Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 486 - Ol' Widder's Tails

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Steve and Tacie discuss some myths about bile, what makes green stools, answer some covid questions and then devise the perfect answer to the perennial question "am I getting lucky tonight?" stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) Get Every Podcast on a Thumb Drive ($30 gets them all!) 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!) CHECK US OUT ON PATREON!  ALL NEW CONTENT! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do you get when you cross a ninja with a squid? Disappearing Inc. 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. Why can't you give me the respect that I'm entitled to? I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Zabola Vib stripping from my nose.

I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out and 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 doing then I'll have to go insane I want to requiem for my disease So I'm paging Dr. Steve From the world famous Cardiff Electric Network Studios In non-COVID non-influenza Central It's weird medicine The First and Still Only on Centred Medical Show

In the History Broadcast Radio now a podcast I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal Tacey Hello, Tacey, back from sabbatical. How are you? Hello, everyone. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider.

If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-766-4-3-23. That's 347. She still won't say it. Pooh-head. I thought about it. It's too infantile for you, isn't it? I'm too good for it. It's amazing.

Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine, or, well, I don't know. at Weird Medicine. 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 anything you hear with the grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking about talking about with your doctor.

Nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, clinical laboratory scientist, registered dietitian or whatever. You'd think after 17 years of doing this, I could do that a little bit better. but I'm a little distracted because you look quite lovely today. Oh, stop.

Oh, you do. Well, thank you. Quite lovely. I feel like crap. Yeah, so we have non-COVID, non-influensal, COVID-like illness. Yes. And, of course, when I got sick, I thought it was allergies, and I thought it was allergies when I had COVID.

So I went, oh, shit, maybe it's COVID again. And I went and got tested, and they tested me for influenza A, influenza B, respiratory syncytial virus, and COVID-19, all negative. And then you started getting sick, so I knew it was communicable. Yep. And I don't feel bad. I just, you know, nose. It's very upper respiratory. And it must be very contagious because I am washing my hands.

I'm P.P.E.ing up at work. And who'd you give it to? I gave it to you. Oh, yes, other than that. No, no, no. I don't know, but I'm just saying I'm taking all these precautions not to get COVID-19. And, of course, I did still get it, but I know why I got it. But, you know, so this must be really communicable.

And so a lot of the common colds are extremely communicable. We don't trace them. Nope. You know, so what we're hoping is this asshole virus, will get to the point where we're no longer tracing it either. Now, I've talked about this on the show multiple times. A significant fraction of common colds are coronaviruses. And when those coronaviruses were new, they probably caused a global pandemic back then, too.

And they tend to affect older people who have not been exposed to them worse. So that's why kids don't get it. Then they grow up. And then it's just a cold to them. Just like when you had respiratory syncycial virus, it was just a cold. to you, but it almost killed our kid. Yeah. So, you know, and that's sort of the opposite.

But when these things first came out, I think probably that was the case. But 10,000 years ago, who would notice a coronavirus pandemic when you're dealing with the plague of Justinian and, you know, cholera and diphtheria and stuff like that? I mean, it must have been hell to live. Yeah, exactly. You just lived in fear constantly of invisible. visible things that could just kill you. Kill you at any time.

We were watching, what show was that? 1883. 1883. And people were drinking water out of the river, not realizing that, you know, people upstream were head cholera and were shitting in the river. And, you know, it must have been terrifying. You couldn't even drink water without worrying whether you're going to die or not. Just imagine trying to have a baby back then. And bandits.

And then you get them bandits too. Bandits everywhere. You better watch out them bandits are coming. It's a good show. It is a good, it's a really good show. It's a really good Tennessee accent. I'm usually not a big, absolutely. I'm not a big frontier type person for TV shows, but this is a good one.

And yeah, well, Faith Hill, I think she's from Tennessee, right? We should probably look that up. Echo, where's Faith Hill from? Mike Hale is from Dallas, Texas Mike Hale, it's not what I was asking. Okay, Faith Hill. Audrey Faith Hill McGraw is American, okay, of course. And where was she born?

Let's just get to that part. Where does she live now? I'm sure she lives in Nashville now. Yeah, I would assume so. So anyway, we'll try not to call on you. No, she was born in Ridgeland, Mississippi. Okay, well, anyway, but her southern accent is authentic. and Tim McGrath's is pretty authentic.

So it's not those sort of phony, maloney southern accents that you get when you watch some of these shows. Yeah, too much. Yeah. Yeah, but we were very impressed with the fact that their accents sound right. But anyway. Just like our neighbors. That's right. That's right.

So what were you going to say? I was just going to say we're going to try not to cough on people too much. Yes. because, of course, that's an issue that you could catch it from us. No. I'm sure they just don't want to hear it. Smart-ass. So my, thank you.

Welcome. My point about how communicable this is, is this Omicron supposed to be insanely communicable. If you remember, the original COVID-19, one person in an idealized population would infect about 2.4 people. That's called the R-0, or the, well, just the, you know, it's transmissibility. There's several other numbers, but we represented as R sub-zero. And then Delta came along, and it was between five and seven. They're saying Omicron is 12.

Measles is, or no, I'm sorry, Omicron is 10. Measles is around 12. So whatever I got was certainly more communicable than original COVID, probably more communicable than Delta because it took a real special circumstance for me to get it. We could have got it the night that we watched. And just like that. That is true.

So we had sort of a... A party like it was the last night of college exams and everybody was going home. That is true. Everybody was kissing each other and all kinds of crazy stuff. So it could have gotten it then. Don't make it sound worse than it was.

But it was insane. Oh, that was awesome. It was ridiculous. Girl on girl. No, it was awesome. There was nothing wrong with that. It was stopped. It wasn't like that.

And then we went to a... Wasn't like that. And then we went to a basketball game in the middle of a global pandemic where, you know, there was a lot of yelling and shouting and stuff. So you can get it from those kinds of things. My friend Dan, who I won't say what business he's in and don't say it, but he... I don't know who you're talking about. is responsible for a large group of people in the Atlanta area, and they had a Christmas party,

and about 10 of those people got it at their Christmas party. So anyway, it's still around. We will know in about two weeks whether the stories about Omicron are true in that it is less virulent or less deadly. So the numbers are going to spike. Cases are not the issue. the issue are hospitalizations and death. And it's not even the absolute numbers.

It's the relative numbers. So I was talking to Dave, or buddy Dave Landau today. And he said, I don't know what to believe because I hear different things. I said, well, here's why. If you want to say that the sky is falling, then you will quote the absolute number of cases. Well, we've had 100,000 cases a day, 200,000 cases a day. We're breaking records on cases. If you want to say this isn't that big of a deal, you will quote the relative numbers of people who are going to the hospital and dying,

which at the worst of this was 5% hospitalizations, about 1% people dying. So you'll say, well, but it's only, you know, 5% of people, 95% of people do fine. So it all depends on your bias going into this. If you're a sky is falling person, you will quote the absolute numbers. If you're a, this isn't such a big deal, then you will quote the relative risk numbers. And you really need to know both. Because here's why, if we get a huge spike from this Omicron, there will be more people going to the hospital. That doesn't mean it's more deadly or more prone to severe disease.

It just means that the numbers are huge. So if you have, for example, a thousand people and, um, You have a virus that has 10% of people will end up in the hospital. Well, you'll have 100 people in the hospital, right? But if you have another virus that has 10,000 people but is only 1%, you know, you will have another, well, that'll be 100 people again, right? And you'll look, oh, it's the same. It's not the same.

It's 1% of people compared to 10% of people. And then if that same 1% becomes 100,000, well, now you've got 1,000 people in the hospital. It looks like, oh, gosh, we've got this huge spike in hospitalizations. But the relative numbers are still 1% compared to 10%. Does that make sense? Not really. But I heard a new theory this morning. And this new theory is a friend of ours, has a friend of ours.

A friend of ours has a friend of hers who believes that doesn't believe in vaccinations, but does believe... She doesn't believe they exist? No, doesn't believe in getting them, but does believe that keeping your gums clean and using listerine will keep you away from getting it. Really? Oh, wow, that is very interesting. Please tell me more. Can you like, shut up? Well, that's because you're an idiot. Okay, anyway.

All right, yeah, that's, I would like to see her double-blind placebo-controlled trial date on that. Yeah, I'm like, why not just the science? She goes, I don't know. So that was the end of that discussion. Well, you could do science on that. Listen, if someone had that hypothesis, you would do, we could do a study. You take a thousand people, you give them listerine, and whatever, gum thing, you know, a water pick that you want to do, and you take a thousand other people and

you match them, okay, the same number of, let's do it all unvaccinated, that makes it easy, and see if there's a difference between the two. If there is a statistically significant difference in the Listerine group versus the placebo group, it's hard to do a placebo with Listerine, but you could do it. Then you can say, yeah, this actually has a net positive effect or a net negative effect maybe it makes people worse but it the most likely thing is it will be within statistical uh within the statistical error on both sides and there will be no effect whatsoever but you could do science on that yes on a separate note i used the water pick today oh yes and it worked oh good good good yes yes i used it the way you told me so we have i i'm some people know that i

I got Envisaline because I'm planning on doing some TV after I retire. Oh, yeah, that's right. We'll do that one. Oops, well, shit. And I don't want to have this snaggle tooth in the front. It drives me crazy when I'm doing cameos for people. By the way, check out our cameo. Just search for weird medicine on cameo.

They're cheap. After the first of the year, I'm going to go up. So if you want a cheap, howdy-do-do and fluids and secretions, My tagline is, I hope you have a year filled with fluids and secretions, but only those not tainted by chlamydia and gonorrhea. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. Okay. All right, all right.

So, but, yeah, so, and then check out our Patreon. Basically, our Patreon is what Tasey and I are doing now. but we are doing short relatively short shows but they're filled with with phone calls and stuff and no ads.

Yes and hilarious content classic content. Classic content. I found a show the other day that I was playing before we went live with the video feed and I was listening to it. I said this is actually pretty good. like number 20, and so it was different back then. We were a little bit more raucous, so we're putting some of that up that can't be found anywhere else, and we're going to have some celebrity guests and some other stuff like

that, so all right? Okay. Okay, you want to answer some questions? Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. Especially these two. All right.

Hi, Dr. Steve. Amen. John from Chicago. Hey, John. Dr. Stratt, Tacey, if you're there. Bacy's Ms. Smok I'm sorry I fuck that up

Anyway how are you guys doing? Hope you're great Thanks man Here's a random wife's tale That I got told when I was a kid I had since not doing this anymore But I was told by a certain family member When I would be sick

You know, sometimes when you're sick You get all that bile in your throat And I would spit it out And they would say, don't do that You know, it's bad for you to do it You got to swallow it And, like, was it, I wonder if his, the old wife he was talking to was Myrtle. Well, all that bowel, you got to swallow it because the devil will come up and get you a haint in your house, don't you know?

I don't know if that's true, but give your body the ability to, I don't know, take it in and put in your stomach and, you know, and I'm, oh, as I've gotten some years on me, I'm like, yeah, that's stupid. But I guess since that's kind of in the medical room, is there any, I don't know, basis for that or is it more, I mean, yeah, if you're sick and you got bile in your throat, spit it up, cough it out, get it out. Well, when he says bile, I wonder if he's really talking about bile, because bile is fluid, fluid that comes from the bile duct, which is created. in the bile ducts, the cannuli in the liver, and it collects in the gallbladder. And then when the body needs it, because bile salts help in the digestion of fats. When the body needs it, the gallbladder contracts,

and then you get bile. So you shouldn't really have it in your throat unless you're having emesis or vomiting. And persistent vomiting, you can get bile reflux into the stomach, and then you can puke up bile, and it's usually seen as a yellowish green, green fluid. And by the way, if you eat certain foods that have certain blue food colorings in them,

those food colorings don't change in the stool and through digestion, and the blue in the food coloring with the yellow in the bile will make these beautiful emerald green stool. So if you ever have the most beautiful, deep green emerald colored stools. It's probably because you ate booberry or something like that. Or if you buy your kid a birthday cake with blue icing. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

It scares you to death. Yep. Well, I remember the first time Liam had one of those, I had fed him some kind of blue kid's yogurt. And then, you know, I'm changing his diaper. And then this is amazing. It's amazing. It was a gorgeous shade of green.

except it was a turd, you know, so gorgeous and turd usually doesn't... Our kid's poop is pretty. I'm sorry, I've popped my pee. Yeah, that you did. Thank you. How do you like, you know, there's no point at being in there. Anyway, curious if my family member is a dullard, or if there's maybe some validity to it. No, they're not a dollar. They just made something up.

And they just didn't want to see you spitting up vials what it is, so they came up with that excuse. because, you know, you have some kid. The kids are all snotty and gross and gooey. And then you've got this kid spitting up bile. Yeah, just tell them to swallow it. They're just trying to keep you, keep your behavior under control. That's all. Anyway, yeah, there really, no physiologic reason for that.

If your body's trying to expel it, they're doing it for a reason, it's totally okay. Probably trying to keep themselves from getting sick. Well, that's true. They're like, what? Throwing up from it. Yeah. That kid's spitting a bowel over the room. That's disgusting.

All right. Hi, Dr. Steve. Hey. Hi, Dr. Scott. Hello. Hi, Casey. Hi, everybody. How are you doing?

Good. How are you? Great. This is John from Chicago. I've called before. I love the show. Question about, just general, about rejection when it comes to organ, transplant, things like that.

So why, just in general, is it? it that the body can receive foreign things like blood and plasma, and not reject that, and yet it takes in another kidney, even if the body needs it, and it says, no, I don't want this. Why is that going on? Or is there a minor amount of rejection going on even with blood, but it's just different. I don't know. Could you help explain that whole thing?

Sure, absolutely. That's a great question. It is a great question. I don't, well, I'll give me one of those. So there is a form of rejection when you do blood transplants. That's why we have to match people's blood to the donor. Tacey, what's your blood type? I don't know.

Okay, well, if you had someone that was type A and you tried to give them type B blood, it would coagulate in their bloodstream. And Tacey is O negative, and I'm O positive. Are you sure? Mm-hmm. Okay. And therefore, if she hadn't gotten Rogam after we had our first baby who was RH positive, she would have rejected all of the other babies that she had. She would have made antibodies against their blood proteins.

And that's what happened to Anne Boleyn. That is why Anne Boleyn lost her head. She had Queen Elizabeth, and then every other kid after that died of what they call hydrops. And that was just a baby whose mother had rejected it through their immune system. And so if she had not been R.H. negative, we never would have heard of the six wives of Henry the AIDS. You know, they would have, because he loved her. And if she had been able to give him a male heir, he would have stayed with her. According to Tudors, he really did love her.

Yeah, yeah, right. Right. And we get all of our information from TV dramas. Exactly. But, you know, history indicates that he loved her as well. So, but she had, she was R.H. negative. He was R.H. positive. She had the first baby.

The first baby's fine. And then when that blood mixes during delivery, that's why. when the mother gets sensitized to those R.H. positive proteins, and then the next thing you know, they will have another R.H. positive baby inside their R.H. negative body, and they'll reject it. So, but if you'll match those proteins on blood, you don't have that. And there's more to it. There's different antigens and stuff that the blood banks will tell you they've got to match lots of different things, but that's the basics of it. And those are pretty

simple. The difference with organs is that the body is always looking for foreign bodies to kill. So if you get a foreign virus or any kind of foreign invader, the body's

going to try to kill it if it can. And it has to recognize it as foreign. And so when you put a foreign heart into someone's body, There are these sugar proteins called HLA antigens. And those, everyone's are mostly different. You can get people to match up, but mine are different than yours.

They're not quite as dense information-wise as, say, fingerprints are. But the body's immune cells are always looking around saying, oh, this one's fine. is us, it's like friend or foe. And they're constantly surveying those HLA indicators on the surface of these cells going friend, friend, friend, friend, you're okay, you're okay, you're okay, you're okay,

wait, who the hell are you? And they don't even ask questions, they just attack. And so you have to suppress those cells in someone, unless you have your identical twin, donate a heart to you. It's very difficult to find perfectly matching donor so they'll have to give you medication to suppress those cells from attacking foreign antigens now when it comes to cancer it's the same sort of issue as those cells are

always looking for foreign cells to kill and they're going friend friend friend and a cancer that's successful in growing is one that will express those friend and antigens on its surface. So the T cells that are monitoring for that will just pass them right by, and that's why cancer can grow. And so what we're trying to learn how to do is to teach the T cells to kill only the cancer cells and leave everything else alone. So ultimately, cancer therapy is going to be an immunologic problem.

It's not going to be a chemotherapeutic problem. and we will use immunology to cure cancer in the future. That's cool. Does it make sense? I explain that in a way that makes sense. God damn it. Because you're my audience, you know? All right.

Yeah, but you talk a lot. Hey, Dr. Steve and also Dr. Scott. This is a question for you, too. I had COVID in July of 2020. I got a fever about, nine days took me about two weeks to feel back to normal, but during that time period, I also lost my sense of smell and taste. Now, it gradually came back. However, there are certain things that have been affected 100% differently since then. Wine and oranges and citrus stuff don't taste

the same to me. They don't taste as good to me any longer. I was a bit of a wine snob type of person and no longer it all tastes kind of mediocre to me now interesting um the smell of feces or human waste of any kind um doesn't smell as bad as it used to however well wait why are you complaining about that i mean if if if if i could have a virus and it made all shit smell like flowers i would think that that was a net plus and now i can drink cheap one that's right because it doesn't make any difference. Like raw onions and raw garlic to me now. I'm Italian and I've always loved cooking with garlic.

And now the smell of it is not pleasant to me anymore. Oh, wow. I haven't really heard anybody else talking about this. And I was wondering if you had any insight or if Dr. Scott perhaps has any ideas of some Eastern medicine or herbs that I could potentially do to. Astragalus. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. help the situation because I don't like it. Okay, well, one thing, you could consider emailing Dr. Scott.

Go to simplyerbils.net and see if he has any of his nasal spray left. It had a nasal anti-inflammatory in it, which is basically peppermin oil. And I'm not going to say that it will help, but hell, you know, what else has helped? and it may not hurt anything to re-stimulate those olfactory cells with a little peppermint oil anyway because what you have is called paroasmia. Now there's anosmia.

That's a complete loss of smell. So an, being the Greek from the Sanskrit, not. And then osmia, meaning smelling, or you know, oz is related to sense of smell. So an aosmia would be inability to smell anything. And then there's parosmia, which points to a distortion in your sense of smell. Then there is phantasmia.

Can you think of what that would be, taste? Nope. Oh, you could. Just think. Fantasmia. I haven't been listening. The phantom smell, see. Oh, okay.

Olfactory hallucinations. Okay. Those are also associated with COVID-19, and it may be due to actual viral damage to the olfactory nerves themselves. There are a cluster of nerves in the top of the nose near this thing called the ethmoid plate, and they hang down. And they're very complicated chemical sensors. and depending on how you stimulate them, you'll perceive that as different smells. And remember, everything that you perceive in this world,

well, this is going to be sound circular, but it's just perception. Everything that you smell is a creation inside your brain. So if you change the way that the nerves act and send signals to the brain, it's going to change how you perceive smell. And when I had COVID, I used nasal steroids, aka Flonase, and I used it from day one. And I never had any.

So you think that helped? I'm an N-of-1 in this clinical study, but I've looked at some other clinical studies that said that they thought that it helped as well. I had no loss of smell, no parosmia, no an-osmia, nothing. So I'm counseling people that when they get COVID-19 to start using the flones and see if that helps prevent that. Because it is irritating. This guy was a wine connoisseur, maybe a sommelier, maybe a master salmelier. Now it's taken that enjoyment away from it. As you said, you're more practical.

Yeah, now you can just drink shit wine and you won't be able to tell the difference. But the garlic thing and being Italian and like, and that sucks. sure the whole thing sucks yeah now will it come back it may come back it may take uh 12 12 months well he had it in like june or july of 20 oh is that what he said yeah well i'm looking at some data here it said 90 to 96 percent of patients depending on the study will experience at least some recovery of function within 30 days they plateau over time with some studies reporting small gains out to 12 months. Now, it's just not COVID-19 that does this. There's non-COVID-19 post-viral smell loss, and the number of people who recover estimated to be about 60 to 65 percent

in those. And patients with COVID-19 related smell loss, about 35 percent don't recover in three weeks. So if you look at all of that, you know, maybe 60 to 70 percent will recover. They don't know what degree they'll recover. This is still too new. We just don't know. But a couple of the studies that I looked at did seem to affirm that using nasal steroids early in the course of the illness may help prevent this. So I'm just recommending that because I don't think that there's any harm it will do to anybody. Okay. All right. I would certainly try it. Yeah. So sorry, man. That's a tough one. And I guess it's easy for me to say, well, just be glad you didn't lose everything, but sometimes losing part of something is worse than losing all of it.

Although I have lost my sense of smell before I had a viral illness where I completely lost all smell and all taste, and it sucked, because you couldn't tell if something was rotten. And that was what I was thinking about the whole time. I can't tell if the sandwich is rotten. I can't tell if anything I eat is actually good. and I think that part of the reason that we evolved a sense of taste is so that we could tell when things are bad for us or they're rotten.

I couldn't do that. It was very disconcerting. Anyway, all right. Let's take one more and we'll get out of here. Hey, Dr. Steve and Dr. Scott. This is Mike in Pennsylvania. How are you? Good, good. How are you?

So, in long COVID bullshit, it just seems like any news of variants possibly being more mild. and not as big of a deal to get, all the so-called experts say, yeah, but we still don't know about long COVID yet. Is this just a scare tactic so we don't let our guard down or is there any actual data? Data, not just complaints from hypochondriacs on the Internet who have made it a new identity to be COVID long haulers or whatever. Right.

And if it's not bullshit, the most unique about COVID to cause this, or are we just ignoring tons of long-term health effects of other viruses people have had and recovered from? So, like, every ailment, the manifestation of some virus we had a long, long time ago, thanks, Merry Christmas. Yeah, you too, man. And happy New Year. Happy New Year. There is some data. I'm looking at Ploz Medicine.

This is an open access journal. What's a decent one? It's open access. It's peer-reviewed. This is incidence, co-occurrence, and evolution of long COVID features, a six-month retrospective cohort study of 273,000 survivors of COVID-19. And so they did a retrospective cohort study. This is not great data.

This is just where you take their chart after it's all done. You go back and try to mine it for data. And they looked at 81 million patients, including 273,000 COVID-19 survivors. And they looked at nine core features of long COVID, which would be breathing difficulties, breathlessness, fatigue, malays, chest or throat pain, headache, abdominal symptoms, myalgas or other pain, or cognitive symptoms, in other words, post-COVID foggy brain syndrome, not a real syndrome. I did have that. I did have that, yeah.

I think I still do have it. I'm not as sharp as I was on this show, particularly I can tell a little bit. Some people may be able to tell a lot. Anxiety and depression as well. So the co-occurrence network was also analyzed and compared it with some other stuff. And what they found was 57% had one or more long COVID feature. Well, that tells me if more than half of people had something like that, that's just normal, right? And 36% had symptoms between three and six months, and the incidence of each feature was abnormal breathing.

That's about 18%. fatigue, malays, 12%, chest or throat pain, 12%, headache, 8%. Abdominal symptoms, 15%, myelogist, that's muscle aches and pains, 3%. Cognitive symptoms, 8%. Anxiety and depression, 23%. Now, can you say that that was due to the virus or the virus, you know, was it your infection or was it just that we're dealing with this shit? I mean, surprised, it's only 22%.

I mean, seriously, don't you think that the incidence of depression and the general population, after two years of this crap, is greater than 22%, wouldn't you think? I would. Okay, so maybe COVID is protective. It's ridiculous. Maybe it cures people's depression because 22% seems pretty low to me. So all of these features were more frequently reported after COVID-19 than after, you know, influenza but you do get them after influenza and the hazard ratio is like 1.4% so it's a 40% more chance of having long haul symptoms with COVID than with influenza that's basically what that

means so yeah now so it's been described and there is some data it has not been well categorized nor has it been well doped out in my opinion because we don't for a while They were saying, yeah, if you get a COVID vaccine after you've had it, it makes your long COVID symptoms better. And there's some evidence that that's the case. But I haven't seen anything wonderfully conclusive on that either. So it's not bullshit. There's something there. But it's not just associated with COVID-19 either.

Almost nothing about this virus is only associated with it. It's just that it sucks more than it does for other things. Agreed. You know, loss of taste. I've had that. I had that 20 years before COVID. But thankfully, I recovered, you know, fogging as not solely associated with COVID-19. All these long COVID symptoms also associated with influenza.

Things like Gian Beret that are associated with influenza vaccine are also associated with influenza. the thing that causes influenza or causes gionne barret which is ascending neuritis that's when people get weak in their feet then their knees then their hips that if it ascends up into their chest

they have difficulty breathing some of them end up on the ventilator can be caused by vaccines absolutely but can also be caused by the viruses that the vaccine is trying to prevent so it's basically the body's immune response to those

things that causes the Gianbury and it's just host dependent in other words it's just some people that'll happen to them and other people not fortunately it's a vast minority of people anyway

so what do you want to talk about I'm sick of this shit I'm sick of this shit how was it the way every damn thing was COVID well no it wasn't two things were COVID related that's not so bad

one thing was poop related yeah I like the poop related stuff two things yeah what was the other poop The guys poop didn't smell as bad. Oh, true. Okay, right, right, peripherally. Pretty green, emerald green.

There you go. Yeah. All right. Do you have anything you want to talk about? No. Are you going to, am I going to get lucky tonight because we're both drinking? Mm. If you don't mind getting coughed on, maybe.

Oh, I don't care about that. Guys don't care about that. That's disgusting. But if you mean, if the correct answer is, if by lucky, you mean me ordering you a pizza, then yes. All right. Well, listen, thanks Tase for being here.

And catch us over on the Patreon side. It's really fun over there. It's patreon.com slash weird medicine. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teff, that Gould Girl, Lewis Johnson, Paul Off Charsky, Chowdy, 1008,

Eric Nagel, the Port Charlotte Horror Tase, the Saratoga Skank, and the Florida Flue. Can you believe that Holly called me and said, well, now, who's the Florida Flusie? It's like you, it's you, you idiots. She's also the Port Charlotte Hoare and the Saratoga Skank. Roland Campos, sister of Chris, Sam Robert, she who owns Pigs and Snakes, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinschmidt, Dale Dudley, Holly from the Gulf.

Christopher Walkins double, aka Steve Tucci, the great Rob Bartlett, Vicks, Nether Fluids, Cardiff Electric, Casey's Wet T-shirt, Carl's Deviated Septum, The Inemitable. Vincent Paulino, everyone. Eric Zane, Bernie and Sid, Martha from Arkansas's daughter, Ron Bennington, and, of course,

our dear departed friend, Frez Watley, whose support of this show has never gone unappreciated. Remember GVAC. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel. SiriusXM Channel 103,

Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern, on demand at other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. Quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you, Tase. You know,

Oh, Oh, Oh, Uh, Uh, Uh, Thank you. So,

you know, I'm Thank you.