Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 415 - Humorous Immunity

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss endemic coronaviruses from the past and possibly the future. Also cellular vs humeral immunity, shockwave therapy for erectile dysfunction, a pepperoni windfall, home orthopedic fails, and more. stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) Get Every Podcast on a Thumb Drive (all this can be yours!) hellofresh.com/weird80 (America's #1 meal kit and get $80 off!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolabovir stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain now, clasped with the wave, an ultrasonic, egographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic mill. 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, unsensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve, and my little pal, Tacey, will be with us in a little bit. 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 the regular medical provider.

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of shows on it and it's all the shows And right now, other than going to premium. com, that's the only way to get the old shows. And don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website. Someday when this virus is over, we'll allow him back in the office. But check him out at simplyherbils.net. Okay. So, and here's Tacey.

So you've got limited time with us today because you're working and have some sort of meeting or something. So let's just get going until you. You can, I'll just finish the show off, but you brought, you actually did some show prep. A little bit. I'm very proud of you. Well, I'm not sure it's going to be good, and I don't have my glasses, so we'll see. I'm sure it will be delightful. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio.

That's right. I'm definitely an asshole on the radio. He's talking about me, but I'll give you one of these for doing show prep. Thank you. I don't get used to it. What do you got? Okay. Okay, so let's talk about how face masks do not lower oxygen levels.

Okay. But they feel. like they do. They certainly do. Today, they made us wear goggles. Today, we're having to wear eye protection and the face mask. And I was running up the stairs. And I'm like, I've got to take this mask off because I feel like I can't breathe.

And I checked my oxygen saturation. And when I first looked at it, it was like, 86. It should be 100, right? Or somewhere thereabout. But I was reading it upside down. It was actually 98. Well, there you go. So, yeah, so it's an illusion.

There was a study that looked at surgeons and their surgical masks, and they followed their pulse oxymetry throughout the exam, and they found that it actually did drop, but it dropped like from 98 to 97. It was statistically significant, but not clinically significant, which is why we have so much headroom, you know, in our bodies that we can tolerate. things like that. I don't understand the people who won't wear one. I don't get it. I don't understand. I will not be muzzled. Yeah, I will not be muzzled. Come on. We can be done with this. This is real, people. It's real. There actually have been study after study after stand. There have been a few studies that show that there's no benefit. And that's what people are sort of grabbing onto, but there have been huge meta-analysies that have been done. I have to disagree with you.

I do not believe some of these people that are not wearing masks are grabbing onto any sort of study whatsoever. I know what you mean. Some of the people that we know, they've never read a study, but there are people who are online who are using those few studies to sort of bolster their thing that wearing masks is bullshit. And, but there was a large meta-analysis done, and there have been several of these done and several studies that show that you can decrease transmission by wearing face masks.

And the thing is, is that, okay, so what if it's not perfect? What if it's only 10 percent? How many cases do we have in the United States right now? Let me look and see. I'll look at it. I'm going to COVID-stout Labs. and it's Stout like you would expect Stoutlabs.com

and this is our friend Daniel Stout who is an awesome, awesome webmaster he did our web page and he's this guy's a genius so what he's done is he's tapped the Johns Hopkins and the Amazon data lakes and then he's turned it into graphics

that you can manipulate yourself to see things and you can look at trends and data of total cases, new cases, new deaths, new hospitalizations, all kinds of stuff. Plus, I convinced him to add the simple moving average because sometimes data will sit on somebody's desk for days and days and then they'll output a bunch and you'll see these big peaks and valleys and the simple moving average, if you go back 20 days, will smooth out all of that and you'll see the true

trend. And then he's also adding, I got him to add Bollinger bands, which have to do with the standard deviation of the data over those previous 20 days, and they'll widen when it's higher and narrow when it's less. And so when you see more consistent data, those bands will narrow. So it gives you an indication of where the data is going anyway. So the United States, let's see here, as far as total cases is concerned, let me just go to the number one, which is going to be the United States, almost 4 million, 3.97 million. Okay. So let's say that you decreased transmission by 10%.

That'd be 397,000 cases that were prevented. And if it was only 5%, right? Well, so the data that I got today on the world then is 623,507 cases with deaths. I'm sorry, yes, with over 15. 2.2 million cases. Yeah, so if you're going to reduce that by 10%, you would have saved 60,000 lives. So can we not agree that maybe it decreases transmission by 10%? And there are, there's data out there that shows it may be higher than that.

And, you know, there was a guy did a mathematical model, which we know what to do with models. They're, you know, it's just what they are. They're models and they're not perfect. but universal maskage would allow us to get the R sub T. Do you remember what the R sub T is, Tase? Is that how often it gets spread from one person? That's right. Very good.

I'll give you one of these. Give yourself a bill. And that's in real life. So the R sub zero is the theoretical transmission rate. So if you have one infected person and they're surrounded by people who are susceptible, how many people will they infect? For measles, it's 12. For COVID-19, it's like 2.4.

But the R-Sub-T is real world. That's how many people are actually, on average, being infected. And most states are at 1.5 and below. And there are some states that actually have negative R-Sub-T's main is one of those. And if you want to look at that data, go to RT. dot live, RT. Live. And they update that every

day. And back in the beginning there were a few red states and a whole bunch of green ones and then that line has just been working its way down so that the vast majority of states now have positive R subtees. But they're all very close to one, which means that if

we can decrease transmission again by 10%, we could get almost all of those states down to below an R sub t of below one. So now if, let's say you have an R sub T of 0.9, that means 100 people will infect 90 people and 90 people will infect 810 people and 810 people will infect 720, right? So it will continue to decline until it's gone. And we, you know, you can eradicate this virus just by not having any more hosts. That was another question I was going to ask you.

Do you feel like this will just disappear like SARS did? No. And why is that? Well, because it's more transmissible than SARS. So MERS is the most serious. It's got a death rate that's astronomical, but it's very hard to transmit it from one person to another. That's the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, coronavirus. Then SARS was a little bit more transmissible, but not as much.

And then this one is just very, so it's almost as if these viruses are just trying different things. things, which they are through natural selection, trying to find a method that they can propagate themselves. To no end, by the way, there's no endgame for these viruses. They just, this is just what they do. They're like mindless nanomachines, and their only programming is to infect hosts and to increase their number. That's it.

So they're not intelligent. They're not alive. I have no problem wiping them out. I think we should declare war on human virus. We've had enough. This is enough. You know, if smallpox and measles and, you know, all these other virus, Ebola isn't enough, then we've got this effing thing. So it needs, we need to declare war. We have the technology now that we can start to wage war on these viruses.

We need to eliminate them. Now, here's my theory about this coronavirus. There are, what, four or five coronaviruses that circulate all the time. catch them, you know, over and over again. And they caused the common cold. My hypothesis is each one of those coronaviruses started the same way, caused a global pandemic where a certain number of people died because the adults weren't used to it. You'll notice that when kids get this, they don't, on average, they get sick.

It orders of magnitude less than the adults do. Yes, there have been some kids who have died and it's tragic. Some kids have gotten really, really sick. But for the most part, this is affecting people my age and, yes, and above. Well, I was talking to our scientific nanny today. And she, though, I mean, she's really on top of this stuff. And she was talking about how, well, here goes this story. The guy that she talked to at the gym who used to be an assistant teacher.

No, it was saying that. I just was wondering if this is true. Okay, okay. That it's not, when school starts back up, it's not so much about the younger children giving it to each other because you can pretty much isolate them in a room. Well, that's not where I'm going with this. Okay, okay. So hear me out. Okay.

It's more about the high schoolers and the middle schoolers who are going to school that are going to transmit it because of changing classes and in the hallways and things like that. And that is the big issue with sending schools back and whether or not the schools will end up closing again. Yeah, they probably will end up closing if this spike continues. I know they're planning on trying to do it and their social distancing or physical distancing and they're making them wear masks and lots of hand sanitizer. But, you know, I went to – well, let me finish my thing. No. And I went to see my kids' school where they're doing band, and they're all just glob together. So they're not physical distancing.

You know, it's hard to get kids to do that. Let me finish my hypothesis with the coronavirus, and we'll come back to what you wanted to talk about. Okay. So you'll notice that the kids really aren't getting at the same rate, right? So, but the adults are having this. Now, if we get it and it disappears for a while and then comes back and becomes back and becomes endemic like the other coronaviruses are. When you're infected by this, if you survive it, yes, you can probably get re-infected with

this virus, just like other coronaviruses. But when you get reinfected, it's going to be a very mild illness and self-limited. It'll be like the common cold. So after this first generation passes through, then this coronavirus likely will become endemic, but it will just be another coronavirus that causes common cold. cold. And, you know, they never spent money looking at viruses that cause common colds because they're like, oh, you know, who gives a shit, right? Well, when you have one, you do. Yes, but I mean, for the most part, you know, nobody cares that you have a cold. Well, now we see why we need to

care because when we have a novel cold virus come through and the, in the adults have never seen it before, then they get, they get in trouble. See, the regular cold virus, We've all had those when we were one, two, five, six, seven. And by the time we were, you know, 25, we'd already had all of those coronaviruses. And that's why when we get a cold now, it doesn't, you know, it just makes you feel miserable, but it doesn't kill you. But we need to declare war at least, and it needs to start with the coronaviruses, in my opinion. Agreed. And then we need to hit the Ebola-type Marburg-type viruses next.

and because those are less likely to cause a global pandemic, but when they do make people sick, they, you know, the mortality rate's very high. And we need to wipe them out. There's no reason not to that I can see. And, you know, unintended consequences are always possible. Do they drive our evolution? Well, maybe, but we're already evolved to the point where we don't need to evolve much farther. Our evolution now needs to be social evolution, obviously.

So I think that's what we need to do. Now, you were going to ask a question. Oh, yes. This just popped into my head, so I'm kind of dropping a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the Today Show this morning when I was getting ready, the FDA has updated on hand sanitizers with methanol. Yes.

And spoken about how they're dangerous. Well, methanol's... And a lot of that was... I don't know that people were absorbing it through their hands and getting sick. I think the few people actually got sick might have. have actually been ingesting it, but methanol is really not for human use. It's an organic solvent. The ones that we can use are isopropyl alcohol doesn't seem to affect people unless you drink it.

Don't drink is isopropyl alcohol. The only one that's even moderately, quote unquote, safe to drink is ethyl alcohol. So anything that doesn't, if it has isopropal alcohol, it can go on your hands. If it has ethanol, it can go on your hands. I would not use a methane-containing product. Yes. Well, apparently there's a whole list, and you can get that list on the fabulous Internet. Yeah, and the FDA is actually recommended that.

So if you are a manufacturer of methanol-containing stuff, talk to them, not me, because I'm just repeating back what they're saying. I don't have a dog on today show this morning. That's right. Well, you know, they're, anyway. Unbiased, totally. Unbiased. and yes as they are all journalists right taste that's right okay that's funny oh no

wrong one all right what else you got um how dr fouchy yeah i never say his name yeah fouchy that's right okay well i heard people say it different well it's fouchy anyway um that this is the worst not Mayor health experts could ever imagine. It's a perfect storm. We're not at the end of the game. Maybe not even halfway through. Yeah. Do you agree with that?

Halfway through? No, well, okay, so we did lockdown right, what, March 15th? I consider that at the beginning of this. Because before that, we were living our normal lives. I have to go. Okay. Okay, everybody. I'm so sorry, but you all probably enjoy it better anyway.

No, they won't. If I get done early enough, I'll be right back up here. Okay, sounds good. Okay, thanks, Tate. We'll give you a little applause. You need some theme music. Oh, I have theme music for you. Uh-oh.

Hit the wrong thing again. Okay. No, it's okay. Yeah, no, we're good. All right. Well, that's Tacey, everybody. And, yeah, so I consider March 15th to really be the beginning of this because we, before that, we were acting like this wasn't anything. So if we get a vaccine in September, which is unlikely but possible, if we could get a vaccine in October, let's say we don't get it until January, well, then yeah, I mean, we're, and then it'll be over the next March.

So we're about a third of the way through, or a quarter of the way through, right? Maybe a little bit past a quarter. We're getting close to being a third of the way through. Now, of course, the more cases you have, the more immunity there is in the populace for what that's worth. And then if the Fava-Pera, which the data is late coming out, they're seven days late, the original data was supposed to come out July 15th, but there has been data out of Russia that has not yet been published that I can find, at least not in a journal that I can get my hands on, that showed an 80% improvement in patients who took FAVAPA pyrivir over standard therapy.

And if that's the case, then we may be able to go back to normal a lot sooner than we thought. I've been saying this for some time. if this drug is as effective as they say it is, you can take it when you first have symptoms so you don't progress to moderate or severe disease. You don't go to the hospital and you don't die. And if that's the case, you go to your doctor's office. They say, yeah, we think you have COVID-19. Here's your prescription.

You take it to the pharmacy. You pick it up. You isolate yourself for seven days, just as if you would do with a diagnosis of influenza. And then you emerge and go about your business. So that's what I'm hoping that we will have very soon. There's an Egyptian study on Clinical Trials.gov that I saw was completed, and we should have data on it. The Russian study has already been done. Favapiravir has already completed phase three.

As a matter of fact, they were in phase four post-marketing data gathering because it was already approved. in Japan for influenza. So this is why this is an off-the-shelf drug that if we can show that it works, it can go straight to market because it's already been proven safe. We just have to prove that it's effective in this. And the longer you put off getting this disease, the more likely it is that you will not die from it. because death rates, despite the surge, continue to drop because we now have remdesivir and we know how to use it. We now have dexamethosone and that we know when to use it. We've got Tocelizumab, which is a monoclonal antibody that also decreases the effects of the cytokine storm,

which we've discussed multiple times on the show, a sign of overwhelming inflammation in the body that ends up attacking other organs in the body. So, you know, we're getting better all the time. We're keeping people off ventilators more than we were before. So we're getting smarter and smarter at treating the severe disease. But my thing is, why let it get to the severe disease? We need interventions that will prevent people from getting to that severe disease. And that I'm hoping that that will be FAFA peer aviary. So we'll see.

Hopefully we'll know very soon. All right. Very good. Well, let's answer some questions. Let's see what we got here. Well, all right. Okay. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. Hmm. Ah, all right. I guess I'm, this Mac is... Hey, Dr. Steve. I got a question in regards to COVID-19. I saw something on Twitter, and basically it confused me. There was an article in regards to, basically what I'm asking is it true that T-cells determine the immunity and not antibody.

There you go. There's an article that said that herd immunity ain't going to be a thing because antibodies for COVID-19 don't last that long. And then inside that tweet, they actually had a story or some stuff, link that said that it's actually T-cells that determine immunity and not antibodies. So I just want to go to someone who is a lot smarter to me and see if you could put some clarification on it. I appreciate. Thank you, sir. Okay, man.

Yeah. So there are two kinds of. immunity. There's cellular immunity and there's humeral immunity. So humeral immunity are factors that circulate in the blood that look for antigens or things to kill that are not

in the cells. So they're extracellular. So it's stuff floating around in your blood, like viral particles. So those are antibodies for the most part. So the antibodies will attach to these viral particles and prevent them from implanting, say, but also they can signal to the cellular immunity side that there's something going on. So cellular immunity is pretty complex. There are a lot of different cells.

You've heard of CD4 and CD8 cells, if you know anything about HIV. Those are cells that are involved in cellular immunity. So when the virus actually invades a cell, cellular immunity can look at the viral proteins that are produced. The cells will present them at the surface, and then these hunter-killer T-cells will look for those and attach. And then there are natural killer cells, there are helper cells, there's all the stuff that goes out that will then just kill that cell. so the cell can't produce any more viral bodies. And, of course, when you're killing a bunch of human cells, you'll get, that's got to be repaired, and it can cause disease itself. And they also release these things called cytokines, which also aid in the destruction of these proteins.

The problem is, is when the body goes crazy, when it sees an invader and it goes, oh, crap, you know, we've got to put out all the guns. while those cytokines can then float around and, say, lodge in the kidneys, cause inflammation in the kidneys that then causes kidney failure or other organs of the body. And that's so-called cytokine storm. And so the body's response to the virus sometimes is worse than the viral infection itself. And so a lot of the people that are dying from COVID-19 are not actually dying directly. from the viral infection, but from the body's immune response to that, that when it overshoets its mark. So when that happens, we can use steroids like dexamethazone to just calm all of that down.

It's like, calm, oh, calmo. And you can sort of do the sexy sax music to the natural killer cells saying, hey, you know, let's chill, man. And then Tosolizumab is an antibody that will actually inhibit interleukin-6, which is another one of these inflammatory markers and cytokines. So it's very important that we have a functioning immune system, but it's also important that we don't allow it to do us harm. And so we're getting better at that all the time. So, but that's the deal. So if the antibodies go away, the cellular immunity, there are these things called memory cells, and they'll remember it.

It's like, we will not forget, we will not forget you. And if that virus attacks again, well, those memory cells are ready to jump into action and start doing its thing again and sort of wakes up the immune system. And there are plasma cells also that live in the bone marrow that are also looking for these. particles to return, and they can start producing antibodies again. So you'll mount a response a lot faster the second time. So if this thing becomes endemic, again, my hypothesis is that next time you'll have an attacked immune system that's ready to go, and when it sees that, it'll attack it. You might still get sick, but it will never allow that virus to take hold to the point

where you'll suffer cytokine storm. Now, the truth of the matter about coronaviruses is that in all past years, we've had at least 10,000 people in this country. Generally, old people with really poor immune systems die from coronavirus infections. But it just gets lost in the noise with everything else that kills them. And, you know, it gets put down as atypical pneumonia or, you know, respiratory failure or whatever. So these are not benign viruses, and even in their mildest forms, need to be killed, in my opinion. All right.

Let's take another one and see what we got here. Dr. Steve, the question about Gaines Way of treatment. Okay. It's very expensive. I was discussing this with some friends in mine, and we're curious if this actually works. It's expensive, like I said. Yeah. But the only information I can find is information provided by Gaines Wave itself.

Yeah, yeah. So my question is to you, Doc, is it safe? Is it real? Is it an actual treatment that works, or is it just focus, focus? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So Gaines Wave is extra corporeal sound wave therapy or shockwave therapy. And it basically sends shockwaves into the penis and it causes some very micro trauma, apparently. And when you do that, you get revascularization.

In other words, you get the production of more blood vessels. And more blood vessels means more blood. More blood means meteor erections. So let me look up extracorporeal. Let me see. I should have done this before, sorry. This is where I would have Tacey be talking about something. And I would be looking things up for erectile.

And I'm going to PubMed. So you're right. When you go and just look up Gaines Wave, all you're going to get is promotional materials, because that's a brand name. So what you want to do is look for what it is. which is extra corporeal shockwave therapy for erectile dysfunction. If you go to PubMed.gov and put that in. And let me see, here we go. This is for Peroni's disease.

That isn't what you're asking for. Okay, state-of-the-art review of low-intensity, extra-corporial shockwave therapy and lithotryptor machines for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. This is in the journal expert reviews of medical devices. Well, let's just see what they say. And there, it's a more, stringent randomized controls are warranted before there's widespread examples, or I'm sorry, widespread

acceptance of this technology is a standard of care. But they are saying many clinical studies reported encouraging results with improved erectile function, good safety records, and short-term durability. However, there is a need to define which subgroup of rectile dysfunction population is best suited. So they don't know that. They know that it seems to help. But, you know, let's say it helps in 20% of cases. Well, maybe those 20% were a certain subgroup, like people who smoked or had macrobascular disease or something like that. And then if you only did it on them, you might get a 90% improvement, but all the other people wouldn't be a candidate for it. Let's see. Here's another effect of low-intensity extracorporeal shockwave on the treatment

of erectile dysfunction, a systematic review and meta-analysis. This is an American Journal of Men's Health 2019 and oh no it's the main author is liang dong so you know it's unfortunate but anyway low intensity extracorporeal shockwave therapy has been reported as useful in non-invasement treatment for erectile dysfunction and systematic review and meta-analysis are used to evaluate the efficacy okay so what a systematic review and meta-analysis is you take you look for lots of studies that might have 10 people in them or 15 people, and then you match the data, and then you might be able to get a single study that's got 200 people in it, and there you can make better conclusions about statistical significance.

So let's see what they came up with. So the data revealed that men treated with this low-intensity extracorporeal sound wave therapy showed significant improvement in pooled mean scores from baseline to follow-up compared with sham therapy. So sham therapy, they just took the probe and just kind of mushed it around on these poor people's members. It would be the worst thing in the world to get the placebo arm of that. But the P value was 0.000001.

Goodness gracious. So that was extremely statistical. significantly significant. In other words, only one in a, how many zeros is that? One in 10,000. Let me see. Gosh, I'm going to have to, okay, that's 100,000, 10,000. One in 100,000. One chance in 100,000 that this was a random chance that caused this improvement. So that's highly statistically significant. And then said changes in the erectile dysfunction score increased significantly in the treatment group with another piece. of 0.001, and the erectile something score, EHS, I'm not sure what that stands for, increased significantly in the treatment group in four studies, again, with a highly statistically significant, and patients with moderate and or severe erectile dysfunction reported better results than people who had mild disorder, which makes sense. They've got farther to go. So, okay, so yeah, so it looks good to me. I mean, this is compelling enough for me to say that you will get some improvement. Now, almost everybody who uses rogain gets some improvement in hair loss,

but only about 33% of them get really outstanding improvement. So you may see some improvement. So if you've got nothing and you go to half, does we really gotten anything? Well, yes, maybe if you can take a Cialis and get all the rest of the way, right? So, you know, for the people who are on the borderline, this may really help. So, but it is expensive, and it looks like it wears off after a while, too. So we have to thank Dr. Dong for this meta-analysis. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. All right. Well, oh, boy. Okay. Another stupid question for you. Okay. Insurance. How does a medical professional interact with insurance?

The reason I ask is... Okay. This is Stacey Deloche, everybody. Unless I don't introduce them and I don't have a sound. I hate it when he pretends he don't know you. All right. Thanks, Stacey. We know you.

Low testosterone. Okay. So I go to my doctor. He says, you got low testosterone. Yeah. So he puts me on treatments for six months, has me come back. Insurance pays for it. I come back in six months.

They run the testosterone test. They said, hey, you're low but within normal range. Yep. and now insurance is not going to pay for it. What? And so I go six months without testosterone because insurance won't pay for it without, you know, I'm a cheap bastard like that. And so every six months I get testosterone because sometimes insurance will pay for it,

sometimes they won't. No, this is asinine. You have a chronic illness. So they need to code it properly. You have the illness of hypogonadism. And the insurance should not be requiring them to do. anything but maintenance to make sure that they're bringing you up to normal. So I think that your physician is misinformed about this.

I can't believe. I've never in 35 years of medical practice had an insurance company go, oh, well, you got this guy's testosterone up to normal. Now you have to stop it because everybody knows that this is a chronic illness. So I would insist on them not doing that. And this, I bet it's not that the insurance company won't pay for it because if that were the case, you would take, your physician would write the prescription or your provider would write the prescription. You would take it to the pharmacy. And the pharmacy would say this requires a prior approval before I can fill it.

And then the physician, all they have to do is say, this person has chronic hypogonadism, low testosterone, and this is their effective maintenance therapy. because if what you're saying is right, the natural consequence of this would be, okay, I've got high blood pressure. They put me on blood pressure medicine. Oh, now my blood pressure is normal. Well, now you have to stop it. Come on. That doesn't make sense.

Or I have type 2 diabetes. And my hemoglobin A1C through treatment with medications, metformin or whatever, whatever, some glipton drug, you know, brings my humonglumin A1C down to 5.4. Well, you're cured. You ain't going to take it no more. That would be idiotic. So this is incorrect. So it's either the physician is doing this.

I cannot believe it's the insurance company. I believe it's your provider. And they think that they're not going to pay for it. But tell them to give you the prescription and then see what happens. And if they run it through and you can. got no problem. If they don't, then the prior approval is required because they just want to know that you're actually taking your medicine, because that's one thing. They'll want levels to know that you're taking the medicine, not to make you stop it. Okay. Thank you, Stacey. You know,

Stacey always has good questions. All right. Dr. Steve, I've had a very nice windfall, not diet-wise. Yeah. fellow trucker went to Hormel, a bunch of palettes got crashed, boxes are crushed, they refuse them, and he gave me 25 pounds of pepperoni. Okay. Now, I understand COVID, so, you know, people are worried about that. Well, what I'm going to do? Wait, what are they worried about? Because we've pretty much shown that there's little to no danger from gross.

products, you don't have to wipe that stuff down anymore. You know, fomite transmission in something like this. You know, if you go back to my very first COVID sit rep on the laugh button channel on YouTube, I talked about that surface study. And it's exponential decline. So even if, yes, if virus may be detectable on plastic after, I can't remember what the, you know, three days or whatever, detectable doesn't mean infectious. And each one of these things has a half-life, and if the half-life is eight hours, it could last three days.

But if you start off with a hundred particles, then in eight hours, you'll have 50, and eight hours you'll have 25, and then 12.5. You may still be able to detect it, but it's not enough to infect anything. So, and if they are worried about these packs, you're going to go donate them to a food bank somewhere, all they have to do is just wipe them off if they're really worried about it. is I'm going to put on a mask Yes Open the box Triple steel

Plastic Dip lock trash Um Uh Uh The blot Not trash bag The gallon

freezer bag Yeah And with tongs I'm going to fill the bag About a pound And after seven pounds I'm going to put them in the freezer Okay

Put like three pounds in the fridge I mean how much Pepperoni can you eat? What the fuck to do with that 15 pounds So So I guess what he's saying is it's all in one big bulk thing. It's not individually packaged, you know, pound packages of pepperoni, because that would change things. I know I can garnish a sandwich.

Okay. Yeah. Put it on pizza. Check. Chop some up finely and added this spaghetti. Okay. I'm down with that. I'm really at a loss.

What do I do after that? Because I'm out of ideas. Yeah. I do. I have no idea. I mean, if it's not individually packed, I can't imagine or factory sealed that a food bank is going to take that from you. They want stuff that's individually sealed. Now, you might be able to find a soup kitchen or something that you explain the thing and they might take it. And then they could make pepperoni soup for the next three weeks for the poor folks that come there. You got me on that. I'd just call around and see if you could donate it to somebody. Otherwise, you're just going to have to toss it. But if it were in individual factory-sealed packs, it would be really easy to just go donate it to a food bank. All right. You can make a hat out of it, I guess. Hey, Dr. Steve.

I have a question in regards to COVID-19. Okay. I saw I'm on Twitter. Oh, wait. That's the same guy. Basically, it confused me. There was an article in regards to, basically what I'm asking. Oh, no.

The T-cells determined immunity. There we go. Well, I've lost my mouse. Okay, here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Brian from New Jersey. I am wondering why, as I'm getting older, and I'm in my mid-40s, my hair is growing faster, and it's growing out of my ears and out of my nose, and my fingernails. I need to cut every couple days.

So I appreciate it if you could give me an answer. I love your show. Yeah, man. So, yeah, it's really interesting. our hair is responsive to testosterone. So when you have hair growth, there are three stages of hair growth. There's anogen, that's the active growth phase. And then telogen is the resting stage.

And catagen is the regression of the hair follicle phase. And then there's exigen. That's where the hair sheds. okay so um for whatever reason the hair in the nose and in the ears and on your back and on your ass and stuff are responsive cumulatively to testosterone so that as you get older the antigen phase is triggered and so they'll just start to grow and then you so you have to trim your oh you see these old guys with these big bushy eyebrows same thing there too and nobody really knows why that is, they just know that it is.

And so, for example, some of the hair growth medications will either trigger antigen or prolong telogen, you know, the resting stage so that the follicle doesn't die as fast. So, you know, I could only grow hair down to about my midback. And that's because of the timing of, and people will say, well, I can only grow hair just so far and then it never grows any farther than that. And that's true because your hair follicles only live a certain amount of time. So they will grow long for a while. And as long as your antigen phase is kicking in, they'll grow infinitely long. But follicles don't do that. Then they'll go into telogen where it sits there for a while. And then all of a sudden the catagin and exigent happens

and that hair will fall out. Then you start all over again with another hair follicle. So there was When I was at Tulane, there was this woman that used to walk around, and she had her hair braided, and it was dragging behind her. So, you know, unbraided, it had to be like a train on a wedding dress or something. It was incredible. And she had really long antigen phase and then a really long tealogen phase because her hair was also very thick. So it wasn't growing long and then falling out. So that's interesting. I'll throw out another fun fact about hair.

you see people who have chemotherapy and their hair falls out. And then when it grows back, it grows back curly. Well, that's a real thing. And people say, oh, that's a myth. No, it's not. And the reason is if you have a circular hair follicle, the hair will grow out and it won't curl. And it'll grow out straight. So my hair is really, really straight.

I've got really circular hair follicles. Now, if you've ever taken a ribbon and taken a scissors and gone to a, a cross. one edge of that and made the one edge larger than the other, it curls, right? So if you have all your hair fallout, if you had long straight hair, when that follicle no longer has anything in it, it's going to relax, and it's going to relax into an oval shape, and it won't be perfectly oval either. It'll be, you know, but it'll be compressed. And now when hair tries to grow through that, one end of the hair is going to grow longer than the other, and it's going to curl because it's no longer got a circular hair follicle.

It's got an oblong or some other shape. And so then they end up with curly hair, and so it actually is a real thing. So there you go. There's your hair, fun fact, for the day. Hi, my name is Reed. I'm from Kenosha, Wisconsin. I had a question. About three months ago, I dislocated my fingers.

I hit them against the side of the wall. my middle finger and my ring finger on my left hand, I set them back myself at that point and just kind of splint to them and let it go. The problem I'm having now is that they have probably about a 20 degree angle to them, and this is three months later after they've been supposed to be healed. Same thing that I'm still experiencing pain with it. Obviously, I've been meaning to go to the doctor about it, But I was just wondering what kind of options they're going to present me when they see this.

Yeah, it's a good question. So, yeah, when you dislocate a joint, it's always best to go get that looked at. When you do home joint reduction, you may not do it properly and you may have trapped soft tissue between the two articular, you know, where the bone touches or cartilage touches cartilage. you get something wedged in there or you don't fully get the joint completely reduced, or if it was so reduced or so dislocated that you tore some of the supporting structure around that joint, and now it can't heal right, so now it's healed all goofy. So you need to see a hand surgeon. Some plastic surgeons are hand surgeons, board certified hand surgeons, some orthopedists are,

and you just got to call your local orthopedic office and say, do you have a board certified hand surgeon and then go see that person and I don't know what they'll have to do. They're going to have to look at it. They may have to get an MRI and look at all the different tissues and stuff. If it's not affecting your life, if it just looks goofy, but it's like if you're not a guitar player,

it's not affecting your ability to type, you should still go see them, but you may not have to have anything done. Now, later on, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, there may be arthritis will set in. And so it's best to go now and see them just to see if they can do anything to prevent that. Okay. So no more home orthopedic trials, please. Thank you.

All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Tony from Southwest Virginia. Big fan. Hey, thanks, man. My question is about these brain supplements, like in Uriva and Trev. I don't know what the name of the other. one. Deriva was one that I saw advertised. Did these things help? Thanks.

Okay, so it depends. So when you say do they help, you have to ask, what is it? What do you want to accomplish? They won't help bring your blood pressure down. They won't help with erectile dysfunction. So you must mean, will it help me somehow be smarter? Now, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, judge that. So I'm 64. I'll be 65 in a couple of months. My mental agility is not what it once was, but George Foreman always said that you will lose speed as you age as a boxer. But what you don't lose is power. And so you lose this agility, but you don't lose the power. And that's been my finding with my brain agility as I've gotten older. It's my brain is less plastic, and it's also less agile.

So I have a lot more on this show. A lot of times you hear me pause for words. What I'm doing, when I'm doing that, is scanning 12 different words to make sure I pick the right one, because I'm fully aware that there are things I could say on this show. If people just blindly did them without me having the disclaimer at the beginning, there could be a problem. So I have to scan a lot of words. well, I used to be able to do that a lot faster than I can now.

So it takes me about a half a second to scan a dozen words to say, and evaluate each one and say this one is the right one. But my mental power, my prowess is not diminished at all. As a matter of fact, that gets better all the time. My writing is a lot more succinct and clear, and my reasoning on paper is a lot more powerful, but I have to sit and think about it more. So you have to just think of what it is you want from these medications.

You know, how do you define getting smarter? So they'll do things like tests of memory. You can memorize words backward and forward. So when you're in your normal state, you could memorize five numbers or five words. and in this enhanced state, maybe you can remember 10. I don't know how that helps you. I mean, that's good for your short-term memory. What we really want to do to be smarter, though,

is to be able to synthesize, you know, take disparate facts and synthesize them together. You know, you've got synthesis, antithesis, or what is it, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. You want to be able to do those things in a more robust. way and a more complete way. And I don't know how you test for that. So there is a known nootropic medication on the market that is sold as provigil. And it is also, its brand name is Modafinil. And I understand that the military has some use for this. This is just anecdotal evidence or, you know,

things that are told to me. I don't know if it's true, where they call them go pills. Anybody in the military that knows a little bit more about that than I do feel free to jump in. And if you've had any experience with these things, let us know. Call us at 347-766-4-3-23, and let us know your experience with these. So I'm just going to give you a little tip. Modafinil is about, I don't know, 800 bucks a month, and it's prescription only. But there is a pro-drug, and I don't know much about this. I'm not recommending it, but I'm looking into it. There is a pro-drug, and what a pro-drug is a drug that you take, and then the body converts it to another drug that's active. And this one's called adraffanil, and it is on, you can buy it over the

counter. So you can buy adraffanil, and it is metabolized to modafinil, but I don't know the correlation between the two doses. You know, if a 50 milligram dose of modafinil gets you a certain effect, how much adraffanil do you have to take to get that? It could be more or less, depending on how the body either cleaves it or adds structure to it. So I'll try to find out more about that, and I'll do some research over the next few weeks, and we'll just sort of do a mini-series on these nootropics and see if we can find out anything interesting. You know, there are these, as I mentioned before, that show improved executive functioning. Well, what is that?

We'll look into that and see if that's relevant to what you want to accomplish. But if you just want to be, quote-unquote, smarter, really reading a lot and reading lots of different things, don't just read things that you agree. with, read things you don't agree with, and try to learn something new every day. That's really how you get to be smarter. And studying and practice, practice, practice, and learning how to take in new information, process it, and then spit it out maybe in a different way. And you're building a framework, a scaffolding, if you will, of knowledge that you can then

just hang new facts on. They'll go in different little places. And every once in a while, you'll come up with something new. And it will be an insight. And I had a eureka moment just a couple of days ago where I've been working on something in my head for six months and couldn't come up with the answer. And then one day it just popped out. It's like my brain finally finished processing it and it spit it out.

And I didn't have any conscious control over that. I wasn't thinking about it, but there was some structure in my brain that was fascinating. And Google Eureka moment, you'll see all kinds of stories of people that were working on problems in their head, and then they'd sleep on it, and then they sort of forget about it, and all of a sudden the answer would present itself. It's like, what's going on there? So those are the kinds of things we want to be able to enhance. And again, I don't know how you test for that.

I was on Anthony Coomia's show today, and we just talked about consciousness and when it goes wrong. And we don't know what consciousness is. The brain has a hard time thinking about itself. And since we don't know what consciousness actually is, we can't recreate it. And we can't fix it when it goes wrong. It's very difficult for us to fix it. We can sort of do some real broad stroke type things like increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain to decrease depression. But that's a very, it's like taking an anvil and using that to drive in a nail because we're not really precisely going in and fixing the problem.

We're just sort of bathing the brain in this chemical and hoping that people makes people feel better. And it normally does. Well, anyway, listen, we're out of time. And thanks for Tacey, even when she's here just for a little bit, brightens up the show. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharski, Eric Nagel, Rowan Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis, Falcone, Matt from the syndicate,

aka Matt Kleinschmidt, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley, who's support of this show has never gone on appreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, Siris 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. Many thanks for our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses,

wash your hands, wear a mask, and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thank you.