Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 444 - Nocturnal Drooling

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Dr Steve takes all your medical questions. Topics include Orson Scott Card's "Hierarchy of Foreignness," COVID and blood type, contact tracing, the demise of rt.live, ear wax, and low Testosterone. 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!) roadie.doctorsteve.com OMG the coolest stringed instrument accessory EVER MADE) simplyherbals.net (for all your StressLess and FatigueReprieve needs!) joinhoney.com/weirdmedicine (get discounts on online purchases! I use it every day!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why did Spider-Man pick his nose? To get rid of the green goblin. If you just heard the bio for Dr. Steve, host of weird medicine on Sirius XM103, and made popular by two really comedy shows, Ope and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. Your show was better when he was.

He had medical questions. Hey! I've got diphtheria, crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivir, stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my infertable 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 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 to Requiem of my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine.

The first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio, now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve, and this is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have 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 of 347-76-4-3-23.

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Nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory scientist, registered. dietitian or whatever. Very good. Please don't forget stuff. dot, dr.steve.com. stuff. dot, dr.steve.com for all your Amazon needs.

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you there ooh yes it does okay so rody dot doctor steve.com it is r-o-a-d-d-I-E or you can just go to stuff dot-doctr-steve.com

let me do that dot doctor Steve now that one you don't have to spell it out you can just do d-R-steve.com but it's just better to spell it out because that's the main website. And is it going to do anything? Yes. And then there's Manuka Honey and then you go down and there's the Rodey and there's a video of it working. It will blow your mind.

If you know someone that has a stringed instrument like a mandolin or a guitar or a bass, you can buy a robotic tuner for them and it's under 200 bucks. I think it's like under, let me see how much it is. Sorry, rowdy. Dot, Dr. Steve.com. Let's go to products. So the ROTE 3 doesn't do base. It does everything about it.

It's $129. Okay. And the base one is the really heavy-duty motor. That's all it is. It's just $149. So it's under $152. You can program different instruments. You can program different tunings.

You want to do a Rolling Stones open G tuning. you can play can't you hear me knocking properly you can do that and you just put it on the on the tuning key and pluck it and it will tune it to the proper tuning within a couple of cents it's perfect so it's neat so stuff dot dr steve.com check out tweakeda audio.com offer code fluid FLUID for the best earbuds for the money and the best customer service anywhere and if you want to lose weight with me. I am 100% back on track.

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All right, very good. Well, you may have noticed no Dr. Scott, no Tasey today. Tough shit. I don't know. I'm recording this at 10.30 at night on Thursday, the, what's the date today? The 18th of February. Just because we've been murdered at work, we've had a nice slacking off of COVID-19. cases, except in my team.

And so, you know, when you're the chief of all chiefs, when people are out, I guess, then that means you have to go fill in for their shifts. That's what I mean. You know, that's what people have to be seen. So I've been working my butt off and loving it, actually. So I'm looking forward to retirement. and that will be in one year and seven months. And then, boy, do I have some things to say

when I don't have to worry about losing my job. So stay tuned for that, assuming that I survive. I'll be moving to South Carolina. Coincidentally, the same state that a former host from this channel is moving to. It is totally a coincidence. It's just it's a cool place. And Mount Pleasant South Kakalaki will be my home.

And I'll be doing quite a different show at that point. Oh, boy, if I've been holding some things in. But until then, we'll be doing your medical questions. And I've got a bunch of them today. I don't have any topics to do. F-COVID, enough is enough. we've got some leftover from last time that I'd like to do

I hope you all heard that may finally solve the probability question last week but we have some others to do and just a ton of questions so the first thing we have to do though is get our disclaimer out of the way number one thing don't take advice

from some asshole on the radio boy isn't that true so I have to get up at 5.30 tomorrow and I'll be finishing this around one in the morning so not a whole lot of sleep for your old pal tomorrow night, or tonight. But anyway, let's see what we got here. Hey, it's me again.

Hi, Tacey. She's not here, listen to a radio. She's not here, jackass. This is Stacy DeLoch, everyone. KK4WZI is his ham radio call sign. If you happen to hear him on the airwaves. Well, radio net, I know 99% of people don't know what that is, but they do now. They're probably a COVID question.

does your blood type affect your vulnerability to COVID? Like if somebody type O less susceptible to COVID? Well, it sounds like you already know the answer. Type A is more susceptible? Because that's the answer. Bye, Tacey. Bye, by, Stacey. Yeah.

I think Stacey knew the answer to that. So he was asking a question he knew the answer to, thinking that it would stimulate conversation on the show, except there's no conversation to be had because I'm sitting here by myself. But it is true that there is a slight preponderance of infections in people with type A blood type and a slight decrease in infections in type O. Now, I think I did this on my very first COVID sit rep, which I quit doing because it's just the same stuff week in and week out at this point. But when it was more novel, you know, I was doing them every week. So, but, so what they did was just very simple.

You get a thousand people in the emergency room or wherever that you're testing for COVID-19. And at the same time, when you're testing them, you'd check their blood type. And what they found was that compared to the population, there was a slight increase in number of patients infected who were type A and a slight decrease of people who were type O. So let's look real quick. Let me just say percentage. We could ask, Echo, I wonder if she would know.

Echo, what's the percentage of people who have type O, blood type? Okay, that's great. Echo, what's the percentage of type O blood type in the population? Sorry, I'm not sure about that. That's just great. Okay, 45% of Caucasians are type O, 51% of African Americans, and 57% of Hispanics are type O. So let's just say you took all the white folks. and you tested them for their blood type and at the same time that they come in with COVID-19.

And so it might be 42%. It was actually, I think it was a 20% difference. So 20% would be 8. So, you know, you'd figure 30, well, okay. 37% of people would have come in and had type O compared to the population, which is 45%. And then, let's say, percentage of type A, because remember, they're not all the same. Okay, here we go. Type A positive is 34%.

A negative is 6% of the population. So we would say 40%. So 20% of that would be 8. he 48% with type A. Now, this does not mean that people with type A are doomed to get COVID-19, and this says nothing about how well they do. They didn't look at that. They were just purely looking at infections.

And it doesn't mean if you're type O that you are, that you're protected. So you could never say this person with type A got COVID-19 because they're type A. And you could never say, you know, this person didn't get it because they're typo. It just is, you know, a change in risk. And, you know, statistics don't apply to the individual. So people who smoke, there's a certain percentage of those folks never get lung cancer, right? And there are a certain number of people who don't smoke who do get lung cancer. So it's kind of that sort of thing.

And now in that one, you could say, that's a terrible analogy because most of the people who smoke and get lung cancer, you can say, yes, the lung cancer caused them to smoke. So I'll think of a better analogy. That's a terrible analogy. It said exactly the opposite of what I wanted to say. All right. Let's see here. Let's see what we got here. Charles.

I got a crazy question. Oops. I'm Steve, Matt, and Charles. Hey, Matt. I will be your neighbor. And I am being very speculative, and I apologize to that. I also apologize for calling and asking a COVID question because I try to not do that. Okay, so RT.D.Live and the COVID tracking project on them today.

RT.Live has already stopped posting data. Yes. But the COVID tracking project. What he's talking about, RT. Dot Live was where we used to look at the R-sub-T, which was the real-life data regarding how many people one person would infect, and when you have a number that's less than one, you would expect to see decrease in cases over time. And RT.Live just quit doing their thing and refer everybody to the COVID tracking project.

I'm not 100% sure why they did that. also announced that they will stop tracking data on March 1st. Oh, really? Are you aware of this? No. Is that a sign that we're crawling out of the tar pit of COVID? Is that a good sign or is that a bad sign? Are they being silenced by the government?

No. I don't think it's that. All right. Thanks a lot. Okay, that's a good question. So let's just explore this together because I wasn't aware of this. So I went to RT. Live, which was one of my favorite websites to refer people to, to look at how we were doing. Because if your state was in the green, the R sub T was less than one.

And remember, there's R not or R sub zero, which is the theoretical number of people that one person with an infectious disease would infect. And for COVID-19, that number is 2.4. For influenza, it's around 1.2. For measles, it's 12. That's how contagious measles is. And you can calculate from these numbers the percentage of population that needs to be immune for you to get an R-Sub-T, which is real-life communication or communicability number below one. and so that's a aka called herd immunity so when you when you have enough people that are immune that one person can not infect more than one person in other words one person infects point

nine or point eight or point seven people on average if it's point nine a thousand people would infect 900 which would infect a 10 infect 720 I've used that those numbers a lot on this show And that is also what we would call herd immunity. So the formula for that is herd immunity equals 1 minus 1 over the R0. So if the R0 is 2, in other words, one person infects two people, 1 minus 1 over 2 would be 1 minus 0.5, which would be 0.5. So you would have to have 50% of people immune to achieve herd immunity. Now, that doesn't mean once you achieve herd immunity that it completely goes away the next day.

That just means that cases will start to decline rather than increase. So you want a lot more than that. But when you've got an R-sub-zero of 12, like measles, if you do that, that's 1 minus 1 over 12. The number ends up to be in the 90s. So you have to have 90 plus percent people vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, which means that we need to have universal vaccination for measles to prevent it. And I get a lot of people, you know, measles vaccine causes more harm than measles itself. Yes, that's right, because we have a vaccinated population.

So in 2008, 2009, we had a radical. medesles from our shores, the only cases that we had in this country came from somewhere else. And I remember saying that on the show one time, and some anti-vaxxers said, you're a effing liar. It's like, no, because, you know, he had statistics that showed that there were measles cases in this country, but all of those came from somewhere else. It wasn't a single native case. And so when you have populations that don't vaccinate. for measles, then you'll see these outbreaks, and that's very communicable.

So, yeah, when you have a vaccinated population, of course, the vaccine, which is not 100% perfect, all medications have adverse effects, all vaccines have adverse effects. You'll get rare cases of people having maybe even a catastrophic adverse effect from a vaccine, which is tragic. But the upside is that if we vaccinate and accept that risk, which is hard to swallow, I get that. But the upside is we don't lose one kid in a thousand who gets measles because that's the way it used to be. I had a friend of mine in kindergarten who died from measles. I had two or three people in my school that were in wheelchairs from polio.

because I'm effing old, and I remember time before there were universal vaccines, I remember rabies commercials because people were terrified of stray dogs because rabies was, you know, on the uptick before they started universal rabies vaccines. So that was a lot scarier world back then. And this isn't that that long ago. You know, I was born in 50-something. And so, you know, we're talking 70, no more than 70 years ago. I mean, not even 100 years, and it was a, there was real terror in this world worrying about infectious diseases that we couldn't control.

So anyway, don't remember what the hell I was talking about, but we're talking about the R-subt, or RT. dot live. So here's what, so now you have the context. Since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, we've calculated the R-Sub-T, which has been a useful measure of how quickly the virus is spreading. However, we believe other metrics are now a better way to track the virus. Well, what are they? With that, we suggest you visit the following organizations, which have alternative metrics. Okay, tell us what is a better way to track the virus. The COVID-tracking project has been the source of our data from the beginning. They do not calculate R-sub-T specifically. but they have a host of other metrics,

hospitalizations, reported cases, et cetera. Okay, well, we always had that. I'm unimpressed by their explanation here. If you want to look at hospitalizations, by the way, don't go to COVID tracking product or project. Go to COVID. Dotlabs, S-T-Labs.com. And you can fiddle around with the data there in real time.

and you can visualize it with Bollinger bands. That was my innovation. Thank you very much. I'll give myself one of these. Give yourself a bill. And with simple moving averages, also my suggestion to Daniel Stout, who runs Stout Labs. But it's a great website. Okay, here's epiforcast.io.

This group is run by the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases, created many of the methods we were using to calculate arsenic. sub t. They currently calculate R sub t. And if you're interested in this measure, we suggest viewing it here. So let's go to epi forecast.io. And it says identifying changes in the reproduction number rate of spread and doubling time during the course of COVID-19 outbreak whilst accounting for potential biases due to delays in case reporting. That's why you want a simple moving average, by the way. Some data sits on somebody's desk and then they output it once a week, you'll see these sort of varying up and down, up and down, up and

down numbers. The simple moving average across about 20 days will smooth that out and give you what the real trends are. It says these results are impacted by changes in testing effort. That's true. Increases and decreases in testing effort will decrease and decrease reproduction number estimates respectively, which makes total sense. Now, they don't do so much graphical analysis, but they do have a map of the United States with decreasing, likely decreasing, stable, and increasing numbers. And the only state that is increasing right now is Nebraska.

But their reproduction number is 1.1. So their doubling time is 28 days, an estimated new case is 486. So a reproduction number, R sub T, of 1.1, is very close to 1.0, which is also very close to 0.99, which is a reproduction number that will result in a net decrease in cases over time. So people say to me, well, masks don't work. No, they don't work 100% of the time. That's true.

Matter of fact, probably don't work 90% of the time. But when you have a reproduction number of 1.1, they only need to work 10% of the time. to get you down to, you know, with other measures, to an R-Sub-T that's less than one, and now you have decreasing cases. So I, look, I'm not a mask freak, and I'm not a, you know, follow the science. I don't understand follow the science. Of course, follow the science. But don't use that as a political club to hit people over the head with,

actually follow the effing science. And look at the math. This is just pure math. And we do work or live in a universe that can be adequately described by mathematics. So anyway, all right, I get off my soapbox for about a minute. So, yeah, this is pretty good. If you liked RT.Live, this is decent. It's not as cool as RT.Live was, but in a lot of ways, it has all the same information.

information. So that is epi-epi forecasts.io. So we'll be using that from now on. All right. Yeah, I don't think it's political. I think some of it is financial. You know, it costs money to do this. Daniel Stout that runs Stout Labs. He has a little thing you can donate. By the way, please do that. Give him a dollar. It says, buy me a cup of coffee. Give him 50 cents. But these things cost money. It costs bandwidth. And I think our T. Live had a lot of bandwidth that they had to deal with. And then just keeping it going, you just get bored with stuff. Like my COVID sit reps, I just didn't feel like I was adding anything to the conversation, so I just quit doing them, and they may have felt the same way. Let's see how Tennessee is doing. We are seeing a decrease, yeah, reproduction number 0.91, with a range of 0.73 to 1.1. and we are seeing a net decrease right now.

But the thing that concerns me is that people are going to go, oh, you know, this thing is over. Well, I know some of my staff thought it was over until they got it themselves. So just still, please be careful. Let's get through this thing. I want to be done with this. And then when we're done, we need to declare war on these damn coronaviruses. Coronavirus first, because if SARS had become a pandemic, it would have been a lot worse than it was.

It was a regional epidemic. MERS, that's Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, killed about 30% of the people that had infected. Thank God, it was not very transmissible. So death to all coronaviruses, that's first. And then we'll hit all the other RNA viruses next. Ebola. Let's see what the other RNA viruses are. They seem to be pains in the ass. Let's do a list of RNA viruses. Okay, come on now. Yeah, there's double-stranded RNA viruses, negative strand

RNA viruses. Satellite viruses, kiss my ass. A bunch of shitty little nanomachines, although But we'll learn from them, for real, we will learn so much from them as far as machines that can reproduce themselves, because that's all they do, but they just do it for no reason. And they just reproduce to no end. You could say humans do that, too. I mean, we reproduce. What's the point? Well, the point is we can regard the universe. So we are, we're not made, we grow out of this universe.

We are an integral part of this universe. Every atom in our body came from the inside of a star. We are the mechanism by which the universe can regard itself. So that, there is some purpose to that. There's no purpose to these asshole viruses. Okay, yeah, so there's pecorra. Ooh, yuck. Viruses have horrible names.

There's, God, who's ever heard any of these? Amalgaviridae. Family Amalgaviridae is a whole family of double-stranded RNA viruses. Burnaviridae, Chrisavirida, sister. Okay, all got to go. Boy, there's a crap load of shitty viruses out there. Look at this list.

This is unbelievable. Just go to Wikipedia and Google or, you know, search for RNA virus and look at just this list. And you know, there's a bunch of them we don't know anything about. Negative sense, single-stranded RNA viruses. Yeah, they all got to go. I don't see the point in them. If you've ever read Orson Scott Card's Ender's game,

later on he starts talking about different species can we communicate with them are they alien to us but can we communicate with them or are they so alien that we can't

communicate with them it's impossible and they were called Varelles and those species were okay to destroy you can tell it's late at night

because I'm getting philosophical plus I'm having a little Willits bourbon which you know anybody ever wants to send me anything you don't have to I don't even ask for that but Willits is a pretty good thing to do

and then my allergies are kicking in plus I am stressed to the max at work and on and on and on so you know you're getting this show but

the higher of foreignness was a classification system of humans and other species designed by Valentine Wigan in her letter to the Framlings as Demosthenes for classifying how alien an individual was relative to a subject. There are four tiers from least alien to most. Utlaning was defined as a stranger recognized as a human from the same planet as a subject but of a different nation or city. Utlaning means foreigner in Swedish.

And then Framling was defined as a stranger recognized as human, but from a different planet. That means stranger in Swedish. Raman is a type of Asian noodle. Oh, no, it would define as strangers recognized as human, but of another sentient species entirely. This term was only ever used to refer to the entire species as a whole rather than individual members. So this would be aliens that we could communicate with. Raman means the frame or framework in Swedish. Don't know why these are all Swedish words.

And then Varelza were defined as true aliens. They may or may not be sentient beings, but are so foreign. No meaningful communication is possible. And Varelza means creature in Swedish. So in Ender's game, they thought that these bug things were Varelza until they realized that they could communicate with them. and they had been trying to communicate with him the whole time so they were really ramen

and you can't destroy ramen you can destroy Varelles you know so viruses are freaking Varelles and we can destroy them and I feel no compunction about that whatsoever I've searched trying to find some good

that viruses do in this world and if you can think of something feel free but and we can have a conversation about that but they're not alive, and I think eradicating them could only be good for the human race. All right. Let's do something different.

Here we go. Your favorite caller. Hey, question. Listening to a podcast the other day, and they brought up a little silly question about something. I don't think you've covered. Earwax. Is it better to use a cotton swab to clean out your ears? No.

That's terrible. Lift your ears naturally do what they're supposed to do with the wax as far as keeping junk from getting in your ears and naturally getting out of your ears. Yeah, don't do that either. Well, unless you are one of those lucky people who produce just the right amount of wax so that your ear canal is protected, but it doesn't clog up. so I used to make money clearing people's ear canals out they would come in and say I can't hear you look in there it's just plugged with earwax and we had a big giant chrome syringe thing

that you could fill with warm water and you'd have the patient hold like an emesis basin up against their ear to catch the water and you would just shoot this stuff in there with the syringe and the way it was constructed was such a way that your thumb went in this loop and your fingers went on these other loops to the side of the giant chrome cylinder

and you could get a lot of pressure and you could just flush that stuff right out of their ear and those were really grateful patients they didn't mind paying money to do that and then I just started feeling bad about it because really you can just go to any CVS Walgreens or any mom-and-pop pharmacy for the most part and buy an earwax kit.

And it's basically the same thing. It'll be a little bottle of glycerin with some hydrogen or some kind of peroxide in it that'll foam up. And you lay down, watch Seinfeld. That's about the right amount of time. Lay down with your bad ear up, put about five or six drops. Just fill the ear canal and you'll feel it bubbling up in there. and the bubbles kind of get behind it and loosen it up, and then the glycerin softens it.

You lay there for about 25, 30 minutes, and then you get up, fill the basin with lukewarm water. You don't want it too hot. And then you take the syringe, fill it up. Now you're putting the bad ear down, pointing into the basin, and then you squirt this syringe or this bulb syringe, range into your ear, kind of at an angle. You don't want to shoot it straight in.

What you really want to do is get it to bounce or go against one wall and then wash along the eardrum and then come out down the other wall, if that makes sense. So you want it to slosh around in there instead of spraying it straight in because what's that going to do? It's just going to push the wax in even further. And when you do this properly, after two or three times, you'll see a big bolus of disgusting earwax fall into the base. of your sink.

Now, if you use Q-tips, what's going to really happen? Q-tips should be used to clean the helix and to put on makeup and stuff not to shove into the ear canal. When you do that, you're going to do one of two things. You're either going to traumatize your ear canal because there isn't any wax in there. You just think there is. Or you're just going to mush the wax deeper into your ear canal.

It's very rare that you can use a Q-tip to actually get out a large bolus of earwax so please just don't do that buy a murine ear kit or just any ear kit and now they have a new one that has a trigger on it and you kind of

pump the warm water into your ear like a gun it's like a spray bottle well it is a spray bottle except it's got a nozzle on it that shoots a stream of warm water into your ear and that works kind of

like what I used to have in my office. And you can buy those now at CBS. I've seen them as seen on TV. Just you could probably Google. Let me see. As seen on TV. Seen on TV earwax. Let me just put that in and see if it comes up.

Yeah, there it is. Okay. So, come on, come on. Nope, I don't like this. This one simply twist to grab and extract earwax. I don't like that. This one's got an auger on the end of it. Now, this you would have to have an eardrum absolutely full of earwax,

and then it's got an auger bit on it, and you twist it, and it inculcates itself into the earwax bullus, and then you just pull it out, and it can't slip off. That's not what I'm looking for. Oh, here's an earwax vacuum. Oh, let's look at this. Let's see if this is anything. Hang on.

What's up? Today, I wanted to do a new series that hopefully you guys will like because not going to... Okay. It's called the Wax Vag. Okay. Let's see if she pulls a big glob of earwax out of her here. There's nothing in there. Oh, I can see a little bit of stuff.

Okay, I don't know But you could try something like that I think that would be okay As long as there's not a lot of Negative pressure Because the thing you don't want to do Is start yanking around your eardrum That's what you're trying to avoid

Is trauma to the eardrum itself And yet getting that wax out of there Because as long as it's in there Pushing up against the eardrum Or the tympanic membrane As we would call it Then you can't You know, it can't vibrate

If it can't vibrate You can't hear well All right. I want to get to this other question. Let's see. Hey, Dr. Steve. Hi, Tacey. She's not here.

Hi, Dr. Scott. I'll tell her, though. He didn't hear either. He's an asshole. I suffer from low testosterone due to a pituitary tumor. Okay. I know all the negative aspects of low to no testosterone.

Yes. Are there any positive benefits? Yeah, sure. Speak on that, please. Yeah, positive benefits to low testosterone, yeah, no more pesky libido. You don't have to worry about having intercourse anymore, so I guess that could be a positive. I was thinking the other day, how much easier my life would have been if back in the day I just didn't give a crap about having intercourse and how much less trouble I would have gotten into. Yeah, I wouldn't have tried the trifecta on the weekend and then have one of their boyfriends show up banging on my door at 2 o'clock in the morning, and I had to throw them down the stairs and stuff.

Well, yeah, hypothetically, I mean, I'm just, you know, whatever. But, yeah, that's about the only thing I can think of. There probably is a, well, the other thing is no or a decrease. incidence of testosterone sensitive tumors like prostate cancer. I mean, what we do when someone has prostate cancer is we give them Lupron or we do an orchiectomy, in other words, remove their testicles to prevent them from producing any more testosterone because testosterone and prostate cancer like, you know, a prostate cancer like, you know, match and kerosene.

Let's see, benefits to low testosterone. So you're seeing behind the scenes today. This is how I find some of these answers. Let me see. No. Okay, low testosterone is good for men and family, says something. One of many things new dads give up for their kids. is ironically the sex hormone that got them into this mess in the beginning with.

Testosterone dips are often synonymous with fatherhood, and that can cause postpartum, depression, lower libido, and shall we say, peak dad bod. But the research suggests low tea isn't all bad, and there's a growing body of evidence that the tea cup may be half full after all. Come on. This is fatherly.com, by the way. You don't have to report and try to be funny.

Low testosterone may be why you're such a family man. You can't blame the baby for knocking out your testosterone completely. Studies suggest that marriage facilitates a testosterone decline as well. Gee, I wonder why. And there's additional evidence that soon. As soon as you make a conscious decision to be a family man, your tea started its gentle march downward. Well, that's interesting. You can't separate mind from body, that's for sure.

This may seem to add insult to injury, but scientists suspect it's nature's way of helping you chill out around screaming babies and spouses. That may make sense. Remember, we talked about multiple times in the past that very small variations in human response to things can lead to big. amplification over time when we're speaking about evolution. So a kid that when they're 14 in the cave says these people I'm living with are assholes, I'm moving to the next cave where they're cool, would have diversified the gene pool by mating with people in that other cave rather than in their own cave. And over time, that may have provided a survival benefit that is, that we still see today

in modern adolescents who tell their parents to go to hell until they hit about 22, 23, and then they realize, oh, wait a minute, those people in that old cave weren't as dumb as I thought they were. I wonder how I'm supposed to balance my checkbook

and then they come running back and they're normal human beings again. So this may be one of those things where those men in a cave back in the caveman days that had a decrease in testosterone after babies were born in the cave

may have been less likely to kill the mother or do something dastardly or, you know, or kill the kid or whatever, who knows, you know. And that small difference may have been enough to make that gene very successful in being passed down through future generations. And, yeah, it would keep them from running off with other people. And obviously, this isn't 100% of people, but it may have been enough to keep the species going. So that's very interesting. All right.

So fatherly, you know, despite the, you know, the yucks, the attempted yucks in their reporting, that's kind of an interesting article. All right. So anyway, that's about all I can think of, though. Oh, my allergies are killing me. Steve, this is daring. What? My teeth are made of moon rock. Oh, boy.

Apropoom. Oh. Fuck that up. Damn it. Apral falls. That's terrible. I drill a lot in my sleep. Really?

And is there anything I can do to stop it besides eating a shotgun? Thank you. Oh, my goodness. Boy, this is a terrible call. Dude, you said it, bra. And the thing is, is he was doing Edgar, except he was asking about drooling. And the one thing about Edgar, as we all know, his mouth is dry. one of my favorite ghost stories of all time

was watching Jim Norton tell his ghost story knowing full well that he was talking about Edgar, his character from Opie and Anthony. If you haven't seen it, it's quite humorous if you're aware of Edgar's history. Anyway, drool is just nothing but excess saliva,

and if it comes out of your mouth, we call it drool. And I drool sometimes I wear a bipep mask It's very attractive At night And sometimes I'll drool into the thing And it's so disgusting That I have to rip the mask off

And I can't sleep with it the rest of the night So I'm not a fan of drooling while you're sleeping too It's very common But every once in a while It's a symptom of something else Like a sleep disorder or another health condition Or if you have multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy.

I doubt that that guy has it, although he sounded like he might have something like that, although I think he was doing a character. The most common cause of drooling when you sleep is pretty, you know, it's pretty common-sensical, and it totally has to do with Einstein and gravity. when you sleep on your side or on your stomach particularly, where is the saliva going to go? And if you open your mouth and you snore and then you've got a bolus of saliva in your mouth and you're sleeping on your side, it's just going to leak out. And that may be all it is.

So particularly people who have trouble breathing through their nose and they open their mouth to breathe and then the saliva comes up. If you have blocked sinuses like I do now, you're going to drool more than usual, and it's because you're breathing through your mouth again. People with reflux will also breathe through their, well, not only breathe through their mouth, but they will be increasing the amount of saliva produced because they have noxious, acidic fluid working its way up from the stomach. up to the esophagus and a lot of times into the posterior pharynx or the lower part of the throat so

those people will also drool and then some medications will do it as well and you just got to look most of these are for crazy people which you know maybe that's it people with sleep apnea

will also drool at night and so I have that I have complex sleep apnea, which means that when you put the CPAP mask on, I stop breathing. So I have to have bi-pap. You know, I'm just a treat. In the bi-pap actually forces air into my lungs, and then I breathe back out under pressure. And it works pretty well.

I feel a million times better since doing that. So change your sleep position. That just makes sense. Sleeping on your back, if you can. If you can't sleep on your back, Try putting a wedge under your bed or bricks under your bed so that you are slightly angled upward with your head above your feet, just slightly. And that way, if you're sleeping on your side and you open your mouth, hopefully gravity will keep the saliva in the bottom of your mouth rather than having it leak out. I'm looking at healthline.com, and they said try biting on a lemon wedge.

and the citrus, they say here that can thin out your saliva, I don't think that's what it is. I think when you bite on the lemon wedge, you're actually emptying out your salivary glands. And I can't imagine that that's a very long-term solution, but it might be for some people. And if they're flowing more freely after you do that, and when you stop, maybe it'll decrease the amount of saliva

that's produced during the night. There is a thing called a mandibular device, something you put in your mouth it's like a mouth guard and you sleep more comfortably and you drool less I have one of those

and I think it's really helped since I started using my device so I've got all these crap in my head when I'm trying to sleep decreases that whole spontaneity about my wife and I have talked about

trying to have intercourse while both of us are wearing our CPAP masks and we were just so grossed out by the idea that, you know, it was nothing more than just sort of a passing. Boy, that would be weird. But since I've started using the mouth guard, I find that I kind of clamped down on it. I don't breathe through my mouth as much. I'm going to have to use aphrine tonight.

I'm not a big fan of aphron for long-term use. But short-term use, it's great. It's absolutely the best decongestant. and that will help me breathe tonight and drool less. And then there are some people that have cealorea. So that's your word for the day is cealorea. That means excess production of saliva. So diarrhea is excess production of watery stool.

And rhinorrhea is excess production of snot. So cealorea is excess production of stuff from the salivary glass. and that would be saliva. So those people can take anticholinergic drugs that will give them dry mouth, which will help. But the problem with that is anticholinergic drugs over time can increase your risk of dimension and stuff. So probably a better solution is Botox. So botulinum toxin injected into the salivary glands will decrease the amount of saliva produced. And it works pretty well.

Now, there are cases where a doctor recommends getting your saliva glands removed. I want to have that done. I have an eggplant-shaped head because of my prerodotid glands. Those are the glands that increase in size when you have the mumps, and they're just gigantic. And apparently, that's just a normal part of aging for some people, but I hate it. And I've tried to get an ear-nose-and-throat doc to take them out. If you know anybody that's interested in doing that surgery on me, I would be happy to at least give them a plug on the air,

and I'll even pay for the surgery. Okay, I think we have maybe time for one more question. Hey, Dr. Steve, what's up? Hey, man. How are you? Good, man. How are you? Cool, great.

So I am trying to wear an N95 mask in my office all day. A nurse friend said you could tape it to keep your glasses from fogging up, tape the top of it to your face. and I'm wondering if there's tape for that, some kind of special tape. I've been using masking tape if there's anything wrong with doing that. You shouldn't have to. I think what's going on is you've got the wrong size N95. One thing that you can try to, now if it's a true N95, you should be breathing through it,

and it shouldn't be fogging your glasses up. So if it is a true N95 and it's fogging up your glasses, you've probably got the wrong size. But I'm not sure why you're wearing an N95 at work. You shouldn't have to do that. A regular, you know, surgical mask would do. And on those, those are very difficult to not fog your glasses up. Twist the ear loops instead of putting them completely around your ear.

Twist them 90 degrees and put them around your ears, and that'll stop it. What it's doing is it's just venting out the side instead of venting out the top. With surgical masks like that, you generally don't breathe through them very efficiently. You breathe around them. And the reason that they work is if you cough or you're breathing or you're, you know, talking loud, any viruses that you have may will be shunted to the sides and the top and the bottom rather than shunted straight out. So they're not perfect, but they do decrease transmission, so we still feel that they're useful. now an N95 actually filters the air

and when we do it we have to put our head in a hood and then they'll spray this stuff in there and if you can smell it then you're not wearing your mask properly so if it's fogging up your glasses you're not wearing it properly or it's not a real N95 or it's the wrong size

okay all right let's um I think this will be a quickie Hey Dr. Steve my name is Colter I'm just responding to what you just described as kind of the weird paralysis with dreaming. And I've had so many issues with that. I would love to discuss this more with you. Yeah.

Thank you. My numbers. Ah, okay. Let me skip over that. Three nine. Ah, Jesus, too. Come on. That's it?

Oh. Okay, I thought that was a question about vaccine and antibiotics. Okay, I don't know what happened there. Okay, well, listen, I kind of crapped the bed there at the end. Sorry about that. Pulling up the wrong phone call, but that's you. A cringe of the week for Carl and the crew. Time to wrap it up anyway.

We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, that Gould Girl, Lois Louis Johnson, Paul O'Charsky, Chowdy, 1008, Eric Nagel, the Port Charlotte Hoare. Roland Campo, sister of Chris, Sam Roberts, she who owns

Pigs and Snakes, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, she who loves Breft, Spris, and Pocky, who's no clue what that is. Matt Kleinschmidt, Dale Dudley, Holly from the Gulf, the great Rob Bartlett, Casey's Wet T-shirt, Carl's deviated septum, Patty C C Cups, Bernie and Sid, Martha from Arkansas's daughter, Ron Bennington and Fis Wattley, who's support of this show has never gone unappreciated.

Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk Channel. SiriusXM. Channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. go to our website at dr steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap until next time check your stupid nuts for lumps quit smoking get off your asses and get some exercise we'll see you in one week for the next edition of weird medicine Thank you.