Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 423 - Charred Meat and Burnt Tongue

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie discuss politics in medicine for 20 minutes thanks to an angry caller, a neuropathic pain syndrome of the mouth, cancer risk from grilling (thankfully inconclusive) 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!) mybookie.com (use Promo Code WEIRD to double your first deposit!) 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, O'B and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolovibis dripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy. of the heartbound, exacerbating my incredible woes.

I want to take my brain out and glassed with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic bill for all my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve.

It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show, the history of broadcast radio now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal. Tacey, my wife, hello, Tacey. Hello, everyone. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. You've got a question you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-7-66-4-3-23. That's 347 poohead. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything here with a

Assault. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapists, clinical laboratory, scientists, registered dietitian or whatever. I think it very good. Please don't forget to check out stuff.doctorsteve.com. Stuff.com. And we have something new on there that I am interested in trying, and I put out a disdustive. just a bulletin on Twitter asking people about it, and it's Manuka Honey. And if you go to Stuff.com about the second thing on there, you can click on it and look. They got all this crazy skin care stuff, and I know that they use it for wound care in some places.

And some people just swear by it. First time I saw it, there was some shampoo that you had that had Manuka Honey in it or something? I don't know what you're talking about. Okay. I remember that. But anyway, check it out. Just go to stuff.com.com. And if you are shopping at Amazon, use that as well and just click through to there. It really helps us out. Don't forget, tweakeda.com. If you use offer code fluid, you'll get 33% off, the best earbuds for the price on the market and the best customer service anywhere. And if you want to lose weight with Tacey and me, and we are both killing it right now. Noom.

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I'm throwing in some extra stuff and you get a COVID-19 weird medicine face mask while they last for 30 bucks. It's in the middle of the page. It just says get every show on a thumb drive because from now on only episodes 300 and up are going to be for free on the laugh button. And if you had a subscription to premium.com, thank you. God bless you for doing that. And all of those subscriptions have been canceled. You will not be charged anymore if you are. Let me know.

But all of the free shows are now just going to be at the laugh button and on iTunes. It will be episode 300 and above because that's pretty much where we stopped being quite so vile. But if you want to hear the early, really vile stuff, then you've got to get the thumb drive. And it's 32 gig thumb drive, and it's only got 19 gigs of stuff on there, so there's a little extra data for you to use. Well, there you go. So what do you think of that? Well, I don't think much of it at all. So you were talking about, if you even want to talk about this, that you don't get nervous coming on this dumb radio show. No, and I just had an interview. wasn't even in person. It wasn't for a job. It was for a volunteer position. And I got so

nervous. And my voice was shaky. And I think it still kind of is. And I just need to settle down. I don't even understand where it came from. It didn't hit me till right when it started. And had I known that that was going to happen, I could have taken a little extra Xanax, you know, but I was feeling just fine. Dang, I didn't have the right sound effect. We got to wait for the sound effects. Quality show, quality. Yeah, I would have done that, and my voice wouldn't have been like this.

And so just ridiculous. And I really wanted this volunteer spot. To get that nervous over interviewing for a volunteer spot. A volunteer spot. Well, that must mean that you're taking it seriously anyway. I mean, it would be a great thing for my job. And I'm sure the people I was interviewing didn't say, well, at least she's taking it seriously. Listen to how nervous she is.

You know, just anyway. What they were saying was, what the hell? This is a volunteer job. I know. Why is she so nervous? And I come up the stairs and I'm like, I'm getting ready to do a radio show that like four or five whole people listen to, which is more than what. what was on the WebEx and not nervous at all. Perhaps more than that taste.

But anyway. Yeah, like six. And they're all friends of ours, and they're probably lying about it. Holly's the only one who listens. That's true. My niece Holly has listened from day one to every single show, sometimes twice, which is really weird, but she likes us. So there you go.

All right. Well, listen, last time we were talking. talking about chemicals in meat, and we kind of had to cut the show short because we ran out of time. And the question was, somebody was calling in about they love to grill and are they at high cancer risk. Well, when you grill stuff, you make these, you make char, and the char is really just sort of, well, it's burnt protein, right? and some of the chemicals that are in that charred meat are called heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And they're chemicals that form when muscle meat is cooked using high-temperature methods

like, you know, grilling over an open flame or something like that. Now, in laboratory experiments, and I talk about this a lot, particularly on my Twitter feed, about some of this COVID-19 stuff where they go, oh, well, this protein was found to inhibit COVID-19. Well, that's in the test tube. We call that in vitro.

There's in vivo, meaning in life, and in vitro, meaning outside of a living system, in other words, in the petri dish, or a test tube. And so in laboratory experiments, these heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons have been found to be mutagenic. And all that means is that,

they can change the DNA in the cells that they're exposed to. Now, because, and the reason I bring this up about COVID-19 is people, you know, bleach will inhibit COVID-19 in the test tube, but you don't want to, you know, drink it or ingest it or anything like that. So just because something is effective or happens in the test tube doesn't mean it happens in the body. so when you take amino acids and well proteins are just strings of amino acids and then sugars and then heat them at high temperatures you'll get these things and the poly aromatic hydrocarbons are formed when fat and juices from the meat drip onto the surface and then cause flames and smoke and then it comes you know it it aerosolizes and then renalizes and then

re-deposits back onto the meat. And that's what makes it taste good, though, right? Yeah, I'm still worried about how I'm messed up on that interview. Oh, no. You may not have me this. I know. Now comes the guilt. Do you want me to just do this show by myself?

No, it's fine. I'll just sit here. Make funny. Do you need to go get something to drink or take a pill? No, I'm going to work out later. Okay. All right. You did fine. The fact that you're, that you interviewed for a volunteer position should at least reflect positively on you. And the other thing I'll tell you about you that you may not know is and that, and other people, I'm not the only one that says this. A lot of times you think that you did poorly in some situation. Nobody else notices that. That's internal. And I'm the same way. We're both type A. We want everything to be perfect. And. Just like when we did, you know, weird medicine in the studio, the first time, particularly,

I had that big, giant book of topics because, God forbid, we didn't have enough to talk about. And I was really nervous, but people, you know, didn't notice that. You know, I noticed it. I thought I was really doing a horrible, horrible job. And then you got Anthony Kumia, who I was sitting in his chair, who was sitting there watching us with his girlfriend. And they were praying that we were going to. F up because it would be way funnier, but he came up to us afterwards that was the best first show I've ever heard. Of course, we've never gotten any better from that first show. We're exactly the

same. But if this were our first show, it would be a pretty good show. But anyway. But yeah, no, I'll guarantee you did fine. And if they give it to you, you know you did fine. If they don't give it to you, it's a blessing because then you actually need something else to do with your life? True. Okay. So either way, it's a good thing. All right. So what is there any evidence? So just because they're mutagenic in the test tube doesn't mean that these things are carcinogenic in humans. So there's been a couple of studies that show that exposure to these chemicals can cause cancer and animal models. And a lot of the experiments, the rodents, you know, we do mice, the poor mice, They were fed a diet supplemented with these HCAAs.

They couldn't just grill them some meat and feed it to them. They had to take all the pleasure out of it, so they just gave them the HCA's, and they developed tumors of the breast, colon, liver, skin, prostate, and other organs. Rodents fed the poly, whatever, the poly, what you can call it, poly aromatic hydrocarbons also developed some tumors. And let me see what they were. They were leukemia and tumors of the gastrointestinal tract.

However, the doses were unbelievably high. Equivalent to thousand times the doses people would get in a normal diet. So they weren't looking to say, hey, does a diet with this stuff cause cancer? What they're looking at in these studies is at the highest doses, that we can possibly deliver, will these molecules cause cancer? Not in a real life, real world situation. Just can they cause cancer at any dose? And they found that they can.

But at thousands of times the dose of you eating a steak. So they do population studies. Population study is you do a survey, say, how many times a week do you eat grilled meat? and look and see if there's a difference between people who do a lot of grilled meat and those that do not. And these population studies really haven't established a definitive link between these chemicals and cancer in humans. And one of the problems with conducting studies like this is it's just difficult to determine the exact level of these chemicals people are getting because there's different kinds of grills and different kinds of ways of grilling.

You know, our old friend Olin had a grill that didn't even smoke. It just basically was a griddle. You remember that thing? It was just flat and he'd put steaks on it, but there wasn't any smoke. And it's like, well, why not just cook it inside? Well, at least the smoke that he was generating was not filling up his house with smoke, I guess. So for him, he wouldn't be generating as much char as someone who's grilling over a high heat on a grill. So they've done a bunch of epidemiologic studies where they just use these detailed questionnaires

and examine people's meat consumption, and they found that high consumption of well-done fried or barbecued meats was associated with some increased risk of colorectal pancreatic and prostate cancer. But other studies have shown no association with risks of colorectal or prostate cancer. So go figure. So when you have some studies saying yes and some studies saying no, it's probably a very small subset or it could just be overlap of the experimental error and it really means nothing. So I am certainly not in a position where I'm going to tell anybody, unless you're at mega high risk of colon cancer, for example, people with maybe familial polyposis, maybe they should go easy on the charred food, everybody else, just everything in moderation.

You know, including everything in moderation, meaning every once in while you've got to blow it at your rear end. And, you know, we just got a new grill and we've been using the hell out of it. Using it like crazy. We're going to get cancer. See, she's not listening. She's on her phone texting with somebody saying, oh, I did bad on my interview. Well, she's getting ready to have hers and she's nervous too. Yeah, there you go.

Well, you don't, in a professional situation, you don't want to be. rejected period you don't want to be rejected in you know if you're single and you're hitting on people in a bar you don't want to be rejected and if you're at work and you want to go for something no matter how trivial it is you don't want them to tell you now because then you start feeling well why why not me and then it starts that whole cascade so I do understand that with this you're not on social media and I you don't get any feedback from this so you You don't worry about it.

But the feedback, by the way, is all good. But for you, not for me, but for you it is. Oh, those people, they're just saying that. Where are they supposed to do? Because you sound hot. Okay. That's what one guy said, she sounds like a smoke show. It's like, how can you tell?

A smoke show. I like it. All right, well, let's take, you want to take some phone calls, and then we'll do maybe an article or something. Okay. One thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Okay, this is an interesting phone call. I think for inquiries please contact customer service abnormal the service will be stopped today

no no it's abnormal because I pay it off every month for English service please press two hello this is so a bank your credit card is abnormal oh my credit card is abnormal it's abnormal because I pay it off every month for inquiries Oh, Tase, we better call them, Steve. We better call them. Who falls for that? You know, these sweet little old ladies, these older people who...

They call them a credit card. And it must work. They still do it. So it has to work for some people. Well, your mother falls for this stuff. She paid somebody $8,000 to put plastic down in her crawl space. And then we had Mike and Todd. for those long time listeners, yes, Magic Mike, aka he who will never defecate in my home.

They did it for 150 bucks, you know? Yeah, it's just... So it is. Yeah, people do fall for this stuff. But good Lord. Don't click on those things. Thank you. That's your public service for the day.

Exactly. We're going to do some blind phone calls because I didn't have time to download any of them. So let's just see what we've got here. All right. Let's see. Hey, Dr. Steve. It's your pal, Jim, from Massachusetts. And someone's been eating at me for the past few weeks when you're talking about the COVID situation.

And I know you're not wanting to tip your hat politically, and I get that. You know, you've probably got friends that you don't aggravate or listeners you don't want to ask. No, that's not it. I'm obviously aggravating you. as I'm reading ahead. That's not it. Politics plus medicine equals politics, period. This is not a political show.

This is a medical show. I'm interested in data and data alone. That's it. That's why. But when you continually say, as long as this situation with the vaccine doesn't get politicized, honestly God, I think you're talking out of your ass. It's been politicized as day one. Right.

So let's not politicize. That's all I'm saying. People, people, I guess what he's talking about is when we were talking about the fact that the, that the, there is a possibility we will have a vaccine in October and people are saying, oh, it's just because the election's coming. And they're rushing it. And I'm saying, no, I disagree with that because, and this is my evidence. Back in, in March, I looked at the phases and said there's no. reason why we can't have a vaccine by October if everything goes smoothly. And I said if we do challenge trials, we could have one even sooner than that. And what I mean by challenge trials

is where you give me the vaccine and a week later I come in and you squirt COVID-19 up my nose. And right now we're having to do 40,000 people and trying to see if that population has a decreased incidents of COVID-19 compared to 40,000 other people in this country. And that's hard to do. And it takes longer. But if we got positive results, there's absolutely no reason that the vaccine couldn't be out there sometime in October. And I'm just saying, don't politicize that.

That's just science. It's ready when it's ready. No one's going to rush this because they want somebody in office, particularly not the pharmaceutical companies. when he's getting ready to try to take some of their money away. You know, I think they're not necessarily fancy. I think COVID has been politicized, but so what? Of course.

That's not what we're here to talk about. Right, that's right. So he needs to call into a different show, one who. Yeah, call Don Bondi now or something. Or, yeah, just some other show who doesn't mind politicizing things. We try really, really hard to not do that. And that's just not what we're about. Or you're about.

So you got the right wing and the left wing, and they see things differently, and I'm interested in what the data shows. I'm not even going to say, I'm interested in the truth because the people on the right and left say, well, they own the truth. I'm not saying that. I'm just looking at data and what's going to help people medically get through this effing thing. so we can get to the other end of it and get going with the roaring 20s. That's all. Okay. Now, we're less than a quarter of the way through his phone call,

so we may be jumping the gun on this. Let's see. In this country, you can go back to when it was first talked about. Remember when it was going to disappear in a few weeks? And there were only five cases? Well, it should have, but that's a whole other story. But anyway. Today, where I have heard in the area I live in,

in just the past few weeks, A, that the virus is going to disappear the day after the election, and B, that there are religious groups in this New England area who are saying that this is all an attempt by the leftist. Right, right, right, exactly. We're not saying any of that. I think, look, there's a couple of approaches to this, and then that becomes a political discussion. One of the approaches is you have a zero tolerance for any cases. And so you shut everything down and you keep it shut down. You just keep it shut down.

Now, talk to people who are living in Manhattan right now and they have seen what's happened with this. I mean, the Walgreens, a lot of, there's pharmacies that are gone, there's shoe stores that are gone. I mean, because. Clon Films is gone. What? Yeah. Your dress place? They're not, like, gone officially, but they're closed and it's all boarded up.

Say yes to the dress. I mean, I don't know, but I was very upset to see that. So that's one way to do it, okay? So New York State has more deaths than any other state by far, even per capita. But right now, they've got no deaths. I mean, I'm not looking at COVID.com. dot com right now, but it's virtually zero. But they've done that at the expense of a significant fraction of their economy.

Then you've got other states where they've just said, well, hell, we're just going to, let's just see what happens and then open up early. And they, you know, for a while there, they were spiking. A lot of those cases are starting to decline. And we'll have to see when this is all over with, which was the right way to do this as far as, because you do have to balance not only the health of your population, but their mental health and their financial health. And, I mean, if we just destroy the economy of the country and but we don't have any COVID, what do we, what do we have? So, but the second that you say that, then it becomes politicized because that's a political discussion.

It is a political discussion. And then you start getting questions, well, how many deaths are you willing to, to accept? to allow people to go to the barbershop, you know, and stuff like that. And you start getting into those discussions. I'm interested in it, but I'm not interested in talking about it. Because, again, this is a medical show. I am interested in what's going, what can we give to people before they get sick? Number one, how can we prevent transmission?

Okay. So what's the evidence on that? How can we, once people get sick, keep them out of the hospital. Once they get in the hospital, how can we keep them off the ventilator? Once they get on the ventilator, how do we keep them from dying? That's really my interest in this. And but he's totally right. It's been completely politicized, but not by us.

And I'm not saying it hasn't been. I'm just saying I'm not going to fall for that. No. Political party, to suppress political. religious freedom. Right. I get it. Religious gatherings.

I know some people think that. It cannot happen. So for you to continually say as long as this doesn't get politicized. But that's, I, okay. I've already said my piece on that. I don't, I think he misunderstood what you've, what we've been saying the whole time. I'm saying for us to politicize it and, and the vaccine itself, I don't feel like the timing is a political thing.

Go ahead. That's what, I mean, he's just misunderstanding. what we've been trying to do when we say we're not going to politicize it. That's all. It's just a misunderstanding. I mean, I've been on shows where they've just tried to get me to dump on one political party or another, and it depends on what side. You know, if I go on a show that's more right leaning, they want me to dump on the left wing. If I'm on a show that's more left leaning, they want me to dump on the right wing. And it's like, let's just look at the data. He sounded very angry. I know. I don't want him to be mad. I want everybody to like me.

It's just crazy. I'm sorry. Politicizing a virus is crazy. I totally agree. But Steve, everything is politicized. No argument there. Just not here. That's crazy, too.

Just not here. If you, what I tell people, my residents, particularly, if you make a decision for a patient that is not based on what's, best for that patient based on the best available evidence, then you are making a political decision. It's not a medical decision, right? So if you're moving somebody out because they're costing too much money while they're being in the ICU, that is a political decision. That's not a patient-centered decision.

Okay. All right. So the thing. You've also been advocating, well, you know, it looks like we're going to have a vaccine next month, November being. And that's all well and good, and God help us. Let's hope that's the case. Yes.

But you don't follow through on that, in my opinion. I don't recall you really talking about it. And the other thing is... What's he talking about? What's he saying I'm not following through on? So when you just say we could have one in eight weeks, but we don't talk about necessarily which vaccine or why you think that, I think is where he's going with that. But I could be wrong.

Well, I'm just looking at the... Look. When you do vaccine trials, there's certain things that have to be done. One, you have to do three phases of study, and we'll go through them again. Phase one is a short study with just a few people to see if you're going to kill people right off the bat. If you don't kill those 40 people, then you can do a phase two study of around, you know, a couple hundred, maybe even a thousand people, but usually around 300 people to see if it, works, and your end point for a vaccine could be just antibodies because there's not enough people to see if you are preventing disease unless you're going to do a challenge trial

and squirt the virus up their nose. Then you do phase three, which you do, and as long as it takes to show effectiveness and safety in a larger population where you're looking for small differences, you know, with more people, you can tease out more rare adverse effects. And if all of those things go the way that they are supposed to, when I look back at this back in February, March and April, it looked like it would be possible that one or more of these could be done by late September with a vaccine hitting the market a month later.

If they had all their ducks in a row and did like Pfizer, doing and have millions of doses just sitting there waiting to be shipped out, you know. So Pfizer is so, I think it's Pfizer is one of them. That's the one that I'm in the bio-intech. I believe that I read that they already have millions of doses ready to be shipped because they're so confident that this vaccine is going to be effective. So that's it. You know, that's how I arrived at that, was just looking at the timing.

of the study, nothing else. That's just basically calendar work, you know. Well, how long is it going to take to the United States alone? Forget the rest of the world, alone to get vaccinated. Okay, not that long. Okay, so I have some information from an article that I pulled out for you to look at what you did not. So let me pull it up.

Okay. So the U.S., okay, and this comes from Associated Press. So the U.S. is outlining a sweeping plan. Not some right or left-wing organization, really, usually. Yeah. So they're outlining a sweeping plan to provide free COVID-19 vaccines. So they're working on when it does come out, who's going to get it. And he's also asking, how are we going to get it out that quickly?

I mean, look, if we can ship out publishers clearinghouse on one particular week to everybody, we can get everybody a vaccine. It's not, you know, we've had to. these drive-through places, and people have said, you know, at least 50% of people said, well, I'm not getting the vaccine. That's okay. Because if you remember many, many weeks back, we looked at the R-sub-zero for COVID-19, which is around 2 to 2.4. And we calculated using the herd immunity calculation, how, what percentage of the population needs to get the, be immune, not get the vaccine, be immune to get the, uh, get the, uh, get the R sub t, which is the real world number of people that are transmitting disease to other

people below one. And the answer is around 55%. So some people are postulating 15% of the population is already immune. It may be more than that. If we can get 50% of the populace to vaccinate themselves, we'll be well above that 55%. And then it doesn't mean that this thing is over that day. What that means is that you're decreasing the transmissibility of this virus so that a thousand people, you know, let's say we get it to 0.8. A thousand would infect 800 and, well, 800 and 800 would infect 640 and such and so on and so on, right? So each one of those generations of infection still takes 21 to 55 days. So it's still going to take months and months for this thing to go away,

but it will be an inexorable decline to noise levels when that happened. So this article says that... I'm glad this guy called in because this is fun. Yeah. In a report to Congress and an accompanying playbook for states and localities, federal health agencies and the Defense Department sketched out complex plans for vaccination campaign to begin gradually in January or even late this year, eventually ramping up to reach any American who wants one. It doesn't say how long it'll take. The Pentagon would be involved with the distribution of vaccines, but civilian health workers would be given the shots.

But then, you know, later in the article, it says only about half of Americans say they'd get vaccinated anyway. That may change when it comes out, and when they see their neighbors doing it and that kind of stuff. You know, I figure 65, 70 percent of people will do it, and that's plenty. That's all we need. And then later it says that questions have mounted because is the government trying to rush treatment and to help Donald Trump's reelection chances? I don't know. That's just what it says here. Well, the timing, look, when I predicted.

back in March or April that we may have a vaccine by, you know, mid to late October. I wouldn't even thinking about the election at that point. At that point, this thing was just ramping up. We were all freaking the F out, you know. And I was looking for any ray of hope, and that was the big one for me,

was that these MRNA vaccines are so much faster to bring them to fruition, than it is a regular, you know, protein vaccine, that this is very exciting. And now all of a sudden, though, October, well, mid-October is just, you know, three weeks before the election. It sure looks bad. Yeah. So what is he, now listen, what if the sitting president was to say, well, we're not going to, I don't want this to look bad. So we're going to not release it until after the election.

election. Now, then how many people, then you're going to get the questions, well, how many people didn't get it that could have gotten it and how many people died that couldn't be, and because you made a political decision, because that is not, again, that's not a decision made to the benefit of the patient that is, so it is therefore a political decision. So I think both sides need to let science be dealt by scientists. It's hard to do. Nobody believes anything anymore. That's the problem. And for every fact that's out there, you can get a counterfact on social media. And that's a good thing in the sense that no one can really just sort of blow out an agenda without somebody questioning it. But the bad thing about it is is that people just have gotten into

this mode where they just don't believe anything anymore. So it also talks about how people will need two doses, 21 to 28 days apart. That's right. There may be multiple vaccines available at that time, but they'll make sure that you get one from the same manufacturer, of course. That's also true. There's like 26 vaccine candidates out there. We've been talking about the Oxford one because that study got delayed because they had someone that had transverse myelitis. But by the way, they've restarted that trial and will only know something if they get another one of those cases. If they don't get another one or it's not more than the population, then that wasn't related.

But, yeah, there may be another vaccine that's more effective that may come down the pike. That happened with shingles. We had the regular zostricks, and then we had shingricks come out. So some people that took the original shingles vaccine now are having to take this new one. And the new one sucks in the sense that it makes you feel like, like, crap for two days. But it's better than getting shingles in your eye. And it's 90-some percent effective. So you may get a vaccine in October. And then in February, they go, whoa, we got another one that's way better. And then you may go back and get that one, too. I mean, this is an evolving

situation. It also says it won't be a sprint, but a marathon. And that the plan is to have the vaccine itself free of charge. Yeah, good. Thanks to billions of dollars in taxpayer funding. Good. Well, that's the way it should be. We're having MicroMogg Fest, April in Asheville, North Carolina, and we may have to cancel it again because we had to cancel it last year, but I'm trying to be optimistic

that by then we'll have enough of a handle on this thing that we'll be able to go back and start doing some things like that. Micro Nerd Fest, everyone. so um wait well he's he's not done oh my goodness i know no i know let's go steve the show is only so long okay we'll go a little bit further i actually did articles okay well let me see um okay finish him out we've given him this much time okay okay okay so you have finished and how much is that going to cost yeah is it going to be free yes or is it going to be a hundred bucks it's going to be free you're going to have to do that twice yes

a full vaccination. Two times zero is zero. For the rest of your life. Maybe. We'll see about that. That we don't know. I mean, there's so much we don't know. And there's so much we can't answer.

We don't get vaccinated against the other coronaviruses. We would only have to do it again if a new novel coronavirus comes out. Because the way that the MRNA vaccine works should, and we will see, should stimulate not only humoral immunity, which is antibodies, but cellular immunity, which is T cells and that whole, that whole cascade. Because when you inject MRNA into somebody, it inculcates itself into the cells. The cells make the protein. They then express the protein on the surface of the cell, and it looks just like an infection of the immune system. So you should get both kinds.

And once you've got that humoral immunity, sorry, your cellular immunity, even if your humoral immunity goes away, you should be able to fight this thing off the next time. So if you get reinfected, you will either be completely asymptomatic or get no infection or it will be extremely mild. That's the theory. How would we know if that's the way it's going to be? And if we do get a vaccine, say not if, but when. It's not going to be a game changer either, is it? We're still going to need to social distance for a while and keep our masks on.

So this is, this, the whole thing is not a sprint. It's not just the vaccine. It's the whole ordeal could go well into 21. Yeah. And I, it sounds terrible. We shut down March, around March 15th. And this could be substantially over by then. If this, again, if this goes the way, you know, if all the dominoes fall into place properly.

now if we find out that wow when you vaccinate somebody for coronavirus you're putting yourself in a position to get way sicker when they're exposed to a different coronavirus or something like that which isn't impossible then you know then we're going to have to take a step back and see what the hell we're doing but right now there's no sign of that and just for this guy who he didn't give his name to show that I'm putting my money where my mouth is I went and got the effing vaccine. I have to go get my second dose in another week and a half. And I did that so you don't have to because I'm an old jackoff. You know, who cares if I have something bad, right? Tase? Right. There you go. You know, those are the things you need to, I think, kind of identify because that's a different issue also. Okay. And then on top of that, even right now, we know 25 to 30 percent of the people say they won't take a vaccination. Yep, that's okay, though. We address that, so we'll move on that.

That also plays a big part into how well the vaccinations would work. I don't know that that's true. We can get herd immunity with 55% of the people. So anyway, I just feel you should really kind of address that without tipping your political leanings. Okay, I'll tip my political leanings. I'm a libertarian. And so I despise both sides in this situation where you've got the right and the left just

going at each other and they can't talk. You know, we need to be able to have discussions in this country. But now that's a political statement, so. Left or right. But to suggest that it's not politicized. Okay. See, he did on a misunderstanding. I never said it wasn't politicized.

Okay, anyway. All right. Good deal. Yes. You made him angry. It's very politicized, and it shouldn't be. Yes. Okay.

And when the vaccine comes out, if it comes out right before the election, that was expected six months ago. So it just doesn't look good, you know, the perception of, but if I see any sense that someone is rushing this along for a political purpose, either pro or against, then I will say so if I see that. I said from the beginning that anyone that was, for example, this is just an example, that was rooting for hydroxychloroquine to fail because they didn't like somebody who was a politician that was, you know, thought that it was a good thing. That person's part of the problem because we should be rooting for all these things to be successful because we all want this over.

You know, anyone that doesn't want this over, I don't know who those people would be, but they're not people I want to associate with. So we want this to be over. If somebody proposes something, we should be rooting for it to be success, except, of course, for, you know, drinking bleach or something like that. That's crazy. All right. All right? Yes. Okay.

Thank you for calling. Actually, it brought out a bunch of different topics that we got to sort of riff off of. So I thought it was very good. All right. Very good. Hey, Dr. Steve. Mark here from a podcast. And I catch you once in a while on the XM.

station there. Actually, my quick question is something about, if you can talk about Burning Tongue syndrome. I've had the all four wisdom teeth told, and this is what the latest diagnosis has been, and nobody seems to know too much about it or can tell me which way to go to get any kind of treatment. I appreciate the information and carry on. Thank you, sir. Yeah, it's awful. So Burning Mouth Syndrome is this thing. It's most likely. a form of neuropathy or nerve damage where people get this recurrent burning in the mouth and there's no cause. You look and you can't see anything.

It can be the tongue, it can be the lips, any place inside the mouth and it can be severe as if like they drank really hot water, you know, or if you eat pizza, you ever done that and the top part of the cheese comes off and it sticks to the roof of your mouth and, oh, God, it's awful. It's not a pizza nut. Oh, very good. Okay, well, just be very careful when you eat it so you don't burn the top of your mouth.

So this, nobody is 100% sure what causes this. If you can't determine the cause, in his case, he had this trauma to his mouth, aka the removing of his wisdom teeth, the condition is called primary or idiopathic. And they always told us in medical school when you say idiopathic. That just means you don't know the cause. It's the patient is pathetic and the doctor is an idiot. The research suggests that primary burning mouth syndrome is related to the nerves of the mouth, obviously, but of those of taste and any of the sensory nerves of the mouth.

But it could actually be a problem in the central nervous system. Now, it's probably not the case in this case. So some other things where you have known causes, one can be dry mouth, you can have nutritional deficiencies like B12 deficiencies, reflux of stomach acid, and certain medications, and then mouth irritation from overbrushing your tongue or using abrasive toothpaste and stuff like that. If you're over the age of 50, you're more likely to have this happen. And then there's not a whole lot that you can do for this other than medication. So they'll do some blood tests. They might culture it in your case because you had this primary trauma. They may just go straight to treating it.

And you can use saliva replacement if you have dry mouth. There are oral rinses that will numb the inside of the mouth. There's a medication called deloxetine, which is also called Simbalta, which is an antidepressant. You go, well, what the hell are they giving me an antidepressant for? Well, just like aspirin is good for ankle sprain and rheumatoid arthritis that also prevents heart attack and stroke, wildly different things. Deloxetine is a decent antidepressant. It's also good for bladder spasm, but one of the other things that Jermaine did this discussion, it's really good. for neuropathic pain or pain caused by nerves that are firing when they're not supposed to be.

So there's two kinds of neuropathic pains. One is called allodynia. And aladdinia is when you have a normally non-noxious stimulus that causes pain. So rubbing your tongue against the roof of your mouth normally doesn't cause pain. but it does in him, so he has allodynia. There's another one called hyperalgesia, where you take a stimulus that's normally as mildly painful, and now it's severely painful, so it's amplified,

and that's hyperalgesia. But anyway, so he has at least allodinia, and therefore deloxetine, lydicane, lydicane rins, those kinds of things may be beneficial. There are some other anti-conunditone, volsense that might be beneficial. And there's one that we use in trigeminal neuralgia that he could talk to his primary care doctor about his carbamazapine.

And that may also help as well, although there are some significant downsides to all these medications, you know. So some psychologists recommend cognitive behavior of therapy to just get your mind off of it. So just like they do with tinnitus, you know. the weird hearing in your ears. All right. All right.

Okay, no. So burning tongue syndrome, let us know if you reach, find something that helps. And good luck. Yeah, that would be. You never think about your mouth until it starts to bother. Oh, tooth pain. Same thing with your mouth pain. Feet and your ass and every part of your body, you don't think about it until it starts to bother you.

And then that's all you can think about. All right. You had an article you wanted to talk about. Well, I have a couple. Okay. Non-COven-related articles. Yay. Yay.

You don't have to wait for you. Hello, everyone. It is Sexual Health Week. Yay. Ooh. Give yourself a bill. I'm sure if you Google that. Well, that's not no.

No. No. So I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying, no. Don't. Anyway, so... Don't play that song, is what you mean. You know, anywhere near me or around me or when I'm in the room or anyway.

Or ever. When Jivak was here, I could get him going by talking about something gross and I could look across to where you're sitting right now and look at the look on his face and the blood drain out of his face and know that I was having a successful, you know, a successful moment. And with you, I just have to play that song. some talk about Love Island where they baby birded each other last night. And they called it vomited. And they called it the baby bird. I wonder if they got that from Opian Antony. Well, I mean, that's what that is what birds do. So. But has anybody ever called it the baby bird when a human does it to another human before Pat from Monarchy did it? I don't think that it did come from there. And I don't know. But these people. I think Joe Rogan came up with that name.

Maybe. But these people are young. And I don't know that they're. Would be in the Opie and Anthony. No, but I wonder if it's gotten out into the vernacular. You know, that's how those things happen, you know. I don't know. Just interesting, but yes, they were baby birding. Yes, and it was so gross. I couldn't even watch it.

It was, anyway. I puked less watching Pat from Munaki do that to Pat Duffey. In real life. I couldn't, I couldn't, no, I almost threw up on the couch. Because they were doing spaghetti and stuff, and it was so disgusting. Yeah, and like this chunky milk substance. I don't even know. That's what got me.

Anyway, so when I found the article that it's Sexual Health Week, the article didn't say much. It was mostly just for toys and things. However, that company had a sale. So there you go, guys. Go out and Google it and find it. I mean, I'm not promoting a. Right this week is Sexual Health Week? Yes.

So, yeah, go to all those places. I'm not going to, you know that you all know. I had never heard of this company, and maybe they made it up. We made your mother do an ad for Adam and Eve very early on when we asked. Yes, that's terrible. So then also another article that I found is five ideas for how to take care of your mental health from Men's Health magazine. I used to write for them. Yeah.

So, I mean, they're pretty simple things, but just everybody needs some mental health right now. Okay, so what's number one? Reach out when you need it. Hey, people, ask for help. Okay. Okay. Number two, don't turn to alcohol on bad days. Who does that?

Is that why so many people... Don't self-medicate with alcohol. It's not... I mean, drink if you want to drink, but don't self-medicate it. It's terrible medicine. Is that why so many people have become alcoholics since this COVID thing started? Yeah, I'd like to... I keep hearing that.

I'd like to know the actual numbers. Well, I know it's increased for us, at least. And I was talking to someone who knows that I'm working from home now, and I hadn't talked to in a long time. And his first question was, so, are you a full-blown alcoholic now? And I was like, hmm. No. Here's the Lancet effect of COVID-19 lockdown on alcohol consumption

in patients with pre-existing alcohol use disorder. And it says two months after lockdown was declared in the U.K., we did a cross-sectional telephone survey of patients with pre-existing alcohol disorders. Let's see what they found. It represented a risk factor for increasing alcohol consumption and people with alcohol use disorders and relapse for those who were previously abstinent. Those who do relapse are at high risk of harmful drinking require Taylor to break. You know, that's the thing.

It's just another unintended consequence. Yeah, we don't want any viral transmission, but, you know, we're going to put our brothers and sisters who have substance abuse disorders at risk. Well, what if you didn't? And what if you thought, like I did, that this thing's going to last three weeks, so I'll just drink through it. And then before you know it, oh, my gosh, I've done this for three weeks. You know what?

I'm going to give you one of these. Give yourself a bill. I think that was the case for a lot of people. They thought, you know, hey, we're going to lock down for a few weeks. Because remember, in the beginning, particularly, they would say, okay, well, we're going to be locked down until, you know, April 15th. And then we'll go from there. and everybody thought, well, that'll be the end of it.

And do you remember how alcohol sales increased during the initial lockdown? And I wonder where that is now compared to where it was when it started. Yeah, I don't know. I know I'm buying more expensive stuff than I was before. Oh, wait, wait. Is that us? Yeah, we're done. Okay, so acknowledge your feelings to yourself.

Channel your creativity and better your whole self, not just your mind with diet and exercise. Well, anyway, thanks always go to Dr. Scott. when he's here, we saw him this weekend. We did. And it was quite fun. Boy, am I rusty on the bass. But I want to thank you for my Laura Lee from Crumbin style bass guitar that you gave me for my birthday. You are welcome. I really

appreciate it. I've always wanted a really nice bass. Now I have one. Nice modern bass. I've got some nice old vintage basses. Thank you. And it sounds amazing. Did you not think it sounded good? I thought it did sound good. I didn't sound good, but the bass sounds good. Well, there are several things that might not have sounded good. Well, poor old Scott, just leave him alone. I didn't say school. We can't forget. Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Cumia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, Lewis Johnson,

Paul Off Charsky, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinschmidt, Dale Dudley, the great Rob Bartlett, Bernie and Sid, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley, who supported this show has never gone unappreciated. And you know who else I'm going to throw in there? Montel Williams. I used to be on his show all the time back when, was it Javan or Jiven, was his producer. But anyway, 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 on demand. And other times, at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners, who's voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website, Dr.steve.com, and check out our Twitter at Weird Medicine.

Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. Quit smoking, get off your asses, get some exercise, wash your hands, get your vaccine when it comes out. What else? Do I say wear your mask? Wash your hands. And we'll see you in one week. Goodbye.

For the next edition of Weird Medicine, goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you.