Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 428 - Libido Libado Hasenpfeffer Inc

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Dr Steve and Tacie take a bunch of phone calls. Topics include organ donation, eczema, self-diagnosis of mental illness, low libido, vaccines vs therapeutics, 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!) hellofresh.com/weird80 (fantastic meals, cooked at home!) feals.com/fluid (premium CBD, delivered to your door!) wine.drsteve.com (get the best deal on wine…delivered to your home!) 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 Bez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. Your show was better when he had medical questions. Hey! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolovir, 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 and blasts with the wave an ultrasonic, ecographic and a pulsating shave I want a magic pill all my ailments The health equivalent of 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 I want a requiem for my disease So I'm paging Dr. Steve Dr Steve No need I was trying to get the dog out from under the console.

Hello, Tase. Uh-oh. Help if I turn your mic on. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve, and my little pal, Tacey. Hello, Tacey. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the Internet.

If you've got a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 347-766-4-3-2-3. That's 347 Poohead. Visit us on Twitter at Weird Medicine. Visit our website at Dr.steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy or go to our merchandise store. Now, don't go there.

CafePress.com slash Weird Medicine, unless you want to get a Bristol stool scale mugged or something. We're going to do something better. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything here with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show. talking it over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, physician, assistant, practical nurse, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupunctures, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientist, registered dietitian or whatever. All right, very good.

When you say, we're going to do something better, I assume you mean you are. No, you and I. No. I'll do something better. Okay. I'll do better. Yeah, do more better. We have a new shipment.

of masks we have 25 masks left and this probably be the last ones I'm going to order because I'm assuming this stupid pandemic is going to be over soon so if you want a weird medicine face masks they're very rare um go to dr steve.com and look for the link that says get every show on a thumb drive and for 30 bucks you get a 32 gig thumb drive with all of our shows on it and this stupid mask and a little extra treat autographed by Tacey and me. So do that today because they are not going to last very long. Oh, high demand. Yes.

Well, yeah, we've gone through boxes of these things so far. But if you want archives of all the shows, you can have that. And it goes back many years from the beginning of Riotcast and then maybe, well, I don't No, I might throw some early serious X-M stuff in there, but don't hold me to that. I don't actually own that stuff, so that would be the issue, turning around and selling it. But don't forget to go to stuff.com.com. Stuff.com.com for all of your Amazon needs. And wine.

Dot, dr. steve.com, W-I-N-E. I've got the hiccups taste. You are great. That's some broadcast. That wine, well, that didn't sound good either, but that wine is more fabulous. More wine? No, I've only had like half a glass. I haven't been drinking.

It's just sitting here. Well, I was, yeah. That was just my redneck accent. We were quoting out of Clockward Orange. Oh, see, I thought that maybe was horrible. Yeah. Well, that's your opinion. You were wrong on that one.

Very few things I'll disagree with you. Couldn't watch it. I think if you watched it now, you would like it. Nope, probably would. Okay. Wine.com, W-I-N-E, it takes you to the best wine club ever. And we get cases of wine, and they're so, such a great price and such good wines that you won't be able to buy at your local wine store. It's fantastic.

So anyway, check that out. And if you need some earbuds, go to tweakeda audio.com and use offer code fluid for 33% off. And if you would like, and I'm not going to keep this going for much longer either, if you would like to lose weight with Tacey and me, go to Noom. Dottersteve.com that will get you two weeks free plus 20% off if you decide to do it. It's Noom is not a diet. It is a psychology program. It will help you in other parts of your life as well. change your relationship with food.

I still binge on stuff, but I binge on rice cakes now, and I like it, which is crazy. So I've been able to decrease my weight significantly. And by the way, I lost 35 pounds. So I gained an inch of male membership as, you know, in the process. And I love Noam. It's become something that I can't really live with. without. And, but you can just do the three-month thing. It's totally fine. And if you cancel, you can still use the app. And check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyurables.com.

You're listening to Weird Medicine. Well, hello. Hello. How are you? Yeah. I got winded coming up the stairs, so I got that gone. I did, too. What was that about? I don't know. And the temperature up here is nice and warm. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. It's great. It's great up here. Well, I did an interview on The Baptise Machine. I always thought it was Baptize the Machine, but it's The Baptized Machine show. And they're just a couple of guys who are curious about stuff.

And it was fun. I've been on there a couple of times. You can check them out on Spotify. I mean, I did an hour with them talking about, guess what, COVID-19, but all also some other stuff. And their website is like Cardib 2024.com and what the hell that is? C-A-R-D-I-B-2024.com. But anyway, if you want to check that out, they're pretty good failures.

And check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. He'll be back someday. Yeah, where is he? Oh, no. I don't know. I honestly don't know. So I think when you go on the road, what we're going to do is Scott's going to do the Sirius XM show, and then you will do podcasts on Saturday. Are you sure that's the way you want to do it?

Yeah, why not? I'm not sure that's the way I want to do it. Oh, really? Okay. What do you want to do? Nothing. Saturdays are going to be like one of my two days that I'm not on the road, and you want me to come home and work. Is this like work, though?

That's bull crap. Is this like work, though? You know what? We could be watching. Haunting a Blime Manor or something like that. Everybody tells me that that's boring so far. I don't care. I'm going to watch it.

I know, me too. What about The Bachelorette, though? Yeah, that's good. What an S show that is. Good. It's good. It's very entertaining. It's hard to watch.

For all you people who think you're too good, you should just try it. This one is really, wow. This woman they've got this time is, She's something. Now, she decided on this one guy and then just blew everybody else off. And these guys are ready to walk off the show. But I hope they don't because they've got a treat coming their way in Tatia or Tatia or whatever name is. Basically, my name just different.

That's right. It's very similar to your name. Yes. Anyway, so, yeah, The Bachelorette. It is the true definition of an S show. What else are we watching? Nobody cares. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares what we're watching. All right, unless it's Love Island, then everyone cares. Especially the British Love Island. All right, well, okay, that's going nowhere. So why don't we just answer some questions. Okay, let's do that. Because I did no prep today. Okay, well, I did, and then I didn't actually drag the files over here.

So let me find the files real quick. You sent me something, but I did. What was that? Did not read it. Oh, no. Come on. Really? You want me to read shit in the middle of what I'm going through with work right now.

Do you still have it? I don't know. Let me look. Could have done this before. Yeah, it's okay. God dang it. Okay, come on. This is very professional.

Sorry, everybody, but... I can't get this folder to open. Okay, keep both. Yes, there we go. Yeah, this is great. This is going really good. Okay, so. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio.

All right. Well, while you're looking for that, I will just do some phone calls. U.S.P.S.T.F lowers collect colorectal cancer screening age to 45 in draft recommendation. Yes. Okay, I did. That is why I said that. So the U.S.PSTF is the United States, some preventative task for. for some stuff.

What their job is is to evaluate the data and tell us what things make sense to do from a screening perspective on the general population. And they stratify it by age. So the definition of a screening tool is something that is very sensitive. In other words, if you're going to screen for colon cancer, the test you're doing should be really sensitive, right?

So people screen for colon cancer by just looking for blood in the stool. And that's not a good screen because, you know, maybe 40 to 60% of people who have a tumor don't have blood in their stool. They don't all bleed right in the beginning, at least. So the other thing is that the disease should be prevalent. In other words, should be common. You shouldn't be screening for rare disease. is because you're going to get more false positives than you will false negative, I mean, then true positives.

And then the third thing is the test should be relatively inexpensive. Oh, and then the fourth thing is the disease should be treatable. So you don't want to test for things like Huntington's Korea. You don't want to screen for that in the population because if you find it, you've just doomed somebody to be worried about it until it happens to them. And then there's nothing we can do about it. so don't screen for that. You want to screen for diseases that you can prevent that eventual outcome.

And it should be cheap. So the colonoscopy kind of fails that one. It's very sensitive for tumors. The disease colon cancer is prevalent. And it's treatable when you catch it early. Colonoscopy is not cheap. But, you know what, compared to the alternative, it's pretty cheap. So it's a decent screening test.

As a matter of fact, because the one positive, thing with the Affordable Care Act, well, there are multiple ones, but one of the positive things about the Affordable Care Act is that pretty much all insurances now have to cover screening tests. So if you need to have a colonoscopy and they can sell it to the insurance company as a screening tool almost always get paid for. So now they're decreasing the age for people at normal risk from 50 to 45, and I think that's a good thing. this a done deal? No. It says draft. It's a draft proposal. Okay. But it's most likely that that draft proposal will make it to the final thing because usually they won't publish a draft

proposal unless they're pretty sure that it's going to make it to the final, you know, to the final thing. Okay. Okay. So yeah. And that'll that'll change some things. You will be hitting people five years earlier. And remember now, let's say if you're your father had colon cancer at age 30, at age 45, you need to have your first colonoscopy 10 years before that. So it's age, it'll be age 45 or 10 years before a first degree relative had colon cancer, whichever one comes first, right? Okay.

So that's how it work. Well, so there is my pre-work. There you go. Thank you. I'm glad you brought it. All right, let's answer some questions. Okay. P.S.

If somebody dies of malnutrition and what organs and what? Dehydration. What organs can be donated? I don't think it's much of dehydration and malnutrition, but what organs can be donated. Okay. So, excellent question. That sounded like marijuana. You think it was this was pot talk?

That was pot talk. I think. That's what it sounded like to me. I could be wrong. And then right after, they're like, what were we talking about? That was always. Maybe not. I could be wrong.

Well, all people should consider themselves potential organ and tissue donors. So it doesn't matter how old you are, how healthy you are, anything. Don't rule yourself out. Even if you have a health condition, I tell people, as I'll ask people, you know, at the cancer center, do you want to be an organ donor? They're like, well, they can't take anything. Let them worry about them. because there are things that they can take, for example, even if you have certain conditions that would preclude them from taking maybe your liver,

you know, aka if you had liver cancer or something, they can still probably take your skin. And that sounds horrible. You get this image that they're going to skin you like they do, you know, a rabbit or something when you watch one of those survival shows. That's actually not the way it works. if you've ever seen one of those cheese cutters where you just drag it across the block of cheese and it takes a strip off the top, you know what I'm talking about?

Yes. That's what the dermatome looks like when you cut off strips of skin. So most of the skin comes from the back, and you just take off strips of skin, and you put it in this sterile saline solution. And what they use it for is bandages in burn units. It's the best bandage that you can have. This is our Halloween talk. I know. It sounds awful, but you're not getting skin, so feel free to at least donate your skin.

But you can become an organ donor anywhere from being a newborn up until your 90s. And there's no reason not to. So dehydration, if someone died of malnutrition and dehydration, their skin, may be tough to harvest, but other than that, their organs should be fine. Now, if you've got an organ that totally failed, you don't want to transplant that to somebody. But, you know, their kidneys may be okay. You know, if they died of renal failure, that may be an issue. But just let the donor services worry about that.

They'll test the organs if the patient is brain dead, and then you can do a live donation. You know, you wait until the patient just right when they die, and then you open them up and take their organs out and save them. If the patient has already passed away, then you can't donate things like hearts and lungs and livers at that point. The only thing you can donate are things like corneas and skin. But there is this other thing that you could consider, and James Byrd, who used to be on, we've had on the show before, he also came in second in the funniest person. the Tri-Cities competition. He runs a company that does medical research. And so when you are done using your body,

aka you've passed away, they take you there. If some researchers doing studies on cartilage of the knees, they take a knee. If they're doing studies on islet cells in the pancreas, as Dr. Scott would call islet cells, then they'll take those. they cremate you and give you back to the family within a month at no cost. So it's basically you get a free cremation out of it and you've advanced medical science.

So that's another way to go if you don't want to donate or if you feel like you don't have anything worth donating. But again, let them worry about that. All right? Questions, comments, Tase? Nope. Okay. I got nothing. It's okay.

Yay. Yay. Hey, it's. And Steve. Hey, got a quick question. Stacey Deloche, everybody. Exima. What is eczema?

I'm out of seeing people with the red blotchy skin and things such as that, but never really, that it didn't affect me or post to me, never really took time to ask you anything about it. And will he eventually grow out of this? Maybe. Most likely, or is it something he just going to deal with the rest of his life? It's not real bad. Well, I had eczema when I was a kid and I don't have it now. So eczema is just, what you call it, atopic dermatitis?

It just makes your skin red and itchy. And it's very common in children, but it can occur in any age. But like I said, I had it as a kid and I don't have it now, so they can grow out of it. There's a lot of stuff that you can do, but first you've got to diagnose it. So, you know, normally you'll see dry skin, itching, red patches, and they can sometimes be brown or even gray, which makes it difficult because things like tini aversic color, which is a fungus, can look like eczema too.

And then you may get these little raised bumps that can crack and scaly skin that'll make you think, oh, gosh, do I have psoriasis? Can you explain the difference between psorias? and eczema. Yeah, psoriasis is an autoimmune disorder of the skin that just affects a different layer. So you get these big, thick plaques, and you get a thing called the kebner phenomenon. The kebner phenomenon is people who have psoriasis will know this when you scratch your arm, and then all of a sudden you'll get these plaques of psoriasis growing where that scratch was.

So it responds to trauma as well, which is a lot of times we'll see it on the extensor part of the elbow, You know, it's a part that you're always banging and leaning on stuff, and you'll see psoriasis there a lot of times. So it responds to trauma, whereas eczema really doesn't. So, you know, the primary risk factors for eczema is having a family history of eczema or, you know, allergies, aka hay fever or asthma. So one of the things that you can do to prevent eczema is to moisturize your skin and try to identify and avoid things that cause it. It could be stress or sweating or certain soaps and stuff like that could do it. And you want to use soaps that are hypoallergenic. And then, you know, you want to actually dry yourself very carefully as well because even the trauma

You know, just rubbing that top layer of skin can exacerbate your eczema. We know somebody that gets eczema every time they have intercourse. Oh, we do? Yeah. And it's really frustrating to them. And it's hard to prevent because if friction can cause eczema, well, it's hard to have intercourse without friction. It's sort of the whole thing.

Now, if you have this. bad enough, your doctor could prescribe steroid creams. And then the one I really like is Pimicrolimus. It's called Elladale. It's a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory cream. And it's related to tachrylamis, which they use to prevent organ rejection. So there are treatments for it to see you a dermatologist or you. your primary care provider and they should be able to help you.

Well, my voice, it just sucks today. I've noticed that. Ah, so I'm going to drink. Drink some more alcohol and it'll make it all better. Anyway, that's sort of my treatise on eczema. So I hope that helps. If you still have questions, feel free to call us back. Yeah, I've been talking all day.

I mean, I started out doing, I voted this morning. No line I hear. No line whatsoever because it was raining, but people don't really. realize that the lion is on the inside, but because it was raining, nobody came out. So I was in and out of there in 10 minutes. It only took me an hour, so that was great. And there's always this weird guy that's always on the presidential ballot. Have you noticed that?

It's names like Toopi DeLoopi or something like that. He's there every time I noticed it this time. No, I've never noticed that. Was Kanye on yours? Yes, he was. See, I didn't pay attention to that. Yeah, he was on the very far. right, which makes it difficult because you're looking at, you know, the column on the left

looks like it's all the presidential candidates. So, you know, it was, it's like I had to look for it. Because, of course, I voted for Kanye. Well, I didn't, only because I didn't see it. That's right. You thought he wasn't on there. So that's voter, some sort of voter suppression. I was suppressed. All right. Let's take another one. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Sean from Montana.

Hey, Sean. I was calling to check in and see what your outlook was on mental health. Oh, it's terrible. With him mental health. It's terrible. I have a loved one that has never been diagnosed with a mental health issue. Okay. But claims that they have said anxiety.

and depression. How does that work, and is this person, it sounds weird, but able to claim them they do have these without it being a diagnosis? Well, that's kind of a cool question. It is a cool question. And yeah, you kind of can. Yeah, you absolutely can. And you can, yes, you can absolutely, look, if you're anxious, you know it.

You do know it. Now, there's times when you don't know it's anxiety. There will be people that come in, say, I'm having a heart attack. Well, what are your symptoms? Well, you know, my heart's beating really fast and I'm hyperventilating and my fingers and mouth are tingling and then you have to diagnose that, you know, you rule everything else out and anxiety ends up being a diagnosis of exclusion,

but, you know, they're having a panic attack. And some people get mad when you tell them that. You know, that reminds me of the very first time I was at a football game and smelled pot. Yes. I knew exactly what it was and had never smelled it before. And that's exactly like anxiety. Well, that's interesting, isn't it?

You feel it and you know it. Yep. It just, the word matches how you feel. And I think depression is, is, you don't have to be a genius to know it when you can't get out of bed. Yeah. Or when you have no interest in doing things. And there are commercials on television all the time. The problem is so people won't get help.

That's right. That's the problem. because everybody wants to be a big boy or girl. Right. Or they're afraid of being shamed or whatever. Yes, ostracized. Really, the shrink's office is one of the few places other than really your spiritual leader. And not every spiritual leader is this way where you should not feel any shame or feel judged.

Or even your family practice provider. I mean, they, if people knew how often. Give yourself. a bill 70% of psychiatry is practiced in primary care exactly and it is just simply people are sick mentally there's a lot of stressors on people these days with work and especially with COVID and so it is no big thing to go to your physician and say I think I'm depressed so how about this one

someone who has lost interest in intercourse so they've lost their libido. No, don't bring me into this. I'm not. No, not you. Someone, this is a hypothetical person. Someone's lost their libido, and they've lost their ability to enjoy things, and they've also lost the desire to do things.

So they have loss of libido, apathy, and anhadonia. what would you diagnose them with? Well, see, I'm not a physician, so I would not. I would ask that they take it. Well, I would think that they had something going on, and they would need to take a questionnaire that they can get off the Internet. Okay. And what it's going to show them is they're probably depressed.

So, but they'll say, well, but I'm not sad. I don't feel sad. So that was the point I was trying to make is you can have all these symptoms of depression and never feel sad and still be diagnosed. diagnosed with depression, because sadness really isn't, sad mood isn't necessarily a keystone of depression. And sadness and anger and anxiety are all those things that can get wrapped up into one and you can mistake one for the other.

Yep. And so one can cause the other. Yes. And a lot of people who are anxious are really just trying to, the anxiety is trying to protect them from their anger. There's all these different things. Or they have repressed anger, which comes out as depression. Exactly.

I know when I had my panic syndrome, I was symptomatic with floating severe 10 out of 10 anxiety for probably six months straight. And I got depressed from that because I thought I was never going to get better. So the anxiety actually ended up causing what we would call a reactive depression because you know the cause of it. So that was horrendous. Ever tell that story? I'm sure you've told me I probably... Well, I caught somebody trying to break into my house. Oh, yes, you did tell me that story.

Yeah, I just wonder if I told it on here. And then I realized how vulnerable I was because he was just on my back porch going to come in there. And when I confronted him, he just, you know, wasn't even scared that I confronted, you know, that I had caught him in the act. And where did you live at this time? I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. With no money. With no money. Did he think he was going to get?

Yeah, I know, right. I was a college student with no money, nothing. And, you know, I just went, dude, what's up? And he just went, yeah, man, like that. And just sort of very slowly walked away. It was not, it wasn't like somebody went, oh, I got caught and ran away, you know. There was no fear whatsoever. And that freaked me out.

And so I started having anxiety. And I didn't know what it was. I went and got all these different diagnoses. At one point, I thought I had hepatitis. I went to all these doctors. And finally ended up in the Shrinks office realizing that I had anxiety and panic syndrome. And if I had a good day, I knew I was going to pay for it, that my anxiety would come back. And that feeling of just your adrenaline, just flowing all the time and you don't know what you're scared of.

and my thing was that I hated crowds and when I was walking down the street I'd see all these people having fun and just walk and talking and stuff and I wanted to scream at them but murderers have walked on the same sidewalk and you all are diluting yourselves into thinking that you're safe and your head wants to just fly off the top of your head yes so I did counseling and that helped I got my brother actually one of my symptoms was severe nausea that went along with this and he gave me a pill called Combid

which had compasine in it which is an anti you know it's a tranquilizer antipsychotic type of tranquilizer and it had something else in it I don't know what it was I tried to look at it but my symptoms just like that went away while I was on the medication

and I realized my brain realized the symptoms could go away so that was the beginning of me getting better was that when I realized that I didn't have to feel like this the rest of my life. And then, remember, crowds were the thing that would trigger me, really just send me into high gear. But my love of fireworks that my dad granted to me was greater than my fear of crowds. So I went to the North Carolina State Fair one year, and it rained like five nights in a row. and it was the last night of the fair

so when they did their fireworks show they had to shoot off all these fireworks right so they shot off every single firework that they had for the finale it was incredible I've never seen anything like it to this day I mean it lit up the sky and it was lit up for what seemed like

10 minutes better than Disney yeah way better because I mean Tacey they took five days worth of fireworks and shot them all at once for the finale right When we were leaving, though, there was one little gate to go through, and there were 10,000 people trying to all get out of that one gate. And I was shoulder to shoulder with people.

As far as I could see, from the right, the left, there was no escaping it. And my wife at the time looked at me, and she knew, you know, how I was. She said, are you okay? And I said, I'm going to have to be. Because at that moment, I was either going to have to get better or die. that I chose not to die. And since that day, now it took me years to still, you know, I still didn't like walking in front of an open window at night, you know, because I couldn't see out. But even that's gone now.

So those of you out there that have generalized panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder, it can be cured because I am absolutely cured. I have some anxiety-type behaviors that I have, but they don't affect my life anymore. I, however, am not. But what I will say to that fellow who just called, just talk to your, who was it, his friend? Or it's a family member or someone? It's a quote-unquote a family member. Yeah, just encourage them to go talk to somebody and get some help. I mean, not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist.

Well, or maybe, but they don't have to start. It doesn't have to start that way. That is not the first step for most, I would say. Agreed. And just go talk to your family practice physician or a nurse practitioner or somebody like that. And just see what they can do because a lot of times you can get better now. Sometimes it does take many medications to get somebody better. I mean, many different.

And you've got to find the one right for each individual person. And my anxiety disorder was triggered by a specific event. So I think in that regard, I was more likely to be able to make it go away forever, you know, than someone that just has generalized anxiety from childhood trauma or something, you know. Yeah. Anxiety's tough, but you don't even have to be put on controlled substance. That's right. I never was. They never gave me it.

They never even offered it to me. Yeah. And a lot of people who like to smoke marijuana or, God, I'm talking about that a lot today. But a lot of people who like to do that just to treat the anxiety, actually be making it worse because it makes it better for a little bit and then it just comes right back like a demon because that's what it is.

Sure, sure. Well, and that's why, you know, we try not to take young people and put them on, say, L.Prasalam or Xanax or lorazepam, which is called Ativan. Because as those things wear off and they're habit forming, now the drug itself, the act of it's wearing off,

you know, coming out of your system, actually triggers anxiety, so now you've got to take another one. And that's a train that's really hard to get off. So, as you know. Preach it, exactly. So, but please, if it's you or your family member, have them get help. Yes, you can make that diagnosis yourself, but there may be some nuances to it that they can't do because they're not a medical professional and they can get some help.

There's all kinds of questionnaires you can do on the Internet and just try to see what's going on. But it's really an easy, not a weird thing to go to your family practice physician. There's no shame in it. Matter of fact. None. Especially now. I mean, let's look up the prevalence of depression in the United States. So prevalence. Well, let's look it up in COVID.

In COVID. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we're going to talk about that of depression in the U.S. Okay, let's see here. So what is the prevalence of major depressive order in the United States? I'm just, okay, I'm just asking for the answer. 7.6% of Americans age 12 and over had depression defined as having moderate or severe depressive symptoms in the past two weeks. More prevalent among females than males and among adults age 40 to 59 than those and other age groups.

So 16.1 million adults had at least one million. major depressive episode in the past year. So it's a lot of people. A lot of people. And I bet it's higher than that. It's like COVID-19. There's people who aren't reporting their illness to anybody so they don't get,

you know, the statistics don't get collected on them. All right. All right. Hi, Dr. Steve. Hello. Sarah. Hello, Sarah. I turned 38 years old in July.

of 2020, and my husband turned 43 in September. Since I was about 35-ish, my libido has been cranking upward. Everybody that I've spoken to about it says that it's my body recognizing that I'm getting closer to menopause. Oh, so it wants to get pregnant? You think that's what it is? I'm trying to reproduce that way. That's interesting. I wanted to know, is that true?

Does your libido increase before menopause because your body's trying to get the last few babies it can? That's a really interesting hypothesis. Or is that just an urban myth? No, everything, every woman is different. There are some women that may have. have that. There are some women, their libidos go up after they go through menopause, because then they're like, I can't get pregnant anymore, so I can do whatever I want. What were you going to say?

You told me there would be one day that I would want it all the time. And I think that was early 40s. Yes, exactly. And so we better be doing it all the time back then. Yeah, you were totally wrong. Yeah. I don't want y'all to think he doesn't ever get it, though. That's not true. Shut up. Yeah. No, I don't. I didn't say anything. So, anyway. Yeah, there is this thing called perimenopausal sexual peak, and some women have that, where right before they go through menopause. Now, how old did she say she was? She's not anymore. No, she's in her 30s.

Oh, she's, no, that's not it. Because unless women and her family go through early menopause, the average age for menopause is like 51. So, yeah, perimenopause, usually that's, you know, the pre-menopausal syndrome, usually starts in the 40s. It can be as early as one's 30s. And here's what Mayo Clinic says, perimenopause is the transition time from more or less regular cycles of ovulation and menstruation toward permanent infertility or menopause. so this person says you can think of perimenopause as a bookend to puberty when one's hormones once again wildly fluctuate and because the ovaries are you know they're gradually ceasing to produce hormones so you some women will have an increase in libido and if if it's not like driving you crazy and you're not just doing stupid things all I can say is enjoy it if you enjoy it if you enjoy it It's okay to enjoy that because it may not last forever. Now, as I said, everybody's different.

I've known women that started just having sex with everybody after they went through menopause for the reasons I said because now they felt in their head free that they couldn't conceive anymore. So they felt more free. I had a friend who couldn't have an orgasm because she had a tubal ligament. when she was very young and for a medical reason and she couldn't ever get pregnant and she didn't ever feel like in her head

that there was any reason to ever have sex because she couldn't conceive and so she never had orgasms. It was almost like she was punishing herself and she started having orgasms when she realized that's what it was. That's interesting. Yeah, it was a true, just 100% psychological.

So that's interesting. And all I can say is it's a mystery. Labido is a mystery. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Ryan from Indiana. I got a question about the COVID. Did you have anything to add about the libido thing? Nope.

Vaccine, everything you hear or read in the media since they're close to it, you know, it's weeks away and whatnot. And I was wondering why it was easier or it is. is easier to get to a vaccine rather than having a therapeutic for them to make a medicine first. You would figure they would get that first. It's a great question, and you've got to think of how this is done. So when you're going to make an antibody to something, the body does it, right? So all you've got to do is expose the body to the protein or give it the instructions to make the protein,

which is what an MRNA vaccine does, like the Pfizer vaccine, is a set of encoded instructions that the body then takes in and then the cells produce the vaccine and the body reacts to it and you get immunity. That's actually way easier than trying to figure out, okay, what pathway does this thing use to reproduce itself and how can I interrupt it? So you'll notice that all the drugs that are right now being proposed for COVID-19 are all off the shelf.

Every single one of them. Remdesivir was developed for Ebola, was ineffective in Ebola. It's moderately to mildly effective in COVID-19. Remdesivir basically is a fake bill. building block. So when the virus tries to reproduce itself, it inserts remdesivir instead of the nucleotide that it's supposed to, and then it just breaks down and can't finish the job. It's almost like a terrible analogy, but like if you substituted bricks made out of sand for a brick later that was laying a wall, and if you can substitute enough of those sand bricks, the wall will just

collapse before they can finish it. Does that make sense? I mean, I don't know. Okay. So Tacey doesn't like my analogies, but that's one I can come up with. But anyway, Ramdesivir, Favapyrivere was developed in Japan for influenza, and they did decades of research before they came out with that. And then we're just trying to pull stuff off the shelf. So that's what happened with hydroxychloroquine. is there were some studies done in a computer simulation that showed that hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and some other drugs might be effective against this virus. And then that French researcher Didierryo decided, well, let's try it on people.

And then he published these quote-unquote studies that were really observational, anecdotal studies that said, hey, I gave it to 300 people and they all got better. Well, that makes sense when you have a disease that has a case fatality rate of 0.5% or whatever that if you have 500 people, maybe one or two of those will die. So if you only have 300, then maybe none of them will die by a chance. So that got a lot of people excited in the beginning because it's just an off-the-shelf drug that's very inexpensive. And there you go. So for us to design a molecule that will specifically prevent COVID-19 viruses, SARS-COV-2, from reproducing is much, much harder than taking the protein and injecting it into people's arms. That's why the vaccine is hit in the market before any novel and therapeutic is going to hit the market. And really before any, you know, off-the-shelf therapeutic, because you still got to test them.

And you still got to study them. You've got to give it to thousands and thousands of people. And I was really hoping to have a peer of here would be out by June or July. And I'm very disappointed that we're getting into November and we still haven't seen it yet. But, you know, it ain't all about me. So, oh, let's talk a little bit. You know, my vaccine? Mm-hmm.

trial. So they give me the vaccine. They told me that the placebo was saline, right? But I had muscle pain and I had at the site of injection, which I would not get with saline, plus I had muscle aches and pains for two days afterward, low-grade temperature elevation. Okay. I went and I'm going to be smart and unblind the study myself because there's a double-blind placebo-controlled study, meaning that I don't know if I got placebo or if I got real vaccine. But I suspected I got real vaccine, particularly when the nurse slipped and told me that the placebo was saline. So I'm so sure I got one of my, I got my primary care provider to order a COVID-19 antibody screened on me. Totally negative.

No, no antibodies. So are you sure it would have been positive? No, well, I thought I was. Oops, I'm sorry. You're just pushing buttons. I thought that that told me that I must have gotten placebo. I was just mistaken. And maybe they did use meningitis vaccine as the placebo because that's what Oxford is doing.

But somebody, and I'm sorry if you're listening, I'm not giving you due credit, told me that one of the researchers was saying that if you got, not the vaccine, you wouldn't have normal COVID-19 antibodies, the ones that they're looking for right now. You would have antibodies to a side chain that the vaccine is producing. That's a different target for the antibodies. And so then that made me feel better again. Maybe I did get it, and I can't order those, but Pfizer can, and they did. So what's going to happen is when they apply for FDA approval and if it's approved, they will notify everyone that had the placebo to come in and get the vaccine, and then they'll enroll

us in the treatment arm of the trial, and they'll just terminate the placebo end. So either way, I'll end up getting the vaccine pretty soon, but I'm just hoping that I really got the real deal. But I was very disappointed until this very smart person pointed that out to me. I thought that was kind of cool. Okay. Well, there you go. There we go.

So I just still have to be careful. I was hoping that I could just go just stroll into the COVID wing and not put on any PPEs and go, hey, how are y'all doing? But I'm not going to work. No, that's not going to work. Okay. Hey, Dr. Steve, Ken from New Jersey. Yeah, man. You know, I thought I was getting a headache just now, and I was just thinking, has there ever been any resolution or facts come out for sure about that?

If you used of ibuprofen, which is COVID, I think it was initially, you know, if you took an ibuprofen, they said, oh, you're more likely to get it or die for me. Yeah, that was crazy. I've been using the other one that doesn't work as good. I guess it's a seven minutes. What, Napperson? Oh, I see it a menophen. Yeah, it's Tylenol. Yeah, it's time.

I don't know if there's been any data out there. Thank you, sir. Enjoy your day. Okay. So here we go. Yes, in the early days, contrary to what we would have thought, people were. saying that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs were actually contraindicated in patients who were at risk for COVID-19 because it would increase their risk of getting sick. And I never could figure that out because if cytokine storm is a big part of this disease, really a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug should be helpful, right?

cytokine storm being a hyper-inflammation situation. And I've always found that ibuprofen or naperson is better for bringing down a fever, for fixing a sore throat, muscle aches, and pains than Tylenol was, or acetaminopin. So there was a cohort study published on when was that it was very recently in the online journal called PLOS 1, which was a decent online journal. I mean, it's a good one. And it said that the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen, is not associated with severe COVID-19 disease or death.

And they looked at data from 9,236 Danish residents who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They looked at them from February 27th to April 29th. And 248 of those had filled a prescription for a non-steroidal in the 30 days before their diagnosis. And weirdly, in Denmark, if you want to get ibuprofen 200 milligrams, you've got to have a prescription. And that's something. So there were no significant differences between non-steroidal users and non-users in terms of 30-day death rate.

It was 6.3% in the NSAID group and 6.1 in the non-users, and that's not statistically significant. it's within experimental error, or with hospitalization or intensive care unit admission. So matched analysis showed that the non-steroidal users were no more likely than non-users to die within 30 days or to require hospitalization, ICU care, mechanical ventilation, or dialysis. So there you go. All right? So, yeah, it's okay, and I've gone back to using them again. Okay.

All right? Yes. There's the answer. Hello, Dr. Steve. This is Mike from Buffalo. Hello, Mike. I'm just calling to ask you a question about numbers, basically. The answer is 42.

Conspiracy theories, we'll call them, floating around the Internet these last few months about deaths, like total deaths in the world or even the country. Yeah. And their relation to the COVID or coronavirus. Yeah. So people are claiming, like, you know, let's just say whatever the number is, you know, all 400,000 people die a year in America. Well, now, how come the numbers aren't like double that right now because of this newfound, this, you know, the COVID-19? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. They are, and there's all kinds of data that shows that there's excess mortality in this country.

So excess mortality is what you're asking about. And it's an epidemiologic term. Look, this ain't calculus, right? You've got to, what you have to do is look at this week last year and do, and then the week before that and the week before that and do a running average because you've got to smooth that data a little bit. And then you have to take into account as the population increased or decreased. And are you going to look at a certain age group? And as their population increased or decreased, because you've got to correct for that, too. Because if you have, you know, all of a sudden you have a huge immigrant population, just for example, that doubled your population, then you would expect the mortality to increase by, you know, 100%.

And that doesn't really say anything because the population increase. So you have to correct for that. So excess mortality is a comprehensive measure of the total impact of the pandemic. And it's better than COVID-19 death count alone because, Tacey, you brought this up earlier. People aren't just dying of COVID-19. You know, they're dying of suicide or they're not seeking medical care because they're scared to go to the hospital, stuff like that, right? Depression. So what you do is, you know, you take the deaths and then you minus the average deaths and divide it by the average deaths.

And then that gives you a – and then multiply it times 100. and then you get this score. And it's, so let's just look at this. I'm looking at our world and data.org. And it's just Google excess mortality, Our World and Data, and it'll come up. And they've got a chart shows excess mortality during the pandemic for all ages

using this P score that we just calculated. And England and Wales and Spain suffered high levels of excess mortality. Others like Germany and Norway. more modest, but I'm just looking at the United States. So when the first wave hit, April 12th, 2020, we had 45% increase in excess mortality. In other words, you know, if you had 100 people die on that day, we had 145 die that day. Does that make sense?

Then it declined until around June 14th, where it was down to 13%. And then it started to climb up again. And at July 26th, it was up 27%. So there was 27% excess mortality between July 26th and August 2nd, and now it's starting to drop again. So as of September 6th, it was down to 10%. So we are getting better at treating this, but there are still people dying from it. You know, we throw the ramesivir, convalescent plasma, dexamethosone at them, and whatever, they still, you know, they still won't make it.

And when I say they, I mean, those people that don't make it. I mean, most, we're getting better at this all the time. And the death rate is declining significantly because we've learned how to deal with this. Now, if we could just get a therapeutic, like Favapiravir or one of the other early treated things, or remdesivir inhaled, there's a version that you can, um, that you can take as an inhalation when you're not in the hospital. You don't have to have an IV. That might be something.

Anything that will keep us from progressing from mild disease to serious, severe disease will help us end this thing because I'm sick of it. And I'm sick of viruses in general. I am not even effing kidding. We need to have a moon launch type Manhattan project. type program that eradicates these asinine viruses from the face of the earth. Because they just reproduce for what? To no end, just to reproduce themselves. It's like, you know, it's just like a game to them, and this is not a game.

So kiss my ass viruses. Thanks, always go to Tacey, my delightful friend. Thank you. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton. Travis Teft, Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Eric Nagel, Roland Campos, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinshmidt, Dale Dudley, the great Rob Bartlett, Bernie and Sid, Holly from Florida, Ron Bennington, and Fez Watley, Chowdy from wherever she's from, whose support of this show has never gone unappreciated.

Also, don't forget Martha from Arkansas, listen to our serious XM show on the Faction Talk channel, Serious XM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand. And other times at Lewis Johnson'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, wash your hands, wear your mask, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thank you.

Well, thank you. Thank you.