Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 571 - Plasma Makes Things CRSPR

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Dr Steve, Dr Scott, and Tacie discuss: ganglon blocks can you get influenza from the flu vaccine? Xanax, Zoloft and anxiety Prior Authorization B.S. Liver age v@ginal yogurt Please visit: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net/cbd-sinus-rinse (the best he's ever made. Seriously.) tweakedaudio.com (use offer code "FLUID" for 33% off!) RIGHT NOW GET A NEW DISCOUNT ON THE ROADIE 3 ROBOTIC TUNER! roadie.doctorsteve.com (the greatest gift for a guitarist or bassist! The robotic tuner!) see it here: stuff.doctorsteve.com/#roadie Also don't forget: Cameo.com/weirdmedicine (Book your old pal right now because he's cheap! "FLUID!") Most importantly! CHECK US OUT ON PATREON!  ALL NEW CONTENT! Robert Kelly, Mark Normand, the O&A Troika, Joe DeRosa, Pete Davidson, Geno Bisconte. Stuff you will never hear on the main show ;-) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Still selling some? Yes, sir. Oh, good. Yeah, well, thank you. Okay, doke. Did you have any articles today? Tacey is still in Mexico. I've got a couple here that are pretty interesting.

Okay. Well, let's hear them. I'm going to have to, you want to start with the CRISPR engineered chickens? I don't care. Proof of concept. CRISPR engineered chickens shrug off flu. Okay. So some researchers are doing a lot of work over, and it looks like, in Czechoslovakia.

Well, do you want to tell people what CRISPR is? It's a, it's CRISPR is a gene editing. science, what they're doing is they're editing a genetic code to try to make things happen differently. So, in other words, what they're doing is they'll take out, if they see a faulty piece of genetic code, they may try to take it out and replace it with something else, or what they'll do is they'll take a piece of genetic code and insert it into a gene in order to hopefully make something more resistant to a disease.

Correct. Which is kind of interesting because, actually, I was watching this morning on C. previous morning, where these kids, there's a group of families that have children with really rare diseases. Sure. Genetically rare diseases, right? And it's called Jordan's. Jordan's syndrome, I want to say.

I think it was the name of it. And these families have these children who have these super rare diseases, which a lot of the researchers and pharmaceutical companies don't do a lot. lot of research on because they're so rare they're so rare and they cannot make any money on which is unfortunate so what these these parents have done is taken upon themselves to put together researchers from all over the world and come together and what they're doing is they're actually using this crisper technology also to help with this jordan syndrome as they call it which is p p pp2 syndrome type r5d is jordan syndrome it's characterized by neurodevelopmental delay

and intellectual disability and or neurobehavioral challenges. So I'm wondering how they're treating this with CRISPR. Are they doing it in the embryo? Well, that's exactly what they're doing. They haven't treated yet, but what they've done is thanks to grant funding that they've been able to access with the help of a lot of people. They were raised like $38 million. They're actually taking these CRISPRs and doing some genetic modifications

and they just started in a lab. and they're hoping to start using them in animals, and one of them will, I'm sure, will be the chickens and to help these kids who have this Jordan syndrome to as they mature to be able to use this CRISPR technology to help them get past this disease, which would be just incredible if you think about it. Well, it says here's an article,

molecular signatures and reversibility in mouse models of Jordan's syndrome, so they've tried it in mammals. Yeah, so they're having a little bit of success already. Prior support from Jordan's Guardian Angels, a foundation dedicated to finding a cure for the disorder. They generated constitutive, inducible, and reversible mouse models of the most common mis-sense mutations that cause Jordan's syndrome. And remarkably, preliminary data reveal that even in their heterozygous state, meaning that they've got one normal gene and one abnormal gene. The mutant mice recapitulated the cardinal features of Jordan's syndrome, including developmental delay. So that's actually a good thing.

It gives them a model that they can work with. Right, yeah. So they can actually create this problem. So they can hopefully work through it. You have to have a working model to try to fix it. So, in it incredible? So CRISPR stands for clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats. And they have...

Pull it easier to say CRISPR. I know. That's why they have I know. But, yeah, so they you know, they've got this protein that forms a complex with the guide RNA in the cell

and that attaches to matching DNA sequences adjacent to these spacers. And then it cuts out the double-stranded DNA and then the program DNA can be inserted at the cut. So it's pretty cool. It's really incredible.

It's amazing. It is. It's amazing. When you think about years and years ago, not being any kind of hope whatsoever, at least now they're making some strides forward. Yeah. But, you know, the main reason they did this with the chickens, Dr. Steve, was because the avian flu, trying to save millions and millions of chickens. Right. They're just trying to make for food.

Well, yeah. So because chickens are a little bit easier to raise and don't cost quite as much and don't take up as much space. Right. But, you know, that one virus just wipes them out. And so being able to interrupt that. And what they found was that after gene editing using CRISPR, that they were able to inoculate some of these birds with avian flu, the chicks. Right. With avian flu and none of them died.

Wow. Which is incredible. That's amazing. And more importantly. That virus is going to get pissed, though. Yeah. Trying to find a different host. That's the true.

Well, it doesn't really work that way. Didn't think about that. Well, that we know of. But, you know, the interesting thing is that not only did they not. die, but they did not pass it on to other chickens, which was, which is hugely important. So this one actually prevented transmission and like certain other things. Well, good for that. Yeah, that's awesome, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, poor old chickens. I always hate it when the avian flu comes through and then they just have to kill millions of chickens. It's not their fault. They're just, you know, walking around eating some, you know, chicken. Well, they give it to us and we're screwed, so, you know, better them than us, but still, That would be, yeah, that's a bad thing. All right. That's a good one.

So that's a good one, yeah. So we've got another one from old buddy Stacy, the loach. He passed one on, it's about plasmitech transforms blue-green algae into wound healing wonder. What? Which is pretty incredible. So what researchers are doing is with plasma technology is to transform blue-green algae, microalgae into bioactive coatings that will help cure wounds. And what they're doing is they're using plasma technology to break down the cellular

wall structure of this blue-green algae. And then they're putting it on plasma technology. Well, like plasma cutters, I would assume is what this is. You know how they do plasma cutters to cut metal? Yeah. And what it does is it superheats. It's superheats, whatever it is. So if it superheets the mellet cuts or superheets the micrology.

Yeah, plasma gas, where it's so hot that the electrons have been pulled away from the nucleus, and so it exists in a charged state. Right. So it breaks down the wall, and evidently, what they're doing is taking this microalgae after they've broken down this wall, the cellular wall, putting in all these band-aids or bandages and wrapping it and to keep, you know, bacteria out and allowing your wounds to heal because, you know, something we've always, we are not always done, but one thing we know is that if a wound is allowed to heal from inside out, a lot of times it'll push all the nastiness out where

if you allow something to scab too quickly, sometimes wounds will develop the infections underneath that, that scab. So this is keeping it from being infected from the outside, but allowing it to heal from the inside. Well, it says that the unicellular organism possesses a simple reproductive system, generates a biomass containing bioactive compounds with potent antioxidant and antibacterial properties because these things are trying to fight off bacteria all the time. Okay. You know, algae and bacteria are not friends, so they're always fighting, which means that you can find stuff that will kill bacteria and algae. But they have real thick cell walls.

And so when they use the plasma, it gets rid of the cell wall, but it leaves behind these anti-bacterial substances. And so it decreases the inflammation and enhances healing. So it's antibacterial activity of argon-treated algae was assessed found to be highly effective against pseudomonas at ruginosa, which is a nasty bacterium. and staph aureus with 93% and 73% cell death. So it's really operating as a film that they put on the bandage that then kills bacteria. Not too dissimilar to that stuff that we use iota form gauze, you know, where it's impregnated with iodine and you jam it in a cyst or something and then pull it out an inch at a time and it will heal up from the bottom, like you said. Well, yeah, that's incredible. That's a good one.

That's a good one. So thank you, old Stacy. All right. Yep. He actually came up with a good one. It usually does. Oh, I know he does. Do you know anything about this Maya Kowalski business?

No, nothing at all. I think somebody missed it in a show, what, a week or two ago? No, well, did they? If they did, I didn't notice it. I was on live stream last night, and you can check out our live streams on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine. I do them every once in a while. I did it last night Friday at 9 p.m.

Okay. And somebody said, do you know anything about the Maya Kowalski case? And there's a documentary on Netflix called Take Care of Maya. And I wanted to get your input on this because this is a very strange case. There's a $220 million case against Johns Hopkins. And so this doctor who had treated. this patient who at the time was a kid testified that she was suffering from complex

regional pain syndrome. Well, I have that, but I have a very mild case that I got it from a toenail removal. So complex regional pain syndrome very often comes from trauma and you get shocked to the nervous system and then the sympathetic nerves start to misfire and what you get is pain and thickened skin, modeling of the skin. You'll get neuropathy and all that kind of stuff.

And so they said she relied on an anesthetic drug ketamine to be able to accomplish basic tasks. So, of course, because I'm being prescribed ketamine right now myself, I perked up a little bit. And so I'm just going to read you this story. This is from Daily Mail. the doctor who prescribed Maya Kowalski's ketamine treatments. He says the teenager at the center of Netflix has taken care of Maya would have suffered a slow and painful death without them. Now, I've had a lot of people with complex regional pain syndrome. I've never had anybody die from it.

So she must have had, well, you look that up and just see, you know, CRPS mortality. I'm sure it's not zero. No, so she must have had a really bad case of it. Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick testified that Kowalski-17 required the treatments to be able to do basic things such as feed herself and brush her hair due to the fact that she was suffering from complex regional pain syndrome. It's also used to be known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and then the other kind was called causalgia. He took to the stand in a $220 million case against Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital on Tuesday amid a legal battle brought by the two. team's family after she was removed from their care as a child and held at the facility. So, Kowalski was placed into state custody for three months at the age of 10 after doctors at

the Florida hospital began to suspect her parents were faking her symptoms. In other words, they suspected that they had Munchausen's by proxy. So Munchausen by proxy is a condition where you bring your... kid in and you may poison them or just say they're sick or you coach them to be sick so that you can get attention right right as the parent uh florida's department of children families and a state judge also supported the suspicions of child medical abuse and ordered her to be housed at the center during this time her mother beta or biata took her own life amid the misery of being separated from her daughter.

That's horrendous. Kirkpatrick was the person who first diagnosed Kowalski's CRPS. He told the light touch blowing on the skin as perceived as being painful. She had that. She had a bad case of it. He initially prescribed low doses of pain medication ketamine, which Kowalski reportedly responded to, but he soon deemed that they were not enough.

He then recommended upping the dose, and an intensive ketamine coma treatment in Mexico, something he said he discussed with the hospital. Dr. Kirkpatrick told the court, I emphasize that if she doesn't get the ketamine, it's going to be a slow and painful death. The family opted to move forward with a therapy, which Kirkpatrick said was a success.

He added she could take care of herself, comb her hair, brush her teeth, eat with her hands, and so forth. The Kowalski family is hoping the doctor's testimony, when he will persuade jurors that teen was, in fact, suffering from CRPS, which hospital staff began to doubt when she was admitted in 2016. Part of the problem is there's not really a good test for it. There are criteria for it, but not a good test for it. You know, a definitive test.

It's a checklist. They questioned how insistent Kowalski's mother, in particular, was to have her daughter prescribed that ketamine treatments began to suspect. She may have Munchausen system by symptom. Munch Hudson Syndrome by proxy, a psychological condition where caregivers crave medical attention for their wards has previously been reported. Kualeski's mother demanded

1,500 milligram dosage of ketamine for her daughter. 1,500? That is a big dose of ketamine. That's a big dose. Yeah, Lord. That is 100 times more than my starting dose. Yep, that's a bunch. Typically, standard anesthetic doses in clinical setting are well below 10 milligram.

I don't know if that's true. Maybe IV, according to Rehab Center of the Recovery Village in Ridgefield. Well, treatment for acute CRPS is normally treated with one milligram of ketamine per kilogram of body weight per hour, according to Florida medical pain management. So if you were 70 kilos, then you'd get 70 milligrams an hour, though, over how many hours? At a previous hearing, lawyers for the hospital highlighted the potential risk of the ketamine treatment question the family's eagerness to pursue it. The attorney, Ethan Shapiro, asked the teen's father, Jack Kowalski, if he was made aware, the coma therapy, carried a 50% risk of death. That sounds high as well. So we need to look this up.

Ketamine, ketamine coma therapy, mortality. 50% sounds very high. Why would they even do this? I don't know. Okay. Prolong ketamine therapy as a infusion as a therapy for complex regional pain syndrome, synergism with antagonism. This is from 2014 British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, not a, you know, a stupid journal. No.

Okay. So let's look this up. So they are at least reporting on it. Let's look at mortality. Okay. Within this setting, okay, since its earliest introduction, it's also been a drug of abuse taken for its hallucinogenic and euphoric actions, within this setting, it causes both morbidity and mortality through overdose-related aspiration or psychotic delusions leading to self-harm.

Right. Well, that's to be expected. Those are people abusing it. Right. Under a medical situation, I do not think that 50% is an accurate number. And as a matter of fact, in this particular study, it's never mentioned again. Hmm. Ketamine infusion studies provided evidence of clinically, sorry, clinically meaningful analgesic benefit,

something that is all too rare in the pharmacologic management of complex regional pain syndrome, which is absolutely true. It's very difficult to treat. Let me see. I'm just looking to see if they had doses in here that were that high. But I don't know where – I would challenge that attorney and say, where are you getting your information from? Now, after he asked that, then the father responded, well, there's a risk in every procedure. That wouldn't have been my response to that.

my response would have been that's not what we were told where are you getting your information from? Right. And then you have an expert come in like me and evaluate whether that data that they're presenting is bullshit or not. Right.

So the attorney pressed further saying I understand that Mr. Kowalski respectfully there's a risk and then there's a risk that there's a coin flip in which your daughter could die. Did you know it was 50%? The Dad replied, he was aware of him and told nobody had ever died from the procedure.

Okay. So there's some miscommunication here because if there's a 50% death rate and then you're saying no one ever died from it, well, that can't be true. It's a 0% death rate. Yeah. So there's some malarkey going on with that attorney. But anyway, yeah, it's a tragedy. And, yeah, there's not a whole lot else here, but the medical part of it says their lawsuit alleges Kowalski's condition was aggravated by the care she received at the hospital. She was videotaped for 48 hours on another occasion stripped down her underwear and photograph without the permission of the Guardian or the dependency court.

They're seeking 55 million in compensatory and 165 million in punitive damages. And, you know, this girl lost her family for three months and then lost her mother. So, you know, one of the things that I said on the live stream is, so you get a family, they come to you, and they're asking for something that sounds outlandish. Just because it sounds outlandish to you, listen to them, at least. Give them the respect of listening to them and then do some research because apparently they had gone to Mexico and had this and then they came back and wanted it again here. From the parent side, if they were doing this in a foreign country, then to have, and you wanted to do it in the States and you've got to have somebody set up ahead of time. You can't walk into the emergency room demanding this because they won't be able to figure it out.

And that, they're looking for how to fit people into a nice little box in the emergency room, and that just doesn't fit. No. Did you find any doses for the prolonged ketamine therapy? No, that wasn't what you, that wasn't my task you gave me. No, I know, but I just assumed that you were looking, looking at things, the neurocognitive effects of five-day anesthetic ketamine for the treatment. What? No, I mean, you know. You told me to look up this, the death rate.

Did you look it up? I did. And what does it say? 50% of people with CRPS have considered suicide. But as a direct... Right. But as a direct causal effect on someone's... You know, causing death from CRPS, there's nothing that's been reported that I can find.

Yeah. Okay. So, sure. That's true of trigeminal neural neuralgia as well. Right. the suicide kind of nerve pain. That's what, that's another nickname. So that's, if they had said that, listen, she was suicidal.

That's different. This was a little kid and she was contemplating suicide. That all from a medical standpoint makes more sense. Right. So, but, okay, so I still don't know where the 50% death rate from the ketamine infusion. That's the only 50% I could find related to CRPS. Here we are. Nine patients receive neuropsychological evaluation pre and six weights post-treatment.

And they got, let me see, CRPS, your microphone is killing me, is characterized by severe neuropathic pain that exceeds the severity of an injury is refractory to traditional treatments. Okay. Recent experimental interventions include ketamine infusion therapy. And we sought to evaluate physical. neurocognitive and emotional effects of extended treatment with anesthetic doses of ketamine in refractory patients.

They had nine patients who received neuropsychological evaluation pre and post treatment, and they saw there was marked reduction in the report of both acute and overall pain for treatment. So deep ketamine therapy is effective for the relief of pain in CRPS. I'm still not seeing any doses, though. But anyway, we're going to have to change the battery. on your mic today. That's got to be what it is. But anyway, yep, I'm not seeing anything else as far as what these crazy doses are, though.

I hate to, I mean, I wish I'd been a little bit more prepared for this to look this particular thing up. Yeah, I'm scanning through these articles and can't find anywhere where they give what dose they're using. So anyway, it's a tragic case. I'm sorry for her and for her family. And hopefully they'll get some resolution from this. And everybody will learn from this that just because somebody comes in asking for something out of the box doesn't mean that they're crazy or that they are, you know, trying to harm themselves or their kid, you know, just listen to them. and if they had gotten records from the clinic in Mexico where apparently they had had this done,

maybe they would have sung a different tune. But anyway. Right. All right. What else we got? That it? How about one from Diesel Child? Yeah, yeah.

Is it safe to assume that a probiotic that isn't required to be refrigerated pretty much is bogus. No, that's the weird thing is these stupid bacteria are so simple and just dumb organisms that you can freeze dry them

and then reconstitute them in water. Now, I always wonder, they say, you know, 23 billion colonies, that's not a lot. You know, when you're talking about bacteria because they're so small. Is that how many survive reconstitution, or is that how many are actually in there? I don't know.

Now, when you get something like a yeast probiotic, often those things will be spores or they'll be the dehydrated yeasties and those things can just be reconstituted. Think about it this way. If you buy brewer's yeast, it's dry, and you put it in water and then you make beer out of it. It comes back to life. So it's kind of the same thing for the dry probiotics as well. They're just dumb one-cell organisms that can live.

Well, they can, they don't live. They can exist in a state where they could be reconstituted just by throwing them back in water. Did you have another one? No, I was just reading, Knott Cupcakes was talking about that. Yeah, Not Cupcakes is one that turned me on to this whole case. Oh, got you got you. What were they saying? She was talking about Maya was getting ketamine from a hospital doctor when she went to see Dr. Kantu in Mexico and was put in a coma giving this high dose of ketamine.

And then came back to the States and I guess wanted it again. And then they were like, what? Yeah, that's an exceptionally large. And then, you know, well, it is to us. But it is it. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a normal dose. And the thing is is that if it was over a long period of time,

So let's say that she was 30 kilos, right? Mm-hmm. So, and then they wanted a milligram per kilogram per hour. Let's see how many hours that would be. Echo, what's 1,500 divided by 30? 1,500 divided by 30 is 50. Yeah, so maybe they did it for, you know, two days. Okay.

Right? Right. If they put her in a coma for two days, at 30 milligrams per, I mean, one milligram per kilogram per day, God, one milligram per kilogram per hour for two days, that would be 1,500 milligrams. And that is not abnormal. I mean, they do that treatment with ketamine coma for some, for patients in the United States for chronic migraine headaches or profound migraine headaches. How long do they put them out for like a day or 20? No, no, I'm not, I'm a look at it.

But what I'm saying is I think there's precedence for it. I just don't know what the – I'm agreeing with you. No, I think that – Well, I thought you were going to yell at me and ask me what the doses were. We just said it's a milligram per kilogram per hour, and you just said they do it for a day. So two days doesn't sound like a whole lot to me. And now, in a 10-year-old kid, maybe, but still that adds up to 1,500 milligrams.

It doesn't sound so crazy when, you know, you and I are imagining, well, they're just giving her an infusion of 1,500 milligrams of ketamine. that's just not, you know, that's outside the realm of normal for us. Mm-hmm. You know, particularly when I'm taking 30 milligrams a day. Right. You know. But anyway, yeah, it's very interesting. So I wasn't aware of that with the migraine.

So, yeah, I need to bone up on my deep coma ketamine. See what you can find. Well, what they hope, and the reason they do is kind of like, I would assume what they're doing for, again, I haven't seen that case. is to when somebody has such profound migraines they try to put them in this ketamine coma

for a day or two and helps it resets everything. Yeah. Yeah. Ketamine is an interesting drug and it affects

neuroplasticity and stuff and so in a good way. Now, yeah, here's that one that I was reading was five-day anesthetic ketamine.

Deep ketamine for five days. Wow. So really, 50, hours, doesn't sound like that much. No. Sounds like a lot more to this story than.

Yeah. I wish that somebody, you know, would talk about those numbers because we hear 1,500 milligrams of ketamine and every ER doc, every pain person, you and I were both like, damn. But when you look at it over a prolonged period of time, it's not, it's not, it's not, that much. No. No, it's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, and again, they may look in the future and say, well, shit, that was the only half of what you needed to do. Well, maybe, but. I mean, I'm just, right, right, right. You just never know. The other thing was, this was a while ago. This was like 2018 or something, so ketamine wasn't as common. I mean, right now, they look kind of silly because you can buy ketamine mail order now.

I mean, you have to have a prescription for it. But, you know, mine just comes in the mail. Yeah, no, well, so we've got another good question here from the fluid family, Golden George, keeping it in this kind of nerve. By the way, you can now become a member of the fluid family. It's only 99 cents. A lot? That's a bargain of the day. Scott and I will do some sort of members-only thing if we get, you know, enough people.

But anyway, go ahead. Sounds like an interesting time. So Golden George is wondering about Gapapentin. What about it? As terrible nightmares, and he's on 300 a day, which he, 300 milligrams a day, which he knows is a low dose. Yes. We all know it was a low dose, relatively speaking. But it was just wondering how in the world people can tolerate, you know, these massive doses of Gapapentin, which you and I both know, people go 2,000, 3,000.

So he's, so he was not having nightmares before. before he started it. Right. Now he's having vivid, wicked nightmares. Oh, well, take it in the daytime. You know, you can do that. Oh, yeah. Well, unless your prescriber tells you to take it at bedtime.

Well, right. Well, if they do. Then as a general rule, though, you can take gabapentin any time of the day. Yeah, so people take it three times a day. But, yeah, you can take it breakfast. Talk to your prescriber, see if taking it in the morning will abrogate that. In other words, that the gabapentin, the effect, that's causing the weird dreams is gone by the time that you go to bed at night.

And you have a gabapentin, also known as neurotin, is a neurostabilizer type drug. It was first brought out for seizures, and then we started using it for neuropathic pain. And you can use it for other things like hiccups and chronic cough and some other stuff. So gabapentin is a pretty neat drug. It is renal-dosed. In other words, if you have renal failure or renal insufficiency, the max dose starts to decrease, but the maximum dose for a normal healthy person is 3,600 milligrams. So he's on way less than the max.

But I think the most important part of this message is all these medications affect people differently. So that's a really important thing. So he may just be a little sensitive to that gap. So you're not alone, but talk to your provider. Yeah, that's an important point. Everyone is different. And so some people can tolerate $3,600. Yeah.

One other thing that they could. It doesn't even phase them. One thing that they could maybe do is split it up into 100 milligram three times a day. Right. If you've got to have the 300 and taking it all in the morning is a problem, you could split it up that way. Yeah, and I'd say that's probably a, your insurance company question is. Yeah. Depending on, they may not pay, well, but you know what, they may not pay for it.

The stupid EMR, you know, as long as the math works, it doesn't matter if it makes any sense. I sent in a prescription for someone for gabapentin 600 milligrams three times a day. The EMR decided it was going to give them 100 milligram capsules, and it wrote out gabapentin 100 milligram six capsules three times a day and gave them like a, well, what would that be, 618? Good Lord, a whatever 18 times, 450 capsules. And the insurance just paid for it. Oh, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Well, that's not cool. It's stupid.

Someone say something. The pharmacist could have said something. The patient could have said someone. It's like, what's this big giant bottle of, I didn't order 450 gabapentin? I've seen people come in my office with those damn, that's like a half jarlet jug. Yeah. So we have a, Cupcakes was also saying that Gabapentin. after a total knee replacement

made me so dizzy I fell because of it the gabapentin did yeah I'm sorry so yeah you have to be super careful and yeah he just very sensitive to it yeah well that was that was cupcakes

not golden George George was saying that they told they said not to take it during the day because it made him so drowsy well he makes sense for him yeah yeah we got another we got a follow up to the ant or the probiotic

question which is a pretty good question as well. So what are some other, what are some foods, or are there foods that will help to rebuild the, so evidently a lot of a really high dose of a potent antibiotic. Sure. Feels like it destroyed his gut and trying to figure out some ways to rebuild that. Absolutely.

So probiotic foods, high probiotic foods. Well, there's prebiotics and probiotics. So prebiotics will feed the probiotics, but I don't worry about that so much. Most, we eat enough stuff. A variety of over there. So I'll go and you'll go until we run out. Okay.

So the typical one is yogurt. Sure. Needs to be cultured. It's got to say live cultures on it. Sourcrowd. Oh, good one, good one. Kaffir is another one. Kimchi.

Kimchi is a good one. kombucha. Kambucha is a great one. Now, that's an acquired taste, but I'm telling you when I started drinking kombucha, my life changed. I'm going to do one better, and this will be the kind of drop the mic one for me, beer. No. They know now there was a report. I sent you that email, and I don't know where it is.

There was a report that the live beers, live beers like Belgian beers. Well, they've got to be live. Right, right, their probiotics are better than the probiotics like a good bunch of stuff. No, yeast is a good probiotic. And when you buy these capsules and it's just 39. billion of lactobacillus, you're not getting what you need. The one thing I like about kombucha, over yogurt and kefir, well, particularly over yogurt, but over other probiotics is kombucha has a bunch of different bacteria in it.

It has a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, and you need all of that. You need good yeast, you know, Saccharomyces is good yeast. your gut uses that very well, and then lots of different kinds of bacteria. And the other thing is in kombuchas, there are acids that are good for digestion and stuff like that. Well, for pre-botics, just real quickly, a lot of fruits are high in pre-botic. Sure. So apples fruit. And asparagus is particularly high as a pre-botic.

So asparagus is a good thing to eat as a pre-botic topic robotics. You can get fermented pickles, too. Now, my son's fiancee loves pickles, and she's very picky about them, and I made fermented pickles, and they were really good. You can't use the cucumbers that you buy in the store if they have the wax on them. They have to be canning pickles, or use homegrown pickles. and you just wash them off and you stick them in a jar

and you add distilled water and then you got to weigh how much the contents are minus the jars so you got to weigh the jar first. And then you add enough salt to make a 3% brine solution. And then take two bay leaves. The bay leaves will keep it crispy. If your pickles are mushy, put bay leaves in there. You can also use tea bags.

It's just the tannins. but tea bags make it look gross and I don't like that so just put a couple of bay leaves in there and then sprigs of dill and some garlic and then cover it with a fermentation cap which you can just buy at Amazon or wherever

and all it is is just a it keeps fruit flies out and lets gas out etc and you let it sit there for two weeks and then you stick it in the refrigerator and a lot of love those pickles She's still talking about them. That's how good they were. That's cool.

Yeah, they're real crispy and stuff. Now, they don't have the shelf life like the hot processed pickles that we make, do. But those are also very probiotic and got a lot of lactobacillus in it. Buttermilk's another one. And then there are cheeses that still have live cultures in them as well. Now, have you ever had this tempi shit? You're a hippie. I love tempe.

I love the tempe. So what's it like? I know it's fermented. soybeans, but what is that? Smoke, smoke from, yes, smoke's fermented soybeans. It's got a much better flavor. It's much more nutty flavored, and it's,

and the, the texture's much more meaty. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's almost like chicken, I would say, or a scallop. Really? Yeah. It's that, it's that kind of, so they make phony meat on them.

Oh, I love tempe. It's, it's a, I'll make, I'll make, like, tacos and, you know, make that the, I guess, for like a better term, the meat component of a taco or something. You just use the, taco seasonings with it. It's fabulous. So soybeans usually have this stuff called phytic acid in them, which is a pairs absorption

of minerals. But when you ferment soybeans, it lowers the amount of that phytic acid. So it allows your body to absorb more minerals, which is pretty cool. Also, fermentation produces vitamin B12. That's another, that's a nutrient that soybeans don't contain. So you usually get B12 from animal products. So people who are just eating soybeans for their protein, they're not getting enough B12 if you eat a little Tempe,

you'll get some B12 that way. Or just take the B12 supplement. Yeah, and then Miso. And Mesa, yeah, yeah. Didn't mean interproproductuary. No, no, no. Livewire kitty's got a great question, too. Is there a cure for gluten intolerance?

and and and sure don't eat any fucking glute well but can you reset your system so let's talk a little bit about the difference between an intolerance versus like gluten allergy right right right so there's celiac sprue

those are people who are truly allergic to to gluten that will cause inflammation in the gut and cause malabsorption and cause abdominal pain and all that kind of stuff so that is and you have to be tested

for that, and there's several tests that they can do. And then there's intolerance, which is what I have, because I don't have spruce. Go ahead. Well, and then there's sensitivity, too. That's what I meant? Yeah. What did I say? I meant sensitivity.

Yeah. So intolerance and sensitivity, maybe it would be synonymous in this case. But what I would say is if that's the case, if you do not, if you've not been diagnosed with an actual allergy to it, but you have a sensitivity to it, I would look at resetting my gut with all these probiotics and probiotics we talked about before, but eliminating some other inflammatory things in your diet. For instance, and I'll tell you just for me, me specifically, one of the things that was killing my stomach was onions and garlic. And I, for years, I thought that I was gluten sensitive. As soon as I stopped eating onions and garlic, a lot of the

inflammation my gut went away, so now I can eat gluten now. So it was, the glutes were getting a little bit of a bad rap, yeah. So I was blaming you on glutons, and that was not the case at all. I don't think it's gluten for me as it is concentrated carbohydrate. Because if I eat a bunch of rice, I'll have the same thing that happens to me if I eat a bunch of bread, which is horrible heartburn and bloating. Oh, terrible abdominal pain. And I think visceral pain for a lot of people is really frightening because, you know, organ-related

pain for people. Because a lot of times it's hard to diagnose. and it's hard to identify what the triggers are. So what I would say is that if you've taken the gluten allergy test and you don't have celiac spruce as we described and you have a sensitivity to it, look at some of the other things that may be involved. For instance, you know, love Italian food,

you know, our favorite Italian restaurant we go to all the time. I stopped going for a little while just because it seemed like every time I went there, I fell awful. Yeah. But as soon as I figured out what's going on, now I go back there all the time and I can eat, I just don't have them put up. onions and garlic in things.

Correct. So I can eat pasta. I can eat pizza now. You mean cooked onions, bother you? Any of them. I can't eat raw onions. I can't eat any of them. They kill me.

Even a cooked one. And that's the crudy thing because, you know, onions and garlic are both. Typically, if you can tolerate them, pretty healthy for you. And I am pretty biotic. There are enzymes that you can take supplements that are

gluten aminaic, I don't know what it is. It's gluten something in A's. And, but these enzymes basically will cleave gluten in your stomach and then you just absorb the amino acids. I've not had any luck with that, but you can try it. You can get those at GNC and other places like that. They're still under investigation, so I haven't seen a lot of data on them.

All right? Yep. What else we got? That for right now, our full of family, has come three big time today. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. I had voicemails on our Dropbox and forgot to download them.

So let me grab those real quick because these are brand new. Oh, we're not going back in 15, 20 years for those stuff. That was actually kind of fun. That was fun. We'll do it again. Being able to find some old school stuff. Okay. So this is not doing its thing.

Come on now. Hey, Dr. Steve, Ticey. Good morning from the mountains of Colorado. It's Jethro from PA. It's been a hot minute. Hey, man. Anyway, doctor. I was burying one into my wife this morning at 8,500 feet above sea level. There you go. And I damn near passed out. Can you go into some details about orgasms at altitude? Sure. And also, is it like autoerotic exfixiation without the risk of pulling.

David Carradine? Yep. Nope. Actually, it depends on how high you are, I guess. Well, yeah, I mean, 8,300 feet. She shouldn't kill him, but he might feel really crappy. It's lack of oxygen, my brother. You nailed it.

I should give him a bell. Give thyself a bell. And no one's really 100% sure why oxygen deprivation causes improved orgasms. I know I tend to hold my breath. getting close to the end. And I think that's the same sort of thing. And it's just natural. I've always done that.

And then some people do this autoerotic asphyxiation. Please don't do that unless you're doing it with somebody who knows what the hell they're doing. Because, you know, you don't want to have an orgasm. If somebody choke you to death, or if you're doing it by yourself, have what happened to some famous people where the mechanism doesn't release, and they just end up dying. So try holding your breath instead, or do what this guy did and go to a high altitude. For real. There's got to be some kind of resort up on the high mountain somewhere you can go to and enjoy all of those things.

I was at Snowbird and almost died up there. I told you that story. I was skiing in powder, and I got stuck in the powder up at the top of the mountain. It was like 11,000 feet. And I just said, well, I'm just going to lay down here and die. I don't know I've never told you that I don't think so oh I was at a meeting and there was this cute young woman and she was like oh tee-he-he I don't know how to ski will you go with me and so we go all the way up to the top and I get off of this thing and it's a double diamond oh geez and it's in Utah and it's and it's you know there's powder everywhere and she just goes see at the bottom and there I'm like you effing B she I'm not the first guy that's been lured to their demise by some cute woman. But anyway, so I got up there and I started going down the hill.

And I'm a decent skier, East Coast skier. I mean, I raced in high school and stuff like that. So, you know, I'm decent, but not when you're knee deep in powder. I don't know. My body didn't know what to do. So I just got stuck and it was hard just extricating myself because my feet were down below the level of the surface of the snow and I couldn't reach them. And I was just going to leave my damn skis there and pay for them. But I ended up rolling onto my side and getting my skis up above me and I compacted the snow enough so that I didn't smother.

and then I just sort of slid down until I could find a place where I could ski. But the altitude was the big problem. If it had been at sea level, I wouldn't have been nearly as panicky. Right. But, you know, I thought I was going to die for real. Yeah, I don't do heights or elevation at all.

It makes me sick. It's fun, though. If you get out of the shower, you just need a little, like a little square of Kleenex. You hardly need to dry off at all because it just all evaporates so quickly. It's pretty neat. It was wild.

All right. Uh-oh. What the hell? Come on now. Well... Too much, Doc. We'll be in touch again. Okay, man.

Thanks. Take care. That wasn't what I was trying to play. There we go. Hey, folks. I got a little bit of an oddball question for you. Okay. Fingernails on a chalkboard.

I don't know anybody that line. that sound. Right. The question is, is what is it about those sounds? Is that just an unnatural harmonics? Yeah. Or what's the deal with?

Why do so many people despise that sound? See ya. Well, okay. So they've done studies on this. Oh, they have? Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. And what they found is that, well, a couple of things.

Number one, it makes tones at the very top of our hearing and we're very sensitive to it. The other thing is that it's a vestigial reflex. We've talked about these before, evolutionary. It was useful a long time ago in our evolution, and it was selected for. So it's pitched such that, you know, it might have been a cat who was changed. chasing you, the growl of the, you know, the screech of the cat or the screech of someone who's having something bad happening to them. And so if we keep the children, we have safe and sound, an amped-up response to the

child getting hurt could save them. And you get that adrenaline boost makes us nervous now, but would have been useful for strength and speed back then. So that might be what it is. But so a vestigial response to the sound that an extinct predator that hunted human animals made, something like that. Who knows? I love all those sort of evolutionary explanations for things. Okay.

So anyway, Dr. Scott, we've got another question from the fluid family before we get out of here. Yeah, Cupcakes wants to know if, so if you do bong hits at high altitude, do you get extra high. Oh. I would say, well, if you're already a mile high. Already, that's a good question. Damn it. I don't know the... I'm trying to think if there would be a difference in the absorption of the smoke over the surface area of the lawn.

I will tell you, let's just say hanging out in Boulder, seeing Dead and Co. up there back in July, you didn't have much of a chance. If you were breathing while you were at the show, you didn't have much of a chance. You didn't have much of a chance. I would say, I don't think there's a huge difference, especially if you've got a good amount of herbal medicine flowing through the air. Yeah, this is from, I think there's some controversy from Marijuana Packaging.com, I don't know. So smoking at high altitude locations isn't getting you higher. It's just as if you smoked after taking a long hike and felt short of breath and tired. The THC may come on stronger.

because you're already in a somewhat weakened state. Yeah. So I'm going to say no. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's a good question, not cupcakes. And that'll do or a doctor, Steve? Well, here's one from a Denver, Frost Denver dispensary. Yes, I'm over 21.

Getting high when you're high. How does Denver's altitude affect the cannabis experience? So it says being higher doesn't, what? The English in this is not good. There been a study conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration regarding alcohol and altitude. They conducted tests on humans in a pressurized chamber that could replicate the air and air pressure of any altitude. There was no difference between alcohol's effects at sea level and those at high altitude locations like Denver. Your body can only metabolize alcohol so fast.

So, yeah, they're saying the same as applicable to marijuana, but I wonder, though, if there is some difference in the absorption at high altitude. So I'll look into that, but it doesn't look like the studies have borne any fruit as far as recommending that you go to a high altitude to toke up. I don't say if you're getting high, you're probably going to just make sure it's good stuff and not street pot that's laced with buprenorphin and stuff like that. You know, like some of ours around here. You get it from a reputable source.

Correct. Very good. Reputable source. All right. Well, thanks to everyone who's made the show happen over the years. It has and continues to be the most fun I've had in many years, at least some of the experiences of it have been some of the most fun. Listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk channel.

Serious XM, Channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern on demand. And other times at Jim McClure's pleasure, it's basically all at Jim McClure's pleasure. I don't know when they run the show. Just listen on demand. That's the best way to help us. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Check out Dr. Scott's website and simply herbals.net.

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