Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 590 - Sun Moon Cult

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Dr Steve, Dr Scott, and Tacie discuss: the eclipse (this was recorded 032024) LSD for generalized anxiety disorder dementia drugs (again) Our pal from wvrampsalt.com calls in what the heck is hydration anyway? tall kids superchat stuff join the "FLUID FAMILY" at youtube.com/@weirdmedicine Please visit: simplyherbals.net/cbd-sinus-rinse (the best he's ever made. Seriously.) 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!") shoutout1.com/weirdmedicine (either one works!) Keep Dr Steve in Ham Radio! Send a TIP here! Most importantly! CHECK US OUT ON PATREON!  ALL NEW CONTENT! Robert Kelly, Mark Normand, Jim Norton, Gregg Hughes, Anthony Cumia, Joe DeRosa, Pete Davidson, Geno Bisconte, Cassie Black ("Safe Slut"). Stuff you will never hear on the main show ;-) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is not how same people act. I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola vibes stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my inflatable woes. I want to take my brain out, blast with the wave, an ultrasonic, ecographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill.

All my ailments, the health equivalent of citizens, cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve. It's weird medicine,

the first and still only on censored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medicine provider, gives me street cred the whack alternative medicine ass hats. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dr. Steve. And my partner,

and all things, Tacey. Hello, Tacey. What's up? Sup with you. This is a show for people who'd never listen to a medical show on the radio. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call 347-7-7-66-4-3-23.

That's 347. Pooh-Hood. Visit our website at Dr.steve.com for podcasts, medical news and stuff you can buy. I can't mention contractually. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show. without talking it over with your doctor, nurse, practitioner, physician, assistant, pharmacist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, yoga master, physical therapist, or whatever.

All right, very good. Don't forget Dr. Scott's website. It's simply herbals.net. That's simply herbals. Dot net. How's things going over there? Busy. Yeah.

Busy good. Busy good. Thank you. It's that time of ears. It's that time of year. My nose full of Bradley pear pollen. Physician heal thyself. Exactly, exactly.

So Dr. Scott has the delightful CBD nasal spray, nasal rinse on his website at simply Herbils.net. So I use it every day. I've been seeing a bunch of other sort of THC adjacent products on the market. There's some people are marketing this stuff. What is it taste where they say, oh, you know, forego the alcohol. Put drinks in water. So we ordered it.

Yep. We'll report back on it. You know, they try to, I think, they sort of try to get you to think that it's THC, but that's not legal to ship just all over the country. No, it is not, no. And if you really look at it, it says it's hemp derived, so it will be CBD, which is legal. But I don't know if people are going to find that CBD gives them that, you know, alcohol replacement that they're looking for, but we'll see.

we'll see that'd be a tough that'd be a tough there is something interesting there is something about alcohol I don't know what it is the folks out there that have a problem with alcohol

certainly understand it and I understand when you take you know there's the ritual of copying it and you know and then either pulling the tab or taking the cork

or sniffing the you know the whiskey the bourbon when, you know, you smell that aroma. Right. And then, you know, you swirl it around in your glass. But the thing is, is that when it hits your tongue, there is a bunch of receptors fire at that point. Right.

That are different than, say, what are going to fire for CBD or even THC? Completely. And I bought, so I can't get quinine tablets for my leg cramps anymore. That's what we used to prescribe. Why not? Oh, the FDA said, you can't. sell them anymore because apparently it caused cataracts in rats or something at these mega doses which are not what we take but you know how it is so um so you can't buy quinine

anymore and that's what I used to give the little old ladies in my practice that complained of leg cramps at night and now I'm that little old lady I'm a little old lady with effing leg cramps exactly and it sucks and one night I woke up and I had a leg cramp that went from my ankle to my grinds to my inguinal region that's a hell of the cramps it went all the way up into my thigh you know usually I was used to having them in you know below the knee your calf or hamstring or something yeah this one went above the knee and I couldn't you know the

we'll talk a little bit about nocturnal leg cramps Okay. But one of the things that you do is countertension. Yes. So if it's yanking, you know, if it's causing your foot to point away from you, you want to stay. It's to plantar flex. Correct. Ooh, very good, Dr. Scott.

I don't know. Self a bell. Yes. One taste. Call it, sister. You would want to dorsaflex. Right. In other words, one of the great exercises you can do when you have a cramp in the, in that calf muscle is to stand.

on a stair and then put your toes on the stair and let your heels be off the stair and then drop your heel and that will stretch the shit out of that the other thing you can do is just stand in front of a wall and lean forward and it will stretch it well when all of the muscles in your leg are cramping you can't find a position where you're comfortable and I'll tell you if it had persisted much longer I would have done just about anything to make it stop. I've had a really high pain tolerance, but that about did me in. I've got your solution. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Your swimming pool, cold water. All you got to do is go sitting there for two seconds. Just two seconds would have probably converted it.

Yeah, probably so. Well, there's a canvas cover over my swimming pool. I'd be ripping that sucker off. If my leg was cramping like that. That was unbelievable. Well, one thing you can always do is just get up and walk around. And that does seem to take care of it. But I was really, desperate that night. I couldn't even sit down. And so I'm walking around my living room and I'm Googling stuff. And I found some stuff. It's a magnesium supplement with something else in it. And so I bought that. But then I remembered quinine. So tonic water has quinine in it. And so I started drinking quinine. And I'm coming back to what we were talking about, which was alcohol. And, you know, I just choose not to drink a lot of alcohol right now.

So I bought some of this stuff that is gin that has no alcohol in it. It's just basically juniper berry extract and some other stuff. But it smells just like gin. And it tastes just like gin. I figured out, put it in the tonic. Because I always like gin and tonics to see what it was like. Couldn't stand it. Is it awful?

It is weird that the alcohol has even. Even if you just put a tiny little bit in, what it does to your psyche in the short term, I'm not saying it's necessarily good, but it does have an effect that is not matched by things that purport to, you know, be alcohol-like but aren't alcohol-like. Now, I've never tried alcohol-free beer, but I just can't imagine that that's worth anything. Back when we had that lovely store, we had some alcohol-free. alcohol-free beer that was Yes, that was one of my Well, that's because you're an idiot. But, um, Dr. Scott and I used to own a beer story together.

It was fun. It was just really, it was really expensive. Anyway. But, you know, we had some alcohol-free beer and some wheat-free beer. And they were both. It was just, and I think probably if that's what you start drinking, you would like it a lot more than if that's something you try to convert to later. Well, right. Well, right.

Well, why would anybody start drinking alcohol-free beer, though, just drink soda or something? Right, well, you know, maybe they just want to fit in, or maybe their parents were alcoholics and they didn't want to be an alcoholic or something. But they still wanted to drink beer. Right. And be cool. It is sort of like vegan hot dogs, you know. That's disgusting. It's like just don't even do it.

I tried that shit. Don't call it a vegan. I went vegan for a day, and I went and bought a vegan Italian sausage and a toferky. I think, well, we talked about this. And the next evening, he was passing him off to his old buddy, Dr. Scott. Yeah. Well, because, you know, that's true. Did you ever eat any of them?

Yeah, some of it was pretty good. Yeah, it wasn't the worst thing. I mean, if I had to live on it, I could. It's got a weird taste. I'm just going to make, by the way, and this has nothing to do with it. And now it's, you know, garden time with Dr. Steve. But I'm going to, I'm rotating my crops this year, so I'm growing nothing but legumes. and I'm going to make tofu.

Oh, cool. I'm going to make my own tofu. But I learned that you can make a, was it Burmese tofu out of lentils, either red lentils or brown lentils. And it's not curdled the way that soy milk is. Okay. But it really looked pretty interesting. I never heard of it either, but you can fry it up. and it's a lot easier

to make than soybean because that you've got to make the soy milk then you have to curdle it and then you have to get it compressed and all that kind of stuff. All the work.

Yeah, it is a lot of work, but you know, what am I going to do with all these soybeans? Yeah. I mean, for real. And I'm not making that fucking Natto. Have you ever had that?

No. Okay, so Nato is fermented soybeans and other beans and there are these people on this fermentation subreddit that I'm on, and it looks, it just looks like someone blew their nose in a bowl of beans. Oh, wow.

And it looks unbelievably disgusting. Lovely. They had it in Shogun. Are you watching Shogun? Not yet, but I'm looking forward to it. It's really good. It's really good. But they were eating Nato on that, and that kind of made me laugh because the English guy, you

know, was like, oh, let me try it. And he acted like he liked it, but I can't imagine that he actually did. Anyway, all right. That is funny. I want you all to check out Normal World with Dave Landau. It's on YouTube or you can go to Play's Media. My third installment of Ask Dr. Steve will be on there this week. And I did a topic that everyone's interested in, which is Vaporlock or Coitus, no, penis captivus.

In other words, peni that get called. caught in other people's orifices and can't get them out. Oh, interesting. Either because of muscle tension or vacuum. And one of the things I talked about, which is very interesting because, you know, I just do it in front of a green screen. I had to buy all this shit to do this. And so I've got this video studio next door. And so they add all of the graphics.

And on this one, I swear I saw an erect penis in the behind me on. one of these. Oh, my gosh. I've got to talk to them about that. But I talked about how my dog was caught, you know, having coitus with a female dog. And apparently dogs, it's very common for them to become locked together. It's actually a part of the process to enhance sperm transfer from one of the other. And it's called a canine.

Oh, dang, I can't remember the name of it. canine, it's not slip. Anyway, all the veterinarians are yelling at the radio. But it's normal for that to happen. I remember, and I told the story about how my dog, Alpo, finally got laid. And he was in the backyard, and a dog in heat came through there. And he jumped on her and started boning her. And then this pack of male dogs showed up.

Oh, no. They all wanted some, too. Oh, no. So the female dog just takes off. She got spooked and took off, and she's dragging poor Alpo by his erect penis. Oh, poor thing. Poor Alpo. Yeah.

So, you know, if you ever feel like you'd like to trade places with your dog, maybe, you know what? Maybe it's not that different. You know what? You're having intercourse. You're getting dragged around by your genitals. Maybe it's kind of the same thing. Kind of a metaphor, isn't it? But anyway.

But yeah, and so they actually had video of that happening to another dog. Oh, gosh. So I thought that was kind of cool. So they're very creative. There's a guy named Steve Gibbon, another guy named Sam Farr over there, and Allie Lerman, who work with Dave, that help, you know, put this thing together. I'm very, very happy that they let me do this for them. Tacey's like, when are they going to pay you? And it's like, well, we get a lot of plugs out of it.

But I'm going there for the eclipse, and I'm going to be their eclipse correspondent. Oh, gosh. And when is that? April 8 is the eclipse. And it is the great American eclipse. It starts in Southern California and works its way up to Maine. Okay. It goes, bisects the country.

So everyone will see a piece of it. If you're like in northern Montana, you may only. get a 10% but if you just are anywhere near the middle of the country you'll either have total eclipse or near total eclipse and so let's talk about that just for a second sure um don't use exposed film i did that before back and when there was an annular eclipse back when i first moved here um i ran into radiology and grabbed some film and held it up but the ultraviolet light can still get through that you can look at the sun but it's not good to for your eyes.

Gotcha. And it will increase the risk of retinal damage and also cataracts, which, you know, could have had

something to do with the retinal shit that went on with me back then. Oh, that's right. You just never know, but we just glimpsed at it because we didn't have

anything else. If you know a welder, a welder's helmet is perfectly safe to look at the sun with and if you have welder's glass, but you can buy

right now on Amazon, you can buy a Eclipse glasses. Okay. So some of the people who, if we excerpt this segment for the podcast, they'll hear this probably after the eclipse has happened. But don't use your eclipse glasses from the eclipse from seven years ago. They're no good anymore.

So you need to get new ones. Really? Yes. Why? Because the coating on the myelar goes bad. Oh. Yeah. There you go.

Now, another way to look at the eclipse, if it's not in totality. If it's in totality, you can naked eye it. It's totally fine as long as there's no part of the sun showing. But another way that you can look at the eclipse indirectly is with a pinhole. So one easy way to do that is you take a card and you stick a pinhole in it. And then you have another card. The second card should be white. And you hold it on the other side.

So you've got sun, then pinhole, then card. Okay. And you can focus that pinhole onto the card and you can see the crescent sun. Now, anything that's got holes in it, though, will work. If you have a colander that has circular holes all in it, if you hold that up during, say, when the sun is 50% covered by the moon, you will see millions of little crescents on the ground. when it gets closer to that closer and closer to totality

even gaps in leaves will project crescents on the ground so you can imagine what it was like in ancient days to see something like this what the fuck is going on

that'd be crazy you know the something is eating the sun and if you were in the path of totality you know so they were fascinated with eclipses in the ancient days, obviously, because it was just something I couldn't explain.

And there's this piece of equipment called the Anticathera mechanism. Oh, my God. There we go. Well, listen, they found this off the coast of Greece off of an island called, there's Cathera and then Anticathera, which means it's a cross from Cathera.

And it is a bronze device with a bunch of gears in it. Well, they didn't even know they could make gears like that. this back then. And then they counted the cogs on the, or the, you know, the notches, whatever you call them, on the, on the gear. Okay. And on the main gear, I think it was 280 or there's some number.

This gave them the idea that this was looking at the Soros cycle, which is a cycle of eclipse, solar eclipse and lunar eclipses. Because when you have a solar eclipse, you're going to have a lunar eclipse soon thereafter because the sun and the moon. are lined up. Now, so when they had to use a lot of different techniques to try to dope out what was inside this mechanism and what they found was an analog computer to calculate solar eclipses that predates calculus by 2,000 years or more. I don't have the exact dates on it. But Google the Anticathura mechanism, it is cool as shit.

And I'll have to wax eloquent about that. as I'm talking about the eclipse on TV. But anyway, check out Normal World. So I did Worst Way to Die, which, spoiler alert, is Fornia Gangrene. Don't Google image it. Number two, I did one on deviated septum, and then the third one. And then the fourth one that I'm doing, which I'm going to record tonight for week after next, is on asparagus piss. Why asparagus makes people's urine smell, the history of it.

I talk about Babe Ruth at a black tie event when the, he was so uncouth. Oh, gosh. The hostess offers him some asparagus, and he was trying to be all, you know, highfalut. And he said, no, thank you, ma'am, for asparagus makes my urine smell. It's like, okay, dude. He said urine instead of piss. Oh, my God. He is the babe.

Yeah. But anyway. So there you go. So that's that. That's all I've got for today. Thank God. All right. There you go. Fuck yourself.

It's Tacey's Time of Topics. A time for Tacey to discuss topics of the day. Not to be confused with Topic Time with Harrison Young, which is copyrighted by Harrison Young and Area 58 Public Access. And now, here's Tacey. Well, hello, everyone. Hello. Now for the second most boring part of the show, I have two stories. The first one is about an LSD-based medication for generalized anxiety disorder.

Now, this isn't boring. And how it receives FDA breakthrough status. Really? Yes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted breakthrough designation to an LSD-based treatment for GAD, based, based on a promising top-line data from a phase 2B clinical trial. Okay. So we need to talk about what phase two is.

Phase one is where you give it to about a drug to 40 people and just make sure it doesn't kill them. And, you know, it's kind of seemed like it's doing, you know, you don't have any horrendous adverse events. Then you give it to about 300 people. That would be about phase two. And then phase three can be anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 people when you're looking for rare events and also efficacy. And then phase four is post-marketing. After it's been approved, then you study the drug in wide release.

And that's when you find all of the really rare side effects. So anyway, so this one is in phase two. Go ahead. Okay. In a news release, the company reports that a single oral dose of it met its key secondary endpoint, maintaining clinically and statistically significant reductions in the Hamilton Anxiety Scale. Ham-A is what they call it.

Ham-A is basically a validated scale to gauge people on, gauge their anxiety. We're using a different scale in our VR thing that we're using the DAS scale. But, you know, there's different scales for judging anxiety and they're all been validated and you can use them statistically. Yeah. Comparing with placebo at 12 weeks, a 65% clinical report. response versus 48% clinical remission rate.

The company previously announced... Wait a minute. They're saying they had 50% clinical remission in generalized anxiety disorder. Holy shit. The company previously announced statistically significant improvement on the ham A compared with placebo at four weeks,

which was the primary endpoint. I've conducted clinical research studies in psychiatry for a over two decades, and I've seen multiple studies on many drugs under development for the treatment anxiety. That MM-120 exhibited rapid and robust efficacy, solidly sustained for 12 weeks after a single dose is truly remarkable. What they're saying here, and when did they achieve remission, 50% of them, or 48% or

whatever? Four weeks. Four weeks. Okay. I'm just looking at standard drugs, less than 50%. achieve remission in five years. Wow. Five years.

That's insane. That's insane. With standard therapy. And by standard therapy, we're talking antidepressants like deloxetine, fluoxetine, et cetera. And antipsychotic drugs like trifluoroporaparine and then benzodiazepine and that kind of stuff. Wow. Those of us who struggle every day to alleviate anxiety in our patients look. forward to seeing results from future phase three trials.

No shit. God, I'm so pissed at Timothy Leary about this. We should have had this 40 years ago. 40 years ago, Sandos was making psilocybin, pharmaceutical grade psilocybin, and they were making LSD for research purposes. And then these knuckleheads, you know, have these quote-unquote trials where they go to a church And they take the drug with the, you know, the cohort that they're following and then, you know, start popularizing it for use at Woodstock and other places like that. And that's when the politicians went, okay, enough of this shit.

And that was the end of that. And now, finally, we're getting some movement on psychedelic therapy in, you know, we have ketamine for depression. Still off-label for ketamine, but not off-label for S-Ketamine, which is one of its anantomers, I guess. So, very interesting. Yeah. Prior to treatment, they were clinically tapered and washed out from any anxiolytic. Yes, anxiolytics. Or antidepressant treatments and did not receive any form of study-related psychotherapy for the duration of the participation in the study.

Really? So they just gave them this LSD analog. Let them go. And let them go. Wow. Wow. That's incredible. Because it's always been medication plus talk therapy. It's been the gold standard for anxiety.

Well, and go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say, and what they've said, and, you know, when studying like psilocybin's, is a lot of it, a lot of your response is predicated on your thought process going in. So they encourage you before you do your mushrooms or whatever, your psilocybin, to be in a happy place. He said, look, you know, watch something funny. Yeah.

You know, don't watch something that's gory. Don't watch seven. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, what's something funny? So did it say anything about that that they encourage people to, before they take the acid to. No, I didn't. Wow.

Some more information, it says the dose that demonstrated optimal clinical activity produced a 7.7 point improvement over placebo at week 12. With a 65% clinical response rate and a 48% clinical remission rate, sustained to week 12. Oh, okay. They also looked at clinical global impression severity scores and an average improvement from 4.8 to 2.2 and the 100. What's that little you thing? I used to know what that was.

Microgram. Microgram dose group representing a two category shift from markedly ill to borderline ill at week 12. Wow. Wow. Okay. So you're looking at Ham A and CGIS, which is. It's a pretty big deal.

Yeah. Here you go. Here's one, just looking at standard drugs, comparative remission rates and tolerability of drugs for generalized anxiety disorder, systematic review and network meta-analysis, double-planned, randomized control trials. But this would be predates all of this. So this is going to be things like venlo-faxine and peroxitine, et cetera, you know, Simbaltas and Paxels, et cetera. And let's see here for remission rate, deloxetine had, were superior to placebo, but the odds ratio was just 1.88 with a confidence interval of 1.47 to 2.40. So, I mean, there's decent remission rate. It doesn't say over what period of time.

But let me see. Others were worse than placebo in terms of toleration. with odds ratios ranging between 1.86 and 6.0 for lorazepam. Larazepam, very commonly prescribed anti-anxiety drug called Ativan. And it says it was very poorly tolerated compared to placebo. 600% worse. Oh, God. And head-to-head comparisons, deloxetine, and ventalifaxine were more effective than tiaigabine.

Well, who cares about that? Let me see. I'm just trying to find if there's anything else. Larazepam and quatapine, that's Syracwell. We're poorly tolerated when compared with other drugs. So, wow. Phase three testing starts the second half of 2024. Okay.

So this could be out. I'm looking at the conclusion of this. Only agomelotene. Have you ever heard of that one? Agamelotene? I don't even know. Is that on the market? manifested better remission with relatively good tolerability.

These results were limited by small sample size. Deloxetine, aka Simbalta, eschatalopram, that's Lexapro, Venlifaxine, and, which is, what is that one, a faxer, peroxatein, paxyl, and quixopine, Syracquel, showed better remission, but were poorly tolerated. So we, listen, no flies on those. they are effective for some people and they're very important drugs, but we need more than just dumping buckets of norapinephrine and serotonin and serotonin in people's brains. And these psychedelics have a completely different mechanism. And, you know, I think it's just, it's good to have some choices.

That's all. I'm not necessarily pushing while everybody should be tripping balls for their anxiety. And really what we're talking about are microdosing. Microdoses, yeah. But I do think that having a choice other than an SSRI, SNRI, or an atypical antipsychotic is a good thing. Yes, that's it. Well, especially if it works that quickly and you only need like one dose. So for my hospice patients, they don't have 12 weeks to see if deloxetine is even going to work for them.

Right. When I have S-Ketamine or ketamine will give them positive results in three days. Yeah. So, yeah. Jeez. Wouldn't be nice to be able to give them results in like three hours. Yeah. Certainly.

Well, some people have immediate, you know, improvement. Sure. Gotcha. Cool. Now, ketamine itself is legal to prescribe. It is still off-label for depression and anxiety. but it's being more commonly prescribed. And our compounding pharmacy has the troquase here, you know.

So anyway. All right. What else you got, Tase? Eli Lilly said Friday that the Food and Drug Administration has pushed back its approval decision deadline for the drug maker's experimental Alzheimer's treatment. Donanamab in a surprise move. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

The agency plans to call last-minute meeting of its out. side advisors to further review the treatment, safety, and efficacy in a late-stage trial. So they're saying they're not going to improve it? Or they started to approve it, and now they're not going to. They pushed back its approval. Yes, okay. So they were thinking it was going to be approved. You know, the stockholders are crapping themselves, and so are the drug reps that were hired

to sell this stuff. Been there, done that. Yep. And the FDA was expected. But that's not what's important. Yeah, the FDA was expected to decide whether to greenlight the medicine by the end of the first quarter. That deadline is already delayed from an expected approval last year. That's not a good sign. No. Lily's drug significantly slowed Alzheimer's progression in a late-stage

trial, but the treatment, along with similar drugs, carry safety concerns related to brain swelling and bleeding. The agency's decision to call for an advisory meeting reflects the high stakes of developing treatments for Alzheimer's. The condition affects more than six million Americans and currently has no cure-leaving patients who have it with few effective care options. Right. And the medications really are disappointing. There are seven stages of Alzheimer's. You know, with the first stage, you're just sort of eccentric.

And then the seventh stage, you're curled up in a ball, just making noises, and then everything in between. And it's sort of inexorable. Now, some of the medications will prevent progression by six months. And, you know, there's the NMDA receptor antagonists like Nameda. And then there's the, you know, there's some anticholinergic type medications. We were really hot there. I'm sorry. That's my fault.

I had our faders a little bit screwed up. Sorry, I hope that's better. We, you know, there's these anticholinergic type medications and or colonergic medications. and I'm been disappointed with those. I think once the damage is done, it's going to be very difficult to treat Alzheimer's. What we need to do is either prevent it or stop it from progressing when you get to stage one.

Because you can live with stage one. Sure. If we caught everyone at stage one dementia, most of them could still work and do things. Right. Drive. I think so, yeah, yeah, they really could. So if we could stop it or back it off right at that point, that's got to be the goal.

But to do that, we sort of need to know what causes it. And we're not 100% on board with that yet. So anyway. Maybe they need to try some low-dose micro-dosing. Well, I don't know. But that'd be nice that the microdosing would take away the inflammation and the... That'd be awesome. You know, one thing that shows me,

maybe some promise is lion's mane mushrooms. Right. Yes, I've read some studies recently that Lions Main is a nootropic or neutropic, however you want to pronounce it, and may even regenerate lost brain cells, which would be amazing. Now, I'm not advocating that people just go out and start munching on lions' mushrooms. although they're very tasty, and you can make crab-free crab cakes out of them because the consistency is about the same as crabmy. But I am advocating that they do some more research on this because if they can isolate the mechanism by which this works,

then they can make money off of it by dicking around with that molecule. All of the antibiotics that we have started with fungi, killing bacteria. You know, you have an auger plate and you accidentally get it contaminated with a fungus, you know, in 19 whatever, and you notice that all around where that fungus is, there's no bacteria growing on this culture plate, and then you cut out little chunks of the auger and you put it on other plates where there are bacteria growing, and though it kills. them, too, and then you realize, uh-oh, I'm on to something, and you have penicillin. That's how this happened. That's crazy. And the cephalosporins, antibiotics like rosephine, you know, septriaxone and cepapim, all those, were initially discovered with fungi teaching us how to kill bacteria.

Hmm. So. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So wouldn't it be cool if the fungi also taught us how to fix our brains? And dementia and all kinds of stuff. So the fungi are really interesting little things. Yes, they are.

And so I am learning to grow Rishi cordyceps, which cordyceps is the fungus from the last of us, the zombie shell. Okay. Where it has adapted to take over people because, you know, it will take over ants and change their behavior to benefit the cortis. Because they like to live off of ant larva. Wow. So they, but yeah, I'm growing some of those and those have medicinal properties as well. So I'm learning something new. Good stuff.

Yeah. It also talks here about how the FDA often turns to advisory panel for advice. Yes. And whether an approved product is safe and effective and usually follows the recommendations but it's advisors but isn't required to. Right. And how in 2021, the FDA approved an earlier ill-fated Alzheimer's drug called Aduhlhelm from Biogen, despite a negative recommendation from the agency's advisory panel. Right. And then—

I believe I got called about that drug, didn't I, Steve? Was that the drug that— Yes, that's right. They were paying very well. And we looked it up, and I went hell no. Right. Yeah. Well.

So anyway. Well, you would have been out of a job. Would you have been out of a job sooner? if you had taken that job? I can't remember. I can't remember. Because Tacey's, we won't say what the drug or the company was, but, you know, she got promoted to promote a drug that never came out.

And when it doesn't get approval from the FDA, they just say, well, we don't need you. Wow. Time to retire. Well, she seems to be handling retirement pretty well. You think so? I think so. I think so.

I think so. All right, what else you got, Tase? Do you not think so? I'm not saying that. No, don't say it doesn't. You are saying. Stay out of them. Stay out of them.

You're fine. What else are you got? That's all. What do you want from me? Nothing. I'm just okay, no. It's perfect. Some tasty topics.

Absolutely perfect. Thank you. Give myself a bell. Suck it, Scott. Damn. No, Scott gets something, though. You get nothing. You lose.

Good day, sir. All right, very good. Anything else we got? Let's just take some phone calls, then. Let's do that. You want to? Let's do it, phone calls. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio.

All right. Let's see here. This is our old buddy Ramp Salt. Ramp Salt from West Virginia Ramp Salt. Just Google that. He's got a field with tons of ramps in it, and he dehydrates them and makes salt. And we did that last year. Stinks the house up.

Our buddy, DNP, Carissa, her mom had a field of ramps. And, yes, I dehydrated them and it stunk the whole house. I thought it smelled good. It smelled like ramps. They're kind of onion-y, like a real mild onion. And then I made ramps sold out of those. And that was a big hit. I gave that stuff away.

And I think we've only got one little bit left because people wanted it. And so anyway, so he does that. So check him out. West Virginia Rapsault. Let's hear what he's got to say. Uh-oh. Well, now after that build-up, you've got to say something. Okay, here we go.

Oh, boy. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Oh, Lord. Hey, Doc. Here we go. Hey, man. I had a question for you.

Okay. I wanted to call about my girlfriend. Uh-oh. She had two the secular vaginal, fissular repairs, damaged bladder trigon. left ureter re-implantation, reflux kidney, now has bladder stone of 7.7. I'm going to let this play out, and then we're going back it up, and we'll talk about each one of these things, because he's speaking, you know, a foreign language to a lot of people.

And two kidney stones in each kidney. Okay. What's the best course to remove the stones? And they're one to do a procedure where they put a camera up or ureth or find out whether or not it's actually a bladder stone or a kidney stone. Good. And there's some question as to whether or not that's actually, you know, real or not. Okay.

So the answer to this is do whatever the hell they tell you. But you're welcome to get a second opinion. If you want to get a second opinion, go to a university center and just ask them. But let's walk through all of this. Maybe we can come up with something. But I think that this is going to be outside the scope of this show. It's a big ass. She really had a hard time.

So let's see here. She had two de-sicular vaginal fistula repair. Okay, so she had a vesicular vaginal fistula. So what that is is a communication or a hole between the bladder and the vagina. So urine was leaking into the vagina from the bladder. Now, why did that happen? There's lots of different reasons why it can happen. He didn't give us any insight on that.

It's damaged bladder trigon. Okay, so the trigon of the bladder is between. between the two heriters. Yeah, where the ureters come in and then the urethra goes out. So there's a triangular area there of tissue. And it can get inflamed. And when it does, if you have trigonitis, which is inflammation of that trigon, you're going to feel like you need to piss all the time.

Right. So those women will feel the urgency and frequency, but they'll only pee small amounts. Kind of like a prostititis. A little bit. Yeah, yeah. And when that happens, there is a drug that you can take called trimetoprim, and it's half of what's in Bactrum. Bactrum is the big horse pill, sulfa drug.

It's sulfamothoxazole and trim. But you can just take the trim, and it'll calm down the trigon. Good. Left ureter re-implantation. Okay, so when they damaged her trigone, they had to take the ureter, which is the tube from the, kidney into the urator, into the bladder, and move it around and re-insert it, which is not fun. No.

So it's a, you know, the bladder is very muscular. You've got to drill a hole through the muscle, and then you've got to sew it in so that it stays and it's functional. It's hard to do. Reflux kidney. Okay, and then you get reflux in the kidney from a ureter that doesn't have a good valve in it. And so now when the bladder gets full, instead of the bladder just expanding, now the urine is going up the urator the wrong way, up into the kidney. Backing up, yeah. It can cause problems.

Okay. Now has bladder stone. Yeah, okay. So then she has stone. So the rest of this is pretty. Okay, 7.7 centimeter bladder stone. A boulder. Yeah, it's big.

So if you have a normal-sized finger, your first finger from. the knuckle to the tip is around 10 centimeters. So from the tip to the middle, you know, joint is about five centimeters. So this thing would go from the tip of your finger to pass the first joint, past the second joint, halfway to your hand. That's how big that is. That's big. Two kidney stones in each kidney.

Good of sake. Okay. Now, kidney stones in the kidney aren't necessarily. necessarily a problem. If they're just stuck there and they're not blocking anything, you can live with those. Right. Right. What's the best course to remove this then?

Well, and now we get back to whatever the hell they tell you. Because this is too complicated to second guess the specialist but make sure that they've done it before. How many times have you done something like this? Have you

gone up and done a ureteroscope, which is sticking a scope up into your reader in a ureter that was implanted surgically. Because if you dislodge that thing, you've got worse problems. Yep. You've got a dangling urator in your abdominal cavity. And all the urine from your kidney is floating into your... Right, just floating into your body cavity.

Yeah, it's not good. So anyway, so, yeah, just ask them and feel free to get a second opinion. I hope she's okay. Yeah, it's going to be tough. Yeah. Give her some ramsal. It'd probably make her feel better. Yeah.

She's probably sick of fucking rapsoltsal. Probably, yeah. He's probably had it with his ramp cell. But, you know, now that D&P Carissa has moved away, we won't have access to the ramp field anymore. So guess who's going to the ramp festival this year? Some nerd. I've already signed up for it. I'm all about it.

I'm going to go buy a shitload of ramps and I'm going to dehydrate them again. This year, though, I'll do it in the garage taste. Okay. Your garage is in my garage. All right. Hi, Dr. Steve. This is Phil from Tampa. I'm calling because I had a question about hydration.

Okay. And how hydration works. Okay. Good. I've been exercising a lot more and been trying to stay hydrated while doing so. But I never really understood why drinking water keeps you hydrated. I understand drinking salt water can make you dehydrated, but I'm curious how normal hydration works. If I had to take a guess, and this is a completely uneducated guess, might have something to do with the oxygen molecules in water.

that you can use in your bloodstream, but that's probably wrong. But, yeah, just something I've been thinking about recently and wanted to ask about the science project. Thank you so much. I hope you'll have a great day. That's a good sort of basic science question. We have a semi-pro athlete here. You want to talk a little bit about hydration?

I can tell you this. It isn't free oxygen molecules. Water exists in a state of hydroxyl ions. and hydrogen ions. And when you have 50-50 of each, you have water. So you have H-2-O. But they're not completely bound together. The hydrogen can separate,

and you have these two things just sort of laying there together. When it's 50-50, the pH is 7, you have neutral water. But in our hydration solutions, we have other things in there, like sodium and potassium and other stuff. You talk a little bit about hydration after. after, say, you know, exertion, Dr. Scott. After exertion. Well, the big thing with hydration is it does help with your blood flow

and keeping all your blood vessels dilated. Right. He wants to know the mechanism, though, too. You know, think about, so you ingest it. How is it? How does it benefit you? You're going to have to take that one. Okay, I'll take that right.

You talk about your part, and I'll talk about that part. And I think for the most part, the important thing about being hydrated, there are positive charges in water and it helps to pay. push things through your system but the main but the main thing and I've got a question about this too

is why is it why are these high pH waters sold how are they bullshit you mean well yeah why are they why they why they tell us there it's so much better for you I don't know yeah

yes I'm sorry I'm kind of I'm kind of no no it's okay it's okay so what happens is you exercise and you sweat and you breathe and so you're you're breathing out carbon dioxide, some oxygen from the air, nitrogen and stuff, but also water vapor.

Okay, got you. And then you're sweating. You're sweating, of course, yeah. And then your muscles are using energy. And so when you break down fat, particularly, or carbohydrates, one of the byproducts is water, and then you excrete that in your kidneys or through the pores in your body. And so you need to replenish that. So what happens if you don't replenish that is you get.

decreased blood flow to the kidneys, you get decreased blood flow to the heart, and, you know, ultimately to the brain, although the body will preferentially pump blood to the brain almost, you know, over everything else. If it has to pick an organ, it will pick the brain every time. So, and I found out, and Tacey always yells at me, you don't drink enough water, you don't drink enough water. And when I started hydrating, when I had my kidney failure, it was very mild, but it was class three kidney failure, which, you know, I'm normally very healthy, but I would go all day and never drink anything. The thing I like about it is I'd go all day and not have to stop to piss. Right, right. That was really, you know, a lot of it. Sure.

And because I am busy AF and I work my ass off and I don't want to have to stop to piss. So I just sort of stopped drinking during the day. And when I started hydrating, I got this big Stanley cup. It's 40 ounces, and I drink two of them a day. I have to drink two. And my creatinin came back down. My kidney function went back to normal. So the mechanism of it is you drink water and it is absorbed in the stomach pretty much preferentially, very readily.

and it enters into your bloodstream where it's just pumped around and increases your blood volume. Now, the reason that we like having solutes in it, electrolytes, is because we're losing electrolytes. If you're vomiting, you're not just vomiting up water. You're vomiting up sodium and potassium and you can get depleted in those things.

And that's not good. And your body is going to try to adjust through homeostasis by pulling potassium out of the cells and tossing hydrogen ions into the cells and try to exchange them out. Gotcha. And then you, you know, you piss some of that out. And then when things go back to normal, all of a sudden, you're potassium depleted. So you want to take some potassium, some salt.

We're not a fan of sodium tablets, except under very specialized circumstances. You can get an overload in sodium. And now all of a sudden, your body's having to draw fluid out. of places to try to dilute that sodium. So a small amount is good. I like biolite. That's maybe my favorite rehydration solution. It also

has, Dr. Scott like this, has milk thisil in it. It's got a little bit of ginger in it. If you're nauseated, you can drink biolite and it'll help. But then, you know, just Gatorade or any of the

regular pedulite or rehydration solutions are okay and you can make your own as well but that's basically what it's for it's not the naked oxygen that sounds like it would make sense the way naked oxygen gets into your system is by breathing it in

and then those are absorbed the oxygen molecules are absorbed in the lungs taken up by hemoglobin molecules in your bloodstream and then distribute it to the rest of the body it's an amazing system so water's a much more important as far as moving nutrients other than

Yes. And oxygen, I guess, would be. Well, that's why when you have infected bone, it's really hard, called osteomyelitis, it's really hard to treat it because there's no blood supply there. Right. If you, there's not as much water to bring white blood cells in to fight the infection, et cetera, et cetera, or to bring the antibiotics in. So you have to take, you know, antibiotics for six months or whatever.

Anyway, before we get out of here, you got anything from the fluid family by the way, if you want to join the fluid family, you can do so by following me on Twitter at Weird Medicine or going to YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine and click notification button and then watch for notifications. You know, the fluid family is an insular group of folk. We don't get, you know, that many people watching and that's okay. That's, you know, there's a radio show. It's cool people.

It's not a video show. We do enjoy hanging out with our friends from the Fluid family. But anyway, so Saxon Savage had a question. Got a great question. Dr. Steve, if someone takes several different meds a day, is it best to spread them out over the day? Or is it okay to take them all at once? Does taking multiple meds at once affect the absorption of the medications? Depends on the medication.

Sure. Excellent question. 100%. I tried to get my medicines down to where I take them all once a day. I don't want to screw around with taking something three and four. four times a day. I don't know. If you get an antibiotic, it's got a very short half-life, then you have to do it four times

a day. That's fine. But I take all of my medicines at night before I go to bed. I have one of those organizers. And really, I don't take any medicine anymore. It's all supplements. That's right. I guess the one medicine I take is Dexlansoapazol for my stomach.

But that I would die without it. I just can't get away from it. Yeah, but it's really important to know those many. medications and when to take them appropriately. Correct. Because, you know, if you take a whole bunch of stuff in addition to your thyroid medication. That's a good point. Now, Tacey, you want to talk about that?

I have to take my synthroid every morning and wait 20 minutes before coffee or anything else. Right. So it should say that on the bottle if it cannot be taken. Right. So if you have a medication and it cannot be taken with other meds or if it cannot be taken, it needs to be taken with food or without food, It should say that on there. And the pharmacist should be giving you a fact sheet as well. Everybody just throws those things away.

They're good to at least read the administration instructions. You know, a lot of the pharmacists are pretty good about informing you those things, especially if there are some really specific medications that they don't want you mixing. Most of the pharmacists are pretty good about that. Yeah, yeah. And especially if you need to take something with food because it makes you. nauseated, nauseous, nauseated, or... Well, I get nauseated from time to time when I eat a mud bug from the creek.

For example, if you take like a Dexlanzoprazole, it's best to take it 30 to 45 minutes before you eat, so you can get those pumps fired up. Yeah, any kind of PPI like that. Maybe I should stop taking it at bedtime then. Even Dexlanzopazol, because it's, it's, it's... even though it's got the delayed release system. Yeah. I mean. So talk about that for a second.

So what you're saying is with the proton pump inhibitor. You want to get those pumps fired up. So you take the medicine, and you start smelling food, and that fires up those proton pumps. And then the PPI kills them. Kills them. And then they regenerate. Then they regenerate. And then you take it again.

Still blown away by the fact that a proton pump in the stomach. moves a quantum object. A proton is a collection of three quarks. That's it. A naked proton. And yet dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, or our ancient ancestors, the shrews,

you know, had pumps in their stomach to aid in digestion by pumping naked protons into the stomach to decrease the pH. And they literally have a meat pump. It's not meat. It's a molecule.

It's a protein. But, you know, protein's meat. But there's a protein mechanism that can take a naked proton, a quantum object, and take it from one

side of a membrane to the other. That's cool. It's amazing. It blows my mind. Yeah, it's insane. All right. Lovett had a question. She did?

I didn't see it. Her question was, What the hell is ramp salt? Oh, I'm sorry. And I guess I didn't explain that very well. So the way I make it, we'll have to get ramp salt on here someday. Maybe we get some free product from him. But basically, the way I made it was I took the ramps, which they are an onion-like plant, but you take the leaves.

And the leaves are very fragrant and have a mild sort of onion-y flavor slash taste. But it's different than onions or chives or green onions. It's closer to chives than anything, but still not chivaly. And I dehydrated them in a dehydrator, and then I put them in a food, not a food mill, a spice mill, and powdered them. And then I added it to kosher salt at a ratio of seven parts by weight of kosher salt to one part of ramp powder. And that makes it pretty perfect. I tried a lot of different. ratios, and that was the one that worked the best for what we're using it for, which is basically just as a seasoning.

All right. Love it. All right. Any other questions from the fluid family? Last one. Last one, then we'll get out of. So 70-su wants to know, what happens to you if you drink four tall boys a day every single day? Well, it depends.

Okay. Again, it depends. And this is, it seems to be genetic. I have seen people who drank starting when they were 21 and they were dead by the the time they were 35. Right. From cirrhosis. And drinking, you know, four tall boys, about, what, eight beers a day.

So it's a six-pack and a half a six-pack, right? Yeah, yeah, maybe eight beers, yeah. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, not quite that. Yeah, six-pack of beers. Yeah, so it's eight shots of liquor. Yeah, I know, yeah. Of course, if you're in.

That's eight ounces of liquor. Right. So that would be, you know, well, let's say a pints of pound, the world around. It would be half a pint a day. So, you know, it's a substantial amount of alcohol to do that in and day out. Now, there are some people that can drink a half a bottle of vodka a day. They can drink 12 beers a day. And they live until they're 100 years old.

Those people, some of them live in the Ural Mountains, and it's a genetic thing. They never get sick. They live to be 100, and they never go to the doctor. It's not because of modern medicine. It's just purely genetic. And I think, Dr. Steve, don't you, too, think that four tall boys a day, depending on the year, may be really, you know, good for you. Was it four tall boys? Yeah.

Okay. So that would be six beers. Yeah. It's a six-pack thing. But, you know, that may be something that keeps their blood thin. It may keep them, you know. No, there's. I'm serious.

Yeah. It may not be awful. But if it's habitual. There are some people that might be beneficial for, but you don't know who those people are until the end. That's the problem. As long as you're paying attention to your liver enzymes and your heart function, kidney function, all that stuff. I'm advocating everything in moderation, including everything in moderation. In other words, you can blow it out your ass every once in a while.

Except for Myrtle. Myrtle, no moderation. No. Myrtle? Oh, you mean just a little bit of myrtle. Well, I don't know what you're saying, Dr. Scott. Is that a good thing? All right, guys.

We'll see you. Bye it. Have a good weekend, y'all. See you, opinions. See you in the road. I don't know what you're doing over there. I see a penny picket up all the day you'll have a bright, shiny penny. I tell you back in the day you could buy three penny candies for that up at Ernie's Market.

Oh, God. Them days is gone. Okay. Sorry, guys. Them days is gone. I tell you that. Oh, my gosh. All right, let's get out here.

All right. Thanks always go to Dr. Scott. and Tacey, listen to our Sirius XM show on the Faction Talk channel, Sirius XM Channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern. Oh, no, they're working on the Lord's Day. On demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. 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 additional weird medicine. Thanks, everybody. Goodbye, everyone. Bye, guys. Thank you.