Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 464 - Delta Delta Delta Can We Help Ya...oh never mind

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

Dr Steve and Dr Scott discuss: Dr Steve’s MRI results (bah, he's a baby) Do vaccines affect cytokine production? Hip labral tear kidney stone composition (why do we care?) News from the front lines: a Boston Respiratory Therapist calls in mRNA "vaccines" for cancer? 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 ($30 gets them all!) roadie.doctorsteve.com (Every bass/guitarist needs one!) simplyherbals.net (for all your StressLess and FatigueReprieve needs!) BACKPAIN.DOCTORSTEVE.COM – (Back Pain? Check it out! Talk to your provider about it!) Cameo.com/weirdmedicine (Book your old pal right now while he’s still cheap!) feals.com/weird (CBD right to your door!) 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, O'Bee 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 had medical questions. Hey! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Toboliviris dripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heart bow, exacerbating my impetable woe.

I want to take my brain out blast 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 for my disease So I'm paging Dr. Steve It's weird medicine The first and still only unsensored medical show In the History of Broadcast Radio Now a podcast, I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medical practitioner,

keeps the wacko alternative street cred. No, I'm, that's a stupid, whack alternative medicine people away. It gives me street cred with them anyway. Sorry, Dr. Scott, I messed up your intro. How are you? Great. How are you? Okay.

That doesn't bode well for a good show. 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 at 347-7-66-4-3-3-3. 23. That's 347. Who is? Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine at Lady Diagnosis and at DR Scott WM.

Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking over with your doctor, nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician assistant, pharmacist,

chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical Oh, geez. Clinical laboratory scientist, registered dietitian, or whatever. Don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbils.net. That's simply herbals.net. Go to stuff.doctrsteve.com for all of your online shopping needs. That's stuff. Dot, dot, dr. steve.com.

And tweaked audio.com offer code fluid. We'll get you 33% off the best earbuds for the price and the best customer service anywhere. and if you want to lose weight with me and get to your ideal body weight and keep it off. Try Noam. N-O-O-O-M dot Dr.steve.com will get you two weeks free

and you can check it out if you like it. You get 20% off if you sign up for the... It's just a three-month program. It's very inexpensive. And for the three months is less than other similar programs. And it's only three months. You don't have to do it for the rest of your life.

You will incorporate the things it teaches you, for the rest of your life, though. So check it out at Noom. Dotterstein.com. Hey, our old buddy, Dan Natterman has a book on Amazon. Okay. Well, he's got a book. I mean, obviously, if it's at Amazon, he's got a book there.

I mean, if you have a book, it's going to be on Amazon, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. But I started reading this book. This frigging guy stand up, I mean, it's good that he does stand up. He's an amazing stand-up, a really funny guy in person, but it's called Ira Spiro before COVID. And I swear when I read it, I get sort of vibes of Joseph Heller, you know, the guy that wrote Catch 22, and he also wrote the one about the guy named Gold. I can't remember that that was a really insane book. And, you know, it's kind of absurd, but really funny and has some heart at the same time.

So I think COVID's been good for Dan because he couldn't go out and do stand-up like he used to. So he just wrote a book, and he's freaking great. So check out, no, I mean, we don't get anything for this, but check out Dan Natterman's book, Ira Spiro, colon, before COVID. And I think you will quite enjoy it. I enjoyed reading it just about as much as I did Norm McDonnell's book, which I devoured that book. That was genius. Well, that's cool.

This is a novel, and Norms was supposedly a travelogue, you know, of things that, but it was in crazy things happening. And he was blaming everything that crazy that happened on this guy that I've never, you know, I don't think actually exists, but that's a great book too. And the audio book of Norms is great because he narrates it. I mean, he reads his own book, so it's like one long Norm MacDonald story. God. So I don't know if Dan is doing an audio book.

I don't see it on here. But that would be something that he should consider because, you know, he has a very distinctive voice himself. It would be fun. But anyway, Dan Natterman, Ira Spiro before COVID. You could get there by going to stuff. Dot, Dr.steve.com, too, if you want to. All right.

Cool. So we're back from vacation. Yes. And my back sucked balls the whole time. and I just got my MRI report and I thought maybe you could explain this to everybody because it hurt the whole time but I had a great time

so I don't take anything for it I'll take some ibuprofen but I have you know when I walk you know I walk from the golf cart to the beach whoopty do it's like ooh I'm you know so feel sorry for me but it would hit about an aid on a scale a little one to ten, but it never gets any worse than that.

You know, it kind of ramps up to this eight and then stays there. But I had a good time. Yeah, thank goodness. So it didn't ruin, it's not ruining my quality of life. What it ruins is my ability to function. Because I used to be the guy that if I took my kids to Disney, they would, you know, we'd be eight to ten miles in on my pedometer, and they'd be going, can we, you know, where, and I'm like, no, let's go, let's go.

Yeah, and I would be, and my wife would be yelling. at me because I was walking too fast and all this stuff. Well, she doesn't have to worry about that anymore. Maybe this is she did this to me. Maybe she did this to me because she's always complaining that I walk too fast. Right.

I think she's... She hears it's badmelling her. Yeah. Yeah, I got rid of that call real quick. Yeah, she hears me bad mouth and well, no, that's not even that. I've never said anything.

Oh, I know. She doesn't like me walking faster than her, so she got a voodoo dollar. So maybe that's what that effing thing is. Behind you. You know, somebody sent us that Dia del Muerre doctor thing, and maybe it's, like, cursed my back. Because it's been bad ever since that thing came into the studio. I'll take it out of here and make sure I put them. I don't know who the F sent that to us.

I thought it was supposed to be like a good thing. Dio de los Muerrethos. Dia de los mortos. I don't know. It's cool, though. She might have cursed you. She could have cursed you. I think she did.

Yeah, to slow you down. You do walk pretty quickly, though. I've got to give you for an old-timer. Get where you're going. And she's probably tired of you dragging the kids by the... Yeah. Say, come on, kids, let's go. We've got to go.

We've got to go. But anyway, here we go. So I'm just read the impression. No one cares about this. I don't want to compare myself to Lenny Bruce at all, but this is kind of like Lenny Bruce reading the court proceedings against him, you know, after he decided he wasn't really going to do comedy anymore.

Grade two anterioralysis of L5S1, so you want to explain what that means? It's a grade two out of typically four. And so it's a mild to getting towards moderate shifting of the vertebra towards the front. It's an anterioralysis. So grade two generally means up to 50 percent, though. So that's the thing. So that's a, the thing is shifted up to 50%. When you get to grade three, I mean, it becomes a medical emergency.

Yeah. Well, and may I say this too. And that doesn't mean it's more or less painful to you. That's right. It's very painful. Yeah. Increased in comparison to the previous study. Which is bad. This is due to L5 spondylolisis.

You want to talk about what the definition. So the spondylolis. So the bony, some bony prominences in there. You've got some bone spurs and some shifting in the L5. Is it L5S1? No, it's just L5 spondylolisus. So spondylolisus is where those parts are actually just broken, right? They're broken, but typically you'll get a lot of, you'll get some little bony spurs in there too.

Yeah. Which is, of course, also sharp and painful. So it's spondylolisus is of stress fracture in the pars inter-articularis of the vertebral art. So this is part of the structure of the vertebral arch. body that's not the, you know, the, sort of the block itself. Yeah, the block. It's not the, it's the parts that sticks out. Yeah.

Right. And what those things do is they make holes for nerves. For nerves to pass through. And can I see one thing about the pars too? The parsing, you'll see some pars fractures. And those are, they look like little Scotty dogs on a next ride. That's right. That's kind of what that pars is.

There is, however, severe progressive disc and end plate degenerate. at this level. So that's the part in between the vertebral bodies. Right. The soft part. So now, listen to this shit. Left-sided extrusion now seen at L5S1 tracking superiorly with the L5 nerve root as it exits toward the feramina. I never had disc extrusion.

Now, that makes things a whole, that's a whole different level of shit there. Yeah, so what's happening is as these bones shift against each other, the disc got nowhere to go and it just bloops out. All right, very severe ferraminal stenosis on the left at L5S1. Okay, so the ferramina is a little spot where the vertebra kind of go together, and those nerves will run right through those little holes, the ferramina, and if those things get irritated, they're just, they're miserable pain. Right, so as the vertebral body shifts, the... And collapse, too, so...

It collapses the ability for the, you know, the upper part of the, I'm sorry, the lower part of the upper vertebral body intercalates with the lower part of the shit with the upper part of the lower vertebral body and when they do that they make this passage for these nerve roots to go through and because now that these things aren't lined up property that hole is smaller and it's putting pressure on the nerve and then i don't need to read the rest of this in other words it's dr steve that's a lot worse than it was before yeah when you start talking about that disc protruding out that's a pretty big deal. And it's L5 nerve root severe compression. So what that does is on the left side I get pain I don't have pain in my back. I have no pain in my back whatsoever. And what

we've talked about on this show before is if I go in and take a nerve and take a needle-nose pliers and just sort of irritate it when it comes out of the spine, it'll most of the, it may hurt there, but it will hurt where it goes. Yeah. So I have pain in my ass

that comes down the side of my thigh, crosses over onto the inner part of my knee and goes down to my big toe. Right. And that's right where that damn nerve goes. So none of this was a surprise to me. Well, and that's what we refer to as a ridiculopathy. That's right. A ridiculopathy. So you get a...

Give yourself a bill. The pain. And that's sometimes a little... It's ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And it's ridiculous. But that's where you're getting a pain. It's not where it originates, but it's where the nerve root runs.

That's right. So anyway, so your old pal, Dr. Steve, is going to be getting surgery on his back. I'm going to go to University of Pennsylvania, hopefully. They do a new procedure. So let me tell you what they want to do. Yeah. This is part of the physician, heal thyself. There you go.

A section of the show. They want to go in through the front. And you go, what the hell? Well, because when you go all the way, when you push all the guts away, you can see the vertebral bodies, the smooth, part of the vertebral bodies will stick out into the abdominal cavity. And so they're going to go in there, cut all the attachments apart, and move my guts out of the way, and then go in and find this place where these two vertebral bodies aren't lined up, jack them up, put a spacer between them to hold it up and hold it against, you know, hold

them in the correct space. flip me over and put a cage in there, which is screws on above and below where this problem is to hopefully hold it in place. Now, what could go wrong in a situation like that?

I'm sure everything will be just fine. So, anyway, so I would like to avoid that at all costs. And so they're doing an experimental procedure called Tops at University of Pennsylvania. where it's all from the posterior side,

and they take out the fending bone that is putting pressure on the nerves. They just take it out, so it can't put pressure on it anymore. And then, of course, you can't just do that and then just walk away because now the back will be unstable. So then they stabilize it with this thing that just looks like, I don't know, it looks like an alien or the tingler. Do you remember that movie, The Tingler? Nope.

It was a Vincent Price movie. That's what looks like, kind of. It's just this thing that attaches to either side of your spinal column and just holds it up. But it's flexible. You can move back and forth side to side and all that stuff. And they have better numbers for that. Yes. Their data so far is better.

So anyway, I'll keep you guys in the loop if anybody gives a shit about it. But just in case somebody else out there is dealing with this, you know, that hopefully this has given them some knowledge. And I'll tell you real quick before you. And Schadenfreude is about. big thing in this community so people can enjoy my discomfort but in dr steve is right there are there are they've come up with a couple new techniques where instead of having to do the mass of fusion with all the screws that they actually use the body's weight and and one is an stop and one is there's another procedure where it it almost looks like a almost like a flat

sea that they can wedge into the between the part of where and stretches it out and it's got anchors on it oh yeah that makes sense once you put it in it's bar so it doesn't slide out posteriorly. I kind of like that. Brand new tech. I mean, and I was just in a conference. What's that called? And I'll think it before this show.

I know it. I'm sorry. X stop is the old one. It's called an X stop, but that's literally looks like an X, where they take the L4-L-5, and they spread them out, just like you said,

they jack them up. But instead of hardware, that thing sits in there when your gravity pulls it down. It keeps from mashing as bad. But this other one, Dr. Steve, I can't believe I can't remember the damn man. But I'll think of it.

still get relief, thank God, from my tilt table. Yeah, thank goodness, yeah. And so I have an inversion table. If you all have similar problems and you're interested in that, just go to backpane. Dottersteve.com, and it'll be on there. Anyway, all right, well, wow, for the longest time, we were doing non-COVID shows, and then all of a sudden, again, the damn COVID is reared its ugly head. And let's do some phone calls, and we'll get to some. some of that. Number one thing. Don't take

advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. All right, let's see here. Let's see what we got here. I think these people were partying. Let's see. We just found this channel on series, and we are here.

Woo! We're currently listening to Exima. What? With a weird machine on 103. Weird machine. We're hoping to get on to Get us a call back.

Woo! So. Well, there you go. Yeah, they wanted to get on live. Fortunately, we weren't taking live phone calls that night. But I texted them back saying, hey, sorry. And they were like, we don't remember calling it. So no surprise there.

So that's like a pocket dial, drunk and pocket dial. Don't drink and call people, folks. All right, here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Jessamine. I have an article. It's pre-print. It says basically that Pfizer-RNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both the adaptive and innate immune responses. And I'm sure you can find it.

Yeah, I find. What I was interested in was possible effects. of that, I have a lot of small, little small things that irritate me, I guess, or my health, little small things, I should say, but there's just a number of them. So you want to be careful. I get it. So, yeah, I found the article that she's talking about, and I've also found the research, too. And the first thing, like so much of this stuff, this has not been peer reviewed, nor has it

been published. Right. Okay. People are real quick to put this stuff out of it. And then you throw crummy medical journalism into this because it's like, oh, boy, I've got a scoop. And this is written by this article that I'm looking at was by Sally Robertson, comma, BSC. Now, you know, I have MD after my name.

You have D-O-M after your name. Is B-S-C just mean Bachelor of Science? Is that what that means? Yeah, I think so. We're putting that after our names as initials now? Yeah, I guess. Come on. That's hard to say.

I guess it's hard. Okay, anyway. But she's proud of her digits. I don't decry somebody having a Bachelor of Science. But when did we start? Because, you know, I see people, I mean, I have lots of, I have MD, FAAA-H-P, M-F-A-A-F-P, and H-M-D-C after my name. Now, two of those are fellowships, and the third one is a board certification. And then, you know, I see a lot of the RNs will have, the nurse practitioners will have FNP, comma, B, I don't know, other things like that, you know, if they got a master's degree and a bachelor's.

Or specialize in something. BSN, and then they'll have BSN. C or FNPC to say that they're certified. I think that's fine. But if you just have a Bachelor of Science, you didn't go anywhere else. You get to put those initials after your name. If somebody knows anything about this, call in. Yeah, yeah.

Give us some clarification. Because I'm not impressed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could have put B, I guess, B, A after my name. And all I did was do some radio shows and I did some TV stuff. You know, I had a degree in radio television motion pictures. I'm going to put, you know, Steve's whatever your name is. Well, an ASA, you had an AS Associate of Science and a BS Bachelor of Science and so on and so forth.

I don't know. Anyway, so, Sally Robertson wrote this article. But I looked at the article itself, but says in the current study, parentheses, not peer-reviewed, close parentheses. That's the first thing. don't pay too much attention to this. This is the research term from Radbaud University Medical Center in Dinatelands and the Helmshold Center in Hanover Medical School in Bond confirmed the efficacy of this vaccine in inducing effective humoral and cellular immunity

against several SARS-C-OV-2 variants, which is good. So this is the MRNA Pfizer vaccine. They confirm that it induces not only antibodies, but cellular memory, which is what we're interested in because we know the antibodies fade, but cellular memory is forever. And even if the antibodies fade, all that means is you can get reinfected. But as long as you've got cellular memory, it should be a walk in the park if you do get reinfected. Okay. And against several SARS-CoV-2 variants, doesn't say. which ones in this and her article.

However, and here's where it gets, they also showed the vaccine altered the production of inflammatory cytokines. Yes, of course, by innate immune cells. This is what immunity is, by the way, is altering production of inflammatory cytokines with both specific SARS-COV-2 and non-specific viral stimuli.

So what they're saying is is that when you re-exposed people to SARS-COV-2, you got this change in the inflammatory cytokines, but also when it was nonspecific, you know, you expose them to fungi or other bacteria. You got the same effect. Following vaccination, innate immune cells had a reduced response to Toll-like receptor 4

and toll-like receptor 7 and 8, all ligands that play an important role in the immune response to viral infection. So the implication they're making is that somehow this reduces your ability to fight infection, right? Mm-hmm. Okay, so there's no evidence of that.

Listen, we don't live right on the edge. Yeah. It would be stupid for the body to be right on the edge and then if you had any slight decrease in something that now you fall apart. Yep. For a great example of something

we've talked about on this show, multiple, multiple times is anal monometry after people have ass ass play. After anal intercourse. They would take

a monometer and a monometer is just basically a balloon with a pressure gauge attached to it. You shove it up somebody's rectum and you have them squeezed down as hard as they can doing a cagle maneuver. And then you judge the

pressure. Then they go and have a whole bunch of anal sex. Okay. And then they come back after engaging in anal intercourse and then they squeeze it again. And what they found was there was a statistically significant decrease in

their ability to squeeze down on this monometer after having a whole bunch of anal sex. Okay. Which makes sense. Right? Yep. I mean, it's not surprising. No. But there was no change in their ability to be continent. In other words, they weren't now walking around dropping stools everywhere they walked and the floor at work.

Because the body has this huge amount of redundancy and overengineering when it comes to things like that. Because it would be stupid if our bodies, if the sphincter of our rectum was just tight enough to keep stool in. But, oh, no, don't decrease that function at all, because if you do, now you're going to be dropping stools everywhere. Right? Yep. So there's plenty of headroom there to endure a little loss. Redundancy, yeah, a little bit of redundancy. Yeah.

Which the body is great. Redundancy isn't really the right word because then that would mean, like, if you had two sphincters. Okay. And, right. I mean, redundancy is like you have two kidneys. Yeah. If you lose one, you got the other one. But it's just tons of headroom.

Okay. But the concept's the same. Similar, yeah. The same concept. So the fact that there's some reduced response, we don't know what that means. That might be a good thing. You know, inflammation was one of the issues, you know, the cytokine storm is an issue in people who have overwhelming COVID-19 infections. We're actually giving those people anti-inflammatories.

So if it's good in that situation, well, why would you imply this is somehow bad? I don't know. It makes no sense. Stop it. Okay. All that is, is it's a fact that when they did this study, they showed some decrease. Nowhere in here does it say it was even statistically significant.

Let's just say it was. At what level? And is there any clinical significance to this? No. I mean, maybe, but we have no evidence that there is. And there's, you could make a case that maybe this. this is a good thing. So this is this typical medical journalism that is really just irritating the shit out of me.

Me too, because all day long, just like you do, I have to explain to patients why the stuff that they're seeing on certain TV shows or reading on certain websites is profoundly false and inaccurate. And it's really hard. It's devastating. It's hurtful. You know, I hear it's always, okay, so let's talk about the vaccine thing. Somebody tweeted to me, well, if all these redneck mouth breathers would just get vaccines, then we wouldn't have a problem. Well, okay, where'd they get that from? They got that from their side of the thing.

And that is the furthest thing from the truth. You know, I tweeted back to the person, I said, you're really painting with a broad brush because it turns out that the vast majority of people who are in, unvaccinated are the young. They don't see the value in it. And so they're like, I'm not, you know, I'm not taking the risk if I'm an 18 to 49-year-old woman of getting the one-and-a-million chance of getting a stroke or, you know, a stroke. When I think that my chances of dying from this or less than that, now whether they're right about that's a whole other thing. But so there's a lot of just misinformation, and it's not all this right-wing misinformation campaign. Listen, there's a bunch of that.

Somebody tweeted to me that, you know, something that a pundit sent out that said that said that 64% of people who got the COVID vaccine had life-threatening venous thrombo embolisms. Well, it just run the numbers in your head. to do a truth test on that. If 64, so we've vaccinated about a billion people now. Yep. And I think it was a billion people a few weeks ago, so it's probably more than that. It was.

If 640,000 of those in the world had life-threatening venous thrombo embolisms, we would know about it. So I went and did a little research. The sagittal sinus thrombosis, which is the thing, you know, the huge vein. Apex of the head, thank you. It was about four in four million, if I remember correctly, over three months. So it's one in a million over three months. And then you and I looked up the incidence of sagittal sinus thrombosis in the population, and it was four per million per year.

Yep, yep. So if it's one per three months, right? then it's going to be four per million per year, which is exactly the incidence that it is in the regular population. And then you look at regular venous thromboembulism, and it was like 11 per 100,000, which works out to 1.1 per 10,000 people.

And you have to subtract the incidence of venous thromboembolism from that, too. And actually, I had not done that. Let's do incidents of Venus thromboembolism. And let's just see what that comes up with. The annual international incidence of venous thrombomboembolism

and come on, come on, come on. It's not giving it the way I want. It says multinational report. Total number of symptomatic non-fatal VTE events per annum was more than 465,000 cases of DVT, more than 295,000 cases of pulmonary ambalism.

Apparently, that's over across the world, but that's not really what I'm interested in. And while you're looking, Dr. Steve, I'll just look to the total vaccinations across the world over a trillion. What? A trillion. That's what it says right here. Get it the fuck out of here. There's only 7 billion people in the world.

Well, that cannot be right. Wait a minute. Well, let me look. That's total, all vaccines. That's not COVID vaccines. Fully vaccine. A trillion. Maybe it's one of those.

The aliens on, you know, bleepzorpe. How many people are there in a world? Seven billion. Well, shit, that's, some of them got vaccinated twice. Okay, so here you go. The precise number of people affected by DVT is unknown, although as many as 900,000 people could be affected. That's one to two per thousand.

So they're saying that COVID vaccine caused one per 10,000. thousand extra okay okay so it's less than i mean it's 10 times less than the incidents in the general population so stop with that that's so easy to dope out that i can't believe that it's that's somebody's seriously saying that which makes me brings me to a lot of this is trolls and it's fun to troll on the left and the right and just if you're just an asshole and you're a prankster and you love to troll people it's loads of fun to get people riled up and the problem is some of this stuff gets propagated and the trolling becomes a movement and then the next thing you know you have a problem on your head we live in a crazy effing world dude i blame the internet for a lot of this

i do too of course we're on the internet so what am i going to what are we going to do about it but anyway it's too easy to spread a lot of bad information you know what i mean it's fun yeah it's fun it's fun as long as nobody loses an eye well i you know People don't care. It's fun. It is fun. It's fun to troll people, even though I don't troll people. You and I, and you don't know about this, are in a podcast war with this guy named Patrick Michael.

He also goes by Patty C C Cups and Seamus and a bunch of things. I love the guy. I think he is maybe the greatest performance artist since Andy Kaufman. Oh, wow. And, but he, and I'm hoping that it's all part of the performance, but he's just going off on us on his podcast big time. And it all stems from the fact that I did a psychoanalysis of him on a show called Who Are These Podcasts. Okay. And the psychoanalysis, and the thing is, I said, I love the guy.

And I see a kindred spirit because he and I both have the same. issue, you know, and, but he did not like the fact that I was talking about him at all. So there you go. But check him out. Check out his Patreon at Pod Culture. Tell him I sent you and ask him to please unblock me. Jesus. Come on, man.

Maniac. Anyway. So, but he thinks that I trolled him. He said, so some, and will you all please. Never mind. I'm not going to say anymore. But he got trolled and he thought it was me, but it wasn't me. And there's no telling him.

It wasn't me. And you don't have time to do this year. I don't troll anybody. No, you don't have time to do it. I troll them with the truth, man. I'll vouch for you. All right. Thank you, sir.

All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. It's Paul from New York. Hey, Paul. How are you? Good, man. Great to hear. Good.

Enough about you. Yeah. Anyway, my wife has been having hip pain. And she's 42 years. old. Yes. And of course, she got the, the hip pain started back in January. And it appears it may have occurred when we were, you know, given what a couple of adults do. Arguing? It went on for about six months. Playing exploding kittens. And get it checked out. And the doctor took an x-ray. Okay. Which was shown nothing unless-

didn't see anything, but said that in a woman, her age, you know, as women start to get a little older, there's a fascia in the joint, in the hip joint, that can tear. And he said it's fairly common. And this is what he assumes it is. Okay. And told her, well, if that did tear in it can cause the pain you should go to physical therapy for six weeks and that would strengthen the muscles and maybe alleviate some of the pain. Yes. But my thought is what happens

after that? Six months a year later is it just going to come back? Maybe. Does the facial really never heal? Is there something she stuck with for life unless she has surgery? Well, yeah. Yeah, they, so Any thoughts on this? Yeah. More. so do you know what she has I do

Labral tear. Oh very good Dr. Scott. Give yourself a bill. Now you do know this stuff. So yeah you want to talk about it a little bit? And tell them why they don't heal because that's really important. So you have the labrum and both the hip and the

shoulder you'll hear laboral tears in both of those joints. The socket joints, it's a little soft tissue. It forms almost like a cup or capsule where the head of the bone sticks in and it kind of has a little bit of a vacuum component. It kind of holds it in joints because you want the hips and the shoulders to move inside the joint space, but only a certain amount. So it's remarkably well engineered,

actually. And the problem is, and you know Dr. Steve as well, if it is truly a laboral tear, number one, it's not going to show up on x-ray. Right. Because it's soft tissue. Right. Number two, it is difficult to treat. She can live a very long time with a small April tear. Yep. Do some PT. She can do the acupuncture. She can do whatever she wants, yoga, et cetera, and get some pain relief. If it's a great enough tear, there really are not a lot of options other than surgical options where they'll actually go in and kind of clip it together and suture it back. Really?

They can do that on some. They'll do it on shoulders for sure. Of course, shoulders without having load bearing. But here's the problem, Dr. Stephen, you know this. If that tear is bad enough and it causes enough instability inside that joint, it's deep. Yeah, but if there's enough instability inside and there's enough play in there, she's at a much greater risk of some arthritic changes to her head. Give yourself a bill.

Yep, that's exactly, yeah. So that's the problem with that, if it is infected labor, too. You end up down the road getting degenerative arthritis. Where is it out? Where is it down? The reason these things don't heal is because it's this just little, it's like plastic. And it's got poor vascularization. That's it.

Now, I'm going to give you another one of these. Give yourself a bill. That's exactly what I was going to say. Oh, yeah. No, it's fine. There's no appreciable blood supply. I mean, it's very minimal, just enough to keep those cells alive. And when you tear it, they just can't heal.

So the reason, listen, here's the thing with physical therapy. You could somehow maybe, if you could go in there, just bind it up. You know, you could put a binder around the hip. You know, you could surgically implant this thing that kind of holds it all in place. And that would maybe relieve some of the pain. Or you can create one of those that would work infinitely better because what I just described is a terrible idea that would work infinitely better if you make it out of muscle. And the muscle around that hip joint can support the joint if you increase the strength of those muscles around there. And that's why they're recommending that.

So if it is a minor tear, might not get any worse and might actually, you know, the pain may get a lot better if she's supporting her hip better through this sort of corset of muscle that she can make. The same thing is true of back pain. You know, you can wear a corset or you can create one out of muscle. And then you don't have to wear some outside thing. So when you have back pain, it seems weird, but you can work your abdominal. muscles and actually improve your back pain. Yes, sir. Very true.

Well, good luck here. Yep. When they first described it, I thought maybe she had Moralgia paristhetica. Now, do you ever treat that in your, do you? You want to talk about it for two seconds? It's just a nerve pain. We'll see Moralgia, parasthetic on, certainly on people

like that wear tool belts. Yes, sir. I'm not going to give you another bell. I've given you so many. The pinching, the pinching. But it's, and it is, you can. That's a whole different deal, but we can treat that for sure. Yeah, by calming down the nerves and taking a pressure off the belt.

Yeah, yeah, change in that. But, yeah, people who wear a tool belt often or really tight clothes, like if they gained a bunch of weight, but they're still wearing their skinny jeans. Penses them. And it pinches this nerve as it comes down from the abdomen to the hip, and what you end up with is lateral thigh pain, and it can be severe. And we can go in and inject that nerve sometimes. just to determine that's what it is and then all of a sudden the pain goes away,

then you've made the diagnosis, but the key is to stop traumatizing the nerve. Yep, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. Cool. All right. Let's see what we got here. Hey, Dr. Steve and Company. Hope everybody's doing well.

It's your buddy Sean up in New Jersey. Hey, Sean. I have a non-COVID question. Oh, praise the Lord. Last week, I was the lucky recipient of an emergency procedure to remove an 11-millimeter kidney stone didn't belong. They went in and broke it up and they put a stent in and taking that thing out really sucked. That was a nightmare. But I've been, you know, pissing out fragments of this stone and I think everything is stabilized. But my question is regarding the

composition of the kidney stones themselves. Yes. I did some research through this whole thing and I found out that there's different types of kidney stones. And we're still waiting on the lab results, but my urologist is fairly certain that they're calcium stones because we were able to see them on an x-ray. Okay. And certain other types of stones you can only see on CT scans and other types of imaging. But I go back next week and we'll figure all that out and figure out how we're going to go forward. But other than drinking tons of water, I figured that cutting out calcium would be a solution to this happening again.

But I learned that that's not exactly the case, that it also has to do with oxalates and things that I wouldn't think would be a dietary issue like, spinach and nuts and tail and things like that actually also help them to form. I really wasn't too sure on how the two things interacted. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about kidney stones. If you have one, one of the first things you've got to do is you want to prevent them from ever happening again. Yes.

And the one way to do that is to preserve one and have it analyzed. So he's right. You can have calcium stones, but there are calcium fosters. Phosphate stones, and then there's calcium oxalate stones. Okay. So calcium is a positively charged ion, and it's always going to be linked up with a negatively charged ion. So, and if it has eight after it, then it's, you know, it will have been an acid that now is a salt. Okay.

Okay. So a salt is a negative acid that's paired with a positive. positive ion. That's not hydrogen. Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

So you have hydrochloric acid is one hydrogen atom, one chlorine atom. So hydrogen is positive, chlorine's negative. You pair that with sodium. Now you have sodium chloride. That is a salt. Okay. That's what we call that table salt. Okay.

And during the depression, they would have potassium chloride. Because for some reason, there was a... a shortage of sodium chloride, and so people, my grandmother told me that they would sprinkle potassium chloride on their food, and it tastes salty as well, although it tastes, it's different, it irritates your stomach, more of that kind of stuff. But anyway, never does it. So in this, you have oxalic acid, you take the hydrogen off, plop calcium on there, and you have calcium oxalate stones.

Okay. These are very common types of kidney stones. And when your urine contains low levels of citric acid and high levels of calcium and either oxalic acid or uric acid, you can form these stones. And they're linked with foods high in oxalate, right? Makes sense. And that's what he mentioned is beets, yuck. Lovesy. Black tea.

Hmm, I do like that. Chocolate. Damn it. Nuts. Well, check them if they're stupid. And potatoes and spinach. That's a lot of my favorite stuff. Yes, good stuff.

Healthy stuff. So you can often prevent these by, you know, doing a low-oxalate diet. Now, there's calcium phosphate stones. Those are actually caused by abnormalities in the way that your urinary tract is functioning. And for some reason, you are pairing up your calcium. calcium and phosphate, and then you're pissing it out, and it precipitates in your urine and then causes a kidney stone. Kidney stones, basically, if you ever took chemistry, even in high school, you did these

precipitation experiments where you would put chemicals and you'd pour this other chemical into this other solution, and then all of a sudden it would precipitate solids out of two liquids, and that's really what's going on. There are other stones. There are uric acid stones. that people who drink a lot of don't drink enough water and eat a lot of protein or have gout you can get uric acid stones there are struvite stones and all of these there's different strategies for preventing them for example if you have uric acid stones you can pretty much

prevent those by taking a medication called potassium citrate and it alkalizes the uric and the stones can't precipitate in an alkaline urine. So you always want to get a sample of the stones that you're making. Some people make more than one.

You can make oxalide and calcium phosphate stones at the same time. But once they have that, then they can develop a strategy to prevent them from happening in the future. All right? That's it. How about this one?

Hi, Dr. Steve. My name is Justine. I'm a respiratory therapist working in the Boston area. Hello, Justine. I listen to your show every Friday. Sorry, every Sunday on my way to work. Ooh. We are seeing an uptick on the number of COVID patients. We have several patients in the Boston area that have the Delta variant who have been fully vaccinated with Pfizer and are on ventilators dying. Yeah. Part of the problem is that the success rate of people coming off the ventilators was fairly high towards the end. However, the long-term effects of all this is they're traped and pegged.

Some of them have mental deficits. They have to go, you know, to a long... Yeah, trache and peg just means a permanent hole put in the front of the throat so that you can breathe through it. and a pig being a percutaneously placed gastrostomy tube, which just means a tube going into the stomach so that you can facilitate feeding somebody. Long-term care facility, they're never the same. So when people are talking about, yes, we have a success rate, these people came off ventilators.

Ah, I see what she's saying. Yeah, they come off the vent, but, yeah, they're having. Success, to what success. Right. Most of them have what I termed as a post-COVID syndrome. Right. Yeah. So, let me see, but she's got anything else. And they're never the same. There's a round robin of pneumonia and all this nonsense that they get from these outside long-term care facilities. I appreciate your show. Thanks.

Okay, we appreciate you too. Yes, you, Chad. And it is rough. It's a tough gig for R. The thing is, particularly for respiratory therapists and critical care people, they are seeing, they're just seeing that part of it. So what we got to do, though, is we have to use data before we freak the F out on this because we're seeing a little uptick, but we're seeing an uptick because we're seeing more cases in general. So right now, if you look at cases in the United States, and I'm looking at COVID.com, they get their data from Johns Hopkins. And there is definitely, if you go back 100 days, if you go up 100 days, you see this sort of bowl-shaped curve where it was up at a certain level in April

and then drop down to its lowest point around June 11th and now is creeping back up again. So we see cases coming up in the United States. question about that. This is new cases. But let's look at new deaths. New deaths continuing to fall. If you look at the seven-day smooth moving average, if you want to look at 15 days, seven-day smooth moving average, the trend is still downward, continuing to go downward. So this phenomenon can be explained a couple of ways. And we may even see the new deaths

start to creep up a little bit, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The truly vulnerable have mostly been vaccinated. Like 80 some percent. Yeah, over 60. Listen, we're in rural Tennessee,

and all I hear about is redneck mouth breather's not getting vaccinated. We have the people over 65 in this area, which you'd think would be the biggest problem, are 85% vaccinated. So we're not, we are no longer seeing these elderly folks just flooding into the hospital and ending up on the ventilator and then dying.

Now, is any vaccine 100%? No. The Pfizer vaccine may, is 94% from hospitalization and, or I'm sorry, 94% effective for infection, about 100% effective against progression to severe disease in their original trial, which was a small trial, and about 100% to death, okay, to prevent death. But let's just say against the Delta variant, it's 80 and 90 and 95. So as cases go up, you will see death's increase because it'll be in that 5% that are still going to die. Well, five percent of 100 cases will be five cases, but five percent of

a thousand cases will be 50. So you will see an uptick along with that. But listen, at the levels that we're at right now, if your health system is overwhelmed right now, I'm going to bet it's not overwhelmed because of COVID-19. It's overwhelmed because you have this huge pent-up demand of people with non-COVID illnesses flooding into the hospital. hospitals now because they're no longer afraid to come to the hospital. And the people that missed their colonoscopies that now have stage three colon cancer instead of stage one, which they would have had if they'd had it last year, all that stuff is piling in. Then you get a slight, you know, a somewhat of an uptick in the cases going to the hospital, you know, we'll see some of this. But the thing is, is that at the levels we're at now, if COVID-19 is, It's not overwhelming the hospital system, which is why we went to these lockdowns in the first place. Then, why are we locking down again? You know, if deaths continue to drop, what's the use of the lockdown?

And there are some states that are talking about locking down again, and the CDC is talking about, you know, instituting all these recommendations for remasking, even if you're indoors and stuff like. that and we I want to remind everybody we had a pandemic in 2009 we didn't do shit about it you didn't hear any of this why because the hospital systems weren't overwhelmed that was the original reasoning for us to do all of this was because we were going to overwhelm our health care system which didn't happen a big part of which because we did those things you know it did flatten the curve but you know after a year and a half of it people are sick of it, and then you have the vulnerable people are vaccinated.

It's still, I read a statistic, and I can't pull it up right now, but, you know, 90-something might be 95% of the deaths that are happening right now are in the unvaccinated. Now, you could say, listen, this pool of unvaccinated young people and others that have decided not to get vaccinated are keeping this virus going so that it can mutate into these different variants. You could maybe make a case for that. I still, as a libertarian, I'm not going to be saying that we should therefore force everybody to have a vaccine. But it's a, you know, that's something you can discuss and reasonable people could disagree about. Of course. But I think her point that looking at the statistic, well, people are coming off the

ventilators is not the whole story. is right i totally i have a friend who had covid and she still can't smell or taste anything and she feels like crap yep they one of the treatments for that is to give people the vaccine yes and that most people feel better she felt incrementally better but still feels like crap so you know that long covid is a real deal yeah i think our friend there in boston as makes a great point the numbers you know they never say the whole story you don't get the whole story and certainly she you know and being in respiratory therapy during COVID. Oh, hell the job.

It's horrible. They were the first ones, and they're in there. You see, everybody can run when you do an aerosol generating procedure, except for the respiratory therapist. They can't do it. And when we say aerosol generating procedure, we're talking about things like breathing treatments or suction someone's endotracheal too and things like that, and everybody else will run but the respiratory therapist has to be there so I have mad respect for them

yeah me too in many ways they're the true heroes you know people say oh well you work in the hospital thank you for you know it's it's nice I don't ask for that because I don't necessarily feel very heroic but they they are they're on the front lines where you want to call them heroes or not it is whatever but they are absolutely on the they are the infantry, they're the ones that are, you know, on the front lines running the bales of wire to the next trench. Digging the roads. With people shooting.

Yeah. Digging roads so that you're cutting trees that we can get to the front lines. They're the ones out there doing the shooting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They really are. So we'll give you a three finger salute. But anyway, yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, I just hope that people stay safe.

And I'm listening to those folks who are on the front line who are telling the stories because those are some pretty compelling stories. Yeah. I just wish. And but we do have to keep tabs on the numbers. Oh, yeah. The real numbers with this because the media right now, and I don't want to be this guy, but I want to talk about what's real. What I see are cases, cases, cases are going up. cases are going, who cares?

Nobody cared about cases when we had the pandemic of 2009 until our buddy Barry the Blade died from swine flu. Oh, yeah. And our other buddy, RSD, you know, from Richard David's... The phys guy? Yeah, the hyperphysics guy. Why can't I'm having a senior moment. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I can remember his wife's name, Shatai. She's the one that left the impression anyway. But, yeah, hyperphysics. By the way, check them out. H-Y-Y-P-E-R-F-I-Z-I-C-S, which is hilarious. But it's, you know, it's an energy drink for nerds. But anyway, he ended up on the ventilator, almost succumbed to it.

But thank goodness he's still around with us to supply us with excellent, tasty energy drinks. Yeah. But anyway, you know, nobody did anything about that. We didn't lock down. We didn't wear masks. We didn't, you know, we encouraged people to get their flu shots. We definitely did that. Even though that year, the flu shot wasn't very effective.

Yeah. I mean, the flu shot's never that effective. It's never come close to the effectiveness of this MRNA vaccine, which is outstanding. Yep. Are they going to change the flu vaccine, I wonder, to more something along these lines? That's an interesting question, isn't it? We still need a universal influenza vaccine. Right, yeah.

So that you could just take it once and be done with it. Maybe get a booster every once in a while, and it would be effective against all influenza strains. That would be fantastic. Yeah, I've already seen that Moderna has started a trial for a cancer vaccine with their MRNA technology. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, so if you can alert the immune system to proteins that are hidden on a cancer using this, you know,

So now you've made immunity against this protein. And now the immune system just sitting there going, well, well, now what do we do? And they go, oh, wait a minute, over here. A smorgie sport. Hey, where the hell do those people come from? Let's go F them up. And then that's what they do. Yeah.

A buffet. Yeah, a buffet. It's a good way, boys. Yeah. That's cool. So as long as you do it right and you don't accidentally trigger the immune system to start eating your thyroid gland or your testicles or something, you're okay. Some of us don't have many left.

That's true. I don't care. You can eat my testicles. I'm not using them for anything. All right. Well, listen, we can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, that Gould Girl. Louis Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Chowdy, 1008, Eric Nagel, the Port Charlotte Hoar, the Saratoga Skank, Roland Campos, sister of Chris, Sam Roberts, she who owns pigs and snakes, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinschmidt, Dale Dudley

Holly from the Gulf Steve Tucci times three the great Rob Bartlett Knicks Nether Fluids Casey's wet t-shirt Carl's deviated septum

Bernie and Sid Martha from Arkansas's daughter Ron Bennington and Fez Watley who supported this show has never gone unappreciated go to our Serious XM 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. Actually, I think Saturday might be 6 p.m. Sunday, 5 p.m. I don't know. Just listen to it on demand. That helps us out more than anything.

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, get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thank you.