Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 573 - Gwyneth, Idjit Extraordinaire

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Dr Steve, Dr Scott, and Tacie discuss: Gweneth Paltrow and alkaline water Why is the country low on hydrocodone? Normal world talk Covid coronary plaques Do anti inflammatory diets help with coronary disease? Abusing L-dopa "Sody Dopes" and cholesterol Warfarin and tumeric Tinnitus and holistic care 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

Can you like, shut up? You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirs, 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 subalibovir stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out

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It will not be able to demonstrate her, what's the instrument that she was learning, ukulele, ukulele chops, but we've got some other people out there that can try it. But the Rody coach is amazing, or the ROTI robotic tuner. It's, you know, a hundred and something bucks for something that if you give this to someone on your list that plays the guitar, they are going to crap themselves. They'll be very happy with it. for very little money. Check out Dr. Scott's website

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There's exclusive content there. There are shows that you can no longer get on the internet. otherwise. So check that out. Patreon.com slash weird medicine. And if you, I'm still have my cameos at very low price. So camio.com slash weird medicine. I had fun doing those while I was in Dallas. So anyway. All right? That's cool. If you listen on the Sirius XM show at the very end, they give that number out again and they say, yes, that's a real phone number chosen by a grown man in the medical profession.

It was like, well, okay, Borberigmus was taken. You know, arthroscopic, cardiovascular, you know, 1-800 cardiovascular disease was already taken. So, you know, good Lord. You're just trying to have a little. Anyway, check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbils.net. That's simplyerbils.net.

Anything going on there? Just a lot of nasal spray Yeah Oh good Good good Yeah check out his CBD Peppermint nasal spray It's amazing

It's not a lot of peppermint In that one Is there any? Just enough Oh yeah There is some Yeah there sure is Yeah just a little bit

So it's a topical Anti-inflammatory Plus the CBD And I really You know If I'm out of it I am And I mean out of the stuff

I'm usually am out of it If I'm out of the nasal spray I suffer a little bit, so I keep some on hand at all times. Check out our website at Dr. Steve.com. I did want to throw out a couple of things here.

I put out a tweet. Our friend and fellow rigorous scientist, Gwyneth Paltrow, was pushing this stuff. I'm not going to say the brand name. It doesn't matter.

Called alkaline water. Now, do you guys in traditional Chinese medicine have anything to say about alkaline water? Not in the medicine part. I actually like to alcohol and water myself personally, but I don't know that there's a sign. You like to drink it.

Yeah, that's correct. I don't know that there's anything to do it. Somehow it tastes good to you or something. Yeah, I think so, maybe just a little bit. Yeah, I don't know there's anything scientific about it, but I do like it. But I'm certainly not going to say that I've ever read any research on it. Yeah, I know.

She pushes it for its healthy benefits. And you can't actually get closer to the mic. I know I was fussing at you during the mic check, but for some reason your mic was really hot, and now it's not, so I don't, I'm like, smoking. I'm really, I was an audio engineer when everything had VU meters and tape, and it was just so much easier. You just zeroed everything to zero VU,

and then, you know, you put a test tone through the system at zero VU, and you calibrated everything to that, to where your needles all said zero, and then everything was perfect. You know, the headroom on this digital thing is so great. There's a much greater dynamic range, you know, signal-to-noise ratio, but it makes it very difficult. But for me, anyway, being an old-school audio-type person, which is why we're still doing a radio show instead of a video show on the Internet. But anyway, yeah, so Gwyneth was pushing this, and what had this?

The thing that cracked me up was she said, I'd love to have my alkaline water in the morning. Now, let's talk a little bit about alkaline water. So this is water that has a pH that is greater than seven. Right. That's all it is. Water has a pH of seven. pH is a measure, and we could go through the math, but it's a measure of alkalinity or acidity. Okay.

So if the pH is less than seven, you have an abundance. of naked protons, which makes something acid. And if it's greater than seven, you have a dearth of those or an abundance of hydroxyl groups, which is OH. And so you have H2O, which is really H-OH. So you have the hydrogen atom and then the hydroxyl ion. And hydrogen is positively charged, hydroxyl OH is negatively charged, and they just sort of float around.

sometimes they're bound together, sometimes they're not. And you can have free protons and free hydroxyl groups, but the net charge of water is neutral, right? So there should be an equal number of positive and negative charges. So anyway, so if you have more base, then it'll be alkaline. And if you drink alkaline water, what will happen is that the body will go, No, we're going to piss out more alkali so that to return the pH of the bloodstream to 7.4. Okay, got it.

It is tightly regulated. Really, tightly regulated. One of the most tightly. Correct. Yeah, that's one of that. Yeah. Yeah, potassium is pretty tightly regulated, but even that isn't, you know, varies more than the pH of the bloodstream. The bloodstream, yeah.

So your body will never tolerate an alkaline pH for long or an acidic pH for very long. It'll always try to return it back to 7.4. So if you drink acid, you're going to piss out acidic urine or you will metabolize it somehow to make it less acidic to return your pH back to 7.4. And likewise, if you take in alkaline. So it really does absolutely nothing. But what I loved about what she was touting was I take my alkaline water in the morning with a spritz of lime. Oh, so she has a very extremely. Very expensive alkaline water that she's touting for the benefits of drinking an alkaline substance and then putting an acid in it.

I didn't see that. You see? You see your stupid minds. Stupid. Stupid. He's a fucking idiot. So you're putting an acid in it and neutralizing it. So now you just basically have lime water.

So, I mean, she's not doing any harm other than. than people thinking that there's some benefit to it. And then this water is very expensive. Yes, it is. For what you get. Do you know, is it, and I don't know this, this might be said to look up. Do you know if she didn't ped out the acid in it?

Is the alkaline water more easily absorbed into the system or anything? What do you mean? I mean, I don't know. I'm just saying it because that's the only thing I've ever heard anybody said here. Water is the most easily absorbed substance in the body. I mean, that's our body is. Mostly water. Mostly water.

Oh, no. Yeah, I mean, and I think that's the only thing I've ever seen as far as like any claims that it's more easily absorbed into the... Could there be... I don't know. I don't know, honestly. Could there be some benefits to pissing out alkaline urine? Yes. Okay.

But it has to do with things like kidney stones. Yes. And there are certain stones that will not form in the presence of an alkali. There are some that more readily form in the presence of an alkali. So you need to know what you're talking about, what kind of stones you have. So I could imagine someone that's right on the verge and they just need a little bit of alkali in their urine to prevent a certain kind of kidney stone. I'm not going to say it because I don't want people that have that to go out and buy this stuff. Talk to your urologist.

But that's the only benefit that I can think of. Because they would actually have to test the actual stones. Well, yes. I mean, ideally, that is the correct way to... To identify what kind of kidney stones you've got. Right. If you have someone with kidney stones, you have to collect them, you send them off to the lab, and then they're uracid stones, or they're calcium phosphate stones, or they are oxalate stones.

And there are things that you can do to prevent those. stones if you know what they are. So uric acid stones, people with gout or other problems like tumor lysis syndrome, that's where you have a lot of tumors in the body that respond to, say, chemotherapy, and all of a sudden they all die and the body's got to do something with all that dead human tissue, and one of the products of that is uric acid, and you can make uric acid stones. Or if you have gout, and they give you a drug called probiotic. Benesit to make you piss out more uric acid so that you don't have as much gout.

Which is what I do. Yeah. You take the probenesis. I sure do, thanks to you, yeah. But in the beginning, that can precipitate stones. We'll give those peaceful potassium citrate to change the pH of their urine so it won't produce stones. That's the only benefit that I can think of. And even then, I think potassium citrate pound for pound is going to be cheaper.

than buying alkaline water. Could you, Dr. Steve, could you add just a little bit of bacon soda in water,

make your own alkaline water? Sure. That's all they're doing. I'm sure. That's what they're doing. They're probably, they're probably tap water into a big bucket

and dropping some, and then making it some fancy water. Yeah, if it's just pure alkaline water without having some other, you know, molecule in there,

that's basically how they're doing it. Right on. Jeez. Mm. All right. That's what we should It opened instead of a beer store as an alkaline water store. Yeah.

Yeah. Sodium bicarb is N-A-H-C-O-3. So the byproduct of that would be carbon dioxide. And, yeah, so if, right, so it would be carbon dioxide in the presence of an acid. Okay. And now, wow. I do have a quick question. She's a genius.

I have a quick question from Dennis. Yeah. He just was wondering, what about the sudden shortage of hydrocoated? with acetaminisin that just came out of nowhere. Yeah. I haven't seen that. Did you say that? Yes.

We have a lot of our, I don't. A lot of years, yeah. I don't tend to write a lot of hydrocodone with acetaminophen. So that is sold on the brand name, Norco, Vicodin, Lortab, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of our patients have liver issues or they have medications that are straining their liver. And so I'm just not real. or they have liver metastas, you know, tumors in their liver. I'm just not a big fan of just stressing their liver out even more

by having them take Tylenol six times a day sometimes. Right, right. And you can't buy hydrocodone by itself like you can oxycodone. Oxycodone is percocet. It's oxycodone with acetamin, but you can also buy it as just oxycodone. Whereas hydrocodone in the United States is only sold in the immediate release form. as hydrocodone with acetaminopin. So I don't sell, I don't sell any of it.

I don't prescribe a lot of it. But I have noticed that people who were already on it that we tried to refill it, they can't get it. And this is a distribution issue. It's not just that, though. Every week I get notifications, well, we're low on IV diazepam, IV Valium. Or we are, you know, there's a shortage of liquid. oral morphine, or there is a shortage of ivy hydromorphone. And it's, we've kind of descended into a situation where we're beholden to manufacturers

that sometimes, a lot of times aren't in this country. I really think we need to start making this stuff here. So we'll have it. Yes, yes, that would be a deal. Did you know, and this is on another topic, but it's very similar. there are, to my understanding, no resistors. A resistor is an electronic part, and every circuit requires resistors to step down voltage or to reduce current going to a different part of the circuit or whatever.

I'm building a drum machine in there, and 90% of the parts are resistors. and none of them are made in the United States. Zero resistors are made in the United States. So the country that is making them could just say, you know what, fuck y'all. We're not sending you any more resistors. Or we'll just charge you twice. Or that.

But we could tool up to make resistors again, but it would take time to do that. And that puts us in a very much. very vulnerable place. Right now, I don't want to talk about politics on the show's strategic. Oil reserves are at an all-time low. We don't make resistors. I don't think we make capacitors.

We still make chips in this country. But, you know, we don't mine the ore that is required to make batteries for electronic vehicles. And what happens when we go to all electronic vehicles? And then whatever countries are actually producing that. just decide that they don't like us anymore because nobody seems to like us and just says to hell with you guys. Good luck. Right? So I would like for us to be more self-sufficient.

But anyway, so there you go. But that's what's going on with hydrocodone right now. And I'm sorry about that. But anyone should be able to just switch over to oxycodone. Now, the conversion from hydrocodone to oxycodone is 30 to 20. So 30 milligrams of hydrocodone is equal to 20 milligrams of oxycodone. So if you are on, say, 30 milligrams of hydrocodone, then 20 milligrams of oxycodone would do the trick. And that is still in plentiful supply for right now.

Gotcha. Okay. But that's a problem. All of a sudden, I'll get a phone call. Well, we can't get X. and X is something that all of our patients are on. And I'm having to frantically write prescriptions for other things. Gotcha.

It's just a nuisance. Kind of a daily thing for you guys. And it's a nuisance for the patient, but it really takes up a lot of time. Yeah. Anyway. Well, shoot. Yep. All right.

Sorry about that. But that's the answer. Switch over to something else. Hydromorphone is another one. So oral dilauded. So 7.5 milligrams. of oral dilaudid is equal to 30 milligram, or roughly equivalent to 30 milligrams of Lortab. So you divide it by four.

So if you were on 30 or, you know, 10 milligrams of hydrocodone, then that would be equivalent to about 2.5 milligrams of hydromorphone. Well, they don't make that. They make a two and they make a four. Yeah. Wow. So, you know, you could do one and a half of a two or just. take a two. And really with incomplete cross-tolerance, in other words, and those equivalents I just gave you are for people who are tolerant to both drugs.

If you're not tolerant to the hydromorphone, which you won't be, if you switch over from 10 milligrams of hydrocodone to 2 milligrams of hydromorphone, you really should be just fine. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Because you're not as tolerant to it. Got you. All right. Good question. All right. Yes, very good. I have a, let me do one story that I found. COVID coronary plaque infection confirms cardiovascular risk. So by the way, I want everybody listening to this to go to YouTube and search Normal World with Dave Landau and find my episode and just turn it on and put it on a loop and just watch. I want to get my views up greater than E-Rox.

That was a fun trip. I went to Dallas, Texas, and Dave Landau used to, he's a comedian, hilarious, really, there's a darkness to him, but there's also a sweetness to him, and he's really, really smart. And it makes up for a really good comedian. And his special prison, a prison 10 is still available for a little while longer. But they were very generous. It was really a fun show. Now, his co-host, Garrett, doesn't like to read the jokes that Dave rates for him.

But also a very nice guy, well known for being on NerdRodic. Really, I learned a lot from him about doing some videos stuff, and he's also a very gracious host. So, but the two of them have a show called Normal World. It's on Blaze TV, but they put it right on YouTube. And E. Rock came the day after me. So I really would like for my show to have just a few more views than EROCs, but it's fine. It's fine. It all really depends on the topic.

But I really had a blast. They let me kind of wax eloquent about the scientific process, which doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun for a, for a, a comedy show but then we got into bidets and other just sort of fun things like that interesting descriptions

of what your scrotum is like when you get to be 68 and you're wearing boxer shorts and things like that so it was funny. There's a lot of funny stuff in there. The first half, a little more serious but the second half we get into the funny more funny things and I loved

it. It's a real TV studio not like this. I mean, it's a huge warehouse with newsrooms and offices and multiple studios. They have Archie Bunker, I mean, all in the family studio, right there just built into the, they apparently Glenn Beck bought it and moved it there, and it cost like half a million bucks or something. I don't know. But it's the actual studio. Wow.

Or the set. the actual set. And they had the front door that people would walk through. And I knew a guy. Phil Proctor was from Fire Sign Theater. And he did some character acting for a while. And he was actually on all in the family. I saw the, and I knew him.

Back in the day, we hung out at the pier in Raleigh for, you know, an evening and really had a nice time. And I'd corresponded with him a bunch back in the 70s. and stuff. Well, anyway, he just walked right through that door, and I was standing there where that door was. It was cool. Let's do this. This is like old school.

It's old school. Yeah, hang on to say. Oh, she hung up. Okay. All right. Yeah, that was Tacey. I was getting ready to. So she preemptively hung up.

She knew she was going to hang up anyway. That's right. If she calls back, we'll put her out. But, yeah, that was cool as hell. And so Dave's got his own. set, a permanent set, all set up, and I want you guys to check it out. Now, it's a new show, rough around the edges in some places, but you can see the, kind of the fun in it, and it was one of the most fun things that I've ever done.

Cool. And I came out of there. I even went to my shrink yesterday. She said, well, you've got quite the bounce in your step. And I said, do I? And she said, yeah, I said, well, I was really, really happy with how that went down. I'm just seeing everybody at Allie Lerman from Compound Media is now working there and coordinating writing. And she's just delightful.

She's one of my favorite people in the world. And Dave is one of my favorite people in the world. Just the nicest person and an actual friend, you know, not just somebody that has me on their show because whatever they are trying to kill time. So I'm hoping to go back for the eclipse and do an eclipse special with them because it's coming right through Dallas in April. Oh, wow. And then I'm going to pitch to them to be maybe do sort of a regular segment once a month or something for them. So, yep, loads of fun. Cool.

Anyway, check it out, normal world on YouTube. And I think it was episode 52, but I'm not sure. It just says Dr. Steve. All right. Okay, so COVID coronary plaque infection confirms cardiovascular risk. And this is from Medscape Medical News and we'll go to the actual article if we need to because a lot of times they get this stuff wrong, but I did look at it. It was okay.

New evidence shows for the first time the virus that causes COVID directly infects atherosclerotic plaques. These are clogs in your coronary arteries. producing persistent inflammatory response. Inflammation is bad. Invoys is bad. So you know how chicken pox, you get chicken pox, and then it retreats into nerve ganglia outside of the spinal column

and then sits there and festers until it comes back out under stress when you're older and causes shingles. Well, this is kind of the same thing. These damn virus are just sitting up shop. and multiplying very slowly, but then the body is reacting to it and causing inflammation. And it says this is a study from New York University's Grossman School of Medicine. It says our study shows there is persistent persistence of viral debris in the artery. And there is an important inflammatory response.

We can now look at ways to control this inflammation. So just knowing it's there that means that we can eventually do something about it. But, yeah, that's bad. Now, I am going to say that this is something that would be distinct from the vaccine. Okay, I know I am, and I made a big deal out of this on Dave's show. I'm not a vaccine mandate person we've talked about this. I'm taking, I took the vaccine this year because I don't want to lose.

productivity, if it'll help me even a little bit, and I'm at risk of dying from even a, you know, a moderate infection because of what it did to my lungs, you know, the first time I got it. So I take it, I tell everyone, do your own research. You know, our bodies ourselves was a big deal in the 60s. You know, don't tell me what to do with my body, but then people try to tell me, well, you have to take this vaccine. That I don't understand. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not, and I am certainly not a pro-mandate person. I think that under any other circumstance, you're supposed to weigh the risk benefits and alternatives for yourself and then decide what you're going to do.

Right? Right. I agree. I mean, am I wrong about that? Give them, give them the information. Let them do what they want. Yes. Anyway, that's my position on this.

And anyway, so, yeah, other viruses can cause inflammation in the heart like myocarditis, but they can't think of another virus that stimulates the sequence events in the coronary artery inflammation like we're seeing here. Influenza is also associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events, but that is thought to be because it just stresses the body so much. It's no evidence that directly affects the coronary arteries. So there's still a lot going on. You know, I talked on Dave's show. We don't have any long-term data.

It's not possible to have long-term data. You know, we can only have data stemming from, you know, right around November of 2020. Right. That's it. Yep. You know, we're getting ready. So that's three years in November of 2023. It's hard to believe.

You know, so there's no 20-year data. There isn't any. We will have some. The one thing that is beneficial out of all of this is that people are talking about science and trying to use some critical thinking. But more than that, when you go to the emergency room now and you've got a viral or, you know, upper respiratory infection, they do this thing called a viral respiratory panel now. They never did these before. People would come in and have what's called atypical pneumonia, aka viral pneumonia, and then they would die from it. We'd never know what it was.

We just said, ah, viral pneumonia. Well, now we know. They do this thing, and they'll tell you if you have influenza, which is, we could do that before, SARS-CoV-2, which we could do before. But now, one of the other coronaviruses. Do you have rhinovirus, which is a common cold virus? Do you have para-influenza? So we never tested for that stuff before. Now that we're testing for it, we can start to look at, can we just kill these damn things and be done with it?

Wow. That's unbelievable. Yeah, they even let me, a normal world, talk about how we eradicated smallpox. Oh, wow. I mean, they just let me go for better or worse, you know. Cut you lose, huh? Yeah. No, it was fun.

And now, Dave's very good host, and he was good at moving things along, but they did, they were interested. Hmm. You know? Anyway. All right. Well, enough about me. I think this is very interesting. We will look at how this virus affects cardiac tissue going forward.

I really think this is going to be a short-lived effect. Okay. I don't think there's anything special about this coronavirus other than. You know, the fact that probably was the result of gain of function research. I don't know. I don't know. I'll be the first to say I don't know. It's just a lot of coincidences involved in how it came out and where it came out and all that kind of stuff.

But I don't think there's anything special about it in the sense that once the kids who have been exposed to this as children grow up and we get a couple generations away, it's just going to be another cold virus. just like the other five coronaviruses, which, by the way, are not completely benign. No. Kill 10 to 20,000 people a year in this country or thought to. We're going to get a better number on that now because of the fact that we are testing for it now. Yeah. You know. No, I agree.

And Phillips got a good follow-up question. Yeah. Does an anti-inflammatory diet help with this inflammation in the arteries? Probably. Yeah, as you'll say, absolutely. it's a good thing to practice anyway. Inflammation sucks. Anywhere.

I take turmeric every day just because maybe it'll help. Yeah. I take turmeric. I don't take Boswellia. I don't see a downside to that. You know, people will say, well, you know, does vitamin D work? And it's like, well, work for what? If you want to prevent rickets, we know it works.

But for this other stuff, like cardiovascular disease and cancer and things, you know, the data is pretty crummy. but it didn't go do any harm to take just don't megadose vitamin D so I feel the same way

with turmeric I don't see a downside to it or an anti-inflammatory diet I can't imagine you know not going to say it's going to fix it

but definitely it's a pretty good help it might help and it's not going to hurt right so those things I don't have a problem with

if you feel better doing it do it yeah it's it's the stuff where If you're bypassing something that we know works to do something that is iffy, then we have problems with that. Or if the thing has other adverse effects that you're not taking into account.

All right. Totally good. All right. Let's take some phone calls, Dr. Scott. Sounds good. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Very good advice.

Sage advice is always. Yeah, Dr. Steve, I'm trying to get on the show. Okay. okay well I guess just forget this punching out okay he's punching out

perfect he's auguring in and he's punching out yes this is the 347-766 433 right now is a voicemail line and it's just

easier and we do a better show that way this is the Dean Adele version where you call in and then he answers your question like pretending that it's live.

But we will be doing live shows again. I'll be doing those live stream on YouTube, and people can ask questions live there. So be watching that. Go to YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine and just sign up for notifications. And if it goes well enough, I'll set up a schedule so people will know when it is. You have to be careful because if I do it Sunday night, I'm going up again. against, you know, Tuki Soup. And if we do it Saturday afternoon, at two, we're going up against Carl.

You know, WATP is recording in 10 minutes. Okay. And, you know, there's Cardiff Electric. He's on there so much that I'm always feel like I'm going to interfere with one of his broadcast. So you have to kind of stake out your time and just go for it. But, and I need more free time to do that as well, but we're working on it. working on Friday nights. Friday nights might be the night to do it.

All right. Here we go. Hey, Dr. Steve. Hello. If Parkinson's medication works because it increases dopamine in your brain and street drugs like meth get you high because they increase dopamine. Okay. Hypothetically, have you ever heard of levo-dopa drugs being used recreationally?

Give thyself a bell. When I first heard this question, and this was sent to me by Cameo, a Cameo.com slash Weird Medicine, by the way. I'm trying to get up to a certain number so I can get to gold status, so I dropped my price down to $2. And when I was in Dallas doing Dave's show, I had quite a few because at $2, it's like, well, that's just like free. But it was fun doing them. And this was Donna, and she sent me like 20 of them to do. So thank you, Donna. And this was one of the ones I said, please call this one in.

So Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder. There are – and there's this thing called the striatum nigra in the brain that dies. It causes tremor and stiffness and stiffness in the face. They call it masked facies, where the patients just unable to make lifelike expressions sometimes, and it causes trouble with gait. And then there is a dementia that can be associated called Louie Body dementia. And so it's a mess. And so one of the things that you can do, particularly in the beginning, is give people levo-dopa. And it crosses the blood-brain barrier, and it helps with.

the stiffness and stuff. It doesn't work forever, but it is a temporizing maneuver. And we've got to come up with a better treatment for this, something that will, you know, where we could create a new striatina nigra in the brain or something, you know. But anyway, so I wondered about this as well. And it turns out there are case reports of people that were increasing their Liva dopa because they were getting high off them. And they felt so good that they refused to take the dope.

that the doctors prescribed for them. And because it was causing them harm and they were getting euphoria and they were taking it outside of the prescriptive control of their provider, it was classified as a substance abuse disorder. So, yeah, you can get high off of this stuff. Now, some of these other drugs do more than just affect dopamine. But, yeah, that's, I thought that was really interesting. I'd never heard of anybody abusing that particular drug. It makes sense. Don't try this at home either, people.

They're adverse effects for it. Leave a dopa. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. It's John. Hey, John. I had an exam with my provider. Yes.

My cholesterol is super high. And the only difference from last year is, my intake of soda pop. Does that have any correlation? Thanks. Bye. Well, okay. How interesting.

I found an article on MedicineNet, and this is an example of kind of crap medical journalism, because the headline is, sugary sodas wreak havoc with cholesterol levels, comma, harming the heart. Okay? So they're saying that if you drink sugary sodas, take out the middle claws, you are harming the heart. Correct? That's what they're saying. Right. Sugary sodas, blank, blank, blank, harming the heart.

So this was a study of this person who did this study is that's all she does. It's Nicola McCown. And it seems to be she's all over the. place when it comes to sugary drinks. So she, I wonder what happened in her past where she got a, you know, got a thing for doing research on why sugary drinks are bad for you. But it says here, sugar sweetened drinks can play havoc, can play havoc with your cholesterol and trigularized right, liberals, which increases your risk for heart disease.

Jesus. Let me start that over again. That was really bad. Sugar, sweetened drinks can play. havoc with your cholesterol and triglyceride levels, which increases your risk for heart disease and stroke, a new study find. So, yes, elevated cholesterol levels are associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

It's not the same thing as saying sugary sodas wreak havoc, which, by the way, is not a medical term with cholesterol levels, quote, harming the heart. Anyway, so it says here specifically, drinking more than 12 ounces, which is one standard can of sugary sodas or fruit drinks a day, may not bode well for your cardiovascular health. Yeah, may not. I mean, okay, so think before you drink. There's accumulating evidence linking sugar sweetened beverages to adverse health outcomes, and this message is clear. said lead researcher Nicola McCowan, a nutritional epidemiologist at some human nutrition research center on aging at Tufts University in Boston.

So, I mean, you know, she's a real deal. She's got a lot of articles in the medical literature. Now, McCowan and her team found that drinking more than 12 ounces of sugary drinks a day It was linked to a 53% higher odds, higher odds of high triglycerides, boo, and a 98% higher odds of low HDL cholesterol. That's good cholesterol compared with drinking less. So HDL is the good cholesterol and LDL we think of as quote, unquote, bad cholesterol. There's more, it's more nuanced than that. But if you take your total cholesterol and you divide into it your HDL cholesterol, if that ratio is three or less, then we think that's good.

So if you have an LDL cholesterol, or I'm sorry, a total cholesterol of 120 and your HDL is 40, then that would be 3 to 1. that would be, you know, you would be in the lower risk category. I wouldn't say anything about LDL or anything else. It's just that people who drink 12 ounces of sugary drinks a day was linked to higher odds of low HDL cholesterol. I didn't define that in this article. So we're going to go to the actual article. Now it says neither low-calorie sweetened drinks nor 100%

fruit juice was associated with negative changes in cholesterol. So, you know, it's really just got to be the sugar. It's possible that the carbonation is affecting things. We know that carbonation seems to affect bone density. But let me see. Just not sugar-sweetened beverages taste good. Many are caffeinated. They're convenient, all appealing qualities for many Americans.

We can't keep overlooking the fact that they are unhealthy for us, she said. So she has a real bias. She's saying these things are unhealthy. So we have to really look at her studies and make sure that there isn't any inherent bias in that. And she's like, she's an activist. For starters, children shouldn't be given these drinks, given little ones sugary drinks as a sure-fied way to get them, quote, Quote, unquote, unquote, on the highly sweet taste. For older adults switching to flavored seltzers or adding a splash of 100% juice or herbal tea to plain seltzer can quench the craving for bubbles in flavor.

Really? Do we have a study that shows that? Mm-hmm. You know, this is just their idea. Instead, opt for water, tea, coffee, or unsweet. Now, listen, I'm not saying sodas are good for you. I don't drink soda myself. No.

But so let's look at this study. Here it is. So Nicola McCowan was the last author. So she is, that's good. That means that she was in charge of this. And then Danielle Haslam, Gina Pelosi. These people are, you know, research assistants or residents or something. But the final author is usually the one that is running the thing.

So she's the real deal. And so what they looked at was fasting plasma lipoprotein concentrations in, you know, a cohort of 3,146 people from 1991 to 2014, and 3,584 people from 2002 to 2001. So what they did was they went through the Framingham Offspring Study, and there's just a bunch of data in there. and they went data mining for this. So beverage intakes were estimated from food frequency questionnaires and grouped into five intake categories. And then they, you know, so they said we found that regular, which is greater than one serving per day versus low,

which is less than one serving per month, sweetened, sugary beverage consumption was associated with greater mean density in high density lipoprotein cholesterol. Now, you'll notice they don't say, a GD thing about how this is associated with cardiovascular events other than saying that, well, we know low HDL is associated with increased cardiovascular events. Then they said cumulative average intakes of low calories, sweetened beverages were not associated with changes in non-density high, I'm sorry, non-high density lipoprotein cholesterol, LDL or incident. dyslipidemias. In other words, other cholesterol, deranged cholesterol stuff.

So their conclusion in the actual study is sweetened sugary beverage intake was associated with adverse changes in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations. So there you go. That's all they found. Okay. Now, would I use that in my practice to say, hey, man. Hey, go easy on the, yeah. I mean, I don't see a whole lot of benefit in drinking, you know, regular Coke on a regular basis.

You know, my mother-in-law will order a salad and then order a large Coke. Yeah. And these people are actually saying, well, yeah, actually the aspartame flavored ones are better. They don't have this effect. So they're pushing, you know, diet Coke. And then you have other studies where people are saying, oh, it's pretty bad. So it just depends. But so I don't see the benefit in drink.

I don't drink sweet tea. I'll guarantee you that if they tested sweet tea, Southern sweet tea, it would say the same shit. Yeah, I would think so. It's the sugar. You would think, yeah. Definitely do. And, you know, taking a big slug of just sugar water like that will increase your, you know, a spike in insulin. which causes all kinds of problems, and then you will drive your blood sugar low.

And as you drive your blood sugar low, then the body's going to turn down its sensitivity to that signal. So if you keep spiking throughout the day with, you know, however many grams of sugar are in this, making your insulin jump up and up and up and down and up and down, then eventually you end up with diabetes, you know, type 2 diabetes. And that's a known risk to drinking, you know, a lot of substances or eating a lot of substances that have unprocessed or just free sugar in them. So I'm, you know, this clickbait, sugary sodas wreak havoc with cholesterol levels harming the heart. There's a germ of truth in that, but that's a crappy headline. Yeah.

It doesn't wreak havoc. It increases the risk of having a low, high-density lipoprotein, which is the good cholesterol. And, yeah, that is associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke. But harming the heart is just really a clickbait bullshit title. All right? So I'm not a fan of medical journalism, as you're aware, and that's just a good example of it. Oh, now let me show you something else, though. This is from the International Stroke Conference.

This is from the American Heart Association Journal. So while I'm looking this stuff up, this is what I find. Abstract W.P. 265, debunking the myth of regular soda beverages and the rich. risk of incident cardiovascular events. So they said the goal of this study was to determine the effect of soda beverage intake on the occurrence of cardiovascular disease in a large prospective cohort. Now, this was postmenopausal women, but still, a lot of people, 93,000 people, as opposed to, you know, 2,000, and this other study.

And that was just looking at an intermediate endpoint, which was HDL. This is looking at actual cardiovascular events. That's what we care about. If I could give you a pill that would quadruple your bad cholesterol but would reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke by 50 percent, we would do it. Of course, yeah. You don't care about the intermediate endpoint. You care about the actual endpoint, which is cardiovascular events. Right.

So they said, so they looked at 93,000 women, the rates of diabetes maldisper. higher among regular non-caffeinated and caffeinated soda beverage users compared with those with none or minimal use. That makes sense. These people are not only drinking sodas with sugar in it, they're eating other stuff. And that's the other thing in that other study. They didn't control for lifestyle. Right.

You know, if you don't exercise and you drink sodas, your HDL is going to be low. Even, you know, if you don't exercise and you drink water, your HDL is going to be low. So I didn't see where they controlled for that because it could be a correlation rather than a cause, right? Yep. But it says compared with women who are non-users of sugary drinks, the myocardial infarction and stroke was the same. Compared with women who were non-users, regular caffeinated soda beverage users had a lower risk of any stroke. Okay. Isn't that interesting?

Hemorrhagic stroke or myocardial infarction. So their conclusion was there appeared to be no increased risk of incident cardiovascular events in women using non-caffeinated or caffeinated soda beverages despite high rates of underlying diabetes melodice. Hmm. Now put that in your hat and shit it out. You're in your soda pop and top it off. All right. I love it. So anyway, all right.

So this person who called about sugar, sweet, and beverages stimulated a whole damn thing. So a very interesting question. And the answer is, yeah, it seems to affect your cardiovascular markers in the sense of the good cholesterol seems to be associated with a decrease in good cholesterol. if you drink one sugary drink a day, but at least in 93,000 postmenopausal women, it didn't translate to increased cardiovascular events. So we need to do more studies on this. That's the thing. I very often do not pay attention to these intermediate endpoints, harming the heart.

Well, it doesn't seem like it did harm the heart, at least in this cohort. And this is not in some shit journal. This is in the journal Stroke, which is one of the American Heart Association journals. Okay. All right. Anyway, we've got some really good questions for the podcast this week. So check out our podcast at Dr. Steve.com and, you know, and other places. You got anything from the fluid family?

We've got about one minute. One minute. Yeah, real quick. Johnny wants to know about warfarin and turmeric together. He said he's taking warfarin. They said not to take turmeric with it. Yeah, because turmeric actually is a Cox 2 inhibitor. It is a bit of a blood thinner, so that is accurate, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Good question, J.L. It's a very good question. Always, if you're going to take a supplement, you know, if we mention something on here, talk it over with your primary care or email us and we can send you some information on it. But, yeah, I would go easy on that as well just because, hell, we don't know. Yeah. Well, you know what, Dr. Scott?

We've got a little bit of time left. Let's answer some questions from the fluid family. The fluid family. How about one from Muddy Baboon? No, except for that one. Okay, no. No, that's all. Guess have a good weekend.

Okay. What do they got? Here we got. Quick question. I have some tinnitus of crickets in my right ear. Anything in the holistic realm that can provide some relief for that. Well, okay. What do you do for that?

Couple things. First of, I'll try to figure out what's the underlying kind of cause. There you go. Give thyself a bell. You know, it can come from anything from a little bit of fluid in the ear to the side effects of certain antibiotics can cause. Yeah. To, you know, trauma. If it's just one side, aspirin, it may be just somebody taking too much aspirin or, you know, shooting a gun on that one side is caused here to be, have some ringing. Yeah. Hearing loss is a big. So if it's mechanical, it's really tough to treat as far as a holistic component. If it's something that you're taking, you know, certainly stopping that can help.

But, you know, a lot of times I do a lot of sinus treatment and a little bit of drainage, like lymphatic drainage out of the air and into the throat. And sometimes it'll help with the, but tonight's some. Yeah, sometimes acupuncture can help. But I would make sure I find somebody that knows what they're doing. And, you know, there's, you look out on them. internet, there's a thousand different things to cure tenetous without people knowing what exactly is the underlying cause.

If it's reversible, go for something reversible, head and neck trauma. Again, diuretics can cause tinnitus, anti-malarial drug, some antidepressants can do it. If I would see an ear, nose, and throat person, they're the ones that deal with this. And sometimes you just have to use, just like Dr. Scott, you use it. you call it when you put the little pain here and it gated, what do you call it? Like fatigue, gated channel theory? Yeah, fatigue gated channel theory. They can do that with hearing as well, where they give you a different noise that's not as noxious.

And it distracts the brain from the one that's driving you crazy. But hearing loss can do it as well. So the first thing they're going to do is check your hearing. So the answer is, yes, there are some things in the holistic realm, depending on what the cause is. So that'd be it. Okay. There is a super chat from Franklin Schekler. Thank you for the $2.

It says if Tuckie has a cervix, should he see a gynecologist? Now, Dr. Scott, the thing you've got to understand about Dr. Scott is he's not in this world at all. He doesn't give a shit about it. He doesn't know who the fuck Tuckie is unless I show him who Tuckie is. So Tuckie is an Oscar the Grouch-looking puppet by. Bidabler and it is one of his alter egos and Tuckie's origin story is that Bdabler was using this puppet to well somebody, maybe it was Ray DeVito, someone was using the Tuki puppet as a masturbatory device and eventually one day something magical happened and Tuki came to life because of all the

you know the action yeah all the action the dried scene I guess. So that presumes that Tuckie has a cervix, but not really. When magic is involved, then I don't think that we have to assume that Tuckie has actual reproductive organs and parts and stuff. So seeing a shaman would be better for Tewki. Or at least start with your primary care provider. Well, yeah. Well, in this case, should be a shaman because Tuki is a, you know, that origin story is a magic.

origin story. All right, guys. Thanks for coming. See you next week. All right. See, Dr. Scott doesn't understand any of this stuff. I mean, we have floating potatoes. And now, Tuki Soup is one.

If you ever want to know anything about what's going on with crazy people, well, crazy, I'm not supposed to use that word anymore for, with the more disturbed elements of the internet and the sort of random. humorous things that you can find out of their YouTube channels. Tuki Soup, 9 or 10 p.m. on Sunday nights, and it's basically talk soup. He uses all the same imagery and everything, and he talks about all these different people on the internet. And it's quite funny. look for the YouTube channel

Be Dabbler. And Be Dabbling Live is his Saturday morning show and then Tuki Soup is the Sunday show. It's worth watching if you're interested in learning about the dabble verse or just sort of crazy people on the internet who do crazy things.

And he finds the most extreme sort of examples of people putting out nutty stuff on YouTube and then comments on it. Okay. All right. All right, guys. I believe I'll do her.

Franklin said, I gave a much better answer than that dumb question deserved. Well, that's the thing. I remember when Opie called into the show one time and he used some weird voice and he was asking,

do you remember that? Were you here that day? I think so. And he was, you know, talking like that. And even when somebody asks a goofy question, I try to give, turn it around to answer an actual question that I want to answer. So, anyway.

All right. Any other questions from the fluid family? No, sir. Okay, we do have fun in the fluid family. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, come Saturday, usually at 1 p.m. Eastern, and go to YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine. And, you know, subscribe to the channel. do the whole notification thing. And if you do the notification thing,

you'll be around for the live streams, which I'm going to be doing more of. I did one on Gilman Amnesia. Are you familiar with that? Do you know what, Gilman amnesia? I don't think so. Has the news ever come to you and done a story about you? Have you ever been the subject of a news story?

Yeah. In a good way, of course. How many mistakes did they make in the reporting of whatever it was that they were doing. Oh, shit. There's always mistakes. Well, how many mistakes? I don't know. Okay. I can't give a number. It was okay. It wasn't just one then. There were multiple, multiple mistakes, right? When I was up in Vermont, they did a story about our health clinic up there, and everything

they said was wrong. Oh, wow. But then we turn around and they go, well, and now in Afghanistan news, and you assume everything they're telling you is correct. That is what's called gel man amnesia that we forget about the fact that when they talk about something we know about yeah they they get everything wrong but then then you trust everything else that they say wow never heard that yeah it's pretty interesting that is interesting it was michael criton came up with that and he called it gelman uh amnesia after murray gelman who was a uh it was a um vertical physicist so wow yeah isn't that crazy no I've never heard of it, but that makes perfect sense, though.

That's why I do this thing on medical journalism, because it's, they, I, these, this is something I know about, and almost every story I read is full of bullshit. Right. So anyway, that's really, it's wild. All right, my friends, thank you very much for hanging out with us. Thanks always, go to Dr. Scott. Listen to our Sirius 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 it's Jim McClure's pleasure.

Please go watch my appearance on Normal World and just put it on loop and just let it run overnight so I can beat EROC's numbers. Thank you. Many thanks to our listeners. I love EROC. I'm just being an ass. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas

make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. quit smoking, get off your asses, get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weirdness. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, guys.