i don't have my glasses so i will try this getting old sucks um are okay no i don't know the answer answer to that. And for me to look it up would be really

obnoxious because it'll take time. But anyway, so that's that effective reproduction number. We're doing really good in this country as far as it not being geometric in any one state, according to RT. Live, anyway. But the ones that are

over one started Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Alabama, Florida, North Kakalaki, Oregon is 1.01. Vermont, Kentucky, North Dakota, Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, and South Carolina. So they're not all, you know, the myth is it's all the southern states.

It's not. And it's not all just red states either. So, and Georgia, which opened up pretty early, before, really, they met the phase one criteria, which was two weeks of continuous decline, is at 0.97. So over time, they'll see a general decline in their number of cases if that holds up. okay so I'm looking this up and there's a lot of them really so tell me what the rules are the things that you need to pay attention to if you're going somewhere it's not anything I could read just look it up okay that's what you've got to do I'm not kidding because

each state has it's got a state and then it's got a paragraph under each state now I could read the whole well I read South Kakalaki then the state recommends that travelers returning from an area with widespread or ongoing community spread stay home for a period of 14 days from the date of departure. Okay, so that's voluntary. Right? Sounds like it.

Okay. This would be good when we'd, I wish we had the lawyer bitch on here today because she could talk to us about the constitutionality of some of this stuff. She's too busy working up contracts. Yeah, I hope so. I know, that's what I'm saying.

She better be too busy. All right. Anyway, so I had a friend ask me a question. Okay. And this is how he put it to me just a few minutes ago because I said, do you have any questions? Yes. And he said, so if you touch something that has COVID on it and then you're eating a burrito and you get COVID on the outside of the burrito and you eat the burrito and the burrito and the burrito is in your stomach, does the acid in the stomach kill the COVID? Okay. So if somebody, look, viruses got to have something to live on. So there are surfaces that viruses can live on.

Like we talked about this way early in the COVID situation reports that I'm doing on YouTube on the laugh button channel. So if you're interested, go back and just skip over the statistics parts because that'll be old news for you for everybody. Each one of those, after I do the stats, I do a little topic. And one of those was the surface study where they, under laboratory conditions, put viral particles on different surfaces and then went back every hour and tried to see if they could recover them. And what they found was exponential decay. So it decayed with a half-life. All right. So say the half-life, and I don't remember these numbers on, say, cardboard,

was eight hours, something like that. What that meant was, if they put a thousand viral particles on there at time zero, eight hours later, it would be 500, eight hours after that would be 250, eight hours after that would be 125. So this was done under laboratory conditions. Nobody ever said, well, you can get it from that. You know, there's not a single case that I'm aware of of anybody. getting COVID-19 or the transmitted SARS-C-O-V-2,

which is the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 from a cardboard box, for example. If that were possible, you would have had a ton of cases early on in the disease that just sprouted up from nowhere because China, where it was endemic at the time, or where the outbreak started, was shipping us cardboard. boxes by the millions every day. And nobody got it until a person came here and gave it to somebody. So what about food? We're saying no.

Okay. So, right. Okay, well, I'm getting to that. So if there was, you know, to my knowledge, there's not been a single case of food-borne COVID-19 either. But if someone hawked a loogie and it was full of virus and you touched your hand on it and then grabbed a burrito and stuck it in your mouth, then, yes, theoretically, you could contract it from that, but it's because you stuck your finger in mucus that was loaded, and the mucus is still viable, and it's still moist, and the virus is still viable.

So you would get it before the stomach acid got to it because it was be in your mouth first. Yeah, because it, yeah, it'll adhere to mucus membranes on the way down. But let's say it was prepared by a chef and they had the disease and maybe they breathed on it or something and they got a few viral particles on there. This virus is not heat stable. So if the burrito was warm enough, it could kill it almost instantly. And if it's even sitting out for a while, remember, viruses have to have living tissue to attach to. and otherwise they're just inert machines.

They're not alive. They can't live without being inside a cell that has a receptor on it that allows them to attach to it and inject their DNA or RNA in this case into them. So they're not alive, so they just sit there. They're inert machines and they dissipate very, very quickly when not inside a host. They'll live just long enough for you to cough on to. somebody's lip and have them eat something and ingest it. But, yeah, I mean, that's how you get it, right?

Okay. You know, droplets. And so, yeah, if you could deposit it directly into the stomach, then yes, it would kill it. Okay. But it's got a whole mucus membrane respiratory tract, GI tract, on the way down there that it can adhere to. And so to a virus, you're going from your mouth to your stomach is like us traveling from here to the moon, almost. That's how small they are. Okay.

So, okay. All right. Here we go. Yeah, Arizona is one of the 19 states with a trend of new coronavirus cases still increasing. And this is from, this was updated today. And nationally more than 1.9 million people have been infected by the virus that we know of. And 112,000 have died, which is a pretty small number compared to the, I mean, look, every single. The person who dies from this is a tragedy.

There's no question about that. But the original estimate of 60 million people getting the virus, like influenza, and 3% of those dying, which would have been 1.8 million people, has not been borne out, which, thank goodness that they've not, that it was not born out. So the people who say this is no worse than the flu and we're overreacting? No, it's worse than the flu in the sense. that normal influenza has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. Now, the flu pandemic of 1918 killed about 10% of people. That was an outlier. That's why we still talk about it with these sort of reverent tones.

But even the swine flu pandemic of 2009 that took out our friend Barry the Blade and almost took out our friend Richard Smith, Richard David Smith, who is the founder and co-owner of hyperphysics, by the way, an energy drink for nerds. Give him a little plug. It's hyper F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S. Get it? Sorry, anyway. But he ended up on the ventilator.

But even that pandemic, I believe, if I'm remembering my numbers right, the mortality rate was 0.1% or less. So how many laws total about did that equal? It was like 13,000. Okay. Something like that. If I, we've got to look it up. So we've had a lot more deaths with this. Because I hear continuously, continuously people saying, I don't know a single person with this virus.

I don't think it's real. It's no worse than the flu. You wouldn't necessarily know anybody that ever had it because we're talking about a country of 350 million people. We've had about a million get it. So, you know, if you know 200 people, there's a good chance that you won't know anybody that's had it. But that's the scary thing about large numbers is that, you know, the risk to the individual is low, but the risk to society overall is pretty high. Okay, I'm looking 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

Let me see if I can find the mortality rate on it. Okay. Okay. No, I can't put my finger on it real quick. You could, though. Could you look that up? Again, can't see. I'll try. You know what? You want me up here? I know what I was going to say is that you're just looking for a number. Just looking for a number. Okay, CDC estimated 151,000 people worldwide died from H1N. globally 80% related deaths were estimated to occur in people younger than 65 years of age.

You know why? Because those of us that were older had been exposed to this virus before in the 70s. I have here in the United States. Yeah, thank you. 12,469 deaths. Wow, yeah, that's really low. And that's weird that it was that low and we knew two or one, you know, one. person and then another person almost died from it.

Again, I didn't read the whole paragraph. I just saw deaths, U.S., and a number. Gotcha. So that could mean, yeah, and I'm not going to read the whole paragraph. That's where we're at with it. We're going to go with that. We've done this awesome show prep today. Let's see.

Final estimates that were from April 12, 2009 to April 10th, 2010, approximately 6.8 million cases. See, I saw, I see 60.8. What did I say? 6.8. No, 60.8. That's what I meant to say, sorry. Well, that's a little different. Right.

274,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths. Yeah. So let's go, what's 12,000 divided by 60 million? Let's ask Echo. Echo, what's 12,000 divided by 60 million? 12,000 divided by 60 million? thousand divided by 60 million is 0.0000002. So that's a really low percentage. So, and we're looking at over 112,000 deaths in the U.S.? Yep. Well, that is not a good argument for those people at my gym

who say that. Yeah, with 160th of the number of cases, too. That was what we were worried about was that if this thing was transmissible like influenza, and we had 60 million people get it like we do in very frequently in influenza, bad influenza years, that even with 1% mortality, you're talking about a whole crap load of people, you know. So they've done very well in keeping that number down. And with the number of asymptomatic people, we can ratchet down the mortality, the lethality of this virus significantly. But people have done a good job.

You know, there's, yeah, there's. outliers, but I've been very proud of my fellow man for just staying away from other people. It doesn't mean we can't, we shouldn't be able to work and do those things. I went to the ophthalmologist today, and they're at high risk because they're literally operating inches away from people's faces when they're doing cataracts and stuff, and they could just cough in your face any time. I have people cough in my face in the office all the time. And but the ophthalmologists can't get away from it, but they're doing business again.

So it's doable. We just had to step back for a minute, get things calmed down a little bit, and then figure it out how we could all get back in each other's faces again, but do it safely. So let me teach everybody what Fitfo stands for. Okay, yeah. Figure it the fuck out. So if you need me to bleak that. Sorry, I got paged. What were you saying, Tase?

We needed to figure it the fuck out. We needed to quarantine and figure it the fuck out. How we were going to handle this situation? And is that what we're doing now, do you think? Yeah, I think that they did kind of figure it the F out. So now I'm the one with the potty mouth. But you can't say FIFO, everybody needs to understand that the emphasis goes on the F of FitFO. That's right.

Everybody just needs to understand that. And it's also like the best little, what do you call that little, when letters. Anagram? Oh, it's the best one in the whole world. And you can use it at work. You can use it at home. Well, everybody uses snafu, and they don't even think of the fact that it has the word, you know, the F word in it.

Well, I don't even know what that means. Snafu is situation normal all effed up. Okay. It's a military term. I think I did know that. They'll put that in memos, you know, corporate memos. Well, because of this snafu. So we should be able to say fit foe.

Yeah. So, I mean, with people that I work with and they've got a big problem and you don't want to deal with it. You just say, I don't know, just fitfo it. Yeah, that's right. Just fitfo it. So, yeah. I like it. Hell with them.

Hell with them. That's right. That's right. Well, all right. So speaking of fitfo. Again, the potty mouth prevails. It's going to be different from here on out. Oh, is it?

I'm going to fitfo it. Do you want me to back up and? up and bleep those? I think it would actually be funnier if I did. It's whatever you want, because I thought you were going to back up and bleep the ones from last week, and you did not. I know. Well, I was just kidding when I said I was going to do that, but I will do it if you want me to. Yeah. A relative, by the way, told me you didn't do it. So that's sweet. It was my niece. She listens every week.

Yeah. Shout out to her. Yep. She's a good old, old Holly. All right. Yeah, so we're just sort of rambling. How about this, though? Russians claim to have an effective treatment for the coronavirus, which hospitals will start using this month. Well, let's shoot them in the head, Steve. What?

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. I'm drinking wine. Oh, are you? Yes. Oh, that explains everything. And I'm getting a contact high. So, Russia has approved an anti-influenza drug,

Havivivivir. That's another one. How do you say Havifavir to treat COVID-19 and we'll start delivering it to hospitals this month? I want to know how this is different than Fava-Piravir because I think it's the same drug or it is in an analog. You know what? I take back the shooting in the head because after watching 90-day fiancé and before the 90 days, we know very well that they're very civilized people. Oh, yeah. They look awesome.

Yeah. But old Big Ed, though, what's up with him? Well, he was, that's, he wasn't from. No, he's not from Russia. Aslana. No, the, actually, to be honest, perfectly honest with you, the people from Russia on that show seem more normal than the Americans that are going over there to meet them. You're right. So I was just, that was just a joke about shooting in the head.

I didn't mean it. That's some joke. So preliminary trials appeared to show that it could shorten recovery times for patients with COVID-19, the final stage of. Evifavir clinical trials involving 330 patients are ongoing. And so they're just going to rush this to market mostly because there is data from on fevapyrivere in China that looked really good. And we're doing a bunch of these studies as well. This is, as you know, Tase, the drug that I've been sort of hanging my hopes on because it's a pill. it's a general antiviral that's already on the market safety studies already been done for influenza

and if you can diagnose someone in your office and say well you've got the COVID there old buddy and then you hand them a prescription for a vivivir and they take it to the pharmacy and fill it and then take it and go you know isolate themselves like you would if you had influenza, and they don't die and they don't go to the hospital, then this thing is literally over the day that we have something like that, okay? So Epiphyr is Russia's first COVID-19 drug shown high efficacy in treating patients with coronavirus during clinical trials. And it's become, oh, and they say it here,

it's become the first Favapyrivere-based drug in the world approved for the treatment of COVID-19, because Japan has it approved for influenza, but has not yet approved it for COVID-19 yet. According to data received from an earlier clinical trial, the drug 65 percent of the 40 patients, this was a phase one trial, tested negative for coronavirus after five days of treatment, which was two times higher than in the standard therapy group. So Russia is pushing this because they have the third highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world.

and the U.K. is due to host a virtual global vaccine summit. Oh, on June 4th, it's already been. Oh, this is an old article. So let's find the newest article on this. Nope. Not answering that. And I got a complaint from a guy, how come all him tell? Why does everybody have a redneck accent?

He was saying, you know, can't you edit out the, phone calls. It's like if I did that, this whole thing would just be chopped up because I'm on call 24-7. I get phone calls all the time. Okay, here we go. The latest data show above 80% efficacy for Favapyrivere in COVID-19. Okay. This is, oh, and now you've got to log in if you want to read more. So that was the headline anyway. Maybe this was click paid. There you go. This is from the pharma letter. Thanks, Farmer Letter, for not letting me read any further. But anyway, I'm still, I have high hopes for Fabapiravir, but they are delaying the final data on this drug until sometime in mid-July because they've been having a hard time finding enough patients

to try it out on, which is very interesting. So, and there are multiple, if you go to clinical trials.gov, there's lots of studies going on on this drug right now. We have remdesivir. It's great for people who are already in the hospital and it helps some, but we really need something to keep people out of the hospital, and then we can all go back to work in a normal type situation. All right? One with pants.

Yep, with pants. Do you not wear pants? I have not had real pants on in months. That's something. Yeah. I wear yoga pants. Yeah. Well, that's a hell of a damn way to work.

Sure is. All right. You want to take some questions? Yes, we should. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. People start bitching if we don't.

Start. All right, here we go. Dr. Steve, man. So I have a question. I had to freaking call you right away. Okay. Like adrenaline and an epipen? whatever the medication is in an EpiPen, and when you shoot it into your thigh, it gives you

like a burst of adrenaline to overcome, like, the toxins, right, allergies? Sort of. My question is, so that's a very rough understanding, but my question is, if it's just adrenaline, like what about if you get stung by a bee and you're allergic to it, but then right away, you just get on a motorcycle and go like 150 miles an hour or like skydive. Interesting thought. Would that boost your adrenaline and push out the toxins? All right, man.

Thanks a lot. Tell your wife, stop texting her boyfriend. Yeah. Okay, Tay, stop texting your boyfriend during the show. Too lazy to have a boyfriend. Thank you, sir. This is a really interesting question. I thought about this myself until I learned a little bit more of the physiology in medical school.

So he's right. The adrenal glands produce adrenaline. That's why hence the name. and we call that epinephrine, and there's epinephrine, and norephnephrine, it doesn't worry. It doesn't matter what the difference is. They're very closely related. But the reason that it works during anaphylaxis, when you get stung by a bee and now you can't breathe, is because it constricts blood vessels, and that raises your blood pressure,

and also it relaxes the smooth muscle in the lungs where you're having difficulty. passing air through the lungs. But those are the two kind of just sort of readers digest things. So why couldn't you just skydive? Just get in your, of course, practically speaking, you don't have that much time. But let's just say you could teleport yourself to 10,000 feet above the ground and now you've just scared yourself into producing a bunch of adrenaline.

And the problem with that is, the adrenal glands produce it in much smaller amounts because if that really worked, do you not think that when you can't breathe that you're not producing a ton of adrenaline because it's terrifying, right? I would think so. Yes. So you are. So you can't breathe.

Your tongue and your lips are swelling and now you're, you know, struggling to get oxygen into your lungs. Your adrenaline level is about as high as you can get. And still, people die from anaphylactic shock. So that's not enough. And the reason is that adrenaline in the bloodstream is measured in picograms per millilator. And that is, you know, billions and trillions of a gram. Whereas what we give people when we shoot them up is, you know, 0.3 to 0.5 milligrams of.

So, you know, thousands of a gram. So you're talking, you know, millions, billions, you know, these vanishingly small numbers compared to what we can inject into somebody. And so when we do that, it's sort of hyperphysiologic doses. And then you get the medicinal effect from the adrenaline that you don't get when you just let the adrenals do their job by themselves. So what are the side effects from an adrenal pin like that? Oh, if you just gave it to yourself or your blood pressure would go up, your heart would start beating rapidly, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, don't do that. Matter of fact, if you get too much adrenaline, I mean, you can stop somebody's heart with that if you gave them an overdose of it. So, all right. Oh, let's look at what is lethal dose? Just, you know, just out of curiosity taste. Lethal dose of epinephrine. You might give people ideas.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, and here's the thing. They used to give this to us in these weird concentrations because you can get adrenaline in doses that you would use for a code blue. And they're different than if you're doing an anaphylaxis. And they would give it in concentrations, you know, one to one thousand. And so it was confusing to people. So I'm not going to look up the, but it can be certainly an overdose. Oh, here we go. Doctor charged with manslaughter for giving patient a lethal, oh, don't keep me in suspense, a lethal dose of adrenaline 10 years ago. Okay, a doctor gave a fatal dose of adrenaline to a patient. This is from the British Medical Journal, who was in septic shock as standing trial for manslaughter more than 10 years after the death. This doctor who moved to the United States soon after the incident returned voluntarily. Okay, well, anyway.

Yeah, you can certainly overdose people with this drug because it is, you know, it's very, has a really powerful effect in the body to constrict blood vessels. All right. All right. Excellent. Excellent question. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Calvin from California.

Hey, Calvin. I was wondering if a patient is presenting with a cancer. lump, let's say, in the abdomen, why can't they just tie off the blood supply until the tissue becomes necrotic and rots and dies naturally because the blood flow would be shut off and cut off, pinched off, and all the other off, and then after it's dead, then remove it with a scalpel or have medical grade maggots eat it out, which is actually an experimental thing. No. Medical-grade maggots.

Anyway, thank you much. Have a little bit of a day. Okay, so Calvin's idea is you've got a tumor, and let's say it's, and most tumors inside the body, by the way, are not pedunculated. In other words, they don't just have a stalk that you could tie off, but let's just say you had one. It had a stalk, and you could just tie it off, which, by the way, the idea of robbing it of its blood, Blood supply is a good one. I'll give him one of these for that. Give yourself a bill.

Because there are drugs that will target the blood supply of a tumor or the basement membrane of the tumor's ability to force the body to give it blood supply, right? Because it's got to. When a tumor's growing, it's got to recruit blood vessels to feed itself where it will just die. And sometimes that happens. Well, anyway. But let's say you had a tumor in your body. and it was pedunculated, i.e. on a stalk, and you just tied it off and left it. Now, you have dead tissue inside your body, and the body's got to do something with it.

What is it going to do? Well, Calvin's idea is put medical-grade maggots in there. There are such things. Never heard of that. When you have someone with a really horrific, like, leg lesion, let's say we've seen this in homeless folks who will have their legs wrapped maybe for several months and not look at it, and they know they've got something going on, but they don't know what it is.

And then they come in and you open up these wrappings, and there will be this, you know, 10 centimeter, 20 centimeter, this huge. So, you know, 10 centimeters, what, like six inches, something like that, a wound that's deep and it's just got all kinds of dead tissue in there. You can take sterile maggots and throw those in there and then cover it up, and they will go in and eat all the dead tissue. And then when you unwrap it, you just clear out all the maggots. You've got nice, clean tissue.

And it doesn't hurt like if you had to go in there with a scalpel and clean it all out. So those are used. And so, but his idea is so you've got this dead tumor inside the body, just fill up the abdominal cavity with these maggots and let them go to town. Not a good idea. Why not? just if it's pedunculated, just go in and go ahead and tie it off, but then cut it, you know, at the stock and just remove it.

That's what we would do. We would remove it. You don't want dead tissue inside a human body. There is a thing called tumor lysis syndrome. Tumor lysis syndrome occurs when you give somebody chemotherapy and they've got a lot of tumor in the body, let's say, lymphoma, where lymphoma, you've got all these enlarged lymph nodes, right? And you give them the chemotherapy and all of the lymph nodes die at once. Now, the body's got to do something with that tissue. You can't go in and scoop it out. And many of those

folks will go through this thing called tumor lysis syndrome where there's so many products of dead tissue floating around in the body that causes problems. One of the things is it can cause gout. It can cause low blood pressure, all kinds of things. And they can get really, you know, death ill. And there is a, you know, a small number of people who get that will become so ill that they will succumb to their illness, even though the chemotherapy killed all the tumors in their body. So oncologists are always vigilant looking for tumor lysis syndrome. So you don't want to induce that by killing somebody's tumor and just leaving it in their body. If you kill it, you've got to remove it. Okay? That's why. And no, no intraperitoneal, no, no, no

sterile maggots inside the body cavity on there. Those are for topical use only. All right. If you want to see something gross that has something to do with maggots, and I'm just going to warn you right now, do not Google image this. But, you know, if you can't help yourself, Google image oral myiasis. M-Y-I-A-S-I-S. I've used this on multiple shows when they ask me,

what's the grossest thing you've ever seen? and I'll send them that and it never fails that people puke when they see it. So you're warned. All right. I wonder if I'd pupe. That's what people think.

They wonder if they'd say. Okay. Well, why don't you Google it and see? Oral O-I-I-A-S-I-S-I-S- I-A-S. I'll give you some music to go along with it. So this is what happens. I don't see a picture.

Well, you have to Google image it. So this is what happens when people fall asleep. Oh, that's gross, but I'm not going to throw up. Really? Okay. Especially that one. When people fall asleep and they've got bad dentition, they fall asleep outside and flies fly into their mouth

and lay eggs in their rotting gums. And then the eggs hatch and then maggots. are found in their oral cavity, eating dead tissue around their teeth. So, yeah, that's... She's laughing because she's uncomfortable, not because she actually finds it funny. So, isn't that horrible? Can you imagine?

I don't know. That was kind of... I mean, it didn't make me sick. Okay, well... It's kind of like horror movies make me laugh. Yeah. I need to shut up. Because you're uncomfortable.

Google then penile myiasis. and see, you might find that hilarious. No. While we're doing that, let's get this question taken care of. My question about the, this is Stacy DeLooch. I had to beat you to the place, my friend. Okay, fair enough. Stacey Deloche, everybody.

My question about the bandanas and stuff across your face, how about on the other end of the spectrum, does wearing a bandana and it's coarse, or as porous as it is, does that protect you from inhaling a coronavirus from somebody else? I believe we answered this last night. No, we didn't. We went the other way. We went the other way?

Yeah, we were talking about, well, what he asked was, since the viral particles are so much smaller than the mesh of any facial thing that we can make, how does it work? And we talked about the reason it works is because we're trying to stop dropping. which are macro objects and not viruses, which are nano objects. So we're trying to stop droplets that are filled with millions or billions of viral particles, not individual viruses. And what he's asking now is if you wear a mask, does it keep you from getting it? And probably not. You know, there aren't really good studies on that.

There was an interesting case study where there was a guy who got on a bus in China I forgot to wear his mask, and he had it, and they did epidemiologic evaluation, and they found that out of the 40 people on that bus, five people got it from him. And then he got on another bus and bought a mask in between time, and he was on there about the same amount of time, and they traced all those people down. None of them got it from him. So the mask really did at least, look, it's just in some scientific study. But it is an epidemiologic study, and no one got the virus on the second bus where he was wearing the mask, yes.

So what are the dangers of wearing a mask? Oh, I'm breathing back my CO2. I'm seeing it all the time. No, you're not breathing back your CO2. What about chances of getting something like pleuracy or? Pluracy. Yeah, I've read that. I read that on Facebook today.

No risk of that. All these people sharing the stuff like it's just gold. Well, the thing that you're, that you are doing is re-inhaling your own bad breath, so that's gross. I can't believe I even have Facebook friends anymore because I just delete everybody. Yeah. So, yes, re-inhaling your own carbon dioxide is a technique that we use to break a panic attack. We've talked about that on the show, doing square breathing, where you breathe. And you're not even re-breathing your CO2 when you do square breathing. you're just not exhaling your CO2.

That's when people breathe in for four beats, hold it for four beats, breathe out for four beats, and hold it for four beats so that you're only breathing in or breathing out one quarter of the time, and it's impossible to hyperventilate. So people who have a panic attack, hyperventilate, and then they start getting symptoms of rapid heart rate, tingling around the arms or the fingers and the mouth, and they have these horrible symptoms. They can break that. By square breathing. Another way they can do it, though, is by holding up a brown paper bag.

It doesn't have to be a brown paper, but a bag where they re-inhale their carbon dioxide, right? So they're increasing the carbon dioxide levels of their blood. But when you do that on a crowded train or a subway, you've just marked yourself that you're having anxiety. And now you've put a target on your back. You're now a victim or a potential victim. them because you're breathing into a brown paper sack on the subway. But it's perfectly safe to do that. But when you have one of these masks, there's no seal there where you're breathing out into this mask and somehow it's trapping carbon dioxide and then you're breathing it back in again.

If you are at all, it's less than 1%. Okay. So that's what I thought. I would love to do a study where we measure arterial carbon dioxide in people's, you know, bloodstream with a mask on and with it off and see if there's any variation. I would wager that it would be less than 1% difference. All right? That's a good question. I mean, it's a good question.

You got any other myths from your Facebook pals? Oh, there's this one big long thing that's going around that just. just talks about how COVID is basically a conspiracy. Okay, I know. And it goes on at point after point after point after point after point after point. And it's these well-meaning women who don't understand what danger they're putting out there by sharing that kind of information. They want to feel better about it. If it's a conspiracy, then you don't have to worry about the virus doing anything to you, you know, if you're scared of the virus.

now. Oh, there's also a big rumor that the CDC says to stop wearing masks. I haven't seen that. Okay. The CDC never really said that the mask will keep you from getting it. It's so that you're not transmitting it to someone else. But there was a study recently that showed asymptomatic transmission was low, correct? Yes. But then they backtracked and said, well, but we think maybe 40% of cases were transmitted asymptomatically. Get your shit together. Sounds a little hot to me.

Yeah, me too. So I don't know the actual number. So until then, out of respect for my fellow man, I'm wearing a mask when I go into an area where it's hard to social distance. And I still think, even though we don't have data to show it, that if someone sneezes at me, even if it decreases my chance by, say, 5%, that's still 5% decreased risk of me getting it from them. And when the risk is already low, remember we've said year in and year in and year out, time and time again, that most people will not get this and most people who get it will not die. So right now we're still hovering it right around just under 1% of the population has actually gotten it that we know of. And if we say that there's one asymptomatic case for every symptomatic case, then we're talking at most, maybe. be 2%. That means 98% of people still haven't gotten it. You know, the pandemic of 1918, 90% of

people didn't get it. Still wiped out a significant fraction of the world's population. You know, when I say significant, you know, a couple of percentage points, but that's a huge number when you're talking about billions of people. Yes, it is. But still, 90% didn't get it. And of those that did, 10% died. So you're looking at 1%. So 99% of people didn't die from the pandemic of 1918 and look at what the hell it did that's my concern but i think i see light at the end of the tunnel i think we're going to be back uh being much much more normal here very soon and we're already a lot more normal today than we were a month ago and remember though the roaring 20s came out of the pandemic of 1918 so i am looking forward to the roaring 20s that come out of this i guess i

said that of this show already did i say that am i repeating myself i don't think so i just look forward to a robust economy when this is over. Yep, for everybody. Yes. Yeah, let's get everybody back to work and everybody being able to go out and go to a concert. I mean. A restaurant. A restaurant.

Okay, let's start there with our service industry friends. We have friends who are in the service industry, and this is sucked for them. Sucked for them with lowered capacity. You know, the restaurants aren't making the money. Or zero capacity at one point. Yes, yes. And then the service. servers who are there working and expecting to get half the tips.

It's just terrible. It still is not good for so many people. Yeah. Let's still overtip everybody just for a little while. Over tip. And particularly in the places that have been shut down for all this time. But anyway, yeah. So we'll just see you next week.

I know this. We'll get more excited about doing this. I don't know when that's going to happen. When Scott comes back, You think Scott coming back will make things... I'll be very excited. Really? Why? I'm just saying.

Because you won't have to do this anymore? Maybe. Well, you're going to... Okay. Well, I think you need to be a permanent fixture. Honestly. Well, you ask good questions. I asked Scott to just do a little bit of show prep, and he gets in here and then opens up that computer that I provide for him and starts doing show prep when I'm turning the computers on.

Steve, I didn't do any show prep. Well, you had... Yes, you did. You had a question, or two questions from your friends. That's, that's, I can, that's. If a burrito can cause. To me, by God, that's show prep. Okay.

That's more than I've ever gotten anybody else to ever do in here. Okay. You know, my thing was, you know, when I had night nurse Evie or lady diagnosis was like, I want to be Howard Stern. And not that I'm comparing myself to Howard, but I want to be Howard and you be Robin doing the news. Read these news. Bring in news articles. Read them and let me just comment on them. I think I had to pay me before I do that.

Well, okay. But I'm just saying, you know, that's, and so you bring something, you know, I never could, maybe it's just because they don't listen to Howard. Maybe that's why they just didn't understand what I was going for on that. Well, it's just conversation. Yep. Yeah, I always liked that, you know. His thing with her was he wanted to sit back and have her read the news and he would just riff on it.

And then he started doing things like bringing Gilbert. It was brilliant, you know, and I could never do anything like that. But on a medical story, it would be fun to not have to just sit back, let you all do a medical story. And let me talk about how shitty the journalism is because medical journalism tends to be amongst the worst journalism in the world. It's even worse than scientific journalism because they get so many things wrong. And it always makes me wonder, you know, the times when I actually know something about something. they're talking about it, and I see all the things that they get wrong. It makes me wonder about all the times I don't know about something, and I just take it as a given that it's right,

you know, it's a little frightening. Well, medical knowledge across physicians and, well, across everybody in medicine is just absolutely nuts. I mean, I've got people, I know people who I'm like, how did you get into school, let alone graduate? And then I've got people that I'm like, wow, you are so smart. I mean, I don't have a lot of people that I think, whoa, but I've met a few a lot of the way. It is sad that the ones that are really smart are the ones that you remember because they're so few and far between. I think most people have enough knowledge to practice medicine safely and effectively, but it is interesting to see. I think a lot of physicians' problems sometimes, they graduate from school and they feel like their learning should end there and that medicine stays the same.

same. I learned the most that I learned through seven years of medical education the first year I was out of, you know, when I was on my own. Because now all of a sudden it's like, oh, God, this is actually, this is going to make a difference in somebody's life. And there's nobody looking over my shoulder to catch me doing something stupid. And the onus for a physician to keep up with medicine is on them. It's their responsibility. And it's just like everything else. Some people can't get up in the morning without an alarm clock. Some people just can't keep up with their stuff. They just can't.

And not every physician does. They just don't. And I think, you know, so what our certifying boards do is do these things like maintenance of certification experiences. So I have to do a certain number of modules every year. And then I have to take a test. and if I don't pass the test, I'm not board certified anymore. It doesn't stop me from practicing medicine. No, that's not.

But, you know, I, for me personally, I usually do really well on those because I'm a good test taker. But I'm not convinced that doing well on maintenance of certification activities translates into being a better physician. I often think those tests don't necessarily. they're not very modern. Do you get what I'm saying? They're lagging behind cutting edge stuff too. And it's horrible. Even though you're doing them on computer, that makes it worse to me because I'm sitting, I'm 64, almost 65.

By the way, you're married to an old man in case you hadn't noticed. Or in case that wasn't the first thing on your brain every morning when you wake up and open your eyes and look at the ceiling. Oh, my God, I'm married to an old man. but I can't sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours without there being an adverse effect on my vision. And they put the pictures at the end and they're always crappy. And you're supposed to look at these pictures and I'm just looking at them with blurry trying to figure out what the hell they're trying to show me. You know, looking at an picture on a crappy computer screen at the end of eight hours of an x-ray of someone's chest is almost impossible. Now, it's not real world, has nothing to do with anything in the real world.

You know, I would go to the radiologist if I couldn't tell what it was and ask them. You know, that's a sign of a good physician is when they don't know something, they go find out. To ask questions, and that's not always the case. And then I think a lot of times, I lost my train of thought. Well, you have to have that framework. Well, okay, I remember what I was going to say. Sure. So, just like in everything else, if you want to do a good job, you have to try hard.

You have to not rely only on yourself that take opinions from others. Not being intellectually lazy. Yes, and that's just not everybody. Yeah. No, you're right. So that's my doctor bashing for the day. Well, we're not bashing doctors. We're bashing anybody who's in a profession and they're not doing what they could do to do the best.

Yeah, and I don't want it to sound like I'm bashing. It's just like in everything else, there are bad people at every job. Yep. Well, there you go. You struck your neck out on that. I sure did. Well, 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 Klein Schmidt, Ron Bennington, and Fizz Watley, who supported this show has never gone unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM 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. By the way, I'm still lobbying to do live shows that would be completely different from the content that you hear on the podcast.

Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. And go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid notes. 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. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks, Tice. You're again.