Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 516 - Playboi CAR-T Cell Therapy

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Dr Steve and Dr Scott discuss: A lymphoma success story (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell therapy) Donating your body to science The body farm (there's more than one) A guy with high cholesterol but reduced cardiac risk Some other stupid crap Check out some non-pseudoscience cancer cures: https://www.doctorsteve.com/sections/non-pseudoscience-cancer-cures/ Please visit: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net  (now with NO !vermect!n!) (JUST KIDDING, Podcast app overlords! Sheesh!) roadie.doctorsteve.com (the greatest gift for a guitarist or bassist! The robotic tuner!) And our sponsor: BetterHelp.com/medicine (we all need a little help right now!) Also don't forget: Cameo.com/weirdmedicine (Book your old pal right now because he’s cheap! He does it for fun, not for money. Say"FLUID!" to your mama!) noom.doctorsteve.com (the link still works! Lose weight now before swimsuit season is over!) CHECK US OUT ON PATREON!  ALL NEW CONTENT! Robert Kelly, Mark Normand, mystery guests! Stuff you will never hear on the main show ;-) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do you call a sleeping dinosaur? A Z-Rex. I really dig earthworms, but I haven't met one yet that doesn't have a dirty mouth. Why don't squash balls drink coffee? Because they're already bouncing off the walls. 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 Tobolovibov. I'm stripping from my nerve. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my incredible woes.

I want to take my brain out and blast it with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent to citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the template, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want a requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve.

Dr. Steve. From the world famous Cardiff Electric Network Studios, 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 with my little pal, Dr. Scott. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dr. Steve. He's a traditional Chinese medical provider. It gives me street red with the wacko alternative medicine assholes.

By the way, 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. You can't find an answer anywhere else. Give us a call at 347-7-66-6-4-3-23. That's 347. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at D.R. Scott W.M. 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 shelf without talking it over with your doctorate, nurse, practitioner, practical nurse, acupuncturist, traditional Chinese medical specialists, whatever. See, now Tasey's already wearing off on her. She takes all the fun out of these lists. This stern look on her face. She's not even here. Anyway, check out stuff.

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slash weird medicine uh that's the show that tacy and i do and we just recently had anthony kumia on that show it was a fun one and it is uh will never be anywhere but on patreon and so we've had the troika we've had jim norton we've had uh Greg hughes and now uh anthony kumia And one of these days, perhaps we shall have E. Rock and Travis and other folk on there. Sam Roberts was the one that held the camera when I did the first prostate exam on Pat Duffy, so we probably should have him on at some point. Yeah. Anyway, that's fun.

That's cool. All right. And if you want me to say fluid to your mama or secretions to yo daddy, just go on cameo.com slash weirdness. medicine and it's cheap and it's really cheap and if it's too expensive tell me and i'll even drop the price for i don't care i just like doing it in matter of fact i got to do one tonight for somebody who's uh their 40th birthday coming up and it's ridiculous and i just say stupid things and uh you are i'll mostly say what you want me to say within a certain i mean don't

be you know it's 22 come on but anyway uh yeah cameo dot com slash weird medicine All right, Dr. Scott. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. Simplyerbils.net. We want to say happy birthday to our network founder, Cardiff Electric. So have a very happy birthday to you. All right, very good. So what's you got, Dr. Scott?

We're going to do a lot of phone calls today. We've got a million of them. Cool. But I know you have some stories that you want to do. They've got two quick stories. Okay. I saw this. It's kind of cool.

It carries, it goes back. Is it kind of cool? I'll show her. You'll be the judge of this. Okay. It takes us back a couple shows. Research in pigs shakes up what we know about dying. So, yeah, some brand new research out of Yale.

They've actually been able to restore blood circulation and other cellular functions to pigs that have been dead completely clinically dead for over an hour. And what it does, it suggests that there may be some ways to prolong. I'm sitting here looking at James Byrd's picture up there, you know, organ transplants. Oh, I see. Yeah. So they're not talking about taking a dead pig and bringing it back to life. No, no, no. So what are they talking about?

Well, they're talking about the organs. See, some more clipbait bullshit. They're talking about the organ specifically. Okay. Kidneys and hearts and lungs. And what they found. Oh, oh, oh, oh. So let me just throw this out there.

When you do organ transplantation, if the patient's been dead and their heart has stopped and there has not been profusion to those organs, the only thing that you can do is basically harvest some corneas and some skin and stuff like that, which, by the way, sounds horrible, but it's when they harvest your skin for the burn unit, they're not skinning you. Like you would, you see it like if you watch alone where they skin like these rabbits and stuff. They just take the very top layer of skin, a very thin layer of from your back, you know, the widest expanse and maybe some stuff from the, from the abdomen and chest. But it's not something anybody would see. But anyway, so this, when I'm, before you go any further, what I'm hoping that they're talking about doing is being able to take someone that's had a cardiac death. that normally they couldn't harvest kidneys and stuff from and bringing them into the hospital somehow doing some magic and reperfusing those organs and making them usable

without having to keep the person alive on the ventilator because right now the way we do it is when someone is brain dead that means that they have died there's no blood flow going to their brain and they've been declared dead but they're still on the ventilator, so their heart's still beating, and you're still able to get oxygen from the outside to the inside using mechanical ventilation.

Then you could take that person back into an operating suite, and their organs are still perfusing. When I say perfusing, they still have blood flow to them, so they're still viable. That's how we do it now. So tell me the rest of the story. So give yourself a bill? Okay, I will do so. Yourself a bill?

That's exactly what they're talking about. What they're saying is once you can hook them up to the perfusion and maintain that profusion for a long time. And what they're hoping is that all these, a lot of the times, as you said, once someone's died, then they don't have any real hope. Are they come in dead? Yeah, yeah, they're already deceased. There may be a chance now where they can actually re-perfuse those organs

because they don't think those organs cells die as quickly as we thought they did. Well, so what are they doing? Perfusion. Perfusion. That's it? The profusion machines, and they were talking about... So, wait a minute. Are they taking the animal and perfusing them, or are they taking the organs out?

The organ alone. The organ alone. Okay. They can organ out alone and perfusing it. So I'm sure there's some... Are they using some sort of special solution, would they say? That's what I was looking for right now. Some special blood or some special juice.

But, you know, what they're saying is that there's a... The problem is, as you know, and too, as soon as someone dies, there's a whole cascade of chemicals that start breaking things down. And so what they're doing is by perfusing it and then giving some medications, stopping that deterioration process. Okay. Yeah. So you're right on.

Way to go, man. But it doesn't say how they're doing it. No, it's just strictly said with, this is the worst part. Wow. It's hilarious. The pigs were given of anesthesia and then a heart attack was induced. Yeah. Well, that's all they do it.

I don't want to know, but it just sounds awful. I mean, you don't have, you don't have a, you know, an ICU for pigs where they are, you know, they get so sick that they become brain dead and then their family comes in and says, yes, we want to do, you know, scientific research on them. No, they have to induce brain death. Make sure they're bacon and not pork chops. Oh, God. Coming from the pescatarian. Exactly. So, okay, if you see anything else on this.

So basically what Dr. Scott's alluding to is that there may be some hope to increase the supply of usable organs out there from where they are now. Because people, some of these donor services are so strict that it's hard. You can get on the list. You can die before you get certain organs. And I've had several patients have that happen, particularly people who are trying to get a liver transplant often. They're alcoholics. I think liver's the toughest, isn't it? Yeah, it's a tough one because a lot of the folks that I have had were alcoholics,

so they had cirrhosis, and the place says you've got to be off everything. That's no opioids for pain and no alcohol for six months before we'll even put you on the list. And a lot of those patients don't make it to the point where they can get the transplant. So this may allow them to liberalize if they can get the, all the livers that they want, they might be able to liberalize that and make it two months or three months, you know, just enough to make sure that the patient is going to, you know, comply

because you don't want to give somebody a new liver and then just have them, you know, drink that one down too. Now, ultimately, we've got to come up with a way where we can brew these things in vats, where you take stem cells and you say, okay, I need a thousand liver, you know, 250 hearts and a shitload of kidneys and you just have these vats and they just start growing these organs.

And when you do it, you can genetically engineer them so that they don't have proteins on them that would cause rejection. There's all kinds of cool crap you can do. We have to get that. And then down the road, could we have, you know, artificial kidneys and artificial livers and things and just become cyborgs? And then what the fuck?

Go the extra mind. and just upload your brain into a computer. All I can see right now is, you know, you see the fish hatcheries where they have, you know, thousands of tanks there with all this, you know, individual fish swimming around and reproducing. And I can just see that same thing with, you know, kidneys here, livers here. Yeah, you can have some weird organism that, you know, swims around and then somehow reproduces and makes a human kidney. You know, why not? Oh, my God, that's crazy. But, yeah, ultimately we need immortal bodies.

The only way to do that is for us to do what happened. By the way, most people are not aware of this. In 2001, what happened was, spoiler, came out 50 years ago. The aliens who were just running around the universe helping species out, found these ape-like ancestors of ours, put that monolith down, and it taught them just enough to get them. to succeed as a species, but by the time we found the second monolith on the moon and exposed it to the sunlight, that's what the signal was. When these things get advanced enough to find the magnetic anomaly, I'm glad Tacey isn't

here because she'd already be rolling her eyes, find the magnetic anomaly unearthed so that that thing became exposed to sunlight for the first time in six million years. years. It sent a signal to the Stargate that was in orbit in the book around Saturn, but in the movie around Jupiter, alerting them that humans had made that transition. They were now fledgling spacefarers. But in six million years, they had become perfect beings of energy. They didn't even have bodies anymore. So that's what they did to Bowman at the end when he turned into that embryo. They had converted him to a being of pure energy and sent him back to Earth to further Earth's

evolution. But, you know, that's the way he saw himself is that he saw himself as an embryo. So that was the sort of, quote, unquote, body that he created for himself. So there you go. So we have to, it's a logical progression. We figure out how to grow organs in a vat. then we have fake organs that aren't even organic that work just as good if not better then we have inorganic bodies and then eventually we have bodies of pure information

there you can't wait what do you think they'll be shape like pot talk for the day man well if we're pure energy if we're pure information we can take on any shape we want there you go now that's what I'm talking about yeah so I might have muscles eventually again I was thinking about that. I've got to start working out again. I need somebody to go with me to challenge me the way that my buddy in Chapel Hill did. He and I was a ham radio friend of mine, but we would go work out together three times a week. We would challenge each other.

And it was really effective way to do it. And now I just suck. I just don't have. But if I had somebody that would commit to going with me, at least two times a week, preferably three. three, I think I could get back into it again. If you would ever retire. No, I could find the time. I would just go and I would take it away from Tacey time.

Yeah. Yeah, that's not going to go for so well. It would be fine. I'm going to take a lot of other shit away from Tacey time, too. Hey, she's retired. You can't take too much away. Don't get me started on. Number two from our old buddy.

Just kidding, Tacey. She doesn't listen. No, she didn't listen. She could care of us. From our old buddy, Stacey, he sent us a great article from the University of Cincinnati, using light to restore self-function. Okay. So, University Cincinnati researchers. Wait a minute.

Yeah. Like putting ultraviolet light in your body? Hmm. Who said that a couple years ago? And I was apparently told that he was an idiot. Whoever would have thought of something like that. That's right. I mean, I'm not saying it was genius, but, you know, throwing out ideas.

is. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Your old buddy. But anyway, tell me about this. No, it looks pretty interesting. So what they've done to the University of Cincinnati, and going back to exactly what, and you kind of hit on this, I don't know if you've meant to or not,

but discussing how light activity can stimulate proteins inside the body. And what they found is that in cancer cells specifically, the mitochondria, which are the power plants of the cells. They look like little bacteria. They probably were at one point. Yeah, and they come together. It's a process called fusion. They create energy.

Excuse me, and when they separate, it's called fission. And what they're doing is using light, and they're using proteins that are light sensitive to send in. And when they identify this, they're stimulating these. Excuse me, I'm sorry. No, no, I'm sorry, my stupid allergies. but they're stimulating lysosomes to help these cells split more normally. Okay.

Or the mitochondria to split more. Oh, and the more mitochondria you have, the more mitochondrial function. Right. Therefore, the more energy you have. Right. So what they're doing is using the body's natural system to stop the process of cancer. And what he says is we're at. How will it do that?

Well, he says, what we have actually is the natural process we're just making faster. There's no, it's not a chemotherapy, it's not a radiotherapy, and it's called, let's say, some kind of fucking photo therapy. Optogenic. Optogenic treatments, yeah. So, I'm sorry, yeah. Okay, so what's, how, how do they do this? What are they actually doing?

So what are they taking your blood out and putting it through a clear tube and exposing that to light? Or are they just exposing you to light and going good luck? No, what they're actually doing? doing now, of course, they're just now starting a process, but what they're doing now is using different types of light that'll penetrate into the skin further. So that's why they call the optogenics in multiple different colors to affect the mitochondrial function to help with cancer. So you just, all you do is just...

You just, no. I don't understand. Well, what they're doing is they're actually taking these. proteins that are specifically engineered to accept this light or to emit light. Okay. And they're hitting it with the light, and that's what's stopping the mitochondrial process. Okay, so I'm looking here at research from Tufts University, and they used frog embryos. Okay.

And it had RNA that encoded a mutant gene known to cause cancer-like growth. So this is pretty, you know, preliminary, not clinical, human clinical stuff. and they used blue light that activated these positively charged ion channels which induced an electric current that caused the cells to go from cancer-like to a normal, more negatively polarized state. They repeated this process

using green light-activated proton pump and activation of both agents significantly lowered the incidence of tumor formation and increased the frequency in which the tumors regressed into normal tissue. So this is a frog, model in this one. And what they found was that all the, you know, healthy cells maintain a more negative voltage

on the interior compared with the exterior. But then, you know, opening and closing of these ion channels caused the voltage to become more positive. And this allows tumors to be detected by their abnormal bioelectrical signature before they're otherwise apparent. So this is good for detection and maybe something for treatment. Of course, very, very, you know, test tubey stuff and whether this is going to be something that will pan out for humans remains to be seen. But it is interesting.

Well, and you think the biggest. Maybe we've got to look at everything. Yeah, the most, the thing I take from this is what they're doing is they're interrupting the mitochondrial function because cellular growth is just uncontrolled or cancer's uncontrolled cellular growth. Yeah. So what they're trying to stop the mitochondria from reproducing so quickly by zapping them with the light using this. that only in cancer cells, that'd be honest if you just shut them down and they die. Using a liposone that's almost like a Trojan horse, I guess. It's too specifically receive this light instead of detectionist for killing the cancer cell.

So hopefully it's something good. Well, you know, there's so much shit going on. I tell patients that they should just kick the can as far down the road as they possibly can because this stuff is changing every single day. It is evolving. It is evolving. All right. You got anything else? Because both of those were kind of shitty.

Hey, I didn't see it. All right. Oh, you read them, though. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. Let's see what we got here. Hello, Dr. Steve and friends. This is Mike from Ohio. Hey, Mike. I just signed paperwork to have my body

donated to the local medical school. They say they'll keep the body for seven years and then cremated and send the remains back to my family. Right. My question is, what exactly will they be duly to my body?

After seven years, they're going to be going, who? This package is going to show up, and it's like, oh, that's Mike. Who? Anyway, a joke, didn't work the first time. Didn't work the second time.

I repeated the exact same joke. Yeah, Mike. So good for you for doing this. you're going to advance medical science. But I wonder if it's, is it truly seven years or is it up to seven years? Because like at my medical school, they would put people, they would just take people's bodies after they're done using them. And if they donated them for anatomic study, they would go into a vat and they would sit there from what the guy, the anatomist told me for up to a year,

and then they would drag them out and then put them in the anatomy lab for the first year medical students or the dental students or whatever, and then you would dissect on those for anywhere between three to six months, and then they would take them and dispose of them. One of my most vivid memories, though,

was this guy in my lab. When we got down to the pelvis, you had to do a hemipelvectomy on your cadaver, which meant that you basically took their left leg off. And I remember him walking through the anatomy lab with a left leg and half of a pelvis over his shoulder, you know, carrying it like he was carrying a log or something. And then just throwing it in the trash,

you have this clonk as it goes in the trash. And I'm like, I don't think that's where. that goes but my other thing that happened to me was dreaming about anatomy lab and i would dream that um you walked in and all of a sudden your your cadaver would sit up right and look at you and that was apparently a dream that a lot of people had now you guys had cadavers too though in in crazy uh crazy um yeah not um quack lab right i mean quack medical school yeah it's a um I'm sorry, for the D-O-M's out there, I'm just kidding. No, I'm so used to it.

I enjoy it now. Yes, but not the entire body. We did parts. Oh, you didn't? Okay. Yeah, it was, and that's, we had one actually that was not preserved at all, so it was a live smelling. Wow.

It was interesting. Why did they do that? Just to see where the needles go, I guess. Okay, okay. So at my medical school, there was a guy who, was over the anatomy lab and he was selling body parts. Oh, no! Yeah.

And so how that works is you have someone that wants to practice doing hand surgery, so it's just like, you know, you slip him a hundy and he'll give you a little package with a formaldehyde preserved forearm and a hand. And then you can just

do what you want to with it, you know, no questions asked. And the other thing was, and now allegedly, although I, listen, I don't remember who this guy was, so I don't know if he was convicted of this stuff, but he was accused, allegedly accused of all these things, and he was allegedly accused of also having a funeral home, which is a little bit of a conflict of interest. A little bit.

So he was getting some body parts from there as well, and then stacking, you know, bodies and not putting certain people where they thought they were and things like that. Yes. When you think their old dad's going into the incinerator and... Or into the, you know, $20,000 mausoleum, and there's just nothing there. Oh, gosh. And not only did they take the $20,000, but also got another couple... Yeah, 10 on top of it.

Right, for selling parts. So, now, that kind of shit, I have not... They've really clamped down on that, and they've become a lot more vigilant. and not trusting people anymore to do these things the way that they're supposed to. So there's a lot more controls on it. That's my understanding. Holy moly. But our buddy James Bird, who came in, what, second in the funniest fucker in the Tri-Cities

competition, has given up his role as the chief dude in that Restore Life USA. But they take people, their bodies, when they're not. they're done using them, they do not preserve them right away. They do medical research and preserve some stuff and then ship out, you know, if someone's doing a study on pancreas cells, they teach them how they want them to retrieve the cells, how to preserve them and send them to them to them. And then they always will cremate you within 30 days and return you to your family at that point, cremated for nothing.

So you get a free cremation out of it, and it's only 30 days instead of seven years. Yeah, go ahead. Real quick question from Darren Parker. He's asking about how to donate bodies to the body farm. So you know what? You just call them. Yeah, yeah, because University of Tennessee Knoxville's got the body farm there,

and, of course, it's a world-renowned for the research that they do with the decomposition. Yeah, that's for forensic stuff. So if people don't understand what the body farm is, they basically do forensics. So what they're looking at is if you've been there for a month, what bugs do they find on you? Where do they find them? What state of composition are you in and all that kind of stuff? And if you're in mud or if you're under a grass pile or under a dirt pile or it's pretty crazy. I've got a friend of mine went through that program and went on to work with TBI and FBI.

and he told me some interesting stories because they put some crazy situations out there yeah and they'll put you in cars they'll do all kinds of stuff so it's called the Forensic Anthropology Center College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville

just go to fAC.utk.edu That's fAC dot utk.edu. And that's FAC is for Forensic Anthropology Center and you can see how you can donate. And there's body donation, is the third link down, and you can click on that. It'll tell you everything that you need to do. You can get a little packet about body donation.

Now, are there other body farms in the United States? You know, I don't know. I don't know. Let's look up body farms in the USA. You can be part of research. Yep. Pretty cool. Okay, seven such facilities exist across the United States.

let's see where they are so there's one at University of Tennessee Western Carolina really over in Colobee Western Kakalack Texas State University

Sam Houston State University Southern Illinois Colorado Mesa University and oh university of South Florida I bet that one is rank Oh God USF sets in Tampa Can you imagine

The stench Oh because you know they're putting them in swamps in there. Oh, letting alligators eat them. Yeah, we need to read that. Yeah, yeah. That's true, yeah. Tossing people with alligators.

So there, and there's some in Australia, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and other places. Let's see where the USF one. The USF facility for outdoor research and training is part of the Florida Institute for Forensic Anthropology and Applied Sciences at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The fort was created by, man, nobody cares. The facility is a 3.4 acre outdoor research laboratory in Pascoe County utilizing the USF human donation program. The Outlook facility, I'm sorry, the outdoor facility and the curated skeletal collection is opening to visiting scholars and researchers. The facility was opened on September 19th, 2018, with five bodies. It's the first and only facility of its type in Florida, probably also the last, as well as,

as in a subtropical environment. Pascoe County Commission voted May 2019 to end the contract that allows USF to run the facility. Whoa. So the agreement will end May 7th, 2022. What in the hell? USF is in the process of finding a future alternative site. Well, May 7th, 2022 is already passed. So I wonder what's going on there.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I wonder what you do with all the... I don't know. The ones they hid under... Oh, my God. Under a tree or... Now, the Colorado one is, I'm assuming, is more cold.

Oh, they're just... Are they doing humans? Are they doing pigs? It says the first pig was placed in the outdoor facility in September 2012. The indoor facility opened for classes, January 2013. Oh, and the first human donation was placed in November of 2013. As of January 2018, boy, this thing has not been updated. This is a wiki page.

The facility had 11 human cadavers, and they spelled cadavers wrong. So most remains desiccate quickly, and current, and that means dry out. And current research focuses on variation and desiccation process and determining post-mortem interval on mummified or desiccated remains. Because, yeah, they're up high. And so things rather than rotting will dry out. If you've ever been, you know, God. Just dehydrate, won't it? Yeah.

Yeah, I remember when I was at Snowbird for a meeting, and it was weird that you would come out, and it's, I don't remember how high up it is. You could look that up, you know, elevation of Snowbird, Utah. It's 9,500. Okay, you know. Yeah. Okay. You'd come out of the shower, and you wouldn't even have to dry off almost. Right.

It's pretty high. You know, water evaporates. Yeah. Do you ever see the story about the monk that really mummified himself at a high altitude? over time and just dehydrated himself on purpose and yeah and when he died he was literally he was already mumma fine no that's the true story um all right one less is that or is that a true story i've seen the pictures okay and it was on the internet so it's got to be oh it's got to be real hey you want a real quick question for moving massage then we'll get yeah yeah yeah no no no yeah

yeah he says uh let's see if is it true that semen has vitamins and protein. Of course. And could you ingest it to survive in a survival situation? Yeah, but how are you going to get gallons of it? That's the problem. I just don't think it's going to be enough. Let's do calories.

You might be able to get enough for an appetizer, but I don't think it's going to get you home, Mary Cowboy. Let's see. Calories in human ejaculate. So there's between 5 and 25 calories per teaspoon. So it's about the same as a teaspoon of sugar. Mm-hmm. And so it says there's not a lot of research to back this up.

That would be easy. I mean, how do they determine calories in anything? You can put it in a thing called a bomb calorimeter, and you can determine that. And so there are ways to do these things. They don't just make up these numbers. And, you know, it says each ejaculation produces one teaspoon. Well, that's actually very robust. Robust.

Yeah, it's like 2.5 to 5mm. So that would be half to one teaspoon, is my knowledge. And 25 calories per teaspoon. So you need 25, let's say in the wild, you would have to have 1,300 calories to survive. Let's say 1,200. So let's find out. Echo, what is 1,300 divided by 2.5? 1,300 divided by 2.5 is 520.

Wait, I fucked that up, didn't I? Wait a minute. We want 25 calories per teaspoon, so we want how many teaspoons there are. And we want 13 calories, so we've got to divide by, yeah, 13-divide by 20, 1,300 divided by 25. 1,300 divided by 25 is 52. Oh, that's 52 teaspoons. So, Echo, how many cups are in 152? 52 teaspoons.

52 teaspoons is about 1.083 cups. Oh, so it's just a cup. Really? Okay, so 1,200 is starvation diet, but it's not a subsistence diet, but you could get the people alone live on 1,200 calories all the time if you watch that show, which is an amazing show, by the way.

Way better, in my opinion, than naked and afraid, unless they would show people actually being naked, which you really don't want to see when they're starving. So a cup a day of semen, yes, you could survive on that for a little while. How about that? That'd be tough. It would be tough. That would be tough.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. There you go. All right. Oh, my gosh. And then here, under here, you know, when you ask a question of Google and it'll say people also ask, the two questions are, do coms have calories? And then the other one is, is ejaculate healthy to consume?

Yeah, there you go. Oh, my gosh. Now, it says here for the most part, yes, the components that make up semen are safe to ingest. That doesn't mean it's healthy to consume it. No. All right. Now, there are some people that are allergic to semen, you know. Even her own semen.

Yeah, yes. And since the genitone urinary tract, the seminal vesicles, the prostate, and the testes are sort of have an immune, what's the barrier. Okay. They won't have the symptoms until they ejaculate. And when they ejaculate, all of a sudden the immune system goes, hey, what the hell is that? and then they'll start to mount an immune response against their own semen. Hmm. And then they get sick.

And then there are women that can have semen allergies as well, and that's for real. But so just use a condom. Don't worry about it. What's wrong with you? All right. Okay. That was a good one. Anything else from the waiting room?

Yeah, real quick last thing. Well, it doesn't have to be last. Well, for right now. Yeah, for now. Diesel Child, Keith from L.A., looks like he had a. Hyidal hernia operation on Friday. Hyattal hernia or inguinal hernia? A hiatal.

Okay, yeah. And he said the pain, thankfully, he's fine to go away. But he said the gas settling in his muscles and joints and post-op is just awful. What? What gas? Well, he refused to stay overnight in the hospital. Oh. And left after surgery doctor said to walk, let's see, walk to get rid of the...

Intestinal gas. So they probably blew him up with gas. But you get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir! As far as pain relief. Yeah, they probably set him some gas in his end up to distint it so they could see when they're doing the height of horny repair, I would think. That's probably what it is.

Maybe, or he just had an ilias. So when they go in, so ilias is when the bowel is paralyzed, and that'll happen whenever you touch the bowel. Sure. You know, the GI tract doesn't like being messed with. No. And so it won't move. You can't move your bowels, but, you know, you're still swallow. air and it makes that's you know it blows up like a balloon you can't get rid of it because it

won't contract and yeah walking will help osteopaths have a maneuver where they put tension on the muscles next to the spine you lay down put your hands under their back and then you find the spine and then you pull toward yourself with a hook like maneuver of the paraspinal muscles the muscles that run up and down next to the spine and sometimes that will help and also chewing gum will help in that situation as well. But yeah, I doubt that they blew, I doubt that they blew gas up into his colon to do this, to do a fundopacation,

which is what that most likely was, where they take a piece of the stomach and wrap it around the top of the stomach and the lower part of the esophagus to just sort of seal that off. Yep. And kink it off so that you get a better barrier to stomach contents going up into the esophagus and causing those hyal hernia symptoms. But I bet you he had a postoperative ilias and he just said, hey, I'm going home, which a lot of more people are doing these days are just like, I'm going home. And I've had some people recently that pulled that.

You know, they wanted them to stay and they just said, F and I'm going home. And you do, most of the time, you're going to be fine. You will miss some post-operative complications that way and end up in worse trouble. But for the most part, I think you're less exposed to, you know, bacteria and stuff that you can, you know, drug-resistant bacteria that can be passed around the hospital. So I think getting out of the hospital earlier is probably a good idea. Back of the day when they did those, they'd be in the hospital for five to seven days. And they got down to three days. then it's overnight, and now, hell, he's leaving right after his procedure.

He says, I'm out here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, um. But I bet that's what happened. Yeah, I probably, so Candice just chimed in. She's got a four-month-old that she's breastfeeding, and her pediatrician, I guess, suggested she starts adding a vitamin called polyv-sall. Yeah. Said it smells terrible, and she hates it.

Are there any alternatives to that? Um, no. I mean, yeah, listen, kids, kids don't give a shit what stuff tastes like. They'll suck down pediolite. Taste it your damn self. The kids pediolite, not the adult pediolite, because it is not great. Terrible. It's not great.

My kid used to eat Indian food, which is quite tasty, by the way. But he would just eat mushroom soup and saug panier and all this stuff. And then when he got older, you know, it was like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not eating that. So I'm hoping you'll come back to it someday. But the polyvysol is a liquid multivitamin supplement. And it also has iron in it. That's one issue. If you're using well water or you're breastfeeding, the kids can have some issues getting some vitamins until they start eating a broader diet.

Okay. And that's up to between you and your pediatrician, whether I agree, whether they give multivitamins to kids who are breastfeeding or not, you know, it's whatever. But if the pediatrician says so, there really isn't an alternative for that, but the kid doesn't care. It stinks to us and we think it's gross. Kids will put, especially at that age, when they're, they've just come out of their fourth trimester. She said it was the kid is four months old. Four months old, yeah. So humans are born three months too soon.

Okay. But if they stayed in the womb, that extra three months, you wouldn't be able to get them out. Too big, yeah. It would be too big to pass through the vaginal canal. So we deliver them, but they really wish that they were still in the womb. That's why we swaddle kids for the first three months. And why when you have a crying baby, if you'll swaddle them tightly and put them on your knee on their side and shake come back and forth and shush into their ear, which, by the way, is part of my, well,

it's Tacey's, one page, baby manual. I took Christopher Carp, what the guy's name is, Carp, his happiest baby on the block and distilled a 300-page book down to one paragraph. That's how useless the rest of that book is, in my opinion. But the reason that that works is because it mimics being. in the uterus for these kids, you know, being swaddled, they feel compressed, which they certainly were in the uterus, and then the shushing sound, they don't hear, like as we sort of mimic the sound of the heart.

What they hear is the blood flow, and it goes, shush, okay, okay, if you do that into a baby's ear when they're crying, they'll almost always stop if you do the other stuff, too. So you're simulating, well, anyway, so this kid is now. completely out of that fourth trimester and is now entering into being a fully fledged human being and it doesn't need those things and breastfeeding is awesome do that as long as you can i find it a little off-putting when i've got a four-year-old still breastfeeding but you know whatever that's that's up to you they're breastfeeding people that think that that's awesome and there's other people that think it's weird.

I, you know, it's certainly naturally, do whatever you want to do. In our society, it is not the norm, I'll put it that way. But that doesn't mean that you have to be normal. I'm not saying that. I don't, I'm not normal. I don't advocate other people to be normal. But anyway, breastfeed as long as you can. Even if it's just a few weeks, some people can't breastfeed so they can pump but still pump.

and breastfeed as long as you can there's no shame if you can't do it or if you can't continue because you've got to get back to work or you can't keep the doors open that there's you know I'm a huge fan of breastfeeding and it's good for the kid

my son back would not be here today or he would be severely impaired if it weren't for the fact that Tacey was breastfeeding him I've told this story before but you know I get off on tangents this is a tangent he at five days

of being on this earth had a fever of 105. That is not normal for a five-day-old. So he ran him to the hospital. He had a respiratory syncytial virus, aka RSV, which an adult causes colds, but in babies particularly can be devastating to them. And as a matter of fact, he was so sick

that some of the nurses were whispering to themselves that, and of course we heard it, that they didn't know if he was going to even make. And so we're, you know, I'm real good in the short term and then I break down. Tacey's real good. She breaks down in the beginning and then she's good in the long term. So we make a good couple. And but we got him in there, but she continued to breastfeed.

Well, it turned out she gave him the RSVE because she had it. And but she had IGA antibodies for respiratory syncytrial virus in her breast milk. And he just sailed right through. They said, listen, if he does make it, this is how they put it to us. If he does make it, he's probably going to have severe asthma and not be able to play sports and all this stuff. And he had none of that. He just sailed right through.

Yeah, he's as healthy as can be. But the medication that he got was breast milk. So breastfeed, yes, as long as you can. All right. And if you can't, no shame in it, but it is helpful if you can't even for a short period of time. So, yeah, sorry. I'm not aware of a alternative to polymers. of isol that smells better, but the kid doesn't care.

Yeah. All right. All right. And once you get them on a good, balanced diet with lots of fruits, vegetables, and other stuff, you can kind of can that. Cool. All right. Yeah, let's do this one.

Hey, Dr. Steve, Dr. Scott, Casey. How are you guys doing? Hey, good. Great, man. Good to hear. So how does sodium, extra sodium in your diet, increased blood pressure. I was reading that it makes your body retain water, which increases blood pressure. But then if you drink a bunch of water, just are really hydrated. Why doesn't

that also increase your blood pressure? I assume that's something to do with the sodium, like making you hold on to water at the cellular level, cell level, but that's why I'm asking. Very good. Well, I give them one of these. Oops. Uh-oh. Yeah, well, shoot, now it's too late. I was going to give you a bill, but now I lost the moment. Yeah, there is a very close relationship between high blood pressure and dietary sodium intake. There are some people that low sodium can actually be a deficit, but we'll forget that very small subset for right now. But reducing dietary sodium not only reduces blood pressure and the incidence of high blood pressure, but it's also associated with a reduction in morbidity and mortality.

In other words, and organ damage and death from cardiovascular diseases. So, you know, the high salt intake and high blood pressure levels are indeed related to water retention. So when you have sodium, what follows it always is water. And then you get increased peripheral resistance. I'm going to have to call her back. increased resistance to blood flow, which also increases blood pressure, and you get alterations in the function of the linings of the blood vessels, and then you get changes in autonomic nervous system, modulation of the cardiovascular system.

Remember, we've talked before about how when you stand up, then the blood vessels constrict to increase blood flow to the brain, that's autonomic nervous system. All of this stuff is involved in sodium metabolism, so it's not just as simple as, well, you have more fluid in your system. Because you're right, if you drink a bunch of water, transiently, your blood volume will increase, but the body is very efficient at peeing out free water when it needs to. It's just hard for it to do when there's a shitload of sodium on board. So it's got to figure out a way to get rid of the sodium. and it will exchange sodium for potassium. It does all kinds of, and for hydrogen and all kinds of other things that make things very complex.

So the end, basically the end note to this is that it is more complex than just a dilution situation. You can't just drink extra water and lower your salt. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So, yeah, so decrease your sodium intake if your primary care provider or cardiologist tells you to. And in general, avoiding an excess of salt is a good thing. All right.

Agreed. Okay, don't let me see. This one says finally some fucking good news for once. Let's do this one. Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Bruno from California. How are you doing? Good. How are you?

Nice, nice. I'm doing good, too. So, I was listening to your episode the other day, and you mentioned the CAR-T cell treatment for cancer? Yes. Let me, yeah, this is the thing where they take out white blood cells, expose them to cancer cells, put them back in, and then have them just go fight cancer. It's just like giving a search dog, a sock of somebody, and say we'll find that, CAR-T-T. We did a story on it. So it was so new because my mom was diagnosed with.

lymphoma last year like the end of last year okay in November I think yeah or not not last year sorry two years ago and the first lymphoma's a cancer of lymph nodes basically treatment they did with chemo and it looked like it was working um so the cancer went into recession I think that's right word yeah that's okay and we know what you meant so it was gone for a couple of months but then I don't want of a checkups it looked like it came back more aggressive okay so this will happen sometimes. Lymphoma very often will go into remission very rapidly with chemo, but then sometimes it will come back.

We call it, you know, the initial sort of, quote-unquote, disappearance of the lymphoma is called remission, and then you're looking for sustained remission, which she did not have. So they changed up their strategy, and they told us about the Carty. treatment, which we had never heard of. But, so she went through the process of getting that treatment. It was a pretty long process overall, but she got it done. It was much easier than the chemo for her. And now the cancer is gone.

I mean, she's still going to do her checkups and stuff, but the cancer is just gone. They couldn't find any more, like, cancer, tumors or killed or anything like that. It's just incredible that we've come this far with medicine and science. Anyway, yeah, I hope this wasn't super long wind. No, no, dude, it's totally worth that. Have a good day. That's awesome. It's awesome.

Congratulations, dude. Okay, so this CAR-T stuff is chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. And it's a way to get these immune cells, which are called T-cells. And they're white blood cells that fight. other cells, particularly cancer, and they change them in the lab so they can find and destroy these cancer cells. That's basically the easiest way. So this is a cell-based gene therapy because it involves altering the genes inside the T-cells

to help them attack the cancer. It's highfalutin stuff. Oh, that. And so this, we'll see more and more of this. I've been kind of touting a form of this for a long time. As a matter of fact, if you go to Dr. Steve.com, click on non-sutoscience cancer therapies. There's an example of a similar treatment to this that they did on a woman with stage four terminal cervical cancer that is walking around today cancer-free because of this. Unbelievable.

So it's amazing to me that this stuff is already on the market. And apparently to some limited ability or a limited amount, it's been on the market for a few years. And I just don't think that it, I think it was still very, you know, associated with just a few places, maybe MD Anderson or the bigger cancer university research centers. Right on. But now you can get it, just get it, looks like a bunch of places. So very cool.

So ask about CAR-T therapy. if, God forbid, you get diagnosed with cancer. Let's do one more, and then we'll get out of here, Dr. Scott. All right, here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve. Amen. Dr. Scott. Amen.

Ms. Matt, Ms. Hey, Ms. Tasey, if you're there. Hey, this is Paul from New York. I have a question related to cholesterol. Okay. I'm a volunteer firefighter on the island, and we're given physicals each year. so I don't really go to a general practitioner, I'm 43 years old, and our physicals are pretty in-depth,

and they do blood work and send us the results of the blood work after the fact. Okay. And for two years in a row, it has shown that cholesterol is being high. Okay. Write these down, Scott. I'm wondering whether it's something I should be concerned about because they're showing the overall cholesterol is 230. Okay.

And that normal is between 100 and 199. But it shows my HDL cholesterol is 86, and normal should be greater than 40, which 86 is. And my LDL cholesterol is 127, and it says it should be less than 130, which it is. Triglycerides are 83. Yeah. VLDL is 17, and cholesterol HDL ratio is 2.7. Did you get all those? All of those numbers fall within the proper range, and yet the overall is $2.30, and I say it's high.

Is this something that I should have looked into or that I should go to a primary care physician about, or is it something that I shouldn't be concerned about? Okay. Thanks a lot. So, all right, Scott, I'm going to put this through a Framingham calculator. Okay. Did he say how old he was? Yeah, 48. He's 48.

Okay, good deal. Thank you. So 48. And his HDL was what? 86. 86. And his total cholesterol? 2.30. 2.0. And he didn't say if he's on hyper, if he's on blood pressure medicine.

I'm assuming he is not. Probably not. So I'll do 120, and I'm assuming he does not smoke. He didn't say that either. Well, and his fireman, he's probably pretty active. Pretty, you know, I'm going to say he doesn't have diabetes. So, let me see, no to that. So his 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease with these numbers, is 4.7%.

Now, let's see what the normal is for a 40. I don't like this calculator. This calculator can kiss my ass. Let me find. Okay, I always said 4.7, right? Yeah, Omni

calculator. I don't like that one. Framingham Cardiac Risk calculator. This is the one I usually use. because it'll tell you compared to your normal. So, okay, 48 years, sorry everybody, 48-year male non-smoker with a total cholesterol of 230 and an HDL of 86. Now, Scott, while I'm doing this, will you take 230 and divide it by 86 and then tell me what the normal or what that number is?

Is it really taking that long? Well, goddamn, I've got to open my fucking phone. Okay, okay, okay, okay. That's fine. Echo, let's 2.6. Okay, thank you. Hell, fucking fire. I'm not sure.

So this calculator, this is why I like this one, just calm. Oh, he's a non-smoker, though. Okay. So this calculator is calculating him at 2.7%. The average for a 48-year-old is 8%. so the reason for that is even though his total cholesterol is elevated his good cholesterol is very high and his risk ratio what did you say 2.1 6 7 2.67 is below 3 so anyone with a risk ratio of 3 or below actually is felt to have a decreased risk of cardiac events even though their total

cholesterol may be elevated all right right on all right so in other words those numbers are not bad right no especially if his diet's pretty good yeah so this is predicated

on him being a non-smoker without hypertension now if he is a smoker his risk is exactly equal to the average 10 year and you want it to be below average so in that case bringing his total cholesterol down

to like 180 would decrease him back to 4.7. Okay. So if he's go smoke, he's got to get that total cholesterol down. But if he is a non-smoker and doesn't have high blood pressure, then he's actually in pretty good shape. Yeah.

All right. Can we talk about just some options if he wants to try to get the number down just a little bit? Yes, yes, yes, of course. We should discuss that. Natural options if it's dietary. You know, certainly changing his foods. And there's been a lot of new research. Maybe we'll talk about next week on the show about Redbeat.

We always say we're no idea. No, no, I'll make a note. I'll make a note. I'll make a note about red meat and the problems that does cause eating red meat over time. And also, but if you have, and we've talked about this, but it's been a long time, but one way that may help lower your serum cholesterol is blood donation. If you can be a blood donor, there has been research on that, and certainly exercise can help lower your cholesterol, which you probably does as a fireman.

You know, and maybe just genetically he's supposed to have a slightly higher than 200 level of, cholesterol. Yeah, possibly. He may have blue eyes and not brown eyes or maybe six foot. Well, you know, people... Six foot one. You know, one of the reasons they looked at the Mediterranean diet was because people were eating more stuff and they, then people thought that they should.

Certain people thought that they should. And they still had low cardiovascular mortality. And so, but they found that olive oil, these mono-unsaturated. fats are actually pretty good for you. So, yeah, donating blood regularly can lower your cholesterol and try to glyceride levels. And the other thing is what I always told people was increasing soluble fiber. So getting some citrus cell, maybe drinking no more than four ounces of red wine. And if you're a teetotaler, I wouldn't tell someone who's sober to drink.

No, no, no. But you could drink four ounces of red grape juice because it's got the same. stuff in it. Exercising, and exercising will bring up your good cholesterol. It may decrease your bad cholesterol, but it definitely will improve your risk ratio. And the other things that Scott said, too, so, so there you go. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, I was afraid he was going to have like some 600, 800, 800 total cholesterol. I know, no, it's great. It's not bad. Not terrible. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't still have a checkup with a primary care provider at 48. You need to start thinking about that. And really, at 48, you're overdue for your first colonoscopy.

So definitely get a primary care provider. But bring those levels with you. Go to find a Framingham risk calculator. Put in your actual numbers, whether you're a smoker or not. And print that out and take it with you to your visit, okay? How's that? Anything else? All right.

You got anything else? No, I think. All right. Well, if I could find our script, we'll get out of here. Okay. Thank you, everyone. for listening to our show today. And if you don't hear your shout out today,

it's because I didn't do it, because Scott's in a hurry and we want to play music. So listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk channel, series XM channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Sunday at 6 p.m. On demand, and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. And 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, and check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbils.net. 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.