Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 453 - He Who Bones She Who Owns Pigs and Snakes

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Dr Steve does a solo show and answers random medical questions from the voicemail archives, some COVID-related, others not so much. Also a cut from the CD "Olivia" by the band "Tucci." 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!) grammarly.com/WEIRD (if you write, you need this) manscaped.com offer code LAUGH BUTTON! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of weird medicine on Sirius XM103, and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. Can you please stop bullshitting and get to the question? I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Tobolivis dripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out, glassed with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic bill.

Oh, 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 for my disease. So I'm aging Dr. Steve. 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. This is a show for people who'd never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you've got a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 34776-4-3-23. That's 347.

Poo-Head. Visit our website at Dr.steve.com for podcast. Medical snooze. Medical snooze, I'd say that's about rod and stuff you can buy. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt, don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your doctor and nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncerist, yoga master,

physical therapist, clinical laboratory, scientist, registered dietitian or whatever. Don't forget to check out stuff.com.com. That's stuff.com for everything you hear us mentioned on this show. Plus, it takes you to Amazon. And when you click through stuff.amazon.com to Amazon.com, it helps keep us on the air. So we really do appreciate that. Use it whenever you can. And don't forget, R-O-A-D-I-E dot, Dr. Steve.com for the greatest robotic guitar tuner ever made.

Maybe the only robotic guitar tuner ever made. Check it out. There's a video at stuff. dot dr steve.com or you can go directly there at rowdy dot dr steve.com and if you want to lose weight with me the only time i've been able to sustain this kind of weight loss over several years including through covid was noem dot dr steve.com n-o-o-o-m dot doctor steve.com not a diet it's a psychology program you get two weeks free plus you'll get 20% off if you decide to do the three-month program

It's very inexpensive compared to other programs and very successful. And then check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. Good Lord, it's been a really bad allergy season this year. Probably my hypothesis is that it's because we have not had much of a winter. So a lot of things didn't freeze out and it kind of got warm. And now it's just been raining. And so there's mold in the air. pollen is just a nightmare and if you go back and listen to the very first weird medicine

I have fall allergies and spring allergies and then I'm okay in between but lasts about eight weeks on both sides and the fall allergies I guess is ragweed and it affects me differently and it drops my voice about an octave so if you go listen to the very first weird medicine I don't think I can pull it up but I'm not going to try to while I'm actually trying to do it. No, I'm not going to try to do it. But my voice was much deeper. I didn't sound like the crotchety old man I sound like when I've got allergies in their full aspect.

But anyway, don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website. It's simply herbal.net. I could use some of his stupid nasal spray right now, which, of course, he doesn't have anymore. The one thing that was on there that was good, he doesn't have. and check out our website at dr steve.com all right well what i thought we would do is just to answer a crap load of phone calls because i'm here by myself today and we've got a i've got hundreds of them that are just built up over the years that we've never gotten to and then i thought we could do some just raw ones right off the voicemail

without me even pre-screening them. I thought that might be fun. Let's try this one. Yeah, see, this is the reason I pre-screen them. Okay, all right. That was awesome. Oh, here's my accountant. Let me see.

I wonder if he wanted this for the air. Well, okay. Yep. Let's do this. Hey, Dr. Steve had a back epidural question for you. I was wondering why they would have maybe wanted me to reschedule a recent back epidural because I had had the Johnson Johnson vaccine eight days prior. And they were saying that the epidural could have potentially canceled out the vaccine. And to me, it sounded more like we just. don't know and there's potential liability.

Yeah, man. At first I was laughing because I thought it was going to be because of the risk of thrombosis or blood clots, which of course were cerebral. In other words, the blood clots in question were in the brain and were in females 18 to 49 years old. So I didn't think you fit into that category. But on further reflection, listening to your question, the reason that they did it is because when they give you the vaccine, they say, well, you've got to go two weeks and you have full immunity, if they now shoot you full of steroids, so corticosterides are mild immune depressants. And they will suppress the immune response, and they're not 100% sure, but they are concerned that if they do that, you will not develop a full immune response to that effect.

seen. And so that's why. I don't hate that. I hate it for you because for you to volunteer to have an epidural, because I've had them myself, you must have been in a significant amount of pain. And the epidurals really do help. I had, as you know, spondylolis thesis, or I have spondylolis thesis for those who don't know what that is. Imagine your spinal column as a bunch of balsa wood blocks and they're usually stacked on top of each other with say some jelly or

rubber or something, whatever a little pillow between them and just imagine a bunch of blocks and you've taken I don't know peanut butter is fine or jelly and stuck these blocks together

and stack them up to the sky so you've got block jelly block jelly block jelly Okay, so in your back, you have vertebral body disc, vertebral body disc, and they are supposed to line up, and they make a nice gentle curve. Well, in my back, the vertebral body above my first sacral vertebra, which is right above your ass, when you feel those lumps in your back, called the lumbar vertebrae, and then you've got that sort of sway in your back, and then it goes

to a flat place as you come down going toward your tailbone, but you haven't gotten to your tailbone, there's this flat place. That's a sacrum, and the last lumbar vertebra is displaced over the first sacral vertebra. So at the very bottom of my back, before you get to that flat pelvic bone, is displaced forward, so it's not sitting on top of the vertebral body like it's supposed to. And the problem with that is it wouldn't be any big deal, except that there's other structures involved that rely on these vertebral bodies being lined up properly. And one of those are the, or, you know, several of those are the nerve roots as they come out from the spinal column and go to places like the leg,

and the top vertebra and the bottom one joined together in such a way that there's a hole through which those spinal nerves can pass. And so when you have a hole that's narrowed, it's called stenosis, and we call holes feramina. So I have feraminal stenosis. Have you ever heard anybody talk about that? And what that does functionally is it puts pressure on the nerve that goes to my leg.

And so when I walk, it gets everything riled up. And I have what's called neurogenic claudication, which simply means I have pain in the nerve going to my leg when I exert myself. And so when I walk from my office to the emergency room, I start out okay. And by the time I get to the emergency room, I'm limping. and at one point I had to crawl up the damn stairs at my house. And I've had four epidural injections, and every single one of them has helped me. They don't last forever.

They don't fix the mechanical problem, but they absolutely helped me. But it's a pain in the ass to go do it, and then it doesn't feel good while they're doing it. It feels really good afterward. But they're sticking a long needle in your back. and you have to have a really skilled person with some advanced equipment that can see how to line the bones up so that they can just insert that long needle, which can be six, eight inches, directly into your back, and it goes where they want it to. And then they can watch as they inject the steroid and make sure it's going to the right place.

It's really pretty incredible. And so, but putting that off for a way, week when you really want one, because if you really want one, it means you're really hurting because you wouldn't want to have one of these unless you were in a lot of pain. I know that sucks, but at the end of a week, you go in and do it, and then you know your vaccine has fully kicked in, and you should be in pretty good shape at that point. So that's the story there. And I hope that you can get both, your epidural and full immunity from your vaccine.

Well, I guess we probably need to talk COVID and vaccine. I know there's a lot of COVID fatigue out there. I'm pretty sick of talking about it myself. I think we'll be done pretty soon. I hope so. We'll ever be done done. They're saying now, well, you lose about 50% immunity in the first six months or something like that. But it's still, it's going to be somewhat protective.

So every year we go in and we get a shot for the common cold. I'm not opposed to that. I hate effing viruses, as you know, they reduce productivity. They make you feel like crap. And you know, the benign, quote, unquote, coronavirus has killed about 10,000 people in this country every year that we just end up calling them viral pneumonia or atypical pneumonia. We never used to test for them. Well, by God, we will now. And so you get a booster with your flu shot.

I just put it in with the flu shot. Who cares? And I think that'll be okay. I'm fine with that. And I've got a person that sent me a text message through 347-766-4-3-3. It says, does anyone else rip off their mask when they walk out of a store like they just finished a disappointing surgery on Gray's Anatomy? That's a great image. Absolutely.

Yes, indeed. I just rip that sucker right off. And I'm duly vaccinated. I am no danger to anyone. No one has any danger to me. And we have municipalities. I live in a state where they've just lifted the mask mandates. It does feel weird walking into a store without a mask on.

But some of the stores still require it. And if they still require it, you kind of have to honor that because it's their business. And if you don't like it, just don't go there. I've been seeing these billboards. Your compliance is perpetuating this nightmare. If I wear a mask into a store where they're asking me nicely to wear a mask, how am I perpetuating your nightmare?

You're perpetuating it by worrying about me. So I do think that if you're fully vaccinated, mask wearing is kind of silly. But if it is required for the place that you're going, you're, you can have a conversation with the person that runs that or the people that run that or the government that runs that place that you're going into. And, but, you know, if they require it and you want to go there, well, that's just the way it is. I mean, if you're going to Ozfest, you're required to show your driver's license or your ticket, I guess. and we comply with that because it's required. You can't have a bottle with a cap on it at Usfest because people will throw it on the stage.

And if it doesn't have a cap on it, it doesn't hurt anybody. If it's got a cap on it, it's now basically a rock. So there are rules that we follow, and you can choose to or not. Don't go. If you don't like it, if there's a restaurant that requires you to wear a mask and you think it's stupid because you have to wear it, And then you sit down and you're okay. You go to the bathroom.

You've got to put it back on again. Don't go there. Go somewhere else. Cook out at your own damn house. But I am with you in the sense that if you're fully vaccinated, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly with the data that we have now. But that shows that people who are fully vaccinated, at least early on in this, are not walking around carrying the virus asymptomatically.

They just don't get it. so but there's lots of things that don't make sense in in this world that we do why should you have to stop at a red light when there's obviously nobody coming i mean give me a break i'm an adult i can see that there's no one coming why can't i just treat it like a stop sign same stupid shit so we do things that don't make sense all the time this is just another one of those So my compliance is not perpetuating anybody's nightmare. So just get over yourself. If you don't like other people wearing a mask, that really says something about you. Just worry about yourself. All right. Thank you.

All right. Let's take one of these calls. And let me see. I have no idea what this is. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Bill from Massachusetts. Hey, Bill. How's it going?

I'm doing good. How are you? That's great. Hey, Dr. Steve, I had a quick question. My friends and I sometimes goof around when we go to the big dinner. We eaten enough food that our bodies are no longer able to absorb the calories. So binge to a point where you're just not doing any more damage because your body can only absorb X amount. Is that even a thing?

Not really what happens is your body slows down the transit in the gut so the you can absorb all those calories. That's why people who eat pounds and pounds of food get fat. So now, if you, so bulimics, you know, get food in their stomach, and then they puke it up, so they can't absorb those calories. And if you could increase the, or decrease the transit time through your gut, in other words, that you took some medication that caused hyperperistosis so that you ate it and then 30 minutes later

you defecated it back out again. That wouldn't be enough time to absorb all those nutrients either. But I wouldn't recommend that. So, yeah, it's, you're not really able to overwhelm that system because we grew up as a species as a starving species. There wasn't enough. Watch alone sometime. This show alone, I get it on Apple TV.

I just bought the season, but it's on Hulu. And these people, they put them in the Arctic or in Mongolia or places that are just inhospitable where our ancestors lived. And they don't have any, they can bring 10 items and that's it. And they have to catch their own food. They've got to fish, use a gill net, or try to fish with bait. and if they can kill a muscox and chop it up and keep the wolverines from stealing it from them, then that's something. But even then, there's one guy got a musk ox, and another guy got a moose,

plenty of food to eat, but they're still slowly dying of malnutrition because you can't just live off of muscle protein. so they weren't getting enough fat they were missing out on micronutrients that you get with vegetables and those kinds of things now I was talking to my buddy Stacey Deloche the other day and he

has some issues with blood sugar and I recommended him what I recommend a lot of people is a low carb diet low carbohydrate diet for a type 2 diabetic can be extremely effective as a matter of fact I have seen people cure themselves true cure

of their type 2 diabetes by following a low-carb diet. But it's not this sort of, my uncle did it, and he told my friend and my friend told me, and then I told somebody else. And by the time you get through all those people, all they're eating is steak wrapped in bacon, slathered with mayonnaise and cheese. That is not a proper ketogenic, low. carb diet those people will lose weight but they will lose weight because they are malnourished

and a proper low-carb diet in my opinion has plenty of lean animal protein but you don't have to worry about fat so much when you're on that diet but lean animal protein and green leafy vegetables that's the big thing and and without concerning yourself about fat but that doesn't mean you just eat, you know, buckets of lard either. Because you could lose weight just eating buckets of lard. Do not do that. It's absolutely, it's doable. You can lose weight eating nothing but rice,

but you will become malnourished and it will make you sick. So the rice-only diet, the protein-only diet. We are omnivores. You can tell that from our teeth. We have incisors. We have incisors. teeth, aka molars. So we are meant to

have a varied diet that includes vegetable matter and protein of whatever. If you're a vegetarian, that's fine. Just make sure you're getting your protein and your other nutrients that you should be getting that you would otherwise get from meat. But it's

fine. And I have seen people throw away their insulin. I've seen people throw away. Not a type 1 diabetic, but a type 2 diabetic.

Type 2 diabetics are those that have a lack of insulin sensitivity. In other words, they make plenty of insulin, but their body doesn't heed the signal. Now, you can overwhelm that not heating the signal thing by just shouting louder. In other words, injecting more insulin. We try to avoid insulin type 2 diabetics, but sometimes you have to. But I'm talking type 2 diabetes. Those people who, when they take carbohydrates in, their body overshoots and creates too much insulin, which drives their blood sugar down. And after years and years of that, the body doesn't like a low blood sugar situation will turn down the sensitivity to the insulin signal.

And the more it turns it down, the more the body produces of insulin. And now you end up with high blood sugars, but also elevated insulin. insulin levels, and that's type 2 diabetes. Low-carbohydrate diet for many people, don't do this by yourself. Please, you know, do it under the auspices of your treating provider, but many times can get off all their medication and get their hemoglobin A1C, which is a marker of long-term blood sugar control. You can get that under control as well.

So, but not the goofy redneck. low-carb diet. I'm talking about a balanced low-carb diet, broccoli, cauliflower, green leafy vegetables, lean animal protein with maybe some or a little extra fat. A rib-eye is fine. It's got some extra fat in it.

And that kind of diet can be extremely effective. And you can't tell, and it's not healthy. It ain't healthy. Tell me this. What is healthy about eating a big glob of bread or potatoes, if I have a spring green salad with maybe a couple of cherry tomatoes in there, some balsamic vinaigrette and grilled chicken, who's going to tell me that's an unhealthy diet except for a vegan person?

By almost every measure, that's a reasonably healthy meal, but yet it is a perfect and classic low-carb meal. So, something to think about. Anyway, all right. Let's see. Don't know what this one is. I'm just calling this one, or calling this one completely blind. Hi, Dr. Steve.

This is Kelsey calling from Pennsylvania. Hello, Kelsey. I have an after-sex question. Excellent. My boyfriend is well-in-dowed. Excellent. I'm not ridiculous. I'm slightly smaller

and I've never had a problem with UTIs before but after we have sex the next morning or so I feel like I have to pee all day long constantly and sometimes it gets to the point where I can't actually control it I pee after sex I drink cranberry juice I take cranberry capsules

I don't know what I'm doing wrong I don't know if I'm allergic to my boyfriend or if you have any ideas on a subject. Thanks. Bye-bye. Well, I don't know if people remember me talking years ago about having similar symptoms after intercourse burning in the urethra. We had a couple of people calling in about it. I said that I'd had that before. and I wasn't associated with any infection or anything like that.

It was actually a spasm of the urethra itself. And for men, I counseled to dip their male membership when they feel this burning along the urethra into a glass of warm water, not hot, just warm. And I discovered this, I don't know why I tried it. It was long, long ago. my 20s. And it worked.

Works immediately. And the people that did it got immediate relief. So that may be what's going on as you're having spasm of the urethra. Because you're doing all the right things. You are, you know, peeing right after intercourse and you're taking cranberries and all that kind of stuff. Usually, sexual intercourse is associated with a lot of different forms of urethral burning. Women that have a thing called post-coital cystitis usually develop the symptoms right away or within a few days of intercourse. Women that have urethritis.

Now, this would be an infection, develop symptoms one to two weeks later. That would be like chlamydia or something like that. And then women with vaginitis could have symptoms from weak. to months later. Well, this is more immediate, which makes me, again, think that perhaps this is urethral spasm. Now, what in the heck do you do when you can't just dip your penis in warm water if you're a woman? So I'm wondering if you took, well, there's a couple of things I can think of. One would be a sitz bath where you just fill up a tub with water so that you can just immerse yourself in very warm water, not hot, but warm water up to your genitalia.

So it wouldn't have to be real deep. And they, when my wife delivered our children, they gave her a little sit-bath thing. And I think you can go to Amazon or you can go to any durable medical equipment place and get one of these. And if you know it's going to happen, I would fill it up with warm water before you have sex. put it somewhere in your bathroom hopefully you have separate bathrooms from your partner or just throw it in the shower and then as soon as you're done just dunk in that thing and see if that does anything if it does call me back and let me know because the normal things that you do in a situation like this is you get urine studies doing your analysis

look at it under the microscope to do a pelvic exam test the person for a transmitted diseases like chlamydia or gonorrhea, those kinds of things. And look for blood, et cetera. And if all of that is just negative and you don't have it all the time, that suggests a condition called trigonitis or interstitial cystitis, which is basically inflammation of the bladder, then this may be the way to go. Now, there is this thing called trigonitis that's where. where women feel like they have to void their bladder,

and so they have symptoms of a urinary tract infection, but no signs of a urinary tract infection whatsoever. And in those women, sometimes just taking a prophylactic antibiotic called trim. It's half of what's in Bactrum-D-S. So if you're sulfa-allergic, you can still take this stuff. And people will take trimetoprim once a day to prevent it. that's kind of an old school thing but trigonitis it's inflammation of the urinary trigon which is a structure inside the bladder between the places where fluid comes in and out

that's the best way I can describe it at this point okay so look into that stuff call me back and let me know now I sound like a caller to who are these podcasts okay call me back let's get another one. I have no idea what this is. Hey, this is Woodley Joseph, and I had a question. Hey, Woodley. My question was, can you actually not be in pain if you're thinking about not being in pain? How does that work?

Yeah, there are people that swear that they can control their pain through either meditation or by shutting off those pathways. Those pathways are hardwired into certain sections of the brain but those, the pain fibers and we talked about this last week that pain fibers, you have alpha delta and

Charlie fibers basically C fibers that transmit pain and some of them transmit immediate pain and some of them transmit the second more longer lasting pain and they go into the brain and then from there they're interpreted by the

brain as pain and it's an evolutionary thing that helped to prevent further injury when the body was injured but you know chronic pain is really sort of a maladaptive thing once it's like I know I know my back is screwed up you don't have to keep telling me constantly for the rest of my life but that's what the body does so there are people who swear that they can turn that off who knows that'd be great if we could learn how to do that, wasn't it? You know, it's just like Scott was talking last week that you really can't die from pain. You can have a myocardial infarction or a stroke because your blood vessels are constricting because of pain and adrenaline release, but I'm not aware of anybody that's able to just turn it off.

Now, one of the hypotheses of acupuncture, Scott didn't hear to wax eloquent on this, but one of the hypotheses is that you use a little distracting pain or a little distracting stimulus to block a larger stimulus to the brain. So you're causing pain, but it's much less pain than the original pain, and the much less pain distracts the brain from the big pain signals that are being sent to it. And this may have something to do with how a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator works or a tens unit, or it causes sort of a beehive mild stinging pain that seems to improve other pain that are, you know, passing through that same area.

It's pretty interesting. Speaking of back pain, by the way, I have, it's not a discovery. I didn't discover this, but I finally tried something for my spondylolis thesis. that I think would work for other people, too, and it's an inversion table. I used to think that was kind of kooky. They had these weird boots, and people would hook the boots up, and it looked like a big pain in the ass, really. But I went to Amazon, and I'll post a link to this on my website at Dr.steve.com

and found a really cool inversion table. And I'm very impressed with the instructions that they had with this thing. they referenced a they just gave you a QR code and when you scan that QR code it took you to a place called Built, B-I-L-L-T and they had 3D step-by-step instructions on how to put this thing together. No more with this big giant piece of paper that's the size of your kitchen table and with all these arcane labeled parts and takes you forever to kind of get the lay of the land. and you can finally figure it out. But how many times have you put one of those things together and ended up going, oh, shit, I have to take it all apart because I missed something halfway through.

It sucks. Well, this was in 3D animation, and they took you through step by step. Anyway, I put the thing together, and I'll be danged. I had no hope that this thing would help me, but I'll be danged if this thing isn't the best thing I've tried, other than the epidural steroid injections. Because if my back is hurting, which it is right now, because I've been sitting all day, as soon as I get done with the show, I'm going to go invert for just a few minutes.

And it takes the pressure off, and then the pain's gone for hours afterward. So, again, I'll put that on my website at dr.steve.com. You can check it out. All right. Let me see. Let's do a pimple question. I think we've already done this, though. Damn it.

Hi, Dr. Steve. Yes. Short question. Pimples. Why do they hurt? Yeah, we did that one already. The answer is inflammation. Inflammation causes pain.

Okay. Somnifix and drooling. We did that one. Good God. Let's see. Let's do shift work sleep disorder. Let's see what we got here. Hello.

Hey, Dr. Steve. Hey, man. How's it going? Good, man. How are you? Good. Dr. Scott, always a pleasure. Yeah, he's not here today.

Casey. She's not here. When you hear that wine glass? Hello. How are you today? Awesome. So my question regards sleep. Okay.

And basically shift to work. I recently got switched over to a night shift. And I've been trying a couple different things. um my shift is is midnight till noon so i pretty much have to sleep during the day um i've been trying melatonin i'm up to 30 milligrams and i've also been trying diphon hydramine yes i think it is the benadryl stuff um and that has 50 milligrams per 30 milliliters yeah that's too much but i'm wondering if i'm missing anything i have been on ambient before and it was okay at 10 milligrams. It made me feel a little loopy at the

beginning of the day when I first woke up, but after about 15, 20 minutes, I ended up being okay and ready to drive, but it just didn't make me feel right off the back. I am starting to try, Dr. Scott, this is for you. I am starting to try lavender like aerosols and and lotions and whatnot. And I also have a sleep mask and meditations and sounds. I was wondering if there's anything obvious that I'm missing to help get me better sleep and stay away from shift work sleep syndrome. Well, yeah, and shift work sleep syndrome really pertains to people who are

shifting their shifts throughout their schedule. In other words, they'll work a week or two. When I did shift work, I'd work a week on day shift, a week on evening shift, and a week on graveyard shift. And that sucked. Well, what they were trying to do was spread around the misery and what it did, but it just made everybody effing miserable.

There were some people that didn't mind working the graveyard shift, because they didn't have a lot of people around. They just had to do their work. And firefighters have this risk because they have these extended 24-hour shifts and sleep interruptions due to emergencies and stuff. A lot of firefighters have sleep disorders. And it's a tough one.

I didn't hear you say whether you're sleepy while you are working because if you are, then there are definitely some things that you can do. One of those is bright light treatment, and what you want to do is do bright light exposure in the evening or the first part of the night, and then the bright light should be avoided in the morning, which is hard to do when you get off at noon. Wearing dark goggles during the, or blue blocking goggles during the commute home from work, will improve your adaptation to this new rhythm. So remember blue light is activating, so you want to turn all that off on your computers and stuff from noon until you wake up. I guess you probably get up around eight, something like that. The other thing you can do is change your sleep cycle, so it's more like a normal human being. So, for example, I go to bed late at night, but I wake up right before I'm supposed to go to work or take my kids to school.

you may be going to bed at one sleeping till eight and then farting around for four hours before you go to work you might consider and this will suck because most of your friends are doing things in the evening though but you might consider sleeping from four in the afternoon until you know 11.30 or whatever long it takes you to get to work or three in the afternoon until 11 getting up and then going to work and doing it that way. But the bright light treatment may help you and then blocking bright lights when you get off work may help.

You know, melatonin, you mentioned its production is suppressed by light exposure, so it makes sense that you wouldn't have enough during the day. So again, light restriction or dark therapy before bedtime allows its production, So, you know, if you decide that you're going to, you know, stay up, then wear dark glasses or blue blocking glasses, get some of those. And then, you know, melatonin isn't classified as a drug in the United States.

You can buy it over the counter. It's unavailable and required by prescription in some places. But if you take it regularly right before you go to bed, it's been shown to improve your adaptation to this new schedule. So I'm assuming this is a permanent change and you're not shifting around all the time. Anyway, yeah, that's a tough one, dude. And there are some drugs that you shouldn't take on and on and on.

And one of those is diphenhydramine. The reason is, and we've discussed this before on the show, the anticholinergic type medication, in other words, the ones that cause sleepiness and dry mouth. can increase the risk of dementia later on in life. So this isn't something you want to take every day. If you take it every once in a while, it's no big deal. But diphenehydramine every single day,

particularly at the level of 50 milligrams a day, can really be a problem. Okay. And go see a sleep specialist. If you live in a town of any size whatsoever, There's a sleep specialist in your town. And if not, there's one in a nearby town. If you want to email me through Dr.steve.com, just click contact and send me your zip code.

I could give you a list of some. Or you can just look it up yourself. Just put sleep specialists and then put your zip code. Okay, dope. All right. I'm with you, I think, taking the Ambien. It's fine for the first week or two to get yourself going. but after that becomes very habit-forming.

I myself was addicted to one of those drugs at one point, but I successfully weaned myself off of it. So if you're trying to do that, you can be successful. You just have to stick with it. Easier said than done, of course. All right. Let me see. I have no idea what this one is.

Hey, yo, Doc. Yeah, man. The left side of my neck hurts. Okay. I can't look left no good. And it's been going on for a couple of months now. A couple of months. Should that just not look left, maybe make three rights?

Yeah, Doc, it hurts when I do this. Whoa, don't do that. There you go. Oh, shit. All right. I don't know why that's happening. I'd have to examine you. So what I'm going to recommend is you let somebody examine you.

let them look at your neck and a primary care provider can get started with that. You could have osteoarthritis in the neck. You could have a chronic sprain or strain of some of the muscles, ligaments, or tendons in the neck. There's all kinds of things that this could be, including even a slip disc in the neck. You can get those. I had one of those, and it hurt on my right side out to my shoulder, kind of radiated out to the shoulder. and that actually improved with traction. So my physical therapist put me in a contraption that actually pulled my head up off of my shoulders using pulleys and some weights.

Don't try this at home, by the way. And it actually helped. Matter of fact, it was long-lasting relief. That was years ago, and I haven't had problems since then. So that may be all it is, but get somebody to take a look at that. All right. Let's do we have, okay, how about Brian? I have, again, no idea what these questions are.

Hey, Dr. Steve. Hey. Brian from New Hampshire again. Hey, Brian. I have a question, obviously. I have a friend since we were 12. I'm 53. It's gotten so worse.

All he does is make stuff up or embellish everything. Okay. And I wanted to ask you, if you're on really high doses of blood thinner and you get the vaccine, is there any chance that they need two paper towels to clean up the blood from his blood thinner. Oh, maybe, but it would be if his blood thinner was wildly out of whack. I have seen people with blood that would not coagulate because something had happened. They'd either taken an overdose of their blood thinner or if they took a medication or

certain food items that potentiated the activity of the blood thinner, causing them to have markedly thin blood. Now, those people are at risk for strokes, internal bleeding, all kinds of stuff. And if you stick them with a needle, they just bleed everywhere and they will bleed on the floor, like if you're trying to do an IV and you don't get it perfect. And then there will be hematomas under the

the skin, all that kind of stuff. So we try to avoid that. Now, with a COVID vaccine, with that little tiny needle, that's unlikely. Not likely. But it would have to be a very extreme situation. Let me see what else they said. And what is it called, like, borderline personality disorder or what? He has to embellish or just make things up.

Oh, yeah. Well, okay, it could have a narcissistic personality disorder. It could have a bad self-image and then have reactive narcissistic. disorder or just narcissistic tendencies where he has to cause attention to himself. People with a bad internal self-image sometimes will react to that by self-aggrandizing comments to puff themselves up. And you can usually detect those because if you say something critical to them, that internal child that's making up all these stories just crumbles and they get really

really mad or really upset. So if he gets really upset with criticism, that could be what you're dealing with there. And it's, you could just Google how to deal with a narcissistic person and it'll give you some tips. But mostly, if you like the person, otherwise, just ignore it. They're just being goofy. And it's something left over from childhood, I think. All right. Let me see.

Let's try this one. Hey, Dr. Steve. It's John from Chicago. How are you doing? Good. How are you doing, man? Great. I'm great.

Good, good. Hey, another question for you. With all the COVID stuff shutting down in some states, still holding out in some state, et cetera, you know, and you said you hope that we wage a war on these viruses. Yeah, human pathologic viruses. I'm in favor of us waging more on those. polio smallpox you know who's seen those in a long time measles we're starting to see but we should eradicate it kills one kid in every thousand that it infects COVID-19 or well SARS COV2 the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 you know what's the purpose of it coronavirus is this suck in Norwalk virus if we could eradicate that tomorrow, I would be wholeheartedly

not only in favor of that, but I would donate a portion of my salary toward that effort. Norwalk virus is the one that causes the puke bug on cruise ships and other places. And it sucks. It just sucks. There's no reason for it. Just go, you know, stupid virus making me

puke up my guts for three days just so that it can reproduce. To what end? You know, kiss my ass. All right. Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with you. Thank you. I'm a little pessimistic on it. We'll learn our lesson, but what do you think, especially given everything that recently happened, that people should do, in general, going

forward to help prevent future pandemics from happening? You know, like, this whole thing has got me thinking, should wearing a mask in airports in perpetuity, would that be a good thing? Well, it might be a good thing, but you'll catch some hell for it. We are social creatures. We like to be around each other. And therefore, social distancing and mask wearing in the general public is going to be difficult to do. I have talked to infectious disease people, though, but say because we have not seen any influenza this year, that social distancing, universal precautions, hand washing, and wearing masks were very effective at preventing influenza, which has a.

a lower infective index than COVID-19, or, you know, SARS-COV-2 does, that it was so effective for that that they're never going back to seeing patients in the hospital the way they did before. They're going to mask up, wear gloves on every, and hand wash like crazy, in and out of every room from now until doomsday. Now, are they recommending that everybody who goes to, you know, Oz Fest or, you know, you I don't know, Coachella, or one of those hip festivals that the kids go to and they probably smoke a J at these concerts, they will, you know, that's not happening. There's no social distancing going to happen.

So it's a very infective virus that wants to swim. sweep through a population like that will just be able to do it. So vaccination, attacking the viruses where they live, and developing new technologies to prevent us from being infected by viruses, I think it would be a way to go. Larry Nevin had this thing where you would grab onto these two posts, and what it would do it would teleport any particle out of your body that wasn't supposed to be there, including a debris in your cells that cause aging. So people

that did this, not only would they not get sick, but they would get younger again if they would become old. So Larry Niven was a really cool author and wrote some very neat speculative fiction. Although he wrote one called Neutron Star and in it, I'm just going to spoil it for you, he figures out that these people, these aliens who were very secretive, must have a planet that didn't have a moon because they didn't understand that the reason people were getting destroyed inside these indestructible spaceships that they

built was because of the tides. Now, any star-faring, the tides going around a neutron star, so people were getting smushed inside their space capsules or their spaceships, but they were selling the spaceship saying they were completely indestructible, nothing could destroy them. And they wondered how people were being destroyed in there. And the guy said, when he figured it out that it was the tides, he said, oh, I'm going to leave a message and I'm going to make all this money from these aliens because I know something that nobody else knows that they have a planet that has no moon.

Well, any space-faring species that doesn't understand how gravity works is a pretty shitty species. So I would say they just meant that they were dumb. All right, very good. Well, listen, we're going to wrap it up. Here's a deal. Last week's show was titled, She Who Owns Pigs and Snakes. If you listen all the way to the end, you've heard me say that. That is my niece, Holly, who is like my sister and she's my best friend in the world. that I'm not married to her and part of my immediate family

and as a matter of fact she would be guardian of my kids although Liam is now 18 so nice you know that ain't going to happen but you know Beck still if Tacey and I croak she who owns pigs and snakes

will become their guardian and she is with a guy named Steve Tucci which when you talk to him. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. The guy is a genius, and he's a great musician as well. But when you're talking to him, it sounds like you're talking to Christopher Walken.

And this is a guy who's an MD. He's a physiatrist, but he also has a band called Tucci. And it's so much fun sitting there talking to him. And the whole time you're going, I'm talking to Christopher Wacken, even though he's got a different face. It's like face off. except it's Christopher Walk, and he's sitting there talking to you. Anyway, and he's not putting it on.

That's just how he sounds, but the guy is brilliant. Anyway, hence the name of this podcast, the title was He Who Bones, She Who Owns, Pigs and Snakes. And I'm going to close out with a cut from the Steve Tucci band, or I guess the band is called Tucci, and their album is called a live. and the cut is called train blues see you next week everybody oh it's got my baby oh it's got my baby on board man just told me It's going back to Illinois. My baby's leaving.

Oh, and all my pride won't make it stay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Till then took my baby. She's gone away She woke She woke me She woke me up early this morning Just about the crack day

Said she's going to Chicago And that's where she's going to stay Oh my baby's living in And she ain't coming back No, she ain't coming back She ain't coming back no more Oh no, no No

Too bad took my baby Oh so sad Oh so sad Oh so sad She's gone away Hey Hey I don't know.

I'm going to be able to be. I mean, I'm going to be able to be. I don't know. You know, and I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. My heart was packed away In her bags by the door She told me that she had to go

Just like a hundred times before But this time my woman's leaving me Oh On the midnight train Oh, my baby Oh, so sad she's going to weigh. Oh, oh, she's going to wave. Thank you.