Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 652 - The Spectrum of Phlegm

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Dr Steve and Dr Scott discuss: Cardiac tamponade c!rcumcisi0n and infection foamy urine what do they do with your body parts after surgery? why is teleportation stupid? what do different sputum colors mean? Please visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠STUFF.DOCTORSTEVE.COM⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (for dabblegames at cost and more!) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠simplyherbals.net/cbd-sinus-rinse⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (the best he's ever made. Seriously.) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/weirdmedicine⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠x.com/weirdmedicine⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fightthedabbler.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (help Karl and Shuli win their LOLsuit) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/@weirdmedicine ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠(click JOIN and ACCEPT GIFTED MEMBERSHIPS. Join the "Fluid Family" for live recordings!) CHECK OUT THE ROADIE COACH stringed instrument trainer! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠roadie.doctorsteve.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (the greatest gift for a guitarist or bassist! The robotic tuner!) see it here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠stuff.doctorsteve.com/#roadie⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ GET YOUR TROY SMITH ARTWORK FROM "WET BRAIN: THE GAME OF TROLLS AND LOSERS!" get it here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ dabblegames.myshopify.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (a most-fun party game!) each shipment comes with some awful tchotchke! 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, 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

Scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, and anything that might not misbecome the mighty sender, does he prize you, aren't? You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir! Dr. Steve, I hope you're better at prostate screenings than you are at radio screenings. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of weird medicine, on Sirius' XM103 and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown.

Why can't you give me the respect that I'm... I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Zabonabov stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating my impetable woes. I want to take my brain out and blasted with the wave, an ultrasonic, agographic,

and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill all my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed

then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I paid. It's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio, now a podcast.

Dr. Steve with my little pal Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medicine provider, gives me street bread with whack alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Doc Steve. This is a show for people who never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet.

If you've got a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider. Or if you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 347-7-7-66-4-3-23. That's 347. Pooh-Hid. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at DR Scott WM. Visit our website at Dr.steed.com for podcasts, medical news, and stuff you can buy. Most importantly, we're not your medical providers.

Take everything in with a grain of salt. You don't act on anything you hear on this show. without talking over with your health care provider. Don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website at Simplyherbils.net. That's simplyerbils.net. And if you want to check out the ROTI robotic tumor, tumor, I don't want a robotic tumor. The Rody robotic tuner. Go to rotee.

Dottersteve.com or you can just go to stuff. com. StuFF.D.com and scroll down. and it's incredible. You just attach it to the key, click the string, and it goes, and what it really is useful for, in my opinion, is restringing your instrument

because that is a pain in the ass. It is. And it will do it for you and it will tune it up too. So much quicker. So, anyway, check that out. Simplyherbils.net, I already mentioned. Dr. Scott still has the greatest CBD nasal sprays. Got a little bit left, so check him out.

And he'll throw in a chotchkey or, too as well. Absolutely. And doing some interesting things at patreon.com slash weird medicine. The studio is finally up. Making videos. I'm trying to make at least one explainer video a week. So we'll see how that goes.

We'll try to grow it over there. And if you want me to say fluid to your mama, cameo.com slash weird medicine. All right. Very good. Got anything, Dr. Scott? Nope. Of course.

Why do I ask? All right. Show prep is not my thing. Hello. I have a question. I'm one of those douchebags. No, you're not. Here.

Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Now, my shrink used to fuss at me. Why are you saying so many negative things about yourself? It's like because I'm an asshole. That listens to trials. And they're talking about cardiac tempanod. and apparently that's when fluid fills the sack around the heart.

Correct. And the heart can no longer expand and contract because of the fluid, the pressure from the fluid. So you die. Well, fluid is non-compressible. Water is non-compressable. So when you have the sack around the heart that kind of protects the heart and it's part of our, you know, our embryonic development, if it gets filled up with fluid, then the heart can't express. And it can still contract, but it can't expand. If it can't expand, it can't, quote, unquote, suck in blood from the lungs, you know, from the pulmonary vein.

And therefore, it doesn't have anything to pump out. Right. So that's the problem. And you get short of breath. Well, and to be clear, the sacral heart is paracardiome is, even though it's flexible, it's really rigid to keep the heart. Yeah, shape. Right. It can't balloon out infinitely.

Right. Just like the sheath in your... In your brain. Or your, you know, something people are more familiar with around the shaft of the penis. You know, it will expand up to a certain point and then it won't anymore. Because if it just continued to expand, you just have a giant balloon down there. It would be weird. Yeah, it'd be weird.

Okay. All right. Anyway. All right. So let me run this back a little bit. That listens to trials. And they're talking about cardiac tempidod. Yeah.

And apparently that's when fluid fills the sac around the heart. Yes. And the heart can no longer expand and contract because of the fluid, the pressure from the fluid. So you die. But if you have a leaky aortic valve or something like that, why doesn't that sack fill up? So I know somebody that has a leaky valve and needs replacement. Yes. But they're looking at February for a valve replacement.

Right. How come that sack around the heart isn't going to fill up? before then. That's such a great question. When they say a leaky valve, so let's say you have a leaky aortic valve. The aortic valve allows blood to be pumped out of the heart, but the back pressure does not allow the blood to go back into the heart.

Because if there was just a tube there, when the heart contracted, blood would go out, and then when the heart relaxed, the blood would come back in again, and then you would get nowhere. Right. So there's a valve there that allows blood. It's like a diode. It allows blood to flow in one direction because when you're pumping, it opens.

And then when the heart is relaxing, it closes. So the blood can only go forward. Okay. So now a leaky valve is one that allows some of that blood to come back into the heart so that the efficiency of that pumping is decreased. Okay. Yep. So, and that's it, it's not leaking into that sack.

The sack is separate from the blood flow completely. It has its own blood supply, but it is not connected to the blood flow from the aorta. The only thing that is are the blood vessels that are attached to the aorta that deliver blood to the tissues. Okay. So the aorta comes out of the heart, the carotid, arteries branch off of that. So that goes up to the brain and then the blood keeps, you know, the aorta keeps going down. And then it starts feeding things and that down around the lower abdomen it splits into two arteries, the iliac arteries that then split again, become the femoral

arteries and et cetera, et cetera. It's all kinds of, you know, and along the way, it's feeding the superior mesenteric artery, which gets the intestines and then the inferior mesenteric artery. tear artery and then the renal, you know, it just feeds everything. Right. It's incredible. So if that sack was hooked up to that, it would be a really bad design flaw. Yeah. So, all right.

So that's an excellent question. He's going to pass away. No, no, no. Unlikely, what they want is they've scheduled this so that it's not an emergency surgery because when you do emergency heart surgery, the odds that something bad is going to happen increases. So they're scheduling it out. They're making sure they've got all their ducks in a row. They're saying this is not an emergency. It's leaky. It needs to be fixed, but he'll be okay until then. So what you're worried about, and it's awesome that you're worried about your friend,

is if this was leaking into and causing paracardial tamponade, then yeah, then why are they waiting so long? So I understand the question, but that's not how it works. Now, if he did have paracardial tamponade, they would go in and into a paracardial window. It's where they open up the chest and then they take out a patch, you know, make maybe a circular or rectangular patch of the paracardium, allow it to whatever's causing it. It's usually inflammation of the inside of the paracardium for that fluid to flow out into the body

and then the body just deal with it. It absorbs it up, yeah. The heart can continue to beat normally. I guess I have another question. When I was in ICU, I had a heart attack, I was in ICU, the intensiveist told me that the heart doctors, cardiologists really don't care about the right side of the heart. You know, we care about the left side, and intensiveists care about the right side. That's kind of true. What the fuck does that even mean?

That is. And why? That's really interesting. That is kind of true. But it's not totally true. What we're talking about is left heart failure versus right heart failure. So the right side of the heart takes blood from the body. The veins all collect and then it is dumped into the venous blood is dumped into the right side of the heart.

Now, the right side of the heart is low pressure. All it has to do is take blood into the right atrium, pump it down to the right ventricle, and from there it pumps into the lungs through what we call the pulmonary artery. and an artery is any vein going away. It's not whether it's got red blood or blue blood, right? It's going away from the heart or coming toward the heart. All things coming toward the heart are veins, everything going away from the heart is an artery.

So the pulmonary artery has deoxygenated blood and it is pumped into the lungs to pick up oxygen. And then it gets pumped back through the pulmonary vein to the heart. Now, that right side that does the deoxygenated blood is the wall is thin and it's very low pressure. And you can get right heart failure, but the right side is resilient to lack of oxygen because it deals with deoxygenated blood.

It's very adaptable. And, you know, right heart failure causes uncomfortable symptoms, like swelling of the legs. That makes sense, right? Because you're trying to pump blood up to the, right heart, but if it's overprimed, it's backing up, or is it going to back up into everything below it that's trying to feed it fluid? So, and the terminal part of that is the legs.

So you get big, giant legs. You can get fatigue, obviously, because you're not pumping as much blood to be oxygenated, et cetera, but it's less likely to cause that sort of severe breathing failure compared to left-sided heart failure. left-sided heart failure is a real problem because that's a muscular ventricle. The left ventricle is pumping all the blood to everywhere in the body, including the brain and even the heart and everywhere. So if it's decreased efficiency because it's not beating hard enough, you know, and it's like a pump that's overprime, where is it backing up into? It's backing up into the lungs because that's where the fluid coming into the left-fetched. is coming from. Well, when you back it up into the lungs, now you've got fluid in your lungs.

You can't, it becomes a vicious cycle. You can't get as much oxygen into your bloodstream. And so there's decreased efficiency of the heart because it relies on that same blood supply. And, you know, now you're backing up even more and you get this, you know, exacerbation of congestive heart failure or acute congestive heart failure. and you'll see symptoms like pink frothy sputum, shortness of breath, chest pain. When you look at the x-ray, you can see that it's cloudy in there with all the fluid kind of puffing up all the tissues around there. So that sucks. So that's why.

So, yeah, the intensivists do deal with right heart failure and the cardiologists are all about congestive heart failure, but they do both. Sure, sure. There's no intensivist that would ignore left heart failure, nor is there any cardiologist that would ignore right heart failure. They call it diastolic dysfunction, and, you know, it's a whole other thing. Hey, and I've got a quick question for the flu family going along with this whole theme. MSIP-747, if you've had a heart attack before, will the second heart attack always be worse than the first heart attack?

Not necessarily. You can have a big heart attack and then just ding. a little vessel and it could be... Technically a heart attack, but not... Technically a heart attack, it could be what they call a non-STEMI, you know, non-ST-elevation, mycardial infarction. Now, if you... It's all about what gets blocked off, you know.

The paradigm back in the day was if you had an income, what we would call an incomplete heart attack in the 80s, that puts you at risk for having another big-ass heart attack. Okay. That's where the saying came from. Yeah. If the first one doesn't get you to the second one, well, that's right. Okay, got you. So what's an incomplete heart attack?

Well, we would call that an N-stemmy now. Okay, good, good, good, good, it's a, you know, there is cardiac damage, but not nearly enough to cause the enough damage to where your EKG changes and all that stuff. The enzymes go up. Remember, when you kill blood cells, I'm sorry, when you kill. heart muscle cells, they have specific enzymes in them that are unique to the heart, and you can detect that in the bloodstream. So if that goes up, but the EKG doesn't change, it's not a classic heart attack. They'll call it an N-stemmy or non-STE elevation, myocardial infarction.

Now, if you have the full bore thing, you will get a weird current in the heart because of the damage that's being done, and you'll get changes on the EKG that we call ST elevation. and that's a stemmy. So that's the real deal. So you could have a couple of in-stemies and then they have the stemmy. But now, these days, we have cardiac catheterization. And you can go in, see what the actual anatomy is,

what the clogs are, and you can go in and balloon them or put stents in and all that kind of stuff. So you're probably, you know, a lot of that stuff reduces the symptoms of angina, but it doesn't do a whole lot for survival. But now with these drug-eluding stents and all that stuff where they put a stand in there and it actually has drug in it

that will keep the vessels open. They're greatly improved. Absolutely. All right. So that's what that's coming from. I think. That's probably where that idea is coming from. All right.

Yeah, it's a great question there. That is an excellent question. Let's do, you got any more from the fluid family while I'm doing this? No, but evidently Cardiff has huge calves. Cardiff. Yep.

I have huge caps for for someone myself. Whatever that means. That just means you're in good shape. He's got good oxygen flow to his cave.

Cardiff is in there? Yeah, evidently. Oh, yeah. Oh, my friend. All right. How funny. And we did get a Galaga

777-7-7-0. That's God. 20 weird medicine gift memberships. What? Yep. Wow, we need So thank you.

We need one of those things like When they do it on TSN, they do like this, I don't know, like they're taking certain body parts in their mouth and then other ones have something.

What should we have? Maybe this one. He's a fucking idiot. Well, that's because you're an idiot. You get nothing. You lose! Good day, sir! That's probably appropriate for buying 20 weird medicine members, but thank you.

Gala, God, yes. All right. Oh, Tio Hank is in there. Tio Hank is fun. We were in Las Vegas together, and they were playing this bubble craps thing. And it's like, can we just play real craps? But Tio is sort of the godfather of all the people out there. You know, he's taken care of everybody.

Hello, Tio, Hank. And Tuxedo Crank, it says, I had a quad bypass that didn't take. Had to get five stints. Am I a failure? No. But listen, people, I give a talk about compassionate communication. And I say, listen, patients don't. fail anything because they'll say, well, this patient

failed chemotherapy. They didn't fail anything. The chemotherapy failed them. Right? Stop saying patients failed things. It's not true. So no, you are not a failure. You've just got really bad disease. All right. Uh-oh, what happened there?

Oh, boy. You know... Oh. I don't know. I've got another quick question. Yeah, it's a quickie. Good. Joe 479 wants to know our thoughts about vibration plates. What the hell is the vibration plate is

a thing that you can either stand on, lay on. It's good for neuropathy. That's good. That's what I was going to say. So if you're seated in a wheelchair, you can just put your feet on them and it'll shake your feet, vibrate your feet. So the question is what are you using it for? What are you going for? What are you trying to accomplish? People say, is vitamin D good, but

what do you want to accomplish? You want to prevent rickets? It's fucking great. It's a drug of choice. But do you want to prevent cancer? Well, we don't have any really good daddy for that. So, yeah, so vibration plate great for neuropathic pain. What else can you think of? It might be, you know, if it vibrates enough. Lymphadema. Lymphadema is certainly, potentially, yeah. Could be good for, yeah, to increase blood flow. Sure, yeah. Masculance. Actually, it could be good for some people with low back pain if it's kind of vibrating, getting things back where they're supposed to be. Especially if your fascia is stuck and it's in

And it needs to be moved and it hurts to move. Sometimes a little vibration can help. Mary Jane says that they have one. I got no problem with them. I mean, I'm not saying they're going to cure anything, but they're not going to hurt anything for sure. Yeah. And they might be beneficial for some of those things.

I was on Be Dabbling Live last week. It kind of turned into a mini weird medicine episode, which pissed a lot of people off, I think. But, you know, it's just what else am I going to talk about? But Mike Coots 74 said, Dr. Steve, I love you. Thank you for my buy one, get three free dabble dyes. So I don't know what happened, but he called in. And he said, yeah, I ordered one.

And I've got one. And I've got another one. Then I got another one. And I got all these autographed cards and all this stuff. He's like, Steve, you can stop sending me to apple dyes. You know, I just print out the thermal things, whatever the Shopify app tells me to do. and I get that, you know, I pack them, I use a thermal printer, slap them on there and send them out.

So I have no idea what's hell happened. It was funny. hilarious. You can't have enough of those devil dices. That's for sure. Yeah. All right. Yeah, okay.

So Chris Mack, Erie Jane and Tuxedo Crank walked into a bar, and the bartender said, y'all get the hell out of here. All right. Anything else from the from the fluid family? No, sir. And yeah, thank you, Mike, for the $5 super chat too, not required. We're reading all the poor, what they call the poor chats. All right.

Okay, let's hit this one. We did, okay. Oh, this is going to get us in trouble, but we're going to do it anyway. Hi, this is Mr. Back in the day, GVAC loved these. Okay. Oh, no. I know what it's about.

John Jennings, and I emailed you about asking if it's possible to have an increased risk of an uncircumcised penis contributing to a UTI or any kind of topical anti-bacterial thing that you might use on it that could contribute. Yeah. Take care. Bye. Yeah. So, yeah, G-Back used to love this. because I got into it with those intactivists at one point. And in my defense, all I was asked was,

what is the American Academy of Pediatrics stance on circumcision? And I went to the AAP, found the link, and replied to the person. And apparently, they're looking for that, and they just jumped into the thing and just started shit. Oh, wow. And it was like, I didn't even express an opinion about it. I just answered a question. So anyway, but we, listen, everyone should have the choice.

It is a cosmetic, for the most part, procedure that the patient generally does not have consent because parents do it anyway, but parents do all kinds of stuff without their kids' consent. They can't consent. Kids legally can only assent to things, and infants can't even do that. So it's just one of those things. So you have an argument with the people that you want to argue with because I don't have a strong opinion about it. But uncircumcised males scientifically do have a higher risk of urinary tract infections, especially in infancy. There's studies showing a 10 to 12-fold increase in young, uncircumcised.

circumcised boys due to bacterial colonization out of the forest can. Now, having said that, that is relative risk. What's the absolute risk? So we would have to, and we should do this to give you the absolute risk, because that will tell you the number needed to harm. Remember, if you have a thousand kids who are circumcised, a thousand kids who are uncircised, and out of that thousand,

you have 0.5 kids who are circumcised who have a, so it'd be 1 in 2000, right, who have a urinary tract infection, but you have five in the other room. Well, that's a 10-fold increase, but the absolute risk is only 4.5. And that's out of 1,000. So now you have to take the inverse of that to get the number needed to harm. In other words, how many uncircumcised? males, or you can get the number needed to treat. Same way.

How many people do you have to circumcise to prevent one heart or one urinary tract infection? Do you have a calculator with you? Nope. We could do that. Well, I can find one. All right, I got one. So let's just say those numbers were right. And if you would, Dr. Scott, while you're sitting over there on the computer, Google.

Yeah, sure. Prevalence of urinary tract infection in circumcise boys and the prevalence. prevalence in uncircumcised boys. We can actually calculate this. But let's just say in this case, we're saying 4.5 out of 1,000, so 4.5 divided by 1,000, and then take the inverse of that. And that would be you would have to circumcise 222 boys to prevent one urinary tract infection. So is that worth it when urinary tract infections were so easily to treat? You know, it's not a compelling argument.

Do you know. Did you find something? Uncumcised mills are increased risk of genital herpes. Uncumcised. Yeah, uncircumcised, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there's benefits to being circumcised. Absolutely.

Increased sensation during intercourse, all that stuff. Although some people say that they're more likely to have premature ejaculation because it's so sensitive. Okay, he's not finding it. Well, I'm right now on NIH, and it says, now this is from 2013. Actually, we're looking for incidents rather than prevalence, but go ahead. Oh, that's okay. I was just going to say, let's see, single risk factor of lack of circumcision confers with a 23.3% chance of urinary tract infection during a lifetime.

Okay, that's greatly excites. Uncumcised. That's correct. Uncumcised. It greatly exceeds the prevalence of the circumcision. Okay, so what is it for circumcision? 1.5%? Okay, 1.5 minus 12.

20? 23.3%. Okay. That's a pretty big difference. 233 minus what was the other one? 1.5. 0.015. So the absolute risk is 0.218 and take the inverse of that.

That's five. So, you know, you would have to circumcise five people to prevent one heart attack. Why don't I keep saying heart attacks? Because usually we talk about heart attack in this context to prevent one UTI. We'd have to look and get rigorous numbers on that. And I probably didn't look up exactly what you needed either, to be honest. But I did my best. Yeah, here's another one.

One meta-analysis suggests 32% of uncircumcised males experience a UTI in their lifetime, a UTI. Okay? We can treat UTIs compared to 9%. So people, you know, we'll stretch on some of these things and go, well, you know, But really, is that a compelling reason to circumcise somebody? I don't think so. But, again, this is a parent's choice, and your argument is with them if you think that they shouldn't have that right to make that choice. So your argument is not with us.

All right. Excellent question, though. Here's a good one. Hello, Dr. Steve. Oh, Dr. Scott, and whoever else is in the studio and fluid family. Yep. Quick question for you. Yep.

Sometimes when I go to the bathroom and urinate, it looks like you poured a 40-ounce beer in there because there's so much foam. Sometimes there's hardly any foam when you finish urinating. Yeah. What's the difference? Yeah. Okay. Do you have anything on that? I would say just concentration, you know, dehydration versus being hydrated.

Yeah, and protein. And protein urine. Yeah. So, occasionally. The occasional foam is absolutely normal, but if you have foam all the time and it's thick and it persists, and if you have any other symptoms along with it, you need to get your urine checked that they can do a urine for protein just to see if there is a thing called proteinuria. Protonuria. And, you know, it could, but like Dr. Scott said, it could be dehydration, which would concentrate the urine. If you have a really forceful stream, you'll make more foam just because you're, you know,

churning up stuff more. Especially if you're really far away from the water, they're Stacy. Yeah, right, because he's 40 feet tall. Exactly. But diabetes, high blood pressure can cause protein in the urine, certain autoimmune diseases, and all these things can cause kidney damage

that leads to protein loss. Urinary tract infections can do it too, and, you know, just a protein-rich diet. So I noticed that certain things that I eat, can cause more protein. All right. That's all I got on that one, to be honest with him. I thought he was calling about head on beer, which I did have a whole treatise on.

So anyway, all right, here we go. Hello, Dr. Steve. It's Tom from Michigan. Hey, Tom. I'm calling once again to ask a question about what happens to your body parts that get removed, whether it be a leg, an arm, a finger, a tumor, a breast, if you get a mastectomy, or even if you get something as small as like a mole removed, and they punch out that little thing of skin.

Does it all get burned and an incinerator? Does some just get thrown in a biohazard bin? Thank you, Dr. You know, these are people, thank you, man, these are people's body parts. And I've had people request their gallstones and have them refuse. And I don't know if the surge, but I do know, and that's unusual. Most of the time they'll give you a jar of gallstones. I do know that if you have a limb removed, sometimes they will argue with you about that one if you want it.

but there are people who have, you know, religious or cultural reasons for wanting their limb back. Okay. And they can bury it or cremated or do whatever. But it's got to go to the mortuary first that way. Then they'll give them back, you know, after it's been processed and stuff. They're just going to chop your leg off and just give it to you. And I think part of it is that could be ever. Evidence in a lawsuit, I guess, maybe.

Oh, I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, I could see that. Yeah. And because if you take it off and just burn it, there's no evidence. I'm just saying, you know, now every once in a while they may ask you if you want to donate it to science so that they can preserve it and dissect it for educational or even artistic purposes. There are bodies that have been donated where they've sliced them up and put them between glass and you can go visit those. It has an artistic and educational purpose to it. So, you know, usually you're asked what you want to do with the limb if it's going to be used for research. Otherwise, they're going to hold the limb in the hospital for a specific period of time,

and then they're going to incinerate it. Okay. So there you go. But, yeah, you do, you should have some agency on what they do with your limb. But if you say, listen, I want you to put it on a spike out in front of the hospital just to warn other people not to come to this hospital. They're not going to do that. But the pathologists almost always will look at the limb just to make sure it's what they, you know, that they sent them what they said they did. And it's another medical legal thing to say, yeah, you took a mole off and this is a mole.

Right. Or you took a toe off, and yes, it is a toe that. It has gangrene and necrosis. That's just more medical legal stuff. If later on somebody says, yeah, oh, they took off the wrong toe or my toe was totally fine and they took it up. All right. That's pretty interesting. Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

Good questions. Okay, that's the one I really want to get to. Hey, there, Dr. Steve. This is your old pal Logan Field. I've been seeing a lot of stuff here on. line about this new Star Trek show and everything. It looks really bad. I don't know.

I'm probably not going to watch. But I had a question. I was running around the other day, and I was thinking about the teleportation and process and transporters and all that. So let me get this straight. So when you get transported, my understanding is you get transported, you are broken down molecularly. You're killed, basically.

And then you were. That's one way. Oh, this one way of doing teleportation and science fiction. But, yeah, that's start. Rebuilt on the other side where you're going, right? So my question is, if a person, in fact, has a soul and they've never been through the transporter before. So the first time they go through the transporter, basically they're killed. But they aren't killed.

Their copies on the other side, but their soul basically is gone because you're dead for all. intents and purposes and your soul goes back to the soul well or wherever you. Well, where does that mechanism come from? Who says that that's how it works? You know, now that part, that's faith-based. He's making this up. Okay. Okay.

So, and other people may feel the same way, but it's, this isn't part of the science of this. But I'm going to talk about why teleportation the way they do it in Star Trek is not possible. I was wondering what you're saying. thoughts were about that because it's just, it's interesting to think about, like, there's all these soulless people walking around on Star Trek. Yeah, that would be, if it did work that way, it'd be crazy because they'd come out and just not have any soul whatsoever, whatever that is.

But we don't know what that is, so it's hard to say. But I think if your consciousness survives, then whatever eternal thing, if there is a such thing, would go with you. but leaving that aside, how would you deconstruct somebody on one side and then transmit that information somewhere else and have them recreate you? So they would have to recreate the state of every particle in your body to do it right so that your brain goes to the other side and all of your memories and, sensations and all that stuff are intact. Well, okay, so you get a scanner, and it's so precise that it can read every single atom in your body. Well, great, except that electrons and subatomic particles do not exist in a defined state.

The more you know their position, the less you know their momentum, and that's just that is not because we're stupid. or don't know enough, that is built into the universe called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is for real. If you derive the math, you can see it's inevitable. So that's the problem. We could get the position, but then we don't know the velocity. And there are other pairs of these things that when you know one very precisely, you can't know the other one.

And let me see if I can look some of those up. I know one of them has to do with energy. I mean, I did do physics, but it was 50 years ago. So pairs of Heisenberg uncertainties. Let's see here. Yeah, position and momentum, energy and time. There you go. Angular position and angular momentum.

You kind of know all these things. And then the phase and the particle number. So the more, again, the more precisely you know these things, the less you know the other thing. but you have to know all of those to transmit all this information from one place to the other. Now, let's just say that we lived in a universe where you could know all those things. It does raise a bunch of interesting points because if you wanted to get rid of your girlfriend's husband, right, you just put them in the, throw them in a transporter and then just don't transmit him anywhere.

Now you go down for murder and you go, oh, no, no, no. Prove it. Yeah, no, not only that. He's in the buffer. There's a buffer that keeps it in a buffer. There was a Star Trek episode where Scotty was found, his ship was found, and he had tried to transport himself somewhere, but he got trapped in the buffer. So they just recreated him. Oh, wow.

They turned the transporter back on. So you go, no, no, no, he's not dead. Here he is. And you turn the transporter on and you recreate this guy. Okay. Right? And then as soon as your trial's over and they go, no, okay, there's no crime here, you just put him back in. Okay.

Or transmit him to, you know, Alpha Centauri or something. So there's that. Now, so that kind of transporter is not going to work. A wormhole would absolutely work. And a wormhole creates a shortcut through space time where you walk through this door and then you are in another place. And it's because space has folded and allowed you to walk from one place to the other. Right now, they think to create one of those, you have to have negative energy and nobody really knows what that is and also negative mass to hold the thing open. But if you want to read a book about that kind of teleportation,

there it's well there's two of them but Hyperion Hyperion by Dan Simmons it's a four book series it's incredible it's like Canterbury Tales in outer space but they have these things called

farcasters where you can walk through this thing and there's this river that they have and it's a tourist attraction where you take a boat and you go through these portals and the river goes through all these different worlds And when you go under this arch, you're now in a different world and it's got a different environment and stuff and you just keep doing that. And then they shut the, oh, I don't want to, no, I don't want to give you any spoilers.

But it's really good. Now, there's another one which was sort of a dimensional travel. That's like Nightcrawler and X-Men, but also the stars, my destination. That's how they did it. They had a way that you could learn to transport yourself without any. equipment whatsoever, and you went through these sort of micro dimensions and stuff. So that wouldn't work. But anyway.

Well, fascinating. Yeah. Hey, we've got to say hi to KB 103. Finally catching a live show. I love the show. I was wondering if you had any tips for me starting grad school. I'm going to be a nurse practitioner. Oh, shit.

KB. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She is. She is. She is. She is awesome.

That's cool. No, no. She's awesome. Congratulations. I met her a couple of times. Oh, cool. I think she was in Largo, but then she was in Vegas. Gotcha.

And she's delightful. Cool. And, yeah, I tell you what, shut up. You're already smarter than me. I just read that, yeah. Thanks for the 499, finally catching a live show. Yes, sweet. Listen, you're going to be fine.

I've met you. You're very smart. And the thing is that it can be a drudge, and it depends on what school you're going to. For example, trying to find rotations can be difficult. So some schools have all these rotations built in. The one local to us, they have to find their own rotations. So if you want to email me, if they'll let you do a rotation,

we can get you one or two months or even three months where we are. Pardon me. So, but yeah, the advice is just do it. Yeah, it's going to suck for a couple years. It doesn't even suck. It shouldn't really suck. I mean, it's intense, but it's supposed to be intense. Yeah.

It's hard. It's master's level. I think KB probably will get her DNP eventually. She's the type that I think we're going to want to stop at the master's level. But being an advanced practice provider. And listen, I can give you better advice after you, get out, do not take a job where you're going to, where you're considered a minion. And if they call you a physician extender, Ron, my, I have 25 nurse practitioners that I work with and they are my

partners. They're not my minions. We work together as a team. And, yeah, I have to sign their charts. And yeah, I've got 37 years of experience. So they call me with things. And yes, I'm ultimately responsible for the things that they do, but they're my partners. So that's the main thing. The school part, you've got it. You're going to be fine. And you'll wake up tomorrow. It will be over and going to be practicing.

It goes by really fast. It goes really quickly, yeah. But you have my email, and if you don't, I'll give it to you at DR. Steve 202 at gmail.com. You or anyone else that wants to get into this profession, why would you? You have to be called to do it because you don't do it for. for the money. But if you want to reach out to me anytime, I'll be more than happy to help you in any way. Okay. Yeah, that's awesome. Good for you. Good job for you. Very excited for her.

All right. All right. Scott looks like he has a collection of Kirshan knives. What are those? We need to look that up. Never heard till a sitch. Yeah. Oh, I know. Yeah, Toxedo crank says, woof, that's a lot of work wires. Yes, it is. But I don't know. We started this program with one physician, me, and one advanced practice provider.

And now we're, you know, at four, soon to be six physicians and 25 APPs in there outstanding. They're not a turd in a bunch. But, of course, I trained them all. All right. Yeah, KB, she says, thank you. So you're welcome. I didn't give you any advice that's worth anything,

but you're absolutely welcome to call me any time. All right. Oh, Gah is reading Hyperion. Excellent. Good for you. Let's see. McRibbs, if you don't think Nikola Tesla invented all that Star Trek shit, you're fooling yourself.

The man was the smartest human being to walk this planet. You know, I just read, one of the things Tesla wanted to do was broadcast power so that you would just have an antenna and you could turn something on. And the electromagnetic fields were so strong that, you know, people were worried about it causing cancer and stuff like that. So we transmit power through the wires. But I heard that there was a town in Europe somewhere that's now doing it, transmitting power over the, you know, just through the air. So that's kind of interesting. Tesla was awesome.

Yeah. He fucked around with a bunch of cool stuff. He's pretty incredible. And Tesla was in the movie The Prestige, right? Wasn't he in that? Was Tesla the one that showed them how to do the teleportation trick? Wrong, dude. Okay.

Give me a baseball movie. I'm confusing some movies there, but anyway. All right. Dr. Scott. Well, you're ready to get out of here. Get out of here. All right. Oh, you know, let me do this one real quick.

Hi, Dr. Steve. It's Tom from Michigan. I have a question about phlegm. I know different colors of phlegm, for example. Yeah, okay. So his question, sorry to catch your call short, Tom. He's calling about different colors of phlegm. And this one I can answer quickly before the music runs out.

So, yeah, a phlegm is simply mucus from the upper airway, and sometimes from the lower airway, if you've got pneumonia or something like that. If it's clear or white, that's normal. If it's yellow, very often you have some sort of infection. Not always bacterial. Sometimes it's just white blood cells in there that are fighting a viral infection. And different enzymes can cause that color.

Now, green is very often bacterial, where there's lots of white blood cells fighting. And then if it's brown or rusty color, you may have old blood. It's blood. And then red or pink. We talked about pink frothy sputum already. Could be congestive heart failure. But red sputum is almost always blood, and that requires evaluation. The flame.

All right. All right. Very good. All right. Very good. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to Dr. Scott. And thanks to everyone who's made this show happen over the years.

It continues to be the most fun I've had in my six. six decades. Oh, this is old, seven decades of existence. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. If you want to join the fluid family, just follow us on Twitter. Sometimes I post on there that we're going live, but the best way to do it is to go to YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine. Click the like and subscribe and the notification bell, and you'll be notified when we go. live. And also click the join mutt and just click the thing that says accept gifted memberships. Gah gave out 20 gifted memberships. Thank you again. All right. And then we just kind of hang out. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules podcast of the crap. Check out Dr. Scott's website. It's simply herbals.net. And if you want to see the roadie robotic tuner, stop.com. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps. Quit smoking. Get off your asses, get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.

Thanks, everybody. Thank you.