Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 422 - Bradykinin Storm

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss the new cytokine storm data, the role of bradykinin in COVID-19, curing diabetes with diet, someone used poison ivy leaves instead of a bidet, and more. Check Out: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) Get Every Podcast on a Thumb Drive (all this can be yours!) feals.com/fluid (premium CBD delivered to your door, get 50% off your 1st order!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirius XM103, and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Benz, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I'm stripping from my nose I've got the leprosy of the heartbound exacerbating my incredible woes

I want to take my brain out plastic with the wave an ultrasonic, agographic and a pulsating shave I want a magic pill all my ailments The health equivalent is citizen gain And if I don't get it now in the tablet I think I'm doomed then I'll have to go insane

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Let's see. Okay. Hey, don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website. at simplyerbils.net and check out our website at dr steve.com so we had some people complainant it well some people one person complained to me sent me an email that just said arg enough already about the COVID-19 I kind of agree with him I don't disagree either I cannot find other articles I can't do it and then the questions we get are mostly COVID too it's just it's or we could talk about mergers between health organizations, but that's not interesting.

Well, neither is, it's just the world we live in right now. Yeah. Well, so I did put out a poll on Twitter, and you can follow our Twitter at Weird Medicine, but said with regard to the amount of COVID-19 coverage on Weird Medicine, number one, STFU already, sick of it. Number two, it's okay, but more balance, please. Number three, the current level is fine, or number four, more COVID coverage. And the current level is fine, hit it at 45% with 27% of more, the wanted more COVID coverage.

So what's 25, let me see, that's 72% of people. And then 11% said it's okay, but they would like more balance and only 17% said STFU already. So I don't know what to make of that. We'll try to balance this. I think as things move on, you know, I'm now a week into having had the vaccine myself. I feel great. We'll see. You had an article about one of the other tests, though, that you wanted to talk about, right?

You ready to do that? Yeah, we'll do that. And then we've got a bunch of non-COVID-19 questions to do today. So there are people will be happy. Yes. But then in a couple of weeks, we'll be talking about the flu and COVID. So there you go. That's right.

That'll be more excited. Hopefully we'll be talking about Favapiravir here and how it is the panacea that we wanted and that the vaccine has already been rolled out and everybody's excited about that. Let me just talk for two seconds about that. I've gotten a lot of people online asking me, do I think that the government saying this thing could be out by October or November is political? And I do not think that. and you can call me Pollyanna, but I will advise you to go back and listen to my early COVID sit reps where I first talked about vaccines, and I looked at the vaccine phase schedules, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three. And I looked at the schedules and said, there's no reason we couldn't have one by October.

And I don't know why they're saying first of the year. I think they just don't want to get people's hopes up. I said if all the dominoes fall into place, we could easily have a vaccine by the end of September or mid-October. So I've been saying that since April, so the fact that it's actually happening doesn't surprise me. So although it's propitious, you know, the timing is interesting because it's going to happen right before the election. I don't think that they're rushing this to get it out to help one candidate over another. Now, you could also say that the virus itself is political, you know, because it came at a time when we had the best economy, lowest unemployment in history, and a certain person was probably likely to be reelected on the basis of that. So I'm sure that he and his team are going, well, this virus sucks.

So, you know, politics plus medicine equals politics. This is not a political show. It's a medical show. But I don't see any political motivation by doing that because that's when it should have come out anyway. All right. Now, if we find out that they cut some corners to get it out in time because they were supporting a certain candidate, now that's politics plus. medicine equals politics, and that's going to be harshly dealt with after this is all over. That and people who have profiteered off of this, and you know who you are, and people who

have used this for political means are going to suffer when this is all over. But right now, everybody's just worried about staying alive. All right, go ahead. Hey, did they fire me on that poll? Did anybody say, I need to get off? No. Uh-uh. They were saying more Tacey.

What's wrong with you people? More Tacey. Come on now. You're sort of the Raina Voss of this show. Mm-hmm. Because people want more Raina. She is hilarious. She's hilarious.

That kid is going to be the funniest person who ever lived because she's living with these two really, really funny people. And she's getting the jeans from both sides. And she lives amongst comedians in and out of their house. and back and forth, she goes to gigs and stuff. There's no, you know, she's really smart. Hopefully she goes into medicine and just a really funny, smart doctors or a lawyer. But if she goes into comedy, she's going to be a powerhouse.

Anyway, go ahead. Okie-doke. So, first article of two people, two. AstraZeneca pauses COVID-19 vaccine trials due to unexplained illness. Right. And that illness? What was the illness? Transverse myelitis.

Ooh, interesting. Wow. I mean, not for that person, not interesting at all. I can't imagine that that is going to be an adverse effect from the vaccine. But let's talk a little bit about transverse myelitis. It's inflammation on a section of the spinal cord. And it damages the insulation. You know, there is nature developed wires and insulation and electrical conduits way before humans ever did.

And by way before, I mean, like millions of years before. But so what it does is it, this transverse myelitis, the inflammation, eats away at the insulation. So now you're getting shorts between trunk lines. And that interrupts the messages, the spinal cord. is trying to send throughout the body and can cause some real problems. Now, yeah, just sort of a non-specific inflammation like this, I guess it could be an adverse reaction to a vaccine. It would be an exceedingly rare one.

And, but Gian Barre is another nervous condition that can be caused by viruses or vaccines that, you know, are purportedly created to prevent those viral infections. And that's where you get weakness in the legs. It starts in the feet, gets to the knees, gets to the hips. If it works its way all the way up to the chest, that's why we call it ascending neuritis. It can cause problems with breathing, too. But the good thing about Guillaume Bray is it often,

as it ascends, it often descends back down. And many people who have that will end up with little or no neurologic deficit. But anyway, but this was the AstraZeneca virus. AstraZeneca or vaccine. Vaccine trial. And they are offering no timeline as to when it will restart. Yeah. So I don't know that they're going to be able to know whether this happened.

The only way in this is going to be sound terrible is the only way to know is if they get another case. Yeah. Because it is unusual enough that, you know, if you have a small cohort and you've got two or three cases of transverse myelitis, then that's a big red flag. But to get one, you know, if it's one in a million people were going to get it anyway, it's not the odds are not zero that in your group of 3,000 people you could get one that would just have this. And so that's interesting. that that vaccine is different than the others, too. That one is, they're taking a relatively harmless, if I remember correctly, adenovirus, and then they're putting in some of the COVID-19 or the SARS COV-2 RNA into it.

And then that new virus becomes the delivery system for this MRNA that then you will make proteins that the immune system can then. you know, develop memory against. So it's different. Some of them, the one that I took was the Pfizer one. That was Bio-Ntech. And that and the Moderna vaccines are

just naked MRI. And the benefit of this is it's a little, I believe it's a little easier to transport viruses that have RNA in them than just the naked MRI itself. So that's why they want to try it this way. Okay.

Dr. Fauci says, you know, that this kind of thing is not uncommon at all. The illness may be unrelated to the vaccine and just happened, but you can't presume that. Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you, when you're doing something like this at a small scale, so let's just say that this is caused by the vaccine. And let's say they did a thousand people. You had one. So right now, your data is showing you one and a thousand. Now, you could do another a million people and never get another one, or every thousand that you do, you get one. So if you're talking about vaccinating 350 million people and one in a thousand get

transverse myelitis, that's not acceptable. So they, again, they won't know until they do a whole lot more investigating on this, whether this was just sporadic and just happened or if it was caused by the vaccine. And if so, what's the incidence? So would your guess be that they will now need to extend the phase three trial by a long time? Yes. Yeah, I think so. That's what I thought too.

What they'll do is they'll go back to committee and then they're going to have to decide the ethics of this. Do we continue? And I think the answer is yes, we need to continue. But if you get another one, then that's a huge red flag. And it's going to suck for whoever that happens to. And they need to be fully informed before they enter into the. this trial, obviously, that this is a possibility. Okay, no, okay.

All right. Oki-doke. And so... So far, the Bio-Ntech slash Pfizer one is still full steam ahead, and Moderna is still full steam ahead. And there are several other candidates, too. If you want to look at vaccine trials, you can just go to clinical trials.gov, and if they get federal assistance or federal funding, they'll be on there.

And you can just put the condition, COVID-19, and then. then the keyword would be vaccine, and you can see all those vaccine trials that are out there. Clinical trials.G.O.V. All right. What else you got? Okay. Second article. Second of two. Okay. Unexpected results in new COVID-19 cytokine storm data. Yeah. What did you find on that? Apparently, cytokine storm is not a major player. Well, in their study. In more severe COVID-19 outcomes. Do you have their study how they did it? Can you, oh, no. Well, I do see that was published online September 3rd in a letter in JAMA.

Yeah, that's the, there you go. So this is a letter to the editor. This is not a peer-reviewed. Letters to the editor are not peer-reviewed. And then it says, for the first time, we measured cytokines in different diseases using the same methods. Our results convincingly show that the circulating cytokine concentrations are not higher but lower compared to the other diseases. What were the other diseases? So they'd be looking at things like interleukin-6.

That would be one of those. So cytokines are these inflammatory molecules that trigger the immune system to do things, basically. Okay. So they studied 46 people. People, I'm not going to you talking. No, that's good. 46 people with COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Okay, just a regular old, yeah, respiratory failure.

Who were admitted to the ICU at Radbaud University Medical Center. And all participants underwent mechanical ventilation and were treated between March 11th and April 27th. Okay. Then they measured plasma levels of cytokines. Yep. including tumor necrosis factor, interleukin 6, interlucin 8. They compare results. Give yourself a bill.

They, are what, are you happy that I said it right? No, I was giving it to myself. They compared results in this group to those in 51 patients who are experiencing septic shock and ards. Yeah. 15 patients with septic shock without ards. 30 patients without a hospital. When you say ards, that's acute respiratory distress syndrome. 30 people with out of hospital cardiac arrest and 62 people who experienced multiple traumas.

Okay. And then they used historical data for the non-COVID-19 cohorts. Yeah. Okay. And they found lower levels of cytokines in the people who were really sick. So I would, this is just a letter to the editor, but it is interesting enough that it demands. further investigation because we have been assuming all of this time that what we're seeing with these people is indeed cytokine storm because we have drugs that inhibit interleukin-6

like Tocelizumab that actually do help people who have severe COVID-19 and on the ventilator. And also, dexamethazone is also helpful in reducing mortality in patients who have this disease as well. So everyone was kind of assuming that this was caused by cytokine storm, which is basically you have humoral immunity, which is antibodies, so the antibodies do things, and then you have cellular immunity, and the cellular immunity are all these various T cells. You've got natural T cells. You've got killer T cells. You've got monophages, all kinds of stuff. And these white blood cells come and

try to attack cells that are infected and envelop viruses and things like that. And when they do this, they release these factors that draw other cells to them. And if they, these factors are called cytokines and when they release too much of them,

in other words, if they overshoot going, holy crap, we're in big trouble, bring on the guns, you know, like a nine alarm fire, then those cytokines don't stay where they're supposed to. They start circulating around and depositing on the inside of blood vessels depositing in the kidneys, and then you get renal failure, you get vasculitis and blood clots in the vessels of the circulatory system. All kinds of bad things happen. And so that's very interesting, because we do see those things. It's interesting that

These people found lower levels of these factors. Maybe those things are being eaten up, even though they're being secreted in high numbers. There's all kinds of interesting science that we could look at. When you see a result like this that's surprising, it means that there's new science coming. But some people have wondered if it's Brady Kynan, and we've got a question about that. the one. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Mark up in Connecticut. Hey, Mark. I was reading an article in the scientists where a guy at Oak Ridge National Labs crunched a bunch of data from COVID studies, I guess, and came up with hypotheses that there was a Brandy Kynen storm. Yeah, Brady Kine.

And it's interesting. Remember when this first happened? that we were told that watch out for people with dry hacking coughs. Remember that? And we still talk about that. One of the presenting symptoms is a dry hacking cough. What else causes a dry hacking cough? You used to know something about that. There are certain drugs like ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers,

which are blood pressure medications that cause, in some people, dry hacking coughs. And what was the cause of that? It was the, do you remember why? Kind of. The ACE inhibitor blocked the breakdown of this molecule called Brady-Kinan. And so in some people, they would get elevated levels of Brady-Kinan. When you get elevated levels of Brady-Kinin, you get a dry-hacking coughing. cough.

I would have screwed that up. Yeah, that's, well, I didn't, I didn't do it much justice myself. But anyway, when you get a huge influx of Brady Kynen, you can get things like fluid buildup in the lungs and other things like this. So I'm looking at this article in The Scientist, and this Daniel Jacobson, he was a computational biologist. Interesting. And he's at Oak Ridge here in Tennessee. He was

looking at gene expression data from the lung fluid of COVID-19 patients. And he spotted something weird that the expression for genes for key enzymes in the reninangiotensin system, okay? So that makes sense because this thing is attacking

a receptor called the ACE ACE2 receptor right? And that is involved in this renin angiotensin system. Don't worry about all that. That just has to do with blood pressure control. And he noticed that the expression of these genes was out of balance. And he followed this into fluid samples and looked at this thing called the Kynin Cascade, which is this inflammatory pathway that's regulated by this renin angiotentis. system, and he found that Brady-Kinan, which causes blood vessels to leak and fluid to accumulate in tissues and organs, was thrown off balance as well in COVID-19 patients, and they showed heightened expression of genes for Brady-Kinin receptors, as well as for enzymes called calicranes

that activate this pathway. Anyway, so he published these results, and he's saying, look, it may not be just pure, or, you know, cytokine storm, it may be Brady-Kinen storm that's causing some of this stuff. Now, one person in our audience, when I tweeted this article out, said, well, one other thing that ACE inhibitors cause because of elevated Brady-Kin is this thing called angio-edema, right, where you get swelling of the lips and the throat and they have trouble breathing. And I said, well, you're right. That is interesting.

We're not seeing a lot of angio-adema with COVID-19. 19, well, we're not, I haven't seen it. I went and looked at angio-edema and COVID-19 and found that indeed there have been cases of that. So that actually strengthens the idea that maybe this thing is caused by Brady-Kinan. So there are some Brady-Kinin inhibitors, and they are testing those right now on humans. One of them is called Icatabant, and they're testing it in critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU. That's a multi-center randomized clinical trial. And then there's another one testing a monoclonal antimotty called Lannadelamab in patients with COVID-19 viral pneumonia.

So, you know, we'll see. Look, this is how science works, is you have 100. hypothesis and you tested if that hypothesis is proven to be either false or not as helpful as you thought it would be, then you move on to the next one. So they are now testing the hypothesis that Brady-Kinan, elevated Brady-Kinin levels are responsible for some of the bad things that we're seeing in COVID-19. So I look forward to seeing those. We'll be talking about it in a future COVID sit rep when we get some data

on our YouTube channel. All right? All right. How about that? Didn't understand it. Oh, did you not? Well, that means I did a crappy job. Well, I kind of wasn't paying attention even.

Oh, well, okay, fair enough. And probably I bored everybody else in the audience, too. Yeah. So, well, let's answer some questions. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Anyway, the take home on that is

still think cytokine story. but also let's start thinking Brady Kinen and should we be looking at things that affect Brady Kinen levels to improve people who are critically ill with COVID-19. None of this helps us with the patients that have mild disease who are at home that we want to keep them from progressing

to moderately ill or severely ill. And that's why we're still waiting for the final data on Favapiravir, and then the other one that we talked about, MK, whatever the hell it was. The pills that you can take at home that would be more like taking

Tamiflu for influenza, okay? To prevent you from getting sick and dying. Because that's what we really want to do. Yeah, if you get really sick and you're critically ill, we need to have things to treat you, but it'd be even better if we can prevent you from getting to that place.

All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. I called before leaving my number. I thought it was like a calling. So I guess my question is this. I was in the woods, and I was going to the bathroom, and I took a poo. You know, so I obviously reached for a leaf to wipe my bottom. And it turns out I either got poison icy, poison oak.

First, how do I figure out which poison that I got? You don't. Okay, that's number one. body reacts the same way to poison ivy and poison oak, basically, and any, and poison sumach, and any of these things, and anything else that you may have a delayed type hypersensitivity reaction to. So we call it that, because if you've ever gotten poison ivy, you get exposed to it, and then a day or two later, that's when the itching and the blistering occurs.

So it's a delayed type hypersensitivity reaction, as opposed to a bee sting where you end up in the ICU, which would be an immediate type hypersensitivity reaction. Okay. And second of all, what do I put on my butt? This shit burns like a motherfucker. I bet it does. I'm pretty sure it's poison oak or lean. Anyways, Dr. Steve, please help. Yeah, so the treatment is the same for all of these things is basically stuac.

steroids. If it's bad enough to warrant taking a pill, then you present to your primary care or urgent care. Let's not go to the emergency room with this unless that's the only health care that you have available to you. And they'll put you on a steroid dose pack, and with a couple of days, you'll notice improvement. When our youngest had it, what was it, we put something topical on him. What was that? Most likely, it was. topical hydrochortizone cream, which you can buy over the counter. And that will work if it's not too grossly blistery and it's not too big of an area. And it wouldn't be too harsh on the private area?

Oh, he got it on the private. Okay, so, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. So potent anti-inflammatories like triumcinolone or some of the really strong steroids. You don't want to put those on your face or on your genitals. But hydrochortoone is not considered a potent anti-inflammatory, and most dermatologists would be okay with you putting it on there for those. If you've got an inflammatory reaction to something in those areas, most likely they're going to give you pills for that. All right? So, yeah.

So it just depends. If it's so bad, you can't sit down, or you're constantly itching it, or it's burning when you move your bowels and stuff like that. It lets your primary care provider do something about it. Okay. Now, that is your son. Should I answer it? Hey, you're on the radio. Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm good. Do you need? Yeah. We're all up here. Do you need something? No, I'm good. Okay. All right.

You can come on up if you want. Oh, no, thank you. Okay. We'll be done in 31 minutes. Is he leaving? No. Are you leaving? No.

Okay, good. All right. We'll see you in a minute. Right. Very articulate, young man. All right. Talk your head off. Hey, Dr. Steve.

This is Polly down in Charleston. Hey, man. I hope you're doing well. Years of listening, and I finally called you this morning. Now I'm calling you. again twice a one day I am have been all I've been diabetic for a long long time I was on 1,000 milligrams of metformin yeah twice a day right okay yeah metformin pretty standard medication for people the type 2 diabetes and for a long time my 81 C

has been in the 53 to 5 7 range excellent I recently in January went to a plant-based food diet. And one of my goals was to get off of the drugs I'm on. Let's just for two seconds get everybody on the same page. He talked about a hemoglobin A1C. That's basically a test that shows long-term blood sugar levels. So hemoglobin is a molecule that circulates in the blood, and so does glucose. And glucose can glom onto the hemoglobin, and the more that you have, the more it will glom on.

And blood cells that have hemoglobin in them last around 150 days. So as they're ramping up and then dying off, you get a nice 90-day average with the hemoglobin A1C. So the higher, the number, the higher your blood sugar has been on average over the last three months. Well, his sounds great, though. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, 5.3 is fantastic, so. It's on April 40 milligrams a day and receive a statin 10 milligrams a day. Okay, so he's on the reason.

So he's on lysineapril, which is an ACE inhibitor, which protects the kidneys from the ravages of diabetes. So people who are on lysinepril or other drugs like that tend to get less kidney failure from their diabetes because people think, well, it's just high blood sugar. What's the big deal? Well, it causes kidney failure and cardiovascular disease at a much, much higher rate. So he's also on Rosuvastatin, which is a statin drug to decrease his cholesterol and prevent plaque build up in the heart because heart attacks are another way that diabetes takes people out of this world. So, all right. My doctor is fine with trying to pull me off of metformin.

and I'll have half my dose, and we're going to check again in December. Good. My question is, I'd like to get all the way off it. Is diabetes a disease state that I will have forever, regardless of what I bring my A1C down to? This is a wonderful question. Does he even have it now, Steve, with his A1C? Right. So he has the propensity for diabetes.

Are you diabetic? No, he has the propensity, meaning that. he he got it once so his body is prone to elevation you know to overshoot the the insulin and so well let's talk about type 2 diabetes type 1 diabetes are people that their pancreas doesn't work anymore they they can't produce insulin type 2 diabetics come when the body overshoot the insulin insulin response to a carbohydrate load. So you eat a sugar cube. Your insulin level goes up as your blood sugar comes up because that's what the body

detects is the blood sugar rising. And then the two are supposed to decline at the same rate. So as the sugar drops because of the insulin going up, and basically that's just a signal to the cells, take this insulin into your cytoplasm. They're supposed to drop together. and normalize together. But in a lot of people, they don't do that. The insulin level increases.

Now, the blood sugar drops way, way, way below. In other words, the insulin level is overshot. And then they come back to normal at some time in the future. And the body doesn't like a low blood sugar situation. So in an attempt to correct for that, the body will ratchet down the sensitivity to that insulin signal, right? So now you have this decreased sensitivity to the insulin signal, but the body, the insulin part of the body is still trying to drive this blood sugar down, and it's too sensitive. So now it goes even higher, and now you're driving the blood sugar down even more, and so the body turns down the sensitivity a little bit more. And if it turns down the sensitivity enough, what you end up with is high insulin levels and high blood sugar levels,

and the blood sugar never goes down and the insulin level never goes down. They're both high, okay? So that's what we're talking about. So in this person, he has now normalized his insulin production response by going on a lower carbohydrate diet. And through diet and exercise,

he has normalized his body's sensitivity. And so now technically he doesn't have diabetes, but he could get it again if he went back to the way that he was eating when it happened in the first place. Okay. Does that make sense? Yes. Through diet and exercise, or even if I get all the way off metformin, am I still a diabetic?

Well, in the sense that someone who has not had a drop of alcohol in 30 years is still an alcoholic. But I would not, you know, we're trying not to call people what they're diseased. is anymore. You're not diabetic. You are a person who had diabetes. And I'm not, I'm not convinced that we need to call you diabetic anyway, because we don't label people by other diseases. We don't, you know, well, we'll say people are a COPD or, but, you know, we should get away from that. These are people who have certain conditions. They're not defined by the condition that they have.

So I would say that you have the propensity to get diabetes again or to have elevated blood sugars and elevated hemoglobin A1C again in the future if you don't watch it. But as long as you stay on your diet and exercise, you can consider yourself in remission. How about that? And if we could get an endocrinologist on here, they may have specific political reason why they say certain things. But you certainly, your diabetes is in remission. It could come back any time if you go back to the way that you're eating before.

I just kind of worked that out as I was saying it. Sounded good. Does it sound okay? Mm-hmm. Okay. And good job, dude. Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing is, is that almost everyone, not everyone. There are some people who are genetically prone to having diabetes, and it's a lot harder for them. but the people who ate their way into diabetes type 2, almost all of those can eat their way back out of it again and get off their medication and get back to normal again. But it takes a lifelong concerted effort to do it. And a lot of us don't have that in us.

It is not easy. All right. My first question. The other one is my blood pressure and all my cholesterol numbers or as she described, perfect. Yep. I asked her. Well, they're perfect

because you're taking medication right now. So let's see if that's where he's going. I can get off these other two, and she's not as excited about that. Yeah, it's harder. Now, if you will buy a blood pressure cuff, and I got that, what's the brand name, Omcron or Omicron or something?

I got the wrist one. I saw that. I was going to have a root canal, and they just decided to just pull this stupid tooth anyway. By the way, if you have that problem and your teeth hurt when you get up in the morning, you're grinding your teeth. And I found at Walmart they had a little box of 16 mouthguards, and each one you can use for three days, totally solved my problem. Why my dentist has just been yanking my teeth as they break rather than telling me about this, I do not know. But if I get one more, yeah, I know, I get it.

If I get one more tooth gone, I'm going to have to get dental implants, which I'm not looking for. forward to so anyway i didn't know you were walking around with without teeth in your head i mean i guess i did how many are you missing um three or four i guess well not well i mean i i had wisdom teeth i had two sets of two it so i had four wisdom teeth removed and then i've had one two three i think molars removed that were just broken they just broke and they're like well you're chewing too much ice as I don't chew ice, but that was their answer. Wow. Okay. And now I wake up. My teeth don't hurt. You know, I haven't had any dental pain since I started using those. When I found out I was doing that, my neck hurts so bad. Yeah. It was horrible. And then just

what do you call it? Insert. Insert? Yeah. Fixed it. Yeah. There you go. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, geez. Something else. Okay, where is this person going? My pharmacist says Lassanapril protects your kidneys as well. Yep, as long as you're diabetic. Does it make any sense to be trying to get off these drugs?

Sure. So the way to do it would be, oh, we were talking about getting the Omicron or whatever that brand is, wrist blood pressure device. Oh, yeah, okay. Now I know what. I was talking about because I was at the endodontists when they had one, and I saw it,

and it was really awesome, and I found mine to be very accurate. At least it's consistent. I don't know how accurate it is, but it is consistent. But get one of those, and if you'll do that, your primary care provider is likely to agree to cut your lysineapril in half and see where you are. And if you're okay, you might cut it in half again, depending. on the dose that you were on, and then maybe get off of it and then just see. And it's not going to hurt anything if your blood pressure comes back up to 140 over 80 for a couple of weeks that just put you back on your medication.

But if you would be willing to do that, I think you could negotiate that with your primary care. Same thing with your cholesterol medication. They could cut that in half, and in six weeks, check your cholesterol. And if it's good, cut it in half again, and then work on weaning you off of that. But you need to stay on it. You can't just go off these things and go, I'm fine. walk away from it. Particularly, given that you are a diabetic in remission, you're going to need to stay on

top of your human globin A1C's and just pound on it if it starts to come back. You know, if you, all of a sudden, your hemoglobin A1C is up to 6.8, you've got to nip that crap in the bud right then. Okay? But if you'll do that, I think you can do it. But it's not easy for a lot of people to do. And, yeah, I agree with Tacey. Congratulations.

Hey, Dr. Steve, thank here. Listen to your show on Sirius X-M. I love it. All right, thanks, my issue is, at night when I sleep, sometimes I sweat up a storm. Yep. I wake up the next day, my sheets and blankets are sweat soaked. I am just curious why this might happen. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does.

Thank you for your input. Okay. Bye-bye. Well, it's a dude, so he's not going through menopause. So what can cause night sweats, lots of things, and lots of medications. So the first thing we always do is look at your list of medications. You know, think drugs. So number one would be antidepressants, very commonly prescribed in this day and age.

Any drugs used to treat diabetes, particularly if your blood sugar is dropping in the middle of the night, which would be fun to do, you wake up, you got night sweats, you check your blood sugar. If you're not a diabetic, borrow somebody's blood sugar monitor for a day. And when you wake up, check your blood sugar if it's crazy low in the 30s or 40s, you've got your answers. Certain hormone blocking drugs that are used to treat some certain cancers. And then the other stuff is none of it's any fun. So there are some sleep disorders that could just have sleep apnea. I'm thinking about all the benign things.

So if I have someone that comes to me and I, you know, I do a complete blood workup and their normal chest x-rays, all that stuff is all fine with night sweats and their medications don't make sense, I'll do a sleep study on them. And very often, you'll find that they have sleep apnea. So you're going to want to get this checked out. Night sweats is a reason to go to your primary care provider and get a workup. There is a standard workup for this. and then if you find something interesting, call us back and let us know what you find. Okay.

All right. Hi, Dr. Steve. I have a question no one has ever answered. The Spanish flu disappeared on our zone by mutation. How come they were talking about this COVID flu sticking around? How come it doesn't end up like the Spanish flu also? No, this is a great question as well. So what he's saying is in the Spanish flu,

sort of disappeared at the end of, what, 1920? And, but they're talking about COVID-19, the virus that causes that is SARS-COV-2 being around forever. And the reason for that is that the coronaviruses, we tend to be vulnerable to reinfection with those. And if you, for example, I was exposed to swine flu in 1970, whatever. whenever that was. And when it came back around again in, what was it, 2009, I get the, which virus has hit, which you're confused. But it was sometime while we've been doing this show.

I was completely immune to that. That was the one year where influenza came around and all the old people were immune to it. and the young people were the ones that were really at the highest risk. And so because my immune system was still revved up against that one, but the coronaviruses, the hypothesis is you can get them multiple times. They cause a common cold. And my hypothesis is that all coronaviruses started the same way SARS-COV-2 did. They started as a global pandemic.

but 10,000, 100,000 years ago, who would know that that was going on? There were so many other things happening that were killing people. And then as that adult generation that had never seen it before died off, all the younger generation that grew up had seen that virus before. They weren't getting sick by it, but they were getting a common cold, and I think that's what's going to happen with this as well. Is this like herd immunity? Well, so...

Explain that. There is, okay, you know how with this virus, babies are getting it, but they're not getting sick? You know, we've had, even after millions and millions of cases, there's just been a one or two, and all of those are tragic, of course, infants that have died from this. And then if you go up through age 10, numbers are staggeringly low. But as you get older and older, now it's a problem. Well, okay, so when people are reinfected with this virus, it's likely, you know, if they survive the first time, it's likely to be a very mild infection that will cause like a cold. And so my hypothesis is that when all these people that are, let's say, 60 and above or 50 and above all die off, which will be not too far in the future, you'll have a population. that's been exposed to this virus, and now when they get it as an adult, they've already had it

mostly or been exposed to it as a kid, they don't get a real severe syndrome. So it is partly herd immunity, but it's also just this sort of coronavirus low-level exposure immunity that prevents the reinfection from being serious. So when you and I get a cold now, and it's caused by a coronavirus, We probably have been exposed to that virus multiple times when we were younger. And mind you, this is just my theory about this. And so we just get a cold. But, you know, 10,000 people die of coronavirus infections every year, but they're not diagnosed because we're not testing for coronavirus.

You know, we, by God, we are now. Now, this thing changed everything when it comes to coronaviruses. But so as all of us die off, then the people that are old later on will have all been exposed to this virus in the past, you know, as a group. So they will have very mild reinfections and it won't kill them. So, yes, there's a factor of herd immunity, but also a, the factor of reinfection was, likely to be mild because of immune memory. It's just an idea. But now, Spanish flu, that was purely herd immunity.

You know, enough people got it to the point where it was no longer able to easily move through the population and eventually died off. So let's see here. Pandemic swept through the U.S. in Europe in 1918, killing by some estimates more than 50 million people began between January and February in the United States. A flurry of people died after presenting of symptoms of headache, respiratory difficulties, cough, and high fever. And if you look at the pictures from back then, I mean, people were just stacked into wards

just on top of each other. That's terrible. That's what we're trying to avoid. Anyway, a few months later, patients in France, Belgium and Germany had similar clinical symptoms, and in May, a religious festival in Spain. caused an outbreak of the same mysterious disease. It was considered one of history's most devastating pandemics, although it was dwarfed by the plague of Justinian,

which was basically, you know, bubonic plague. And they called it Spanish flu, even though really it looks like it started in the United States. So that's kind of crappy. It was, let me see. Yeah, so they're these two sisters, they're scientists, and they've been studying the 1918 flu for the past two years, and they find a lot of parallels between today's coronavirus outbreak and the 1918 Spanish flu. In 1918, people said it would be a minor cold, and it played out that their health systems were overwhelmed quickly and such as they were in 1918. and they did lockdown procedures that were put in place

that sound pretty familiar today. Theater, schools, borders were all closed. Public spaces, including telephones were disinfected. And in the United States, people could be fined up to $100 for not wearing a mask. And in 1918, it was quickly understood that crowds could cause further transmission. They included hygiene measures, quarantining people, and that were ins suspected of being contaminated. My dad lived through this.

He was two. He was born in 1916. So there were groups that fought against it. In Zamora, the bishop caused for a mass that contributed to the effects of the pandemic. And in Madrid, authorities did not cancel the San Ysidro festivities. Apparently, the, the, the, the, outbreak in Spain took place just after the celebrations of the patron saint of the Spanish Capitol.

And a week after the celebrations around May 22nd, newspapers said people were falling ill with the flu. And that incident fueled the naming of the flu as Spanish, even though patient zero was thought to have been at a U.S. military training center in Kansas. God forbid, we call it the Kansas flu. Yeah, I did read that the Sturgis rally could be linked to 260. 56,000 coronavirus cases. Really?

The Sturgis rally. Sturgis, that was the motorcycle rally? Oh, oh, golly. You know, and they're wearing helmets and stuff with face... Wearing helmets, but maybe they're not wearing helmets. A lot of them weren't wearing masks. Yeah, okay. And they were in close...

You know, they're doing everything that we're not really supposed to do. Yeah, but it's fun, though. I bet it was fun. You know, yeah. It says academics agree that the end of the pandemic occurred in 1920 when society ended up developing a collective immunity to the Spanish flu, although the virus never completely disappeared. Traces of this same virus have been found in other flu viruses.

You know, the DNA, you can sequence the DNA and see little traces, you know, with the Spanish flu DNA going, here I am, I'm still here. They said the Spanish flu continued to appear mutating and acquiring genetic material from other viruses. That damn flu. We have got to declare war on these damn. viruses. So the 2009 flu that I mentioned earlier had genetic elements from earlier viruses and older individuals were better protected than the young. He said, ooh, now who just said

that? Oops. You did? I did. Give yourself a bill? I will do so. Thank you, Ope. Let's see here. Yeah, and a pandemic ends when there's no uncontrolled community transmission and cases are at a very low level. So that's what we're aiming for, and hopefully we'll get there very soon, particularly if we can boost herd immunity through the judicious use of vaccines and also letting some people who have been infected take medication and get them back out into the workplace sooner so that they are able to also be part of that bulwark that prevent. other people from getting sick. The estimation of how much that Sturgis rally costs the public, $12.2 billion.

Really? Yes, and that they could have paid. Worth every penny, though, because... I'm not going to ever say anything bad about my brothers and sisters who ride bikes. But they could have paid each one who didn't attend over $26,000. Just not to go. Not to go and be even. Now, I'd say if you offered a lot of...

them, they'd probably be like, hmm, I'll skip this year. Isn't that interesting? Well, and they're not alone. I mean, there are lots of group activities going on where the possibility is certainly there. Because you have to live too. I worry about, you know, one of our kids is in band, and if one of those kids has it and is blowing into a tuba, they're just going to blow virus all over.

And they're being so careful with everything else. They're blowing in those instruments like crazy. Yeah, well, we'll see. I haven't heard of a tuba-related COVID-19 breakout, but I'm interested in learning more about that. And we'll keep our eyes out for it. Well, listen, thanks always goes to Tacey. She's a gooden, as we say in Tennessee.

We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Lewis Johnson, Paul Oversky, My niece, Holly, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinshmidt, Dale Dudley, the great, Rob Bartlett, Ron Bennington. Did I mention my niece Holly and Fez Watley, whose support of this show has never gone unappreciated? When I thanked Holly and my other niece, Chris, who's her sister, I caught hell. So listen, so I gave Holly two this time. Listen to her Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk channel.

Sirius X-M, Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand and other times at Lewis, Johnson, and Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. Quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. Wash your hands, wear your mask. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Goodbye, everybody. case.