Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 417 - Bidet - A Love Story

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss protests against COVID-19 restrictions, favipiravir data, sudden onset of hypertension, bidets, the ethics of lying to save your life, and more. PLEASE VISIT: 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!) feals.com/fluid (50% off your first order of premium CBD sent to your home!) 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 heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out, and plastic with the wave, an ultrasonic, egographic, and a pulsating shape. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane, and if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane.

I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm aging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal, Tacey. Hello, Tacey. Hello, everybody.

The woman with whom I share a bed. What do you think of that? It's true. It's just true. That's all it is. This is a show for people who have never listened to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-76-4-3-23.

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It's a psychology app, right, Tase? Exactly. And it changes your relationship with food. and it changes your relationship with a lot of other things for the better in your life, too. So check out Noam-N-O-O-M dot Dr.steve.com. You get two weeks free and 20% off if you decide to try it. It's just a three-week program or three-month program, so it's not a big outlay. And there's no points and all that malarkey.

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last. I only got 25 left. And you get a thumb drive with 32 gigs of memory and about 19 gigs now of weird medicine content going way back to number one. And, you know, that's way back when it was just P.A. John and me. And then there was P.A. John and double vasectomy turd. And Jefferson the Scheister, way before Dr. Scott was here, and then we went through the GVAC years, and now the Tacey year. Oh, Tacey short semester. I don't know about that. I don't think you might be around for a while. I think I know.

And then check out Dr. Scott's website at Simplyherbils.comnet. So what were you talking about? What is it that you're... I have real clothes on. As opposed to... yoga pants and a t-shirt. Boy, you didn't just not notice. You don't even understand.

Oh, my God. No, I think you always look delightful. You always have real clothes on. I did last show naked, if you remember. Well, you had on your panties. I had underwear on, that's true. And then I did the Anthony Coomia show with Dave Landau afterward talking about, Oh, it was something like coronavirus or something.

I'm not sure what it was. Yeah, it was coronavirus. And I actually put a shirt on, but I had no pants on. It's because it's hot up here. It is. Yeah, it is. It's not as hot as it has been, but it's still a little stifling up here. So anyway, thanks for being here, Tase.

Glad to see you. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. You got anything interesting? We were, Dr. Scott was going to be here today, and he finked out. Why did he think out? Because, you know. And then he wonders why I cross out his face when I send out autographed pictures of him.

Yeah, that's really mean. Oh, it's funny. I'm just being silly. I always cross out P.A. John, if he's in him, too, and I write, ugh. Did he have something better to do? Apparently, making money. Oh, well. Which is right these days, that's fine.

Yeah. So totally fine. So speaking- Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net, by the way. Oh, yes. Okay. What do you got? Speaking of how, of course, you were talking about coronavirus with Anthony.

I looked all over the place for health news that wasn't related to the coronavirus. We have some calls today that are not coronavirus. Okay, good. And there really wasn't any. And not only that, but what there was, it was all politicized. And I just, not only could I not tell the world about it or all four of you, but I just couldn't even stomach reading it. I'm just so over it. Well, there's idiocy on both sides of the political spectrum, as there always is.

Dr. Fauci has had to hire security because his daughters are getting death threats. Oh, come on. What do they have to do with anything? And on the Today Show this morning, I saw. how many health care officials who work for the health department are quitting or retiring because they are also receiving death threats and having protests on their lawn and things like that. Yeah, when this first happened, people would sit outside the hospital and applaud when we went in. And now I hear that if you go into a grocery store in your hospital garb, some people will spray you with Lysol.

Better safe than sorry. It didn't take long for opinion to take. turn around. Part of this is, you know, I talked to Mehmet from Channel 100 today, and he was just asking me, you know, why do you think people are not listening to scientists and doctors? And the politicization of the politicization of this is part of it, I think. I think, first off, we're not emphasizing critical thinking. in our teaching and, you know, with our kids and with each other. We like yelling at each other and finding that thing that we just don't like and then harping on it and sort of ignoring everything else. But I think that we, scientists and medical professionals have not made a good case for us. And one example of that is don't wear a mask, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, wear a mask. Well, you have to be patient with people because this is a novel virus.

No, totally. But you've got to be patient with the medical profession, too. That's what I'm, that's what I mean. And so. We have never seen science unfold in front of us like this on a 24-hour news cycle this way ever before. And who are these people that have the time to go and protest in front of somebody's house? Probably people who, you know. Protest in general, isn't everyone just so sick and just tired?

Yeah, well, I think. Over it. Well, a lot of people are not working right now, so they do have time to get out and make their voices heard. And I think, listen, the protest is that is as American as apple pie. You know, that's how this country was formed, actually. But that aside, I think that we haven't made a really good case. And let me talk about don't wear a mask, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, wear a mask. So when this thing first started, there were 15, then 30, then 100 cases in the United States, all mostly on the West Coast.

So at that time, you know, Fauci and everybody came out and said, don't wear a mask. Because right then it didn't make sense to wear a mask. It was silly for someone in Tennessee to wear a mask when they were 4,000 or however far away that is, 2,000 miles away from the nearest case. Now, when we have 4 million cases, it absolutely makes sense to wear a mask, even if. and I get people just telling me Face masks don't work and it's like okay cite your evidence because you don't have any

that is a faith-based statement there's lots of evidence that face masks work they're not perfect and they won't 100% prevent transmission but what if they present it prevent it by 10% 10% only

and 90% of the time they don't do anything but 10% of the time they'll actually decrease, you know, reduce the viral load that somebody's getting enough so that they don't get sick or get infected. You're talking 400,000 cases now that would have been prevented. And I haven't checked the death numbers today, but get 10% of whatever, you know, the 100 some thousand, 10% of those, 12, 15,000 lives. That's a big deal.

That is a big deal. That's 100% of how many people died from one flu season, not recent. Okay. So, I mean, not too long ago. So that's why. And there are places in this country where you could probably not wear a mask. And people say, well, why don't we have a national mask policy? Well, there's a reason for that because we don't, this thing isn't a national, well, it is a national. It's a world pandemic, but it's not a purely national phenomenon. It is regional. It is regional. There are regions of this country where people need to be locked down a little bit more where the seniors like me need to be more careful and other parts of this country where they don't need to do that as much. And they can get away with it. New York right now is down to below double digits in their death rate and their new cases rate is incredibly low. You know, they've, after 32,000 people died in New York State, they're right now doing a pretty good job of preventing new cases.

Well, one of the reasons for that is I read New York City, they've set up quarantine checkpoints to make things tougher, you know, for the travel restrictions. And they're screening travelers from 30 states with bad outbreaks. Yeah, I can't even go there right now, I don't think. Or if I do, I'll have to quarantine. but there's a question about the ethics of this coming up later in the show, and we'll try to make sure we get that one on. Well, what are these people protesting, mask wearing or just the virus? Yeah, you're not talking about the BLM stuff.

You're talking about the people that don't want to wear masks. The people who are outside of health office officials, offices. Right, because there's two different kinds of protesting going on. We're to make it clear we're not talking about, you know, the Black Lives Matter. Please make that clear, but no, I mean, I do understand there are two kinds of protests. I know you do. I want to make sure that the people are listening to us realize that you, and that's not what you're talking about. What are these people in protest?

Well, what are they protesting? Not, I mean, are they protesting the virus because I don't think the virus really gives a shit? Right. Or are they protesting the use of masks or how they feel like this was handled poorly? Yes, I think all of the above. I think you have people who feel that this was handled very poor. poorly. And so they are very upset about that. You have other people that are, you know, saying, I won't be muzzled. You can't make me wear a mask. And, you know, there's all kinds of different

issues related around this thing. So they get in large groups outside and, and give each other COVID. I guess. I haven't seen those kinds of protests. I don't know. That's just what I saw today. And what I read also today. So, yeah. So, yeah. I understand people are frustrated. I'm freaking frustrated, too. I expected Favapiravir data to come out July 15th. We did finally get some. Did we talk about that last time?

No, I don't think we did. Okay, so we got some top-level data from a phase three Favapiravir trial now. Now, if you don't remember, if you're a new listener, Favapiravir is a drug we've been talking about for months now that is an influenza drug in Japan. I don't know. It's already made it to the market in Japan. So they've done widespread phase three and phase four safety studies on this stuff for influenza. So now all we have to do is prove that it works for COVID-19. It could go right on the market.

And so there's a company and I, oh, gosh, it's not care. All I can think of is care market. I know that isn't it. that is doing a phase three study, and they released some early data that showed that there was a significant improvement in resolution of symptoms. In other words, clinical cure where people don't have a fever and they don't have symptoms. It was about half the length of time as the people who got standard care. If you're interested in looking at more of this, go to YouTube, search for the laugh button. And if you go under playlists, there's my COVID situation reports.

There's 15 of them, but the most recent one talked about the new Favapiravir data. So it's still looking pretty good. In quite the slam dunk, I was hoping for, you know, you hope for, well, 100% of them got better and nobody died. But they only had 150 people in this first top-level data set. So there isn't enough to show whether they're reducing hospitalization. and reducing deaths, but I'm hoping for the next glob of data to come out any week now. And once we have that, if they can show these people were treated early, which is a perfect study for what I wanted to do, is treating them early when they have mild disease to see if they

progress to moderate or severe disease, keep them out of the hospital, keep them from dying. Because if that's the case, then it's influenza and Tammy flu. We can pretty much go back to normal if it works well enough and you just take the pill when you get sick and isolate for seven days and that's the end of it. Because right now, I'll tell you, I have a partner who's out. She had some diarrhea and fatigue. And they said, well, that's two of the symptoms of COVID-19. And now she can't come back to work until her nasal swab comes back negative. Guess how long they told her it would be?

10 days. Yeah, 10 to 14. days. So that's some bullshit. And I've got, you know, another partner whose husband may have it. And so she's out. And, you know, we're trying to cover, you know, multiple hospitals and multiple cancer centers and see lots of patients. And it's harder and harder to do when they're not letting people come to work. And we can't get the testing done fast enough. Why do we not have fast testing available to us? We have fast testing available. We have huge backlogs because everybody and their sister wants to have COVID-19 testing. Don't blame them. But what we're really doing now is mass screening.

And mass screening is a whole other beast than testing people who are sick and sick only. We were doing that in the beginning. And we caught hell for doing that because we were missing all these asymmetric. So now we're trying to do mass screening, but when you're doing it with a polymerase chain reaction test, it's a little different. You have to stick a swab way back in somebody's nose. They've got some new, more sensitive ones that they may be able to do it with saliva. But then it's got to go into a machine, and the machine has to detect RNA and then amplify it.

Once it sees it, it has to make a copy of the fragments that it sees to build them up to the point where you can then detect it. Okay. Well, I've had friends who have been tested in a private lab. Yep. And they found out the results the same day. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there you go. So do that. They're bigger city people. Yeah. And highfalutin city folk. So anyway, so that's where we are right now. It's still a bit of a cluster. But there is hope on the horizon.

The vaccine trials are preceding a pace. I am very optimistic that we'll have a vaccine maybe by October or November, and if Favapiravere comes out, it'll be a one-two punch, we'll have a vaccine and a therapeutic that works, and we'll go from there and we'll be returning. I'm so confident that we're going to be returning to normal that I am scheduling our micro-mogue fest in Asheville, North Carolina, at the aloft hotel. on April 22nd of 2021. I'm quite certain we'll be back normal enough that we can have meetings like that again. Do you feel like they're going to cancel regular MoGFest? Well, they haven't even started.

I went to MoGFest's website because they canceled last years, which ended up being propitious. It was, you know, maybe they were looking, you know, MoG is odd. Maybe they were looking into the future, but they canceled it last year and then just amazingly. realized they would have had to have canceled it anyway, so they didn't have to refund as much money because very few of us had bought tickets that far in advance.

I'm a nerd. I bought my ticket a year in advance. But I went to their website today and said nothing about 2021. It's still talking about can't wait for Moogfest 2020. Oh, I hate that when people don't keep their websites. Yeah, they haven't touched the website since they canceled it way back in what February, of 2019, so, oh, well. Speaking of vaccine, Steve, I did, well, I did not read the article, but I read the headline

that said vaccines may not be as effective in obese people. Really? Well, that's interesting. I guess I should have read that article. Yeah, no, no, no. Or you could have told me about it, and then I would have looked it up for you. But vaccines, obese, and obese. Oh, this one says vaccines cause obesity.

That's an anti-vaxxer site. Let me see. Is that what caused it for me? You're not obese. I know it's not the one. Let me see. The weight of obesity on the human immune response. Okay, here we go.

I found something. And on PubMed.gov. The weight of obesity and the immune response to vaccination. This is from the journal vaccine. which is no slouchy journal. This is the journal of record for vaccinologists. Oh, and look who's the writer, the author of this? Gregory Poland, MD.

My professor, when I was an intern, the smartest man I've ever met, who is now America's premier vaccinologist, yeah. Wow. And we're going to have him on the show sometime, too. He promised that he would come on as long as I would teach. which he and his son, or him and his son, how to do a podcast. So there you go. So anyway, the weight of obesity on the human response to vaccination by Gregory

Poland says despite the high success of protection against several infectious diseases through effective vaccines, some subpopulations have been observed to respond poorly to vaccines, putting them at increased risk for vaccine preventable diseases. Well, this was specifically talking about the coronavirus. Understood. In particular, the limited data concerning the effect of obesity on vaccine immunogenicity and efficacy suggests that obesity is a factor that increases the likelihood of poor vaccine-induced immune response. So this would apply to coronavirus vaccines, too. Obesity occurs through the deposition of excess lipids into adipose tissue through the production of adipocytes and is defined as body mass index of greater than 30 kilograms per meter squared. that's your BMI.

The immune system is adversely affected by obesity, and these immune consequences raise concerns for the lack of vaccine-induced immunity in the obese patient, requiring discussion of how this subpopulation might be better protected. So when they vaccinate older adults, of which I guess I'm one now, for influenza, we get a double dose. So they may have to do that for, you know, our obiso Americans. They may also have to get on. Oh, how embarrassing.

Excuse me. I'm going to need. Oh, excuse me, ma'am. We're going to have to give you two doses. Do you remember? Oh, how embarrassing. That James Gregory bit where he talked about how he was going on a puddle jumper from one Caribbean island to the other. And the guy was asking people their weights.

And he said, why are you asking for weights? And he said, well, so that. we can put enough gas in the thing. He's like, well, fill her up. And he said, I just know. So some woman's going to say, I ain't going to tell him how much I weigh. Or at least lie about it. Yeah.

Yeah. And then they're going to, you know, end up in the ocean. So, all right. I don't know how many times I see in some of these Noom groups that I belong to on Facebook. Yep. Women congratulating themselves on actually being the weight. that, that they said they were? That is on their driver's license.

Well, all right. You want to take a question? Do you have anything else? I've got a couple of other things. Okay, yeah, yeah, go, go, go, go. And we got time, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not saying they're interesting things. Oh, when have we ever been interested?

Well, yeah, okay. Former First Lady Michelle Obama talks about low-grade depression during quarantine. Apparently she suffered from it. Sure. I bet. Who doesn't? Yeah. I mean, this has been really.

hard. I can go to work, and so my life really hasn't, even though it's scary going into these places and having to hood up and all that stuff, I at least see other people every day. It's terrible. You, on the other hand. Yeah, I hear that word pandemic in my heart just sinks. Yeah. And there's absolutely nothing on television.

Yeah, they can't make anything. Past 11 o'clock. Yeah. Nothing. Oh, I see what you mean. Well, there's not going to be anything. new for some time. Well, I don't even care.

I haven't been home to watch it, but there's nothing worth watching, is what I'm saying. And I just sit there and stare at my computer and wait on it to ding. They make these books. And then I cuss because I don't want to do what it tells me to. They're books and you read them. That's one thing. And you do have a pool. You could just sit beside the pool and read.

But no, I get it. That still sucks. You could do that and sort of semi-retire, except it's, that's, you know, that's, you That's not what you're supposed to be doing. No. No, because I am getting paid and I am working. I think the boys are a little depressed, too, because they've lost, they lost the whole end. Liam lost the whole end of his junior year, which for me was my best year.

It was the least stressful because you're an upperclassman. You don't have the responsibilities of a senior, but you're not a freshman or a sophomore either. and it's such a great year, and he had to spend it basically completely isolated. On that same note, another article I read was talking about how kids in L.A. are going nuts. Nuts. They're going nuts because the bars are closed, so they're having mansion parties. Yes. And a lot of these parties, of course, they're not, you know, self-distance or anything like that.

And a lot of them are becoming violent. Oh, really? With gunshots. Oh, goodness. Crazy things like that. Well, that's not good, but... That's part of the losing it a little bit thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, the thing is, is that young people, a lot of the young people would say, I'm not doing this. They're not necessarily wrong. It's not that they can't get seriously ill and die from it because they have, but the odds are way in their favor. and so we're seeing these numbers and they tend to be more of the young where we're seeing the numbers rise and that may have something to do with the fact there's a couple of things that have to do with

the falling death rate for percentage our death rate is going up slightly but when you see it as a percentage of the total case rate it's actually dropping and that likely is multifactorial has to do with the fact that it's more young people are getting it now because they're the ones out there in groups and that we're getting better at treating

it. As a matter of fact, there was a COVID-19 question on my boards today. I took my, you know, we talked about, I took boards last week. I had to take a different set of boards this week, and these were my family medicine boards. And, yeah, there was a COVID-19 question on there about proning, which I got right. Thank you. Thank you very much. So give myself one of those.

Oh, you know what I ought to give myself? Give yourself a bill. There you go. Yeah. Because the kind of words I'm taking for family medicine, you know immediately when you answer a question if you got it right or wrong and it's got a little commentary. So if you got it wrong, you can learn something from it.

And it was about proning people. So if you don't know what that is, when you have someone who is, got no symptoms, but they have low blood oxygen. In the beginning, they were just sticking these people on the ventilator, right? Or giving them BIPAP, which is a bi-level positive airway pressure ventilation, which is where you put a mask on and force air down their throat. But the BIPP particularly was making aerosols in the room

and probably enhancing the spread to health care workers. And then we used to give them breathing treatments. And the breathing treatments, these nebulizers, you breathe in and you breathe out and you blow these nebules around and you're coughing and stuff. And so we stop doing all that. What you do in that case, if you've got an asymptomatic person with low blood oxygen, is put them on their stomach. And you would think, why in the hell would that work? But if you position them properly, you're actually taking some of the weight off of the lung. themselves. And there's less weight pressing down on the lungs when you're prone. And the

alveolide, the air sacs will actually open up. And a lot of times they'll oxygenate right back to 95, 96% when you do that. Oh, that's cool. So it's pretty cool. But yeah, that's already on board exams out there. This article even talked about how parties, of course, are banned. And violators are subject to be fined or imprisonment. I did not know that. So you have a whole group of people who are peacefully congregating, but in violation of the law because they are... Until they get drunk, then they bring the guns out. Right.

Well, okay. If that happens. But, you know, then you're having to send the police up there. And then, of course, you know, law enforcement are at high risk of getting this disease as well. Yeah. So it's just, it's a mad. This is a, this is a nightmare. And, but it's going to get better.

In 1918, had three waves. It got better. And then we had the roaring 20s. We're in our second wave of this right now. You think so? Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm calling it. You know, we had the initial spike.

And then you saw the curve start to flatten and decrease. And now we're seeing a resurgence again in some parts of the country. It's different than the flow waves. But it's similar. But we have the advantage they didn't have, which is much better virology, much better vaccinology, much better intensive care. And we also have therapeutics and the ability to get these things in the pipeline at lightning speed. The fact that we have a possibility of a vaccine less than a year after this virus first appeared in China is nothing short of morality. And it's not a real miracle.

It's a modern scientific miracle because the people that are doing this really are they're magicians, but they're just using science. You know, and it's, it's beautiful. This Moderna vaccine is the craziest thing. We talked about it a little bit. The Moderna vaccine is just a strand of RNA. And you, our messenger RNA, it's not a virus protein. like a normal vaccine is. This is an instruction set.

You're basically sending like an app, the instructions from an app or like, you probably don't remember, but we used to have punch cards to program computers. It's like sending a stack of punch cards into the cells, and then the cells themselves make the vaccine. This messenger RNA goes into the cells, works its way into the cells, works its way into the cells,

is picked up and then is transcribed by transcription RNA and ribosomes to make the protein that is then excreted into the cell wall, and then the body starts making an immune response against it and acts a lot more like an infection, and you get better immunity from that. Now, people are worried, oh, God, but the antibodies go away so fast. it's no longer just about antibodies it's about and we talked about this last time there is humoral response which is antibodies but you also have cellular response which are T cells and a helper T cells and other cells like that and there are memory T cells that will always remember this the infection and they will be there to fight it off the next time you get it so do not fear okay not fear

one more thing fear is the mind killer um apple and google's COVID not team tracking system to be debuted in a new Virginia app called COVID-wise. We heard about this back in January. I know, but it kind of disappeared. And it's interesting because, again, on Facebook, it's been spending a lot of time on there, excuse me. So a lot of my Facebook acquaintances have put this long little thing on, on, what do you call it, Facebook message?

I don't know, saying, if you decide to be a part of this tracking, please unfriend me, delete me from your phone, delete me from, and it's just like, come on. And it's always the people you would suspect that would say that. See, do you have your, you don't have your iPad with you, do you? Yes, I do. Okay. Look up Singapore chip tracking because I heard about this, but I haven't read any hard. information about it, that in Singapore, they're actually going to be putting a chip under people's skin to track them to do contact tracing. And so the hypothesis is that if you have this, you can trace everyone

that this person, so you find someone that is COVID-19 positive, you put them in the system, and then you can go, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, you can see everyone that that person came close to. Speaking of which with that With deadly accuracy I've been seeing a lot of end of time posts as well So we're also in the end of times Every generation thinks that they're in the end times

You know that is definitely true One of them will be right sometime At some point in the future particularly when our star decides to become a red giant That generation that has that last perfect day They'll be the right ones. But if you go back thousands and thousands of years, every generation thought they were the last.

So I did pull up Singapore chip tracking. Okay. What do you got? Well, I don't want to read it. Yes. Well, there's a bunch of things. Here's one that says not a tracking device. Singapore authorities clarify details.

Okay. Then what is it? Well, it looks like a video, and we can't do that. Okay. Let me see. Well, that's pretty much all it says. It's not a tracking device. Minister in charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, Vivian Bubbleble, said on Monday.

And then that's all it says. It's a YouTube video. You can look at it. Okay, that's okay. Singapore building wearable tracking device for citizens because phone-based COVID-19 tracking isn't good enough. Okay. So Singapore is developing a wearable tracking device that will reveal of citizens come into contact with COVID-19 infected people. We are developing and will soon roll out a portable wearable device. Okay, so it's not the number of the beast, folks.

They're not injecting it under their skin. We're developing and will soon roll out a portable wearing device that will achieve the same objectives as traced together but will not depend on possession of a smartphone. If this portable device works, we may then distribute it to everyone in Singapore. You know what else freaks people out? It's just contact tracing. That's all it is.

Cashless society. That freaks people out. Yeah. I think it's a good idea. Well, I just don't ever have it, so. Right. When have you had cash? Never.

Or a checkbook. It's like a... I'm the keeper of your checkbook. A play date when I get cash. Right. I know. I hear the same things. I'm cool with all of it.

Bring me the cashless society. Bring me the tracking chip. I'm good. Just put it in me. Let's go. I'm ready. Okay. Let's just do it.

All right. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. The bidet is on our podcast or S-Sam radio the other day, and I figured I'd give you a call about the first time I went to Japan, Tokyo, and visited the... Okay, so he's talking about our bidet discussion. Okay. Which I have my bidet going, and I love it. Although it was a little tricky. you're on mine, it kind of goes off to the

side, so I have to wiggle around and stuff. I've got to fix that to figure out how to get it to shoot straight down the old Star Wars channel. Poop shoot. Yeah. Or, yes. There you go. I was trying to

anyway. We went to the train station, or the area across from the train station downtown, Tokyo. Okay. And we went into the room. My wife

and I looked around, kind of tiny room, went to the bathroom, and it had one of them toilets in there, and I'm like, called my wife in, she looked at it, and I was like, that's, looks like pretty cool for the morning, so anyways, the next morning I get up to do my thing and get that, it had a little arm on it with these controls, and, um, and, um, and, um, it had a little arm on it with these controls. Yep. And I pushed it, said it, for, to hit the Tister instead of, since I don't have a Jai-Jai, it would have knocked me in the nuts.

But then I pushed a little green button, and I heard this motor going, this rod was coming out of there, and it stopped, and then fired a shot right, dead center, my cat I shot off that toilet like a dark. And then the water's all over everywhere. Turn around and shut that way. It's working the door of this hotel room. Turn around, check the water off. And that knob went, that little rod went back into the toilet and rotate itself,

cleaning itself. So then I, like, I'm a cowboy. And I'm rough and tumbled tough. the pitch. I got back on that thing and pushed that button again. Here's a rod cone out. I'm getting all prepped for that bad boy to hit me. Clinching your tank.

It fired it in there. I'm ready this time. It hits me right dead center and I'm like, I'm sitting there my eyes are rolling back and forward. This thing is like squishing back and forth, just a little tickler of the, of the, of the, of the The pipe back there. I just kind of relax the old fainter and let it do its magic. Then the wife, a hour and a half later, I'm sitting on this thing.

I'm laid back on this toilet just looking good back there. A white pal's on it. Honey, you okay in there? And I'm like, uh, uh, and I'll be out the second. I turned it off and that's my, uh, Toto's store. So he did an hour and a half cleaning. That's a very telling story. It is, we have the tushy, and it sits at the back and sort of shoots forward.

Now, if you turn it on and you're not there, it will squirt you square in the eye or in the middle of the chest. I mean, it will go across the room because the first time we turned yours on. It went everywhere. It went everywhere. And, but it's, yeah, I would love to have one of those that's made. to do that. Now, those toilets are, I think, like, 10 grand a piece because I priced them at one point.

Let's see. Toto Toilet price. Oh, okay. Only $5,000. Now, they have a Toto washlet, which is $4.29, which looks like it's a toilet seat, you know, the seat part that's got the thing built into it. And, oh, wow, they've got, here's a $7,000 to-to.

But I want the toilet. I want the toilet with all of it built in with the lights and all of that stuff, you know? That would be nice. It would be nice. All right. Our computer is shitting the bed over here. Oh, there you go. That's good.

Yeah. All right. Okay, dope. Well, thanks for the Biday story. Hey, Dr. Steve. Charlie from Western Maryland. My wife recently was diagnosed with acute hypertension, just out of the blue. She was at her OB visit in May, and her blood pressure was 106 over 68.

Okay. This past Thursday, it was like 260 or 160. Oh, God. Which, you know, went to the emergency room and got some meds for it. She's 41, 5 foot 1008 pounds. She runs 6 or 10 miles a day. six days a week she's super athletic

so I guess what happened like what could be the possible cause for like sudden onset high blood pressure they gave her medicine you know it's in line now and she wants to get off the medicine

as soon as possible because it's making her really tired and lacking energy but we don't know what the cause was we're working on getting well that is for the primary care or even a cardiologist

to figure out acute hypertension. I mean, it's possible that it was just her time to start having high blood pressure issues and her body's system just shut down to the point where she had this insane, what we call stage 2, hypertension. But I would, you know, I would ask several questions. What medications is she on? Because every once in a while, you'll get an interaction between medications. that can cause something like this, was she started on a new medication.

Was there anything that she took? What was her blood work like? Were her kidneys okay? Was her sodium and potassium okay? Because those things can give you clues to things like there's, you know, renal artery stenosis, which is narrowing of the artery going to the kidney. So the kidney is in charge of your blood pressure. You'd think the heart would be.

The heart is the engine, but the kidney really is the controller. So if you decrease blood flow to the kidney for whatever reason, what's it going to do? It's going to think, oh, no, this person's blood pressure is too low. I need to increase their blood pressure, and it will do that. And it will keep increasing it until it sees the blood pressure that it thinks that it needs to see. because it has no way to detect that you've narrowed the blood supply or, you know, decreased the blood supply to the kidney. So there's a whole protocol for this, things that can cause besides genetics and overweight and medications, you know, sleep apnea can cause it. Like I said, kidney problems, any problems with the adrenal glands, there are thyroid problems, and oral birth control, different

cold remedies. Like, you know, if she had allergies and she took some pseudofed every once in a while, you'll see somebody come in with a really high blood pressure from that. So let us know what they find out. There is a method to figuring this out. Now, whether you want to know if it's acute or chronic. So how would you figure that out, Tase? Keep taking it.

Keep taking her pressure to see. Yeah, keep taking the blood pressure and then decrease the medication. If she decreases it and comes off of it and her blood pressure goes back to 106 over 60, it was an acute event, probably caused medication or some short-term problem. If it remains elevated, however, she now has chronic hypertension, and it's more likely to be genetic than anything else. It sounds like she couldn't be doing anything better. Right. Yeah, she's doing everything right. Yeah.

So you can't meet your genetics sometimes. and there are other things. There are a couple of hormonal things. There's a weird little tumor called a Pheochromocytoma that actually releases hormones that can increase your heart rate and remarkably increase your blood pressure. But we usually see that in 80-year-old little old ladies and stuff. We don't see that in somebody young like her. But anyway, they would do a urinary catacolamine and some other. studies like that to determine if, you know, is there a secondary cause for this? All right?

All right. Hello. So I had a question about COVID and your thoughts on workplace environments that are not safe. Spaces, you know, where people can't open windows and there are people continuously testing positive for COVID. What your thoughts might be around people, for instance, saying or faking that they have COVID symptoms to get time off from work to try to avoid being in that unsafe space while still, you know, hopefully keeping their job past 2020 and hopefully maintaining their health past this year to get to the next year. What you thought about that type of strategy to buy time to get to a point where we would have a vaccine or even better treatments since the longer you can avoid getting sick, the better

your chances are of surviving, and I really hate to put you up the spot with this, but I'm curious about a doctor's thoughts around the ethics that surround this issue. Well, you know what the ethics are. You wouldn't be asking about it. You know, on people and workers. But people seem to be risking their lives daily to keep their jobs. Yeah. But there's that, too.

Is this the type of thing that's absolutely forbidden for doctors, or if strategy could save someone's life, is it something that's a doctor's? Yeah, no. A doctor should even. Okay, so the ethics of it is that we can't falsify data. I can't, in good conscience, have you come to me and say, look, my workplace is unsafe. Can you tell my employer that I have COVID-19 so I can get out of going to work? That I can't do, but what I can do is talk to your employer about making their workspace more safe. Now, you can go to the CDC.gov and put in COVID-19 employer information for office buildings, and there's a whole slew of things that they can do.

And you can complain to HR, too, if you really feel like your area is unsafe. I have friends in air traffic control circles, and they've done a really good job at making their workplace a safe place. to work, even though they're cooped up in a really small environment and cooped up together. So you have to evaluate the building. It's mechanical life safety systems to determine if the building's ready for occupancy, obviously. The ventilation systems and the facility have got to operate properly. And if you're moving air, you're less likely to stimulate an outbreak than if you have still non-moving air.

You've got to increase the circulation of outdoor air as much as possible. I know you said you can't open windows. If you have windows, they need to make them so that maybe you can open them. And you also want to minimize the risk of Legionair's disease. So you need to make sure that all your water systems, your sinks, your faucets, your drinking fountains, and the air conditioning devices, all of those things are functioning properly because Legionnaires disease loves to live in pooled water. And it's the number three cause, taste, of pneumonia, community-acquired pneumonia.

Are there not labor laws to prevent this type of thing? Yes. So if they're violating them, then they can do something about it. So, you know, your employer can do a thorough hazard assessment in the workplace to identify potential workplace hazards. They need to be screening people when they come in. I do not understand businesses that want to do business with the public, particularly, that aren't screening their employees. I think if you do that, you're showing, hey, look, we're taking these steps to do this.

You know, so yes, our employees are all screened 100% come in. You have to sign an affidavit saying that you're asymptomatic and that if, and then they take your temperature. I feel very fortunate that my company goes above and beyond. Agreed. Just above and beyond what they need to do to keep us safe. These companies really need to include employees and the communication plans to tell them what they're doing. Employers don't just do stuff and you may be doing all the right things. You've got to communicate that to your employees so that they feel safe.

Because it's not just about the employees. It's about the employee's family and extended family and friends. The CDC recommends modifying workstation. to maintain social distancing of six feet between employees where possible and install transparent shields or other physical barriers where possible to separate employees when social distancing isn't an option. And to arrange chairs in reception areas by turning and draping, doing whatever you can to remove chairs or whatever you've got to do

to maintain social distancing when you get out there. And use methods to physically separate employees in all areas of the building, particularly work areas, but also meeting rooms, and break rooms and even parking lots, you know. So go to that place. It has everything in it. If your employer isn't doing this stuff, send it to them, say, hey, how come we're not doing this? Go to HR or they should be responsive.

But the ethics of it is, you know, we can't lie and say you got something you don't have. But we can work to make it better. It's like in my car accident yesterday, the kid who hit me was like, can I just say I hit you in the parking lot? And I'm like, no, we can't, no, man, your truck looks pretty bad. I don't think we can say that. You hit me in a parking lot. You can't just fib. All right.

But he tried. Okay, Dr. Steve, I finally got the results for my coronary calcium score. I had that done a couple weeks ago. It was a bit of a hassle, but it was just because of COVID and trying to schedule stuff. Anyway, my doctor had diagnosed hyperlipidemia, elevated LDL. I think it was like at a 140, 145. And anyway, I got that down to about 100 or just under 100. Hey, good job.

Excellent. Cutting out the cheese and the dairy so often. Anyway, the total calcium score was the 61. And they put me in the percentile of 75, 75 percentile. percentile? I don't know what that means. And then they broke it down to the different valve, heart valves. And the left main artery, zero, and then left anterior descending was 25. The circumflex was three. The right coronary artery was 33, and posterior descending was zero. And the other vessels were zero. So they said I was good until 55, 10 more years

from now. So I guess I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. Okay, that sounds good, man. So he has one risk factor, which was hyperlipidemia, if I heard him right. And you want to do the calcium scores. Look, insurance doesn't pay for this yet, but most of the time they'll do these on off cycles during cats scans. It's a very low-dose cat scan. You go in, and it takes literally three minutes to do. And they calculate your risk of developing coronary artery disease through this.

through looking at plaques or calcium build-up in the coronary arteries. So it's calculated based on the amount of plaque that they see on the CT scan, and then they convert it to a percentile rank based on your age and your sex. So the result from your cardiac scoring is usually sent to your doctor, and his was 60-something. So 1 to 10 is a small amount of plaque. you have less than 10% chance of having a heart disease and your risk of heart attack is low. 11 to 100 is some plaque.

You have mild heart disease to a moderate chance of heart attack. Your doctor may recommend other treatment in addition to lifestyle changes. And then if it's 101 to 400, you have a moderate amount of plaque. And if it's over 400, you have a 90% chance that the plaque is blocking one of your arteries. So that's yikes. So what your primary care is going to do is mitigate risk over time, make sure you're not smoking, keep your blood pressure down, get your blood sugars under control. And if they're out of control, increase your exercise, and they're going to keep you on that cholesterol-lowering drug.

Because the statin drugs, as much as Dr. Scott hates them, have been shown to decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke. and to even sometimes reverse plaques. Why does he hate them so much? Well, he's a traditional Chinese medical professional. I mean, he's not a big fan of a lot of things that we do in allopathic medicine. But he feels that the downsides, the risks are worse than the benefits, and I disagree with him on that. Okay.

You know, it's just one of those things. So, yeah, when they do the CT scan, they just lay you down, you put your hands over your head, and they run you through once, and you're done. You're out of there, and they can give you the result right then. So it's a pretty neat test. We talked about this GVAC, who used to sit in, where Tacey's sitting right now, had just turned 50, so we had started talking about it. Oh, boy, we can start doing colonoscopies on you and do them for the air.

And we could do a calcium score and do that for the air and all that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, I wish we had done it, you know, earlier because. He didn't survive the widowmaker heart attack that he had. And it was very tragic because he's one of those things that, you know, this calcium score, maybe we would have caught it early enough and prevented it had he been going to the doctor. And, you know, or if we had done some of these things earlier as a bit for the show, you know. So it kind of sucked. It's terrible.

It was terrible. It was horrible. So, but that's where we're. at, and I do recommend it. It is slightly controversial, but less and less controversial every day. And the cardiologists that I talk to are definitely in favor of it because they're doing them themselves in their CT suites, the cardiology practices that I have them. Well, anyway, thanks go to Tacey.

We can't forget. Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Grigg, Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Tepp, Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinschmidt, Ron Bennington, and Fizz Watley, whose support of this show has never gone unappreciated. I'm going to throw Jim McClure into that mix. I'll throw Mehmet Walker into the mix. Wow. Yeah, yeah, Mammett's definitely supported our show behind the scenes and on the air. And Dudley and Bob out there in Texas as well, who have. always been friends of the show.

And Rob, the great Rob Bartlett, who we don't mention often enough. Listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk Channel, SiriusXM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern and On Demand. And many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic IG... God, goodness. We've been talking too long. Topic ideas. Make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for sketch...

What is wrong with me? Can I have a drink, please? 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 your face masks, and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thanks. Bye, everybody.

Oh, and my niece, Holly. She likes getting a shout out. Hi, Holly.