Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 529 - Digging for Dementia

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

Dr Steve and crew discuss: 1. Huntington’s disease treatment target found 2. Nose picking and Alzheimer's 3. How much saliva is made daily? 4. Does a mixer get you drunk faster? 5. Jim and Sam question about Pet Sounds 6. Wheezing and other breath sounds 7. Gout vs Pseudogout 8. Prediabetes home treatments? 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!) Weird Medicine: The Podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp: betterhelp.com/medicine (Give online therapy a try and get on your way to being your best self!) 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!) Most importantly! 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 did the tortilla chip say to the cheese? It's nacho business. Why did the farmer trade cow manure for goat poop? It was a dung deal. Why was the math teacher such a good dancer? She had algorithm. 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 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 subalibes stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbells,

exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out and blasted with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave, I want a magic pill. Oh, my ailments, the health equivalent to 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 a requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve.

From the world famous Carter Electric Network Studios, it's weird medicine, the first and still only on the censored medical show and the history of broadcast radio. And now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little panel, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese. Medicine provider gives me street cred with the weird or alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Doc Steve. And we've got Tacey, my partner in all things. Hello, Tacey.

Hello. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio, the Internet, or the Internet. If you have a question that you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider, or if you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347. 766, 4,33. That's 347. Yeah, give us a follow at Weird Medicine. on Twitter or at D.R. Scott W.M and 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 here with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking over with your health care provider. All right, very good. All right, Dr. Scott, what the hell? I like it. What the hell? I should get that drop. What the hell? All right. I like it. All right. Check out Dr. Scott. Scott's website, it's simply herbals.net. Don't forget to go to stuff.doctorsteve.com.

That's stuff. dot, dr. steve.com for all of your weird medicine and Amazon needs. And check out, oh, if you want, oh, look, it is the season, right? So if you go to stuff.com, you can go straight through to Amazon.

But you could scroll down, and if you have a guitarist or a bassist in your entourage and you want to buy them an inexpensive gift, but it's cool. A-F. Get them the Rodey guitar tuner. It's robotic tuner. You just hold it up to the key and then pluck the string and the dang thing will spin it. It'll also string your guitar for you

or unstring it. So it's pretty neat. So check that out. It's stuff. dot, Dr. Steve.com. Or if you want to go there directly, it's rody-R-O-A-D-I-E dot-com. Check out Dr. Scott's website as I said, it's simplyerbils.net. And check us out at patreon.com slash weird medicine. I think we're going to have some fun over there, do some slightly different things.

I'm going to try to do a live stream one of these nights just to test it tasty. I've got some new software. Okay. If that works, we'll do that. Okay. And then if you want me to say fluid to your mama for Christmas,

then, or Kwanza or Hanukkah or any other holiday, or just for the hell of it, go to cameo.com slash weird medicines. Cheap as hell. I just do it for fun. It helps buy me

ham radio stuff. That's all that. That goes into a fund and all ham radio purchases come out of that. And I'm really wanting this antenna. So if you guys would do some cameos, I'm just kidding.

I need some new finals for my transmitter, don't you know. All right. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. That's simplyerbils. and I didn't want to say Happy birthday to our

network founder, Carter Follick, it's his birthday today. It is not. It is not. Most certainly is. No, it's not. All those other times that I said it was his birthday. And that's what you've said all those other times. I was just kidding. You're a big fat liar. Now I'm telling the truth.

All right, you got any medical questions, Dr. Scott? No. You have some articles, though, that you want to do. I do have some articles. There's one that I'm very interested in about a chronic illness that we have no really legit treatment for right now. And that is Huntington's Correa. So, a goal, my friend. Yes.

So cellular housekeeping process implicated in fatal neurological disorder. Okay. So neurons that made from Huntington's disease patients in skin cells shed light on some cognitive decline. And as you said, Huntington's is a devastating. brain disease that is genetic passed down through that's why we don't

screen for it because we don't have a treatment for it so if you're going to screen for it you're just telling people well you're going to get it they live their whole life wondering when the when it's going to start the sort of Damocles is going to

so it is a correiform illness which means it's a movement disorder and they get involuntary jerking or writhing movements and the writhing movements. The people who are watching us on camera can see it, but it's kind of rhythmic, writhing. Like, if you were making, how could I explain it? Like, let's take your right arm and make it look like a snake on the ocean, you know, up and down in the surf and side to side

and up and down and round around. That's what Korea is. Okay. And they get rigidity, muscle contracture, and all kinds of problems. And it is, um, ultimately. fatal. And it is rare, fewer than 200,000 U.S. cases per year, but still, you know, that's out of 350 million people, let's say, what, half of

those are adults. It's still a lot of people. It's a lot of people. And devastating to families. Oh, absolutely. Typically, it does wipe out a couple in a family. Yep. But it looks like

at the Washington University School in St. Louis, or School of Medicine in St. Louis, they're doing some research on on what exactly is going on and how possibly the aging triggers a loss of, you know, crucial process of

the dying process of these cells in the brain. Okay. So here's the thing. One of the reasons we can't fix it is we don't know what causes it. I mean, we know it's a genetic disorder. We know what gene it is. But just like ALS

or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is recently, they sort of found the mechanism for it. Once we know the mechanism, we can target it with drugs or other treatments. So we need to know what the mechanism is. So go ahead. Well, and it's talking about it does, the Huntington's disease destroys a specific type of brain cells called or medium spiny neurons, which do cause the involuntary muscle movements. So they're uncontrolled involuntary muscle movements.

Yeah, I think what they actually do, those neurons actually, um, inhibit those movements. The movements are always there, but they're inhibiting them. Gotcha. When you take them away, then they're not inhibiting them anymore. And typically, they show significant cognitive decline. And typically, once you get to diagnosis, it's kind of a maximum 20 years. 20 years?

Yeah, that's what they say live about 20 years after the signs of the disease that first appear. Oh, okay. First period. Yeah, I'm not saying that after they progress. Okay. So it's pretty incredible. So what does this story tell you? Well, I'm scrolling down to it.

Oh, for a fun saying. Hey, you're the one of that. I'll temporize. So it's an autosomal dominant disorder, which means that you only have to have one copy. So if you have, okay, let's do Big H, Little H. So you have someone that has Big H little H, meaning that they carry the copy, but they have Huntington's disease. Right.

And they make, you look, while I'm talking to the, you look up your thing when I'm not educating your math is correct. Okay, well, that's fine. And then they marry somebody that's Little H, Little Age. Gotcha. Okay. So the first kid will be Big H, Little H, the second, or, you know, there's this two by two box.

You'll have Big H, Little H, Big H, Little H, and then on the next two boxes will be Little H, Little H, Little H, Little H, Little H, So that means 50% of their kids, you know, the kids have a one in two chance of carrying the gene and therefore having Huntington's Korea. So that's a tough one. A lot of those people decide not to have children because, you know, we don't have a treatment yet. Now you could say, well, surely to God in, you know, 30 years will have a treatment for it. But, you know, people have been saying that for a long time. So what did you find out?

Well, so what they did, they did from what I've gotten so far down this, it's a big article, but they compared older people who had gotten Huntington's with younger people. And what they hypothesized is there has to be some sort of a change as these kids' age and growing to older people. And what they found is that if they can, and the bottom one is what they're doing with this is they're going to start doing genetic alterations to these messenger RNA cells. Oh, oh, must have your name. That hopefully will stop the changing of these cells that develop into this Huntington's disease.

So how are they going to do this? By modeling different stages of disease across the lifespan, they identify roles in disease onset. Hell, I'm reading as fast as I can, I swear. That's okay. But this is not like a normal article because it doesn't have a conclusion on here, So normally I get down the conclusion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You normally could just read the abstract.

Yep. And pray that it reflects what's in the article. Exactly. So it's caused by an expansion of these sort of things called cytosine adenine-guanine repeats. And what those are, that's genetic material that expand, you know, I guess most of us may know that you've got, you know, four nucleotide bases that form the code that makes DNA and RNA, right? And then the only difference is there's Euricill instead of one of them in the RNA. Anyway, you, and it's been a long time, so if I took that, so the geneticists are screaming at

their radio, it's fine. Both of them. Yes. Right. Or one. If there are some student in high school that just took this. But anyway, these things code for all of our proteins. And if you ever want to see something really cool,

Google, sorry, go to YouTube and search for 3D animation of transcription, MRNA. It's the most amazing thing you've ever seen. These little tiny machines in all of our cells that are just stamping out proteins with this crazy mechanism. Anyway, I did. go over that mechanism on our YouTube channel once. You could search there for that if you want to see it. So anyway, you can get these expansions of these repeats

where these three signals will repeat endlessly. And what it does is it just screws up the protein generation that that gene is supposed to be coding for and you get a malformed protein or you get no protein at all. and then this happened. And I read a little further on it. And what they're doing is they're trying to interrupt that initial process so that maybe they can expansion.

Yeah, they can turn it off so that it doesn't expand. Yeah. It doesn't develop into this full-blown disease. Well, that'd be awesome. Yeah, and Dr. Stevens at the bottom, they're talking about what they're hoping is they can actually use this to help with other neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and possibly ALS and things of that nature. Well, I always say that.

Well, we use, so, you know, we get this breakthrough and perhaps it, Well, you know, whatever. I'll believe that when I see it. But I would like to see it. I'm not going to root against it, that's for sure. No. So, all right. That's good stuff.

Yeah, it's crazy. What else you got? So really what Scott could have said, and we wouldn't have wasted 11 minutes, is they made a breakthrough in treatment for Huntington's Korea. Stay tuned. Yes. Okay. Thank you so much. Well, that's good.

I'm glad that, you know, people are still investigating this and we're moving forward. Yeah, shoot, yeah. The, well, here's the one I had my attention. It was the shocking study that finds nose picking could increase risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. Yeah, I like this one. This one's important. Yeah. No, it is.

It is important because, you know, it's interesting, but they're showing that there's so much research going on with Alzheimer's right now. But at Griffith University, scientists have demonstrated that bacteria can travel through the olfactory nerve into nose and into the brain and mice where it creates markers that are telltale sign of Alzheimer's disease. Wow. And guess what the name of this bacteria they were sitting in? What is it? Chlamydia. What? Really?

It's not trachomidus, though. No, pneumonia. Okay. Yeah, chlamydia pneumonia. It's a bacteria. Chacomidus is the one that causes the STD. There are lots of different chlamidias. Yeah, well, yeah, lots of chlamydia.

That's a stupid effing chlamydia. I know it. It's just, chlamydia's bad, period. I don't care where you have it. If it's in your nose or your nuts. Brain chlamydia. It's just bad. Talk to your grandmother who's got Alzheimer's.

Well, you got chlamydia in your brain. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that won't go over super great. But, you know, what they're saying is with this that. Maybe that's what's wrong with your mom taste. Oh. Maybe. Is she a chronic nosepicker? No.

No, no, I've actually never seen that. Mm-hmm. So she's a closet in those bigger. So this is actually a... So picking hairs, pulling hairs, also increases the risk, too, if I remember reading this article correctly. So, because that creates another pathway. Yep. Well, the stupid viruses and bacteria figured out that, you know, a really easy pathway into the brain's olfactor nerve.

Well, sure. Because it can bypass the blood-brain barrier. So it's a pretty... Because it's wired directly into the brain. It's straight in. Yeah. So the olfactory nerve is the nerve that we use to smell with. Yep.

And it has all these chemical sensory apparatus on the end of it. And depending on how those things are stimulated, you experience that as a smell, which is really amazing. It is pretty well. And the reasons dog snouts are so long is their olfactory nerves longer than ours. And so they can pass a lot more information along the top of their snout to determine distance and much more sensitive analysis of the smells that they're smelling. And apparently they can tell what direction it's coming from. Yeah, it's incredible. We went for a hike through the woods yesterday, actually.

And there's so many leaves up on the mountain that's really hard to see the path. But my golden retriever, she's got her nose to the ground. She's smelling people's feet. And where we've been down these paths before. So heck, I'm just looking around the leaves and the trees, and she just takes me right through the woods. It's incredible. I remember we did a horseback ride thing,

and our horse was so used to doing the path that we were on that fell asleep. And we just walked the whole thing. And when we got there, the horse person said, that horse is sound asleep. Are you kidding? Yeah, yeah, that's what they said. Oh, my gosh. They get so bored, they just go to sleep and, oh, I'm back at the bar and wonder how how that happened.

Oh, my gosh, that is funny. Well, the bottom, the take-home message here is that picking your nose hairs and, you know, picking your nose and plucking your nose hairs. So what should you do instead? Some simply herbal nasal spray. Okay, I don't disagree. Number two, Ivage. Navaj is one of to clean out that crud in there, but don't mess with the... Give yourself a bill!

Yeah, don't mess with that endothelial lining. It's a little tweaky in there. Well, yeah, it's not really endothelial lining in your nose. Oh, it's a mucous membrane. Endothelium. Endothelium is in the inside of blood vessels. Yeah. So, yeah, just don't mess with the amicus memory.

You, yeah, so that is a good advertisement for the Navaj, which I still think for $89 or whatever it is. That's the best under $100 thing I ever bought. It's better advertising for the simple herbs, but, you know, unbiased. Do both. Do both. You can carry the simply herbals around. You can get at Dr. Scott's stupid website. and you can carry that in your pocket

and then when you get home you do the Navage which you can get at stuff.com. Wash it out of your old noggin. That's a good thing. You can lose weight while you're doing it too. Isn't that interesting though? So do they really have data that shows that people who pick their nose?

Is this just a hypothesis? I think it's a hypothesis. What does it say? Did they actually do a study? Oh, hell, I didn't read that far down. Oh, for fuck. No, I was just enjoying the nuts. You want to start sending the articles to me?

I know. Would you read them? I might. It would be worth a shot. I'll send some of them to you. You're retired. Your dance card is full. Okay, let's just look up if there's a correlation between dementia and nose picking.

Are we still on? Yeah, we're on. Oh, you're not even pausing. Okay, this is a mouse study, suggests a surprising link. Okay, so you did say that. Yeah. So they had data in mice, is what it was. What they do, they go in there and then pick the nose of the mice.

Oh. with a little tiny mouse finger thing. Yeah, so we're the first to show that chlamydia pneumonia can go directly up the nose and into the brain where it can set off pathologies that look like Alzheimer's disease. Okay, yeah, very good. Saw this happen in a mouse model. Evidence is potentially scary, potentially scary for humans as well. Stop saying shit like that. Scary is not a scientific term.

No, it's not. That is a clickbait go fuck yourself term. And whenever I see that, and I wonder if this neuroscientist said it, or if the journalist kind of, you know, just changed a word or two in there when they're quoting this person. Anyway. Okay. Good stuff. Is it, though? I don't think it's good stuff.

Okay. You got anything else? Well, I've got that one from bacterial sensors, but I'm just going to tell you I didn't pre-read it. So you can just start raising it out of now. Why do I send these things to you? Well, hell, I don't know. All right, that's fine. Okay.

Here, we got our quiz questions. We do have some questions. All right. Well, we got this one. Dr. Steve, hope you're well. Hey, thanks, man. Oh, really? I don't care.

Okay. Anyway, tasty. Oh, yeah. Scott. What's up? Yeah, anyway. Anyway, a quick little question here. How much saliva does a human body produce in 24 hours?

There you go. Now, that's a great question. So one person suggested to us, Tacey, that on our Patreon show that we do like a quiz and we could have questions like this and then, you know, have listeners. you know, compete for prizes somehow. I don't know how the hell we would do it. But this is the kind of question I like. Okay. So it's an excellent question. I don't like those ones that they do on those

morning zoo things. Well, 26% of people said this. And then it's just luck. Who the hell knows? You know, what that and the fuck that could possibly be. But this is, you could guess this. So let's

express it in leaders. And, you know, If you're not a metric type person, you know what a two-liter bottle holds. So that's two liters. So we're going to express this in liters. Scott, what do you think? Sounds good to me. I like leaders.

Okay, good. How much saliva do you think you produce in a day in liters? A half a liter. Okay, Tacey. Isn't it different depending on the day? Okay, I'll give you that. Give yourself a bill. So give us an average.

I'd say Don't take too long A quarter of a leader A quarter of a leader Okay, let's see if anybody in the exam I liked Scots But I didn't want to Oh you like Scots? You like Scots?

Damn it! I'll say a leader to half Okay, so Scott said 0.5 to 1.5 liters Give yourself a bill! That's exactly right. That's exactly the range. It's 0.5 to 1.1. 1.5 liters per day of saliva. That's a lot.

It is. So let's just say that the median is like one liter. Can you imagine just spitting all your saliva out into a Pepsi or a Coke? I can. I can. I can't. I did Copenhagen for years. He dips.

I spit most of it out. Yes, that's true. So, yeah, that's probably why he was so good at estimating that. Someone that hasn't ever dipped probably would have trouble with that. Also, there are some people that have to spit everything out because they have an obstruction of their esophagus and saliva will get down in there and it's got nowhere to go so they just start having to spit it out or drool or whatever or people that have head and neck cancer that causes the salivary gland to be wide open instead of coming out the salivary duct it's just leaking out into the mouth and sometimes those people will spit out all their saliva as well. Yeah. So if you sat there for two days, you could fill up a two-liter with saliva. And then I would pay someone a thousand dollars to drink it.

That's gross. Try it right now. Anybody that's listening to this. I'm sure they're running to get one. Now go get a spoon. Just get a tablespoon. And let the saliva drip out of your mouth onto the spoon. And then when that tablespoon is full, then just,

Stick it back in your mouth. It was there just a second ago. Or you could just watch TV. Why is that gross? If you're born. But it is gross. It was right there. Swallow right now, you're swallowing that same saliva.

And that's not gross. But if you spit it into a spoon and then try to put it in your mouth, it makes you sick to think about it. That's pretty gross. Just saying. That is gross. You know what else is gross? I made homemade sourcrow. And I'm almost, I'm nervous about trying it.

So I got this fermentation thing, which is really fun if you're going to do, make hot sauce, making fermented hot sauce is the way to go. And it's just, you ferment it in brine and peppers and cabbage and other things. So you make kimchi. Yeah, right. Well, do you like kimchi? I'll make you some. I like doing it. I don't know if I'm going to like to eat it.

That's fine. No, I won't. I have the thing. And so they all have lactobacillus on them. And lactobacillus will ferment peppers. It's not like using yeast that we do for fermenting, say, wine and beer. You're using bacteria. And the peppers will ferment in there for a week or two.

And then you puree them and then put them in a food mill and get the liquid out. And then you take the liquid and measure it. Say it's a liter. then you would put 0.4 of a liter of vinegar, you know, like apple cider vinegar in there, and then add, you know, salt to taste, and you've got the best hot sauce you've ever made. And so I got this thing.

It's like, well, you know, I've fermented all my peppers, now what? And so I made some sour ground. And it's just cabbage and salt. That's it. And it's got to be the right concentration of brine. That's 2 to 3% brine. And so, but I've got the fermenter lids and everything. So if you want me to make you some kimchi, I'll make it for you.

Because I am kind of all about fermenting right now. I don't know if I want to eat it, but I'd love to make it for somebody. And it is probiotic and all that kind of crap. It's lactobacillus. It's good for you. Good for you. All right. Why was I talking about that?

I don't have any other. I don't remember. Fermenting something. It started out with slobber. Yeah. Okay. And devolved into. Yeah, I guess it was just other things that I don't want to put in my mouth.

Maybe that's what it was. All right. Let's do this one. This is a very interesting question. You ready to take some questions? Yeah. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio.

Thank you, sir. Got another little weird question for you here. I don't know if you're going to call a scientific or what, but I heard a study the other day. that if you're drinking and you're using a chaser. Yeah, well, no, a mixer. That if you use a Diet Coke, you will get alcohol, you'll get drunk about 20% faster than without because of the acetate. Is there any truth to that?

That's an interesting question, and I at first thought it was probably malarkey, but what do you think, Dr. Scott? You guys got any opinion on this? Because I do have the answer. I would say, with your answer, I would say it's true. Yeah.

Right, right. Exactly. But why? My gut would have said, hell no. I know. It just seems stupid, right? No chance, yeah. So it turns out that the body recognizes sugar as food, and that slows down the rate of alcohol absorption into the blood, whereas diet sodas, which include, you know, have a spartame in them.

The body doesn't treat that as food, and the alcohol gets absorbed faster, and you will notice. that if you drink a diet soda, you're going to get hungrier and you're probably going to eat more because the, and I'm not saying that you should drink sodas. Just don't drink something that fools your brain. Right. Because it is sweet enough to fool your brain into thinking calories are coming. And then it's going, where the hell are they? Where are the calories? And then it starts generating these, you know, hormones that stimulate your appetite, increase absorption of things like alcohol and stuff like that.

that so it's pretty interesting yeah I would have never guessed that yeah they did a study on this and people who drank diet soda as a mixer had higher alcohol levels that increased more quickly and peaked at a higher level compared to people that mixed it with regular soda again another good reason not to drink sodas right at all just don't drink at all yes isn't that crazy it is bizarre I can't think the last time I actually had to look No, and it's like I'm low carb, so I'll just drink a neat

whiskey. If I drink beer like I did in Rochester with Sean and them you know, forget it. You end up standing on a table and screaming at a man. Yeah, screaming MF at the man is at the top of my lungs. The good old days.

So sad, I miss that. Good old days. October. Two weekends ago. Or when was that? When was the roast, Taze? It wasn't long ago. Yeah, about a month ago.

Yeah. I love it. I'm just standing there in front of the band, just doing the, I guess, you know, either the fist or the devil horns and screaming. Fuck. So ashamed. Fuck. Oh, Lord. There's just no reason for it.

Nope. He's out of control. Nope. But anyway, so I blame it on the carbs and the beer. The, you know, if I'm drinking just whiskey or a bourbon, I'll just have one and I'm fine and I'll just sip on it. But, you know, I ask places, do you have diet mixers? Because every once in a while I wouldn't mind a vodka and diet tonic. No place ever has that. They have, well, we have Jack and Diet Coke and say, I will not.

That's monstrous To me Anyway Okay Nobody cares what I think About that All right Here's a Jim and Sam question

Hang on Not sure what this is I just want to say I think Jimmy is I love Jimmy But I think he's wrong When he says The Beach Boy's pet sounds

Is overrated And Sam is right When he says And it's Jim is wrong about that Thank you. All right. Dan from New Jersey.

Dude, you know who else agrees with you? The Beatles. When Pet Sounds came out, they were freaking out because they were, I can't remember what album they were working on, but I remember reading a biography of the Beatles where when Pet Sounds came out, they were huge fans of Brian Wilson. They were like, can we ever do an album that's as good as this? And the answer was a resounding yes. But it's interesting that they. it gave them pause. They felt like their number one competition

was Brian Wilson. So just a quick synopsis? What the hell is this guy talking about? Pet Sounds. The album Pet Sounds. No, but what's the same thing? Jim and Sam. I don't know what he's talking about.

Jim and Sam. It's the show that it's the flagship show of this channel. And you wouldn't know that because you don't want to listen to anything. I'll only listen to this. But hippie music. I listen to this in the Grateful Dead Channel. It's about it. I'll listen to this show on Saturday nights.

It was Opie and Anthony on the – it wasn't the virus – was it the virus when it first – it was high voltage, right? High voltage. Then it became the virus. Then it became Opian Anthony. And they moved over to Sirius when Sirius and XM merged. Right, okay. And then it was Opian Anthony. And then Anthony got the old heapo.

And it was Opi Radio. And then Jim and Sam said, hey, we'd like to do the morning show, and Opie was nowhere to be found. Apparently, this is what I heard. This I've never talked to him about. And they kind of slid in and got the morning show, and Opie went to mid, was it mid-days

or early afternoon? I don't remember. I can't remember what you're talking about. And then he had his own show with Carl Ruiz and Vic Henley and Sherrod Small. And then Jim and Sam became the morning show. And then Opie got the heave-ho, and now it's Jim and Sam.

Okay. And it's still called Faction Talk because it was Jason Ellis's channel at one point, but Jason is long gone, but it's still Faction Talk. I can see it now, the Dr. Steve Channel. Yeah. No. Weird Medicine Channel. You know it. Weird Medicine Channel.

I would love that. Well, they were always, don't you want to go to Dr. Radio? It's like, hell no, I don't want to go over there. A bunch of hacks. Well, I don't have any history with them except saying things like that. Oh, I'm sure they would welcome me with open arms. As they should. I've shined. I've shined.

on them for 17 years. Oh, Steve, you know they don't have any idea that you even would. Well, they would, though. Somebody would tell them. They could careless. Anyway, so that was a Jim and Sam question. All right, here we go. Hey, Doug, Derek from Texas. Hey, I got a question for you.

Derek, wait. I've had some kind of upper respiratory cold. Derek from Texas can't be the same one. Tejas. Okay. This is Derek from Texas. You remember him on Howard Stern? Mm-mm. It was Eric, Eric, the actor, when he got kicked off or he said, I'm never coming on here again,

or he got kicked off or something. And he called in as Derek from Texas with this horrible pseudo-Texan accent. Didn't fool anybody. It was just his way to kind of get back on the channel again. It was funny. Anyway, I'll start this over again. Hey, Doc, Derek from Texas. Hey, I've got a question for you.

I've had some kind of upper respiratory cold type shit for like three days. terrible coughing and shortness of breath and wheezing. And my question is, where does... I wonder what that could be, but anyway. That wheezing and shortness of breath and that rattle. Where does that all come from? Excellent question. And what entails all that?

Yeah. Dr. Scott, you want to take a shot at that? Fluid. That's true. It's causing the rattling and the... It is. So the virus or whatever is in your airways is. causing inflammation in the airways, which causes fluid and mucus to accumulate because

that's the body's response to this thing, is put fluid there because white blood cells can't float around on air, and they can't go through and dried out tissue or solid tissue, so they need a little fluid to move around in. So exude some fluid in there, and then what happens is, is you get an accumulation of fluid in the tiny little airways. You have these big giant airway up here and we say big giant but it's really what an inch, maybe an

inch around in diameter and then it divides and it divides again and divides again and you keep dividing a few times of you now you're in microscopic territory. Right. And you get a little bit of fluid in there and then you're passing air past that

it's like the flatus flute when you pass air through a little orifice like that, it'll whistle. And if you ever really want to hear true wheezing, it sounds, or if you ever hear true wheezing, it's not the upper

airway kind of like that. It is, it's, if you put your ear up to someone or use a stethoscope that has asthma and they're actually wheezing because all of their airways, the microscopic airways are constricted, it sounds like

you know, like what you would imagine held to sound like, you know, a choir of just evil entities all screaming at the same time in different pitches. That's what it sounds like. Which is completely different from hearing fluid in the lungs where you actually hear the gurgling and sometimes nothing at all. That's right. So wheezing are the tiny little airways and we get constriction of the airways. and then there are ronkai

which is basically what Scott's talking about and then you can have strider which is up top that's when you've got narrowing of the tracheide you got that's strider so let's see if we can find some audio of wheezing here somewhere

because I'd love for you guys to hear that yeah here's index end expatory wheezing on meds cool. Let's see if this is cool. And when you really hear, that's a recording of a recording that's going through a bad microphone or a bad stethoscope. So it sounds even crazier than that. Now, you can also have crackles when you have thin, not mucus, and not narrowing of the airways, but just fluid

collection in the lungs that can happen with congestive hurt failure and when you take a deep breath you'll hear like cellophane and that's pretty interesting crackling let's see ronkai let's try ronkai lung sounds see if we can hear that on here is this fun I don't know if this is fun in this video we're going to discuss the ronkai lung sound oh yeah let's talk about it for 20 minutes before we do it there you go there we go Those are pretty severe. I was going to say, if that's you, that's a problem. You're a mess.

That is a hot mess. Okay, and then he's got crackles in here, too. This video, we're going to talk about it. Okay, that's enough with you. Let's see. If we can get, that's crackles. Really, when you really hear it, it sounds more. It's very difficult to record from a stethoscope and make it sound like what you hear in your ears.

but just kinds of sounds like crinkling cellophane. Yeah. Yeah. So lots of different sounds. Like there's many, as sands in the hourglass, so go the sounds in our lungs. Yes. All right. Okay, let's try this one.

Hello, Dr. Steve and Dr. Scott and anyone else who's attending today's a podcast. Taster. I have a question. Yep. I had an MRI on my knee. Okay. And the results are, too. I have arthritis under the kneecap, and I also have Sugo gout.

What? The doctor recommended I have physical therapy, drain my knee, and then have some steroid injections. So what are your thoughts? Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Okay. I'll talk about doing the drainage and the injection. but you talk about this in general.

Yeah, I'll start first. Okay, so the arthritis under the knee cap is usually called chondromalasia. There's an inflammation of underneath the patella, and as you move your knee, it hurts. Patella being the knee cap, right. The cidogout feels like gout, looks like gout, not actually with the gout crystals in there. Yeah, but they can diagnose that with an MRI. You have to pull out fluid and look at the crystals. Well, I hope people are drinking today with this.

Or you do blood tests looking for thyroid or parathyroid issues. Right, right. Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder about the diagnosis of pseudogative, but something else. Yes, I'm very, I'm skeptical of that. But other than that, okay, we're, okay, so let me give you real quick, real quick piece of advice. Number one, when you, any kind of knee, arthritis, knee pain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a hamstring stretch, getting the leg nice and long is the best way to lower, even if you have a baker's cyst, which is a fluid buildup, Behind the knee, getting a good long hamstring stretch is really important for the health of the knee

because it increases blood flow, number one. Number two, exercises where you do leg extensions. So like if you're sitting on a bench and you put like an ankle weight on and you extend your leg up, it causes a shearing in the knee and it's really the worst exercise you can do. Oh, I see what you're saying.

The ones where you're, so if you go to the gym and you're sitting in the chair holding on with two hands and then there's weights on there, and you're putting the thing on the front of your foot and you're extending your leg. The worst thing you can do for Arthur's knees. The best thing you can do, they're called straight leg raises.

So just you extend your leg straight out, and then you lift it straight up. So you're not bending your knee, but you're strengthening your quadriceps. And the other thing is just the simple, the big muscles in the top of your leg, give your thigh. And so with the osteoarthritis,

Dr. Scott's the jargon master. No, no, God. No, but what I am is a, I am, I have a knee expert because I've got two arthritic knees. But the key is really blood flow. And then the last thing I'll say real quickly is that arthritis, if it's gout, pseudogout, whatever, really be careful of what the foods that you eat because you can have inflammatory foods. Mine, what irritates my knees, believe it or not, is chicken.

I haven't eaten chicken in 10 years and my knees feel like almost normal. For whatever reason, like shrimp affects gout, chicken affects my arthritic knees. How did you find that out? I just quit. But you have gout, though. Do I now? You have gout? Yeah, I do have gout.

But I just went on a vegetarian diet. And I mean, I'm telling you, as soon as I quit eating chicken within one week, I had no knee pain. None. It's crazy. So the way that we have classically diagnosed gout and pseudogout, besides you get a blood test that shows that you have uric acid. elevation then you can make the diagnosis of gout you take out the crystals

and you look at them under the microscope and you use a polarizing light and gout crystals are yellow when they're parallel to the axis of the polarizer so yellow you're right parallel to the axis the nemonic is

YUPA Y-UPA and that's how you You know, this is uric acid. If it's anything else, and the connection, I'm sorry, the syndrome is gouty, then it's most likely pseudo-gout. And you can make that diagnosis again by being yellow, urea, or yellow perpendicular to the axis. So anyway, and then there are blood tests, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think they need to make a better diagnosis.

But so to take the fluid out, if you have an effusion in your knee where there's fluid in the knee, which you can see and you poke on your knee and it goes because it's enlarged and it's fluidy, then it's very simple process to draw the fluid out. Now, I used to do the lateral approach. There are some people do an inferior approach. So I would have the person laying down on the stretch or whatever, you know, the table thing. And put their leg at just about 90 degrees, and I'd feel around for certain landmarks. And then on the outside of the knee. On the outside, the lateral part of the knee. Mr. Big word.

Yeah, no, you're right. So on the outer part of the knee, the part that's facing me. Right. And then this is a. joint so this is a sterile procedure because if you inject bacteria into this and you get infected they're going to be pissed and they're going to be worse off yeah and it could be catastrophic so uh you would treat it like a surgical procedure so you wear mask glove sterile gloves do sterile prep and then you take an 18 gauge needle and i always would use

anesthetic and steroid so two different kinds of anesthetic and a steroid that has had a long acting and a short acting steroid in it. And I would get the needle in and then inject. So if it goes in easy, you know you're in the right place. The numbing medicine, okay, directly into the knee. And then you draw out the fluid or you, you know, and you go, well, aren't you just drawing out the cortisone? And now that I think about it, yes, you are.

So that's not how I would do it. I would draw the fluid out first and then put the medication in at the end. I'm an idiot. It's been a long time since I've done that. And sometimes you would get, you know, we would have these 100-m-l syringes, which is a tenth of a liter. And you could fill that sucker all the way up with this really sort of beautifully amber, clear fluid. Wow. And then you would, yeah, unscrew that.

Screw the one on that had the medication in it and dump it. in there. And a lot of the times the anesthetic would make them feel better right away. Now you've got to tell them you feel better but don't go jogging because it just feels better. But they would get instant relief and at least walk out of there with less pain

than they came in. But it can be a little bit of an uncomfortable procedure when they're sucking that fluid out of there. Yeah, but it feels good though. Pressure back in. Yeah, it feels good though because drawing off that knee feels the pressure of that fluid. And you've got to select your patients, right?

You're not just drawing fluid off anybody. You want to get the ones that have a nice, big, tight effusion. With lots of fluid to pull out. Right. Because the more fluid you pull out, the better off they're going to fit. And it feels... If you pull out 10 CCs, they're going to be like, what are you doing? Right, what the hell are you doing?

No, you just emptied out my joint space, and now it's bone against bone, or cartilage against curtilage. But we would, they would almost always feel immediately much, much better. It does feel better. So that's how you do that. Ben there, done it. Now, the inferior approach, you have them sit on the chair and their leg is at 90, the knee is at 90 degrees, and you can go from below. Yeah, up into the choice space. Yep.

Hey, we've got two quickies if we have time. Yeah, sure, as long as I can answer them. Yeah. Oh, you can't. I trust you. You think? Unless you got another one. You ready for this one?

No, no, no. I've got a million of them over here. It's a diesel child. He says, do. Oh, so tell this, this guy, yes, do, that sounds like they're doing the right thing. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, he's doing the right thing. Yeah, but really work on stretching that hamstring,

getting blood flow through that knee. Gotcha. That's the best thing you do. So, yeah, Diesel Child, he's wanting to know if we have any recommendations for herbal malarkey or anything else that will have a stragglers. Well, damn it. You took my thunder. He's pre-diabetic.

Pre-diabetic, and he's trying to keep from getting worse. He eats super healthy. He exercises daily. What does that mean now? Some people say I eat super healthy. but they're eating, you know, yogurt and stuff, which is healthy, but it's got a lot of carbohydrates if it's, you know, if it's not sugar-free, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'd be interested to know what he means by he eats super healthy. Yeah, because some foods convert to sugar really quickly in your bloodstream, and you just don't realize it. And it's a healthy food. Yeah. But, yeah, but he says he's not overweight at anything, but I guess he is good. So just real quick, a couple of recommendations. Yeah.

You know, believe it or not, a straggless does work really. Oh, damn you. It does. I swear it's been shown in research to work. Hey, I should be getting a bill for that. I should be getting a bill. Well, that's because you're an idiot.

Certainly cinnamon has been shown to help. Okay. With blood sugar. Oh, with insulin resistance, you mean? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, as far as helping people keep their blood sugars under control.

Okay. And the other one is, oh, God, I want to say black coache. It's not black coache. It's black current. Black current, black current oil. Black current oil has been improving scientifically. This is not your buddy, Dr. Scott, just make shit up, which I usually do. But this is true.

Black current oil has been shown to help with people with prediabetes to keep their blood sugars under control. Okay. So here's cinnamon use in type 2 diabetes, an updated systematic review. and meta-analysis. So you can buy cinnamon in a capsule? Yeah. Yeah. This is in Annals of family medicine, not a shit, you know, turd journal.

And they did, you know, he's kind of, Dr. Scott's holding his spank of my fingers crossed. So a meta-analysis, remember, is where you take smaller data sets and you mush them together and try to make a bigger data set. So they did a meta-analysis of 10. randomized controlled trials, so that they took, with an average of about 54 patients, they made it into 543 patients, and they had cinnamon doses of 120 milligrams per day to six grams per day for four to 18 weeks, so they were looking at all kinds of different things. Well, look at this. The consumption of cinnamon was associated with statistically significant decrease in levels of fasting plasma glucose, total cholesterol, LDCs, and triglyceride levels, and an increase in good cholesterol, HDLC levels.

But no significant effect on hemoglobin A1C was found. Now, so hemoglobin A1C is your average blood sugar. So the question arises, cinnamon, yeah, seems to decrease people. It's probably improving their insulin sensitivity, but does it do it enough to have a clinically significant effect? Because we don't care what your blood sugar is. What we do care about is long-term effects of high blood sugar, which are heart attack, stroke, and stuff like that, kidney failure. Those are the three big ones. So does it have any effect on that?

It's interesting. But, you know, in the short term, particularly in an insulin-resistant, pre-diabetic person, why not? I don't think it hurt anything unless it just tears your stomach up. I'd like to see the adverse effects that they had. The other thing is, and definitely don't snort it and don't take it in a teaspoon like E. Rock did. Just go Google E. Rock, Opie and Anthony Cinnamon Challenge. If you want to see somebody that looks like he was almost going to die, that was bad. But I would highly recommend, I don't know what, again, don't know what your definition of eating healthy is.

when you're pre-diabetic, eating healthy means low-glycemic index diet. So you don't necessarily have to go low-carb, but you can go low-glycemic index. I used to teach it people this way. No white bread, but brown bread. The dense brown bread. It's got to be the dense, dense, dense brown bread. No white pasta, but you can have whole wheat pasta. No white rice, but brown rice and no white potatoes, but, you know, sweet, but you could have yams.

So none of the white stuff you can have. You can have anything but that. And that'll get you started on a low glycemic index diet because what that does is those things are absorbed more slowly. So you get less of a peak of insulin and therefore you get less resultant insulin insensitivity down the road because the body doesn't like those peaks of insulin. So they'll just go, I'm not going to listen to you anymore. And then if that doesn't do it, then a low-carb diet will almost always cure type 2 diabetes if it's done properly. And that done properly means lots of green leafy vegetables, you know, fresh vegetables, you can have fruit and lean animal protein. So, you know, a grilled chicken salad with, you know, spinach and greens and carrots and tomatoes, stuff like that, perfectly healthy.

kind of meal that you could have and is also a very low-carb type of meal. So anyway, what do you think of that? I like it. All right. So Dr. Scott, you've got a question from the waiting room, I understand. Yes, this is from Taylor Adventures. And the question is, what our thoughts are about this year's flu vaccines that were going to get them and how effective are they?

Same as they are every year. Get your fucking flu shot. Even the year when it was only 6% effective because they had missed the prevailing mutant I got influenza that year out of fever 105 took Raleenza which is the or you know

the inhaled version of Tammy flu and just sailed right through it watched four seasons of Arrow on the CW during the day drove his wife crazy well Tacey was at work and it was easy you know COVID kicked my ass

way worse and I was only sick for one day with it So what's, you've had your flu shots already? Well, okay, so I am in the Pfizer trial. Again, with the Pfizer trials, I got the influenza MRNA vaccine. Gotcha. And so we'll just by God see. I have no idea.

I have had my flu shot. Tacey's had hers. Soar afterwards, sick afterwards? I didn't have anything. No, I didn't notice anything. Cool. Yeah, I think I'm going to try to get mine tomorrow. And I got my bivalent, or as Jimmy Dore calls it, is my bivalent.

My ambivalent. You're ambivalent. Yeah, I know. Jimmy. He's hilarious. Smartest people on the Internet, but he has trouble pronouncing things. And anybody who knows Kurt Metzker, will you tweet at him and say that they need to get, and just tell them they need to get me on that show?

I want to get on there. I got a couple of things to say to him. But, yeah, so every year they have to estimate based on what's going on in the southern hemisphere, what antigens to put in the flu vaccine. So the 2021-2020 flu season was way less severe than typical years. But there were two peaks of flu activity, one in December and then another one in April. And I remember that. and they were thinking it was just had to do with relaxing of social distancing and then, you know, January and March, people were social distancing

because of Omicron variant and then they relaxed and it came back. But flu transmission rates in other countries are lower than usual so far this year. Flu transmission, the Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia, can help predict what ours, should be, and they've been having a milder flu season than news rolls, so hopefully that will be the case for us. I read Australia that was awful this year. I'll have to read.

Which year are you reading? It's just 2022, 23. I read it was awful. So the flu vaccine doesn't protect against all strains of the flu. It's still recommended for everyone over the age of six months. It's typically about 40 to 60% effective. But the thing is, even if you've got to define effective, effective from getting it

or effective from getting sicker and shit from it and even when it was 6% effective from preventing you from getting it it kept me out of the hospital and most of the people that had the vaccine. It seems to be bad here. Yeah. I don't know how bad it is. I mean, people are getting it,

but we're not seeing it in the hospital. You know, again, you've got to define what bad means. Are you talking about cases or you're talking about hospitalizations and deaths, you know? I'm just talking about people getting it. Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. Yeah.

Well, more people are going to get it because we really put a dent in influenza due to social distancing. As a matter of fact, we killed one of the strains of influenza that used to circulate all the time. It hasn't been seen in two years now. So we will see how things go. If you are over 65, the high-dose quadravalent flu zone, a.k.a. the high-dose flu shot probably gives you better protection. And people who are over 65 are usually more vulnerable to influenza, but not always. When swine flu came around, those of us that were around for the swine flu epidemic in 1972, I think, had already had it.

And so the old fuckers were just walking around, you whippersnappers and your flu. And everybody else was getting the flu, but we weren't. A bunch of softies. I know. And the flu mist is a live attenuated influenza for people ages two and between two and 49. And it has weakened versions of the flu virus and is supposed to give you better protection. But the last couple of years, it hasn't been available because it just wasn't targeted properly. I believe it is back this year.

The dirty little secret about that is if your kids, get the flu mist, which Liam and Beck could get that instead of the shot if they wanted to taste. They will pass it to everybody in the house. It's communicable. And so everybody, you know, you should only give it to people between

2 and 49, but, you know, the 60, 70 year old in the family is going to get it anyway. So, you know, it's a little bit of a, what you call a medical legal trick there, Dr. Scott. I hear you mean. But no matter what, I just really the benefits to the flu

shot out weigh the risk, and, you know, our buddy Richard David Smith, who is the founder with his wife, Chetai, of Hyperphysics, check them out, H-Y-P-E-R-F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S, which is billed or sold as an energy drink for nerds. He was like one of those, I ain't getting my flu shot, and he ended up on the ventilator, almost left us. So now he is quite the proponent of the inflation. wins the vaccine. And I can't agree with it more. I'm just glad he did okay. I miss you, Jeff. He's a nice guy. He and his wife both came to the studio. They're quite, uh, quite, quite cool. Did she make us like chocolate chip cookies or something? No, that was, that was Stacy's wife, I think. Yeah, uh, Richard's wife, uh, they had the two kids that were

here, and then they gave us a couple of cases of sugar-free hyperphysics, which I quite enjoyed. It's my favorite energy drink. I just can't find it around here. all right anything else i believe i'll do that is that it from the waiting room really yeah all right we're going to play some music after yeah let's play some all right let's do it we can butcher something okay well let's get the hill out of here then uh thanks to everyone uh for uh taking you know hanging out with us and uh listen to our serious xm show on the faction talk channel series xm channel 103 saturdays at 7 p m eastern Sunday at 6 p.m eastern on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure.

And thanks to our listeners, particularly those that hang out with us in the waiting room while we're recording this abortion. Our listeners, voicemails and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. Quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you.