Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 519 - The Vagus Title Ever

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Dr Steve, Dr Scott and Tacie discuss: Paxolovid Study Clickbait Pre-pubescent weight training Kettle bell talk Hydration and nutrition in long-duration exercise UFOs, UAPs, SETI and the meaning of life Vagal nerve dysfunction 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 while he’s still cheap! "FLUID!") 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 say to a toilet on its birthday? Happy B-day. I was going to tell you a joke about dirt, but it's beneath us. Why don't you find all you can eat restaurants on piers? Because Fisherman Wharf has. it all down. 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 the period. Crushing my esophagus I've got to bolivide stripping from my nose I've got the leprosy of the heartbound

Exasciating my impetable woes I want to take my brain now 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 doctor from the world famous carnivaletric 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 the traditional chinese medical provider gives me street cred the whack alternative medicine assholes hello dr steve and tacy my partner in all things hello tacy what's up this is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio that was cool tasey

see, by the way, on the radio or the internet, if you have a question that you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider, we can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-7-66-4-3-3-23. That's 347. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or D.R. 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're here with grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your health care

provider. All right, very good. Dr. Scott. Well, check out stuff. Dr.steve.com, stuff.com for all your online shopping needs. And simplyerbils.net, simply herbals.net for Dr. Scott's wacky stuff over there. And patreon.com slash weird medicine for our Patreon show. We have exclusive content there, stuff you can't get anywhere else, lots of tears.

It's not bad. No, I don't mean Tacey makes me cry. There are lots of different levels, aka tears, T-I-E-R-S, right? I do make you cry, though. That is true. There are lots of those kinds of tears, too. But anyway, yep, we have champagne and real pain. Get it?

Well, there you go. Okay. All right. and oh yeah check me out on cameo nobody ever does it but cameo.com slash weird medicine he gets so excited when he gets so I love it and I do I mean I go I do good things on there it's five dollars for our kids call it's right I don't know if it's some it's it's it's under ten dollars I know that so by the time cameo takes their chunk it probably is about five dollars taste you're right I did have some

something that I wanted to talk about, and I don't know where it went to. Let me see. I want to talk about how hot it is in here. It's hot, it's hot, and it's wine, Tom. It's hot, and it's Juan Tom. Okay, well, I wanted to, you know what, we'll do this next time, because it's about no nut November, and I've got a video, and it's not November yet, but I want people to get ready for no nut November, which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

I mean, I had no nut 2021, so, but this will be something I just want to trash pretty good. Okay. Okay, so we'll do it next time. All right, very good. Oh, my God. You know what? I hit that by accident, and it worked perfectly. Did it, though?

Yeah, because we were talking about no nut November. Very good. Well, Dr. Scott, how's simplyerbils.net going? That's Dr. Scott's website. Pretty good. Yeah. Well, you got anything new and interesting there? Nothing new, but that sinus spray is going pretty wild.

It is the, tis the season. Okay, yeah. I meant to bring you some. Maybe I did bring you some. Oh, that'd be great, because last week I was... Yeah, you're miserable. I was a little bit miserable. I'm better today, but we'll see.

I also, on top of having horrible allergies, I have laryngeal dysfunction. Which means that sometimes my vocal cords just clamp down and say, go f yourself or you're not talking for a while. I'm really praying that this does not happen at the roast of Carl and Vitty, September 17th at comedy on the, Jesus, if I do this well there, Comedy at the Carlson on September 17th in Rochester, New York, where I'm going to do my first and last roast taste.

Yeah. First and last. Good. Hmm. I told them, just think of me as Martha Stewart. Because Martha Stewart, when she did her roast, and I can't remember who she was roasting. But she was hilarious. Yes.

And she blew out everyone's expectations. And all she did was she had good riot. and she can read and she you know she she had the right attitude she had the cadence right so I've been watching a lot of roasts and I've got some really good people writing with me I'll say with me because every one of their jokes I've sort of modified because this is a very specific audience you know the people that are there won't be comedy people just coming to see a roast they're coming to see Carl and Vinny get roasted.

Mm-hmm. And therefore, you know, you've got to have some in-jokes that if you're not part of that universe, you just won't know them. So anyway, and I have one joke I'm not going to do, but I'll do it when I get back here that would, I think would be okay, but it might be just a little bit too clean and clever to do. Wouldn't want to do that. I know. Well, my jokes aren't dirty. I don't know. They're funny, but they're,

but this one is, I actually heard, uh, oh, who was the guy? Oh, shit. Well, one of those commentators, uh, that used to be on Sunday morning tell this joke,

but it was, it was hilarious, but I would modify it for this particular audience. But I'll do it when I get back, because I just decided that it's too long. And if, if people, if I lose people's interest during this joke,

it won't be fun but I'll tell it on this show because I can do whatever I want to do people won't necessarily boo at me I do want to say happy birthday to the owner of our network Mr. Cardiff, happy birthday sir. All right

so Dr. Scott we got to do this story Tacey gave me this one Oh cool this is from the New England Journal of Medicine forget the clickbait stuff that you'll read This is the actual study from New England Journal of Medicine, and it's neuraltraver use and severe COVID-19 outcomes during the Omicron surge.

Now, you remember, Omicron was a really highly transmissible version of this asshole virus, but it was we didn't see the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. with that. So you have to remember that when we're talking about this study. So this was, they obtained, and this was a retrospective study, we obtained data for all members of the Clallet Health Services. This was an Israeli study who were 40 years of age or older at the start of the study period and were assessed as being eligible to receive neuraltraver therapy during the Omicron surge. So we know this. Their Meltrovir, Ratonavir, is also known as Paxlevid in the United States. And what they did was they made sure that people qualify that they were at high risk before they did this if they were between 40 and 65.

Or what did I say? Between 40 and older. Okay, they looked at anybody 40 years and older. Okay, they looked at anybody 40 years and older, sorry. So they used this risk score model, and the criteria is you had to have at least two points. So number one, age greater than or equal to 70, gets you two points. So if you're 70 or older, you qualify. If you were 50 to 59, that would remove a point.

If you were 40 to 49, that would remove three points. So if they were unvaccinated or only had a single dose of any vaccine, they got five points. If they were immunosuppressed, they got seven. So if you were, you know, had, or if you'd been hospitalized in the past three years, you got one point for each hospitalization. So let's say you were hospitalized three times for COPD, you know, an exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. and so that would be three points and you have COPD so that would be four points but then you were between 40 and 49

that would remove three points so now you're down to one point you wouldn't qualify for this so the people who qualified for this study were pretty freaking sick right you understand no they're not neither one of them is paying attention to me okay that's all right I'll just keep barreling on you're doing good so thank you thank you

Taking notes. So they looked at 110,000 patients, and of those, only 4% receive this nermatrolvier. Just call it Paxlovir. A capeslovid. Okay. They got 4% received nymatraver during the study period. Or don't. And then among patients 65 years or older, the rate of hospitalization was.

14 cases per 100,000 person days. So the thing is, already the baseline is going to be low as shit. So you're going to have to show a huge effect to show any benefit from this, right? Right. Then, let me see, among treated patients, as compared with 60 cases per 100,000, still low among untreated patients. So if you were 65 or older, there was a significant reduction in, you know, risk of going to the hospital. And the adjusted health ratio for death due to COVID-19 was 0.21 among patients 40 to 64 years of age.

The rate of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 was 15.2 cases per 100,000 among treated patients and 15.8 patients per 100,000 among untreated patients. So they're not saying that this drug, you'll read this, they'll say Paxlovids not effective. And that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is, is that people who were 40 to 64 were at low risk of being admitted to the hospital in the first effing place. Right. Okay. So, yeah, 15 per 100,000 person days, 15.8 if they were untreated in 15.2 if they got the treatment.

and it was not statistically significant. And so they just, so the thing is is that right now, I probably, if I were, if I could go back in time in the Omicron surge, I would say, yeah, if you're in that age group, we don't take anything. Because your risk of going to the hospital in the first place is low. So all the Paxlevitt did was just sort of confirm that, yeah, it's already low. and there's not a whole lot I can do in a situation like that. Yeah, as a drug. As a drug. But I just wondered about the placebo.

They teased out the placebo, just them being given that amount. And the symptoms. Them being given something by their health care provider. And all of a sudden, now they are going to feel better. Right. Because they think they're getting help, yeah. All they looked at that was rate of hospitalization and death. That's a terrible study, Dr. Day.

No, no, no. It's not a terrible study. It's not double-blind placebo. That's right. That's right. Okay. Retrospective. Give yourself a bill.

Get one of those. I've got a study with five people in it today. Yeah. Yeah, we've had a couple of us. Called Bridge. Oh, gee. No, I do. I have a study with five people.

Is that the wristband study? Yeah. Well, let me, we'll do the, let's do the. I'll do it when I want. All right. Oh, by God. And you know what? When I set up the new soundboard, I didn't put Ronnie B on here.

So I don't have, damn it, I'm an idiot. Man, you are one pathetic loser. Okay, so just until next week, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. That's right. Right on. All right. So let's do that one. But this is not a bad study.

This shows that if you're elderly and you're at risk, you should take this stuff. Okay. It really, even in Omicron, it decreased, even with very low rates of hospitalization, it did reduce the rate of hospitalization. Now, these variants, we don't know.

We're always chasing our tail. So if I've got somebody that's high risk, I'm still putting them on this until they say it really doesn't work. You have to. You have to. No, I agree. All right. Let's do this phone call. Here you go, Tase. Hi, Dr. Steve. This is Phil

from Tampa, and I was calling, because That's curious, if you had an opinion one way or the other of using weighted wristbands or ankle bands while walking outside, I usually in the morning before work to try to walk the neighborhood, like a mile and a half or more, a couple days a week. And I was thinking about using some either weighted bands, wrist or leg bands to maybe enhance it a little bit. But I've had some family tell me that it's not a great idea and it can hurt more. And I'm just curious if you have a thought one way or the other. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Well, I think all things being equal, exerting slightly more energy, is worthy.

I mean, you know, boxers will train with heavier gloves and they're going to use. Baseball players swing weighted bets before they. Yeah. Before they bet. Now, if you have, obviously, if you have a muscular skeletal injury, that would preclude you from walking or around with weights on your legs and arms, then I would not recommend it. But if you were healthy and otherwise, you know, cleared for that kind of exercise, I think it would be a good thing.

Tacey, you know a little something about those. I found some information on it, and some of the benefits are boosting the intensity of your workout. Sure. Using weights between one and three pounds can increase the amount of oxygen you breathe by 5 to 15%. Really? It also raises your heart rate 5 to 10 beats per minute. And this was the study that had five people in it?

No, the study that had five people in it were, hold on. Sorry. You could have just said no, and then I would have moved on. Well, but this was talking about weighted wristbands for people who have tremors. Oh, this is interesting. So there are other reasons to wear weighted wristbands other than exercise. Go ahead.

Yeah, I remember when you found those. They looked at five people, and it showed improvement when they wore the weighted wrist cuffs for tremors. Yeah. It took less time to finish a mill. They made fewer spills, and some showed a general decrease in tremor symptoms. Now, did they say what kind of tremors they had? Was it familial? No, they did not.

Familiar tremor or Parkinson's disease, because they're different types of tremors. Oh, yeah. There are intention tremors, and intention tremors happen when you go to do something, and then you start tremoring, like you're reaching for a cup or something like that, and then it starts to shake. And you'll get that with a couple of things. Parkinson's disease is one.

You can get that with certain strokes of the back part of the brain. And then there's sort of this familial genetic tremor that's just where you just tremor all the time. And actually, you know, my My Myrtle character has that. You know, that's where that comes for. Yeah. Yeah, that's what that is. It's a familial tremor in your voice.

Sometimes people, you know, you've got to be specific and Google the types of workouts that you need to, that you can do using risk rights. But it talks about how if you use them while you're walking, it can lead to muscle imbalance as you swing your arms back and forth. That makes sense. You always got to keep your muscles in balance because you don't want. you know, big giant calf muscles and little tiny thigh muscles. It looks stupid. Or the opposite is even dumber looking. You know, and also, you know, it can cause joint and tendon injuries

and the wrist, elbow, shoulders, and neck. One thing I was going to say, Tase, and Scott, you're the professional athlete in this group, is don't use them ballistically. In other words, you don't want jerking movements. You want nice, smooth, low-impact movements with those things. You know, they're great for targeted athletes. exercise if you can't grip a dumbbell it says okay oh well that makes sense scott where are you on all of this well i was going to say i think i think that um for people who don't know scott was

his brother is a professional athlete they played professionally so that's that's good enough for us i turned it down so i could go to school and scott playing college yeah scott played uh you played college yeah division one baseball yeah yeah yeah so uh he could have been a pro i could have been a contender could have been a contend could have been a contend could have been until I blow up my stupid knee two games before the end of my final year. Oh, geez. I hate that school still. But anyway, no, I think this is all wonderful.

You know, the thing I would say is that anytime you have any of these weights past your knee or past your elbow, you do run a real risk of some tenderness injuries in your elbows and your knees both. So I wouldn't do anything heavy, and I certainly wouldn't do a lot of rotational movements. Yes. Keep it all in a very linear fashion. And that way you're really isolating your biceps or your triceps or your quads instead of rotating. Because where I see a lot of injuries, especially weightlifters, is when they're curling. And they're rotating.

Oh, that's hot. Tell them what happens when they do that. Well, they get a little thing called typically it's lateral leprechaunitis or medial leprechaunitis, which would be golfers'ers' elbow or tennis elbow. Give yourself a bill. And that happens really regularly. Which hurts. And it hurts like crazy. And really the best treatment for that is to quit doing it.

in that motion. Yeah. And once you do that, you can get back to it. But I love the, I love the idea of adding just a little bit of that extra weight. You know, I think it increases the aerobic capacity so you're getting in more oxygen. I think it's great. I mean to do that. You know, I walk about two miles just in the hospital when I'm making rounds and stuff.

Maybe I should do that. Put some little weights on your ankles. I'm running up and down the stairs and stuff. And, you know, if it bothers your knees, just put a little weight belt on. Yeah. And just an extra little bit of weight around your. I would do it on my arm. I used to have big old guns now.

I just look like a old man. Simp. Can you see him walking through the, doing this speedwalk? I can't. I can't. You know he'd do that. Oh, I know he would. Oh, when my back is good, which it is right now, I'm hauling.

They can't keep up with me. That's how everybody knew I was sick was when they could, you know, they didn't have to try to run to stay close to me. Because I'm always turning around walking backwards going, come on, come on, come on. Yeah, when you were, when you were scooching. I'm such a nudge. when you're scooching your feet along and walking like you had Parkinson's, that was an issue. Yeah. That was a big issue.

Yeah. It was attractive, though, wasn't it? Thankfully, that's not happening. You loved it? You loved it? He was been half. He was bit halfway over. Yay. That's my new drop. I've got to get a better version of that than that. You are a liar. Actress, go the fuck out.

If you know who that is, you know who it is. If you don't, you're missing out. Watch Love Island, UK, season eight. I'm just telling it's a great thing. I talk like a Hicks talking about kettlebells. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. May I talk about that?

Please, please. I'm just going to tell you, kettlebells. And you're going to get a bunch of hate mail on this. This is Dr. Scott's saying. Yeah, this is, yes, make them all to Dr. Steve at Weird Medicine. But now those kettle bells, those kettle bells have made me more money than any, any gym is made with them. But, you know, they're just, they're usually a little too heavy and a little too dynamic, like you said before, ballistic. And they can cause a lot of overuse injuries for sure.

Yeah. I'm not saying not to do it, but I'm just saying it's, they can be. Do it properly and work up to it. Those guys that do the clean and jerk and stuff, I mean, they work up from smaller weights. Yeah, they've been started at the top. And they have technique. Yeah. And they've got the muscle mass to support their back, particularly when they're doing that.

I don't know how some of them, you know, when they're lifting, you know, three tons or whatever they're lifting, it's just insane. I don't get it. It's amazing to me that the human body can do that. You know, Dr. Steve, I always encourage people to spend as much time stretching and making sure you have good range of motion, making sure there's less tension on those connective tissues, your ligaments and tendons. Yeah. Spend as much time stretching as you do a way lifting. I used to blow it off, and I made a huge mistake doing that. I tore my, you know, gastronomias muscle from trying to run at my age without stretching

and, you know, going straight to running two and three miles without, you know, working up to it and stuff, just thinking I was still 18. Yep. And stretching makes a huge difference. And I will, don't, you know, do your warm up. You have to do your warm up. We've got another question about cool down that's coming. I'll just go ahead and see if I can find that.

I've got it here. Let's do that one since we're on, you know, exercise and sports and stuff. Feels good. Let's do this. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is John from Chicago. Allie. How's it going?

Dr. Scott. Hey. What's up? Hi. Hi. What's up? Hi. Super.

I hope you all are doing good. Yep. Hey, I got a question for you about, so I like going on long hikes and trail running and whatnot. And sometimes I've noticed. you know, when you're out there for a long, long time and you need to eat food and you're stressing your body out, you're on mile like 20 or something. Yeah. I've noticed that.

Certain foods, I don't know, they just don't hit you. Like, for example, I was on a run and my body just, I put a bunch of, you know, some sugary treats and salty stuff in my mouth, and my body was like, I don't want this and just spit it out. But I knew I needed calories. And I'm like, I don't, you know, my stomach body just gave. me that, oh, I'm going to throw up like I'm rejecting it feeling. So what is going on there? Why does the body, even though it knows it needs food and calories?

That's a teleological argument, my friend. The body doesn't actually know anything. That's the problem. But we talk about it that way. So I'm okay working within that model as long as we all understand that. Why does it act like that? Is there something going on? Why is it act so stupid?

Because I say the same thing. You know, my brain is trying to kill me when I'm driving home. It goes to sleep from Norton, Virginia, and it's trying to make me take a nap while I'm driving, so I do understand. Or is it really just a mind-over-matter kind of the thing when you're stressing your body at those kind of crazy extremes? I'll throw in one thing about this where he's talking about, you know, he's on mile 20, and now he's trying to eat something. And the problem is, is that all of your blood flow is directed away from your GI tract when you're on mile 20. And so, you know, putting food in your stomach at that moment can be very problematic for a lot of people because it just can't work it. But Scott, he's really talking about is hitting the wall.

You and Tacey know more about this than I do. Although when our son Liam was long distance running, I worked on some performance enhancing thing. No, I remember that. I do, yeah. Not in an illegal way, but you know, what can he do? before he runs and what can he do after he runs. So, Scott, why don't you talk about hitting the wall and what he can do and why this isn't working?

Well, I kind of explain why he's getting the physical symptoms, but what should he be doing instead? Yeah, well, the first thing, when you're on those long runs and those hikes and stuff, is start early, making sure that you're taking little bits of food as you're moving through and not cramming a bunch, you know, when you get starved or when you get to mile 20. Hygration is key. And when you hit a wall,

hitting the wall in exercise is a really strange feeling. And being able to take a step back, not necessarily physically, but mentally from that wall and figuring out how you're going to get over it. Do you know the German term for hitting the wall? Dermann mit dermmer. No, I didn't know that. It means the man with the hammer. That's what it feels like.

It is. It's just like hammer. It's like you don't think you can go through. But you know, you hear of the Navy, you read those books on the Navy stills, the Navy stills talking about how you have. And, you know, you've only reached, what, 10% or 20% of your maximum, and you just have to keep pushing through it. And all you can do is just continue to stay hydrated, which is more importantly. And, you know, some of those drinks, like the Gatorade's power agents that have have some nutrients to keep him moving. Yeah.

A lot of, when you're doing endurance stuff and you hit the wall, it's because, well, the hypothesis is, is because. you have run out of carbohydrate stores. Oh, okay. So you store glycogen, which is basically just a polycarbohydrate. It's, you know, polygloose. You take a bunch of glucose molecules and they stitch them together with lots of different connections. So it just sort of makes a starch mass and you can store glycogen in your liver and in muscle tissue. And when it runs out, now you have to start burning other things.

They either have to burn protein or fat. Gotcha. A lot of these runners don't have a lot of fat. No. And so they don't have anything to burn. And I'm reading here that the typical untrained individual like me on an average diet can store about 380 grams of glycogen. That's like 1,500 calories. So when you've burned through that 1,500 calories, and chemical energy is very efficient,

but you can still, when you're running, you can burn through it pretty fast. then it's gone, you know. And so if you're running, you can do 800 kilocalories per hour. So that would be two hours, and then boom, you're done. And you've got to replenish those glycogen stores through exercise, or, you know, they're going to be completely depleted. And at that point, you'll start cramping up and you just can't do anymore. And so carbohydrate loading is what,

endurance people will do. Now, if you're not doing endurance, you shouldn't have to do this, but you can do this equivalent thing if you're just hiking by, you know, taking in small amounts of carbohydrate-laden, you know, rehydration drinks like Dr. Scott's talking about. Yeah, because the worst thing you can do, well, not the worst thing you can do, the worst thing you do is, you know, break your leg on a ditch out in the middle of the Appalachian Trail. Nobody comes along for two weeks.

So that would be the worst thing. That would be very, yeah. One of the things that people do that is a mistake is if it's hot out and they're sweating and then they're replacing and then pissing and then they're replacing that with free water. In other words, just plain water. Because now you are excreting sodium through sweat and through urine and stuff and then you're drinking free water. You're not replacing it. Right.

So you do want to replace it. And there are several rehydration solutions out there that you can. take with you. Gatorade's decent for people who aren't elite athletes and stuff like that. But if you're doing endurance running like our kid did, you know, carbohydrate loading is important to make sure that you're storing enough glycogen so that you don't hit the wall. And then consuming food or drinks containing carbohydrates during the exercise, it's a must for long distances. And, you know, I'm looking. at this, it says that Tour de France competitors

receive 50% of their daily caloric intake from on the bike supplements. Wow. That's crazy. I've got a friend of mine who does the 50 mile and 100 mile runs. That's stupid. Yeah, it's insane. I'll ask him, though.

Well, that's because you're an idiot. I'm going to ask Kim if he's trained himself to be able to eat and tolerate food while he's running. Because that would be something else. I wonder if you work through it, I guess you could probably eventually train yourself. Yeah, if you do small amounts, you could train your body to do that.

How many calories are these people taken in that do these? Lord, he eats a ton. I don't know. I mean, I bet. The funny thing is, when I used to do competitive archery, my mentor was a guy that was the 10-time indoor champion. And he was my best friend at the time where you'd go to these things. And he would always say, oh, no, we got a carboload. And so they have these things, the indoor championships be in Vegas.

And they had all these buffets. And he would get all this pasta and potatoes and stuff. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm supposed to do this too. And so I did. And then later on when I started studying this, it was like, this complete horseshit. He just wanted to eat a lot because that kind of competition does not require. You're not going to hit, you're not going to run out of glycopy. kitchen stores not there particularly when you're 511 you weigh 350 pounds you know you're going to be

fine i'm afraid it sounds like he was on his well on his way to type 2 diabetes yeah yeah still one of the greatest people i ever that's cool yeah hey talk like he's got a question that would be amy from kentucky sweet amy from yeah that's right she's from i don't know how sweet she is that's your saying that no she's not be sweet if she's from she's from paduca um so she's want to know about is, is it okay for preteens to lift weights within a reasonable amount of weights? That's a good question. And I've got some answers. Go ahead.

Yeah, if you got the answer, I have an answer, but I want to hear yours. Well, first of all, I would absolutely make sure that whoever is teaching your preteen to lift weights knows what they're doing. You don't want to lift it too much because it can cause a whole lot more injuries, especially if they sell growth plates. Yep, yep. And if they've got, if they've not, give yourself a bill. Maybe a little different for females if they've grown and they're not growing anymore, but I would absolutely be super cautious. It's not the age, it's the puberal stage.

Well, that's what, yeah, I'm sorry for them. But I guess, just suggesting women. You raise that point because women tend to mature, you know, puberty. I mean, they go through puberty at a younger age than men do. And they could probably tolerate weightlifting a little better. But I will tell you this from experience. What I see is a lot of kids is they go through elementary school, middle school, high school, lifting way too heavy weights. They get injuries, and I'm, and I treat them like with those same injuries for their entire life.

And you do too. And we see the same thing. So I would say focus on stretching, focus on range of motion. If you've got a kid that has any kind of limitations in range of motion, they're at a really high risk for long-term injury. Yeah, work on super focused on. They're so limber than they want to maintain that. I mean, if I do yoga now, I look like the biggest dofus. And by the way, if you're the same as me, that's okay.

You still get the same benefit from yoga as the people that do the highfalutin moves and stuff, as long as you try to attain the pose. So I don't want to chase people away. But I look idiotic because I just let myself get so stiff. Yep. And, uh, since a, since a joiner who's been on this show several times had a, uh, this leg stretching thing. And it's a machine and you, and you sit on it and it spreads your legs.

And I could go, you know, the kids could do 90, 180 degrees. Yeah. And I was lucky to get, you know, 40, 60 degrees sometimes. Just enough, just enough to take a link. Oh God, it hurts right in there. Just enough to pee. I just wonder if at my age, I could. if I did it for a year, could I really make some progress with that, or am I just done?

There's absolutely, I believe, unless you've got some kind of strange autoimmune disorder, musculoskeletal disorder, that if you did it properly, really slowly, 20% of max stretch for greater than two minutes, let those muscle fibers get long, greater than two minutes for each of these stretches. Research has shown those muscle. muscle fibers will turn loose. So that gives you a chance for all that to stretch. And then if you really want to get fancy up to a 30 minutes non-loaded stretch to stretch fascia. Yeah.

Because fascia does not is not obviously as well vascularized as muscles. But fascia will stretch too. It just takes longer to stretch. Explain what fascia is for people because they think you're saying fascist. Oh, fascist, no, no. That would be fascist if I said that. but fascia is not oh I just lost a bail

come on man I just lost it but fascia is the connector tissue that keeps everything in your body in place right keeps your organs in place it keeps your muscles

where they're supposed to be it keeps everything kind of smoothing and gliding as it's supposed to so yeah and it's the stuff like if you have a chicken breast and you know

you're gonna eat chicken for dinner and you peel that little that little silver piece of skin off of the muscle that's what it is yeah that's yeah The facial. All right, where are we?

Who knows? Oh, yeah. So concentrate on stretching and endurance with pre-pubertal kids, and I would not recommend bodybuilding, muscle, attempting to get huge muscles in a pre-pubertal kid. Now, there may be some people that would argue with that, but that's the safest way to go. There may be ways to do it, but, you know,

that would require an elite train. and stuff like that. And I don't even think it's, it makes sense to do it. But anyway, all right. Okay, do-dokey. You want to just do a weird one? Sure. Okay, let's do this one.

Hey, Doc. This is Jack Zim from Patreon. I listened to the show. Hey, Jack. I asked you medical questions before, but I was listening to the exam room with Coomia and made me think you were talking. What he's talking about is our Patreon. In patreon.com slash weird medicine. Ooh.

And we had the troika of Opian Anthony. We had Greg Hughes, the actor who played Opie on the Opin Anthony show, Jim Norton, and then we had Anthony Coomia. That's what he's talking about. About other life in the galaxy. And I was really curious about if you're from the Carolina's what you think of Stephen Greer and all that. contacting UFO stuff and how we can basically do it ourselves and whether you think that's BS or not. I know you're like a logical fact-based guy, but I think it'd be really interesting to hear like a couple in-depth shows about what you think of, just all this UFO stuff that's been coming out.

And even the Prometheus-type theory, how our planet was seeded. You know, coming from a guy like you who's very intelligent, I think that'd be interesting. But take care, Doc. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so Stephen Greer, he's a UFologist, and he founded this thing called the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is C-SETI, which is not to be. confused with SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is the, okay, so I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but anyway, he saw a UFO when he was a kid.

He is a, and this is not to discredit him at all, he's trained as a transcendental meditation teacher, nothing wrong with that. I think that's awesome. And he has an MD degree from James H. Quillen College of Medicine. East Tennessee University in 1987, which makes me think that I may have been his, one of his residence, which is interesting because I was clinical instructor at that place back in that time. So that's very interesting.

I would love to talk to this guy. I am fascinated. I was fascinated in UFOs when I was a kid, and then I just got disappointed because it's always He's like, oh, well, we got this great picture, we got this picture, we got this picture. And there's, you know, no aliens on the White House lawn or the Kremlin lawn or, you know, in the forbidden city. No evidence. Everything is, oh, it's, you know, covered up and all this stuff. And I just got frustrated with it.

It's, look, if it's real, then I just can't, I can't. I just can't do it until it's demonstrated to me that it's not real. I mean, that it is real. I got a habit because I'm not going to be chasing this shit anymore because then I'm like a flat earther or a conspiracy person or whatever. You know, I just can't do it. That's how I feel. Good for him. Hope he chases it down and figures it out and then reveals the truth to the world.

The thing that interests me is that either way, it is an astounding outcome. So let's concentrate for a section, a second, Jesus, on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So they do this in multiple ways, but it's mostly looking at the sky with radio telescopes and listening, looking for broadcasts or information that would have to come from an intelligence source. You could find a Dyson sphere through optical or radio or infrared astronomy, which a Dyson sphere is where you have a star that has been co-opted by a super intelligent, super technologically advanced species that has surrounded a star with a sphere and are taking all the energy. He just put a giant solar panel at the distance between the sun and the earth, right? And then just put a solar panel around that whole thing in a sphere. And that will radiate, it won't be perfect, so it would radiate infrared, but we wouldn't see any light from it. And so those kinds of things, we could look for those things.

That would be a very distinct signature that there is, you know, intelligent life there. we had a star that had a thing going around it that we couldn't see it but we could detect it through dimming of the light of the star and it didn't look like a regular planet people were proposing perhaps it was a Dyson sphere under construction but then it turned out it's probably just dust from a planet that broke up and it's still circling the star and it's all spread out so the thing that boggles my mind is if we find intelligence out there, that's going to be an outstanding and insanely important thing for us to know. Because when you have one species that has intelligence, you know something about that one species. But when you have two, now you start to know stuff.

It's like the first person that figured out what an antibody looked like, the molecular structure, they knew something. But when they did the second one, they knew everything because now you could see what was the same and what was different. And all the stuff that's the same is the same and all the stuff that's different is where all the cool stuff happens. So that's when they start learning. It's the same thing with intelligent species. What's the same?

Did they evolve eyes independently the way we did from octopi? We don't have any relation to octopi, but we have the same fucking eye construction. you know so stuff like that there are certain numbers that we can use to communicate with them that will tell them that we're intelligent one over 137 is one of those that is the fine structure constant it's constant across the universe and it doesn't have units so it will be the same for an alien species as it is for us and anybody else there's no units so if you know how to count and you can count to 137 and you know anything about how the atomic structure works, you will know that number. So, but we have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for 50 odd years now. Nothing. Nothing. You know, and that starts people wondering about the rare earth hypothesis.

You know, is it possible that in the observable universe, we're the only thing here? It seems impossible to look at Andromeda Galaxy and see that there's just, Just so many stars in that thing that it's unbelievable. You can't, and it's completely vacant, you know, devoid of life. It seems completely impossible, but then where are they? So until we find life somewhere else, we can only assume things about it. You know, it will seem to make sense to us, but we can't really make a claim about it. It's just like I was talking about Liam the other day.

He's taken this class on philosophy of science. One of the things in philosophy of science is just, you know, is empiricism. And one of the things you could say, there are no white crows. That could be your hypothesis. And you count every crow that goes by and every crow is black. No white crows, no white crows, no white crows.

But seeing, you see 100,000 black crows, it doesn't prove your hypothesis. It just makes it more likely. But one white crow will disprove your hypothesis, right? So we, every day that goes by that we don't find an intelligent species in the universe makes it less likely that they're there. But all we have to do is find one to disprove the hypothesis that we're alone. So now when it comes to UFOs, how are they getting here? They would have to have either an incredibly long lifespan so that it doesn't make, they don't care that it takes,

them 100,000 years to get here from the other side of the galaxy, traveling near the speed of light to them, it would just be almost instantaneous. Or they would have to have warp drive, something that we've posited could be real, but it's got to have things like negative energy and negative matter and things we don't know anything how to create those, we don't even know if they exist. So they would have to have that, or they have to have the ability to open up interdimensional doors. Like, I'm reading a book now called the Fall of

Hyperion, which is written tasty by the guy that did The Terror. Remember the Terror is such a great miniseries. But anyway, about the guys that got trapped in the Northwest Passage for like four years and they went out of their

gourds because they're canned foods, which they did bring enough, were sealed with lead and they all got lead poisoning and stuff. But anyway, in this book they have these doorways that you can just walk through and you go from one planet to another

and it's no big deal we'd have to have something like that but how in the hell do you make something like that and how do you compensate for this planet's traveling at this speed and the one you're walking through is traveling at 20,000 miles per second compared to you

how do you adjust from all the you know how do you make those things work so that's inconceivable to us But Arthur Clark said that any sufficiently advanced technology would look to us as if it were magic. And think about that. It makes sense. If you took my wristwatch back in time and could somehow still make it work and showed it to Galileo, he would say, oh, this is a wizard, you know, and you would be burned at the stake. So anyway, so it's very interesting.

I want it to be true. Right now, I can't, I just can't worry about it. I just have to wake up every day saying, look at the newspapers. Did they find intelligent life in the universe yet? And the answer is so far in my life has been no. So I just move on with my day. That's the only way I can deal with it. Tacey, do you even give a shit?

No, I don't care about space nor robots. Yep. Well, robots. Well, okay, you're so funny. Except for your Zumba. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and dolphin. And what?

Dolphin. Dolphin, what's that? Is that like a sex toy? Don't you have your dolphin, your pool vacuum? Oh, we call that the booger. Yeah, we call it that. That's Stacy's name for it. I do love the booger.

I love mine, too. All right. Well, we've got a little bit left to go. Here, you want to do one on Iridwell Bell or Metamusel and Flatul. Let's do Edo well Did we do post-exercise resuscitation?

Did we finish that? No. No. Okay. You kind of went off on a tangent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. So one thing

I learned was that chocolate milk is just as good as muscle milk when you get done. The muscle milk people will curse at me. But I had talked to our friend Shatai

and Richard David Smith that are the the creators of hyperphysics, it's H-Y-P-E-R-F-I-Z-I-C-S, which is an energy drink for nerds. And you can just Google it. And they produced this stuff,

and I had talked to them at one point about having a pre-exercised drink and a post-exercise drink. And some of the research I found was that arginine supplementation, arginine is an amino acid that increases nitric, no, yeah, nitric oxide.

in the bloodstream would be possibly performance enhancing, particularly for elite athletes. And if you increase nitric oxide, you're dilating blood vessels and you're getting more blood flow to muscle tissue. And so using that as a pre, and then when you're done, what you want is protein and electrolytes and fluid.

Right. And coming up with something like that, You know, because you want to be able to rebuild that muscle. There's some data that creatine is effective for that as well. So, you know, we were trying to come up with a formula that would, you know, this is your pre-stuff. Now you go run, and then this is the stuff you drink post. But you can do it on your own. And anybody that's interested in that, I can send them what I found in my research.

Anyway, all right. Anything else that you have for post-exercise resuscitation, Dr. Scott? post-exercise resuscitation, stretch then, too. Stretch, stretch. Before and after. Is that enough of a cool down? I would stretch. I wouldn't even worry about stretching beforehand.

I'd just stretch after. What? Just double stretch. Research is shown that stretching beforehand does not give you near the benefits of stretching afterwards. But you still need to stretch beforehand, though. You can do some muscle warmer uppers. So you just said that.

Muscle warmer uppers. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I do muscle warmer uppers, but stretch later. Okay. Yep. All right. That's Dr. Scott saying that. Yep.

All right, here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve, just a really quick question. Lately, on the Internet, they say that chiropracting is a little bit of a scam, that there's no real medical. Just lately, they've said that. I mean, I've seen that for my whole career. Or it's just. I don't agree with that.

Just want to hear what your opinion. Okay, so we're running a little bit low on time, but I have no problem with chiropractic. when the data shows that when they stay in their lane, which is low back pain, that their treatments can be very effective. Yes. And there's lots of data on that.

When I have problems is when you get the DC after your name, if you start saying, well, I can also manipulate the cancer out of your bloodstream or I can do these kinds of things, then I have a problem with it. For your sinus infection, I'm going to adjust your ear so I can make your sinus. Yeah, it's like lots of things are associated with the spine, but not everything, guys. I mean, and we used to have a chiropractor on the show on a regular basis, Dr. Kay, she's no longer with us.

And she would say the same thing. She's brilliant. Yeah. And she was off. Yeah, she was wonderful. And my chiropractor, I have a chiropractor. I went to when I had the worst of my back pain, and he took one look at my x-ray. I went, dude, I can't help you.

And I respected that. Absolutely. Now, that's the real deal. So, and most of the chiropractors that I know will tell you the same thing. What about the popping of the neck? Yeah, that's not good. Well, that's what happens is. I mean, I had a friend who had a stroke after a half.

Right, that was what I was going to say. Every once in a while, you can knock a plaque loose or you can actually. Interveteral artery. Yep, yep. You can actually cut off an artery or you can cause. a tear in an artery that goes to the brain. It is extremely rare. Chiropractors did this stuff for ages.

And, you know, there were... And osteopaths. And osteopaths as well. That's right. And I would use to do it because it makes you feel better. But then I read the, you know, some of these case reports. And I was like, oh, God, I'm not going to do that anymore. But there are other ways to adjust the neck and the spine without doing those crankings anymore.

And the chiropractors have machines now. They've got thumpers. They've got all kinds of stuff that doesn't much much more channel. They've got activators. And sometimes just a simple, simple, really simple traction. The simple turning into the side of the sound can actually adjust it without all the crazy stuff. They have some good techniques that are very, some almost merging more toward physical therapy now than it used to. Yeah, agreed.

You know, that's the whole myth of the chiropractor going, you know, and cracking your back and all that stuff. So I think they're fine. If you find one that does their thing and they're cool about it, then, yeah, I don't have a problem with it. So, Dr. Scott, before we go, you got any other questions for us? Hey, I do. Mick was asking, how would Vegas nerve dysfunction be diagnosed and treated? So I guess Mick is having some symptoms like erratic sweating, some GI dismotility, lots of nasal secretions, and a lot of fatigue. Is that what he's saying?

Is that what he's saying? Yeah, right here. Yeah. okay and um i mean fatigue yeah the the thing that i would be interested in who diagnosed that right because normally what we'll see when the vagal nerves so the vagal nerve is one of the major nerve trunks that goes from the brain down through the body and uh it when someone faints because they got scared or something that is a we call that a vaso vagal uh syncopal episode which basically means the vagus nerve wasn't sending the proper signals to the circulatory system

to clamp down and keep blood pressure going to the brain and it fails and then the blood pressure drops in the brain and the blood rushes out of the brain and then you faint so the vagus nerve does all kinds of stuff as a matter of fact we can stimulate a a branch of the vagus nerve in the ear and you can do and when you stimulate that it can decrease pain in other

in remote parts of the body so the vagus nerve is a very important nerve it does a lot of things when I see people with vagal nerve dysfunction they either have low heart rate

or fast heart rate that's the biggest thing that I see you know and with low heart rate we'll call that Bradycardia and fast heart rate tackycardia and

And, you know, but the vagus nerve can also affect digestion, breathing, and then coughing, sneezing, swallowing, and that kind of stuff. So I would be very interested to know who diagnosed this and what they're thinking about doing about it. You know, there are parts of the vagus nerve that go to what we call somatic components, which are sensations in the skin and the muscles. and then you've got the visceral components which go to the organs. And anyway, you got anything on this one? Well, I was just going to say that we actually do vagus nerve stimulation through the ears with electrical, with needles and electrical stimulation for pain. But it's for pain, though.

That's for the somatic stuff. I'm not aware that it does anything for the visceral stuff. Well, and there's actually a Vegas nerve stimulator. It almost looks like a taser, believe, don't you, do it to yourself on a neck. No, and that's true, and it looks like a taser, but they actually use that for headaches and migraines. But as far as stimulating, the visceral component, like the abdomen,

you know, I don't know. I don't know. I would try the ears first. You know, I don't know that implanting a vagus nerve stimulator would be my first choice. Yeah, I mean, they use that for like bad cases. Seizures and depression and stuff. Now, let's just say that he had nausea, and the reason that he had nausea was because he had what we call gastroporesis, which is basically low-functioning stomach, and that was caused by the vagus nerve. Then they could put a gastric stimulator, basically a gastric pacemaker, in the stomach to take the place of what the vagus nerve is supposed to be doing, and then it will contract normally.

Well, not normally, but it'll contract better than it is. And I just wonder what caused this in him. Well, he said it's almost an exclusionary diagnosis. Yes. And he said that they're almost dead, and he's just trying to find some answers. The one thing he does have is the tachycardia. He does. Yeah, so he's tacking.

So he's got a fast heart rate. Well, that's treatable. Yeah. And it may be, there may be some other underlying. Usually with medication. So one thing I want to know is does he have a gag? reflex. So if you don't have a gag reflex, that's indicative of vagal nerve dysfunction because the vagus nerve does control the gag reflex. You can look at, well, yeah, obviously a heart rate

blood pressure and cardiovascular response to exercise. So if they haven't done a stress test or one of the things they could do if he's feigning and stuff too is do a thing. called a tilt table test. This is a fun test. Oh, yeah. They basically put you on this table. It's like a funhouse thing. It's like a tilt-a-war fun-house and they strap you to it and now they start tilting you around and then they see if you

faint and what do they have to do to get you to come back and what positions and how long can you stand them and all that kind of stuff. And that will give you some idea of the autonomic function of the body and also the vagal nerve function. So anyway, yeah, it's a tough

one. Because the vagus nerve, controls so many things, you have to, you know, it's very difficult sometimes to pin down where the problem is. Well, anyway, feel free to email me, and I can send you some more information on this and let us know what kind of testing they have done and maybe what they haven't done. If it's just your primary care, trying to do this on their own, maybe time for a specialty consultation. And I can send him some links to on, yeah, Vegas Nervistam.

Email us. Just go to a Dr. Steve. common click contact and just ignore the warnings, you know, that says don't send medical questions. That's just for the riffraff. Yep, the trouble makers. You know, people who aren't actual listeners. All right.

Well, listen, thanks, Dr. Scott. Thanks, Tacey. And thank you for your research on the arm weights, Tays. We're going to put you to work more often because that was very interesting. But on payroll. I want some wine. Thanks to everyone who's made the show happen over the years. Has been and continues to be the most fun I've had in long, long, long,

time and 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 other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. And thanks to our listeners whose voicemail on topic ideas make this job very easy. And thanks to my niece Holly and her boyfriend, who they were about 80% of the shoutouts at the end. And I just, Tacey started giving me shit about it. And then I'm like, oh, God, maybe I'm doing too much.

So anyway, but thank, well, it's because I haven't heard from her since we, I eliminated from the show. I used to always hear from her after every show. Oh, no. She and I were raised like brother and sister. So, yeah, so thank you, Holly, for your continued support of the show. And I go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules, podcasts, other crap. Don't forget Dr. Scott's website at simply herbals.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. Bye. Man, you are one pathetic loser. Thank you.