609 - Whitlow, We Hardly Knew Ye
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You see? You see? You're stupid minds. Stupid. Stupid. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirius XM 103 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 a, you know, a clown. Like.

You give me the respect that I'm entitled to! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola vibes dripping from my nose. Up the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and blast it with the wave, an ultrasonic, echographic, and a pulsitating shave. I want a magic pill for all my ailments, the health equivalent of Citizen Kane. Now in the tablet.

I think I'm doomed, and I'll have to go and requiem for my disease, so I'm paid. From the world-famous Cardiff Electric Network Studios in beautiful downtown OJ City, it's Weird Medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast, I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal, Tacey, my partner in all things. Hello, Tacey. Hello. This is a show for people who have never listened to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider, if you can't find an answer anywhere else,

Give us a call, 347-766-4323. That's 347-POOHEAD. Follow us on Twitter, at Weird Medicine, and visit our website at drsteve.com for podcasts, medical news, and stuff you can buy. 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 to or with your health care provider.

Please check out stuff.drsteve.com, stuff.drsteve.com. Scroll down. You can see the Rody Robotic Tuner, or you can go to roady, R-O-A-D-I-E.drsteve.com.

and find it there. They have the Rody Coach that'll teach somebody how to play a stringed instrument, or you can get the Rody Robotic Tuner. It's getting ready to be time for buying gifts for the holidays. That's a perfect under $200 gift for someone who plays an instrument

Brian May from Queen said these bloody bastards came out with this at the end of my career. So he loves it.

So who am I to argue with Brian May, for God's sake? Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. Check us out at patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. Everything goes there first, and then including just the behind-the-scenes video stuff all goes to patreon. Cameo.com slash weirdmedicine. I'll say fluid to you, Mama. And that's it. All right, very good. Thank you very much.

Don't forget Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. That's simplyherbals.net. Also, check me out at Normal World. My female ejaculation video should be complete and ready to run in the next week or two. And it tells the truth about squirting and female ejaculation. And if you want to read about it and just see the answer, go to drsteve.com and go to the search section.

of the website and just ask for female ejaculation. You can read the whole thing there. I used to talk to Brian Redban and

We're going to talk to Joe Rogan about a long time ago before Joe got so huge. So I'm too small potatoes for him now. But back in the day, I just didn't have an excuse to go to L.A. when he was first starting out. And he asked us several times to come. Doesn't want you anymore? No, I mean, I hadn't asked in a long time. I'm going to say he's too bad. He's got Trump and Kamala on his show. Why would he want me? You know.

To fill in the spots. Anyway, well, if you want to talk about female ejaculation, we can do that because I have, you know, there's a lot of mythology about it and I have the right answer. It's the answer backed up by science. There is coital incontinence and there is female ejaculation. There are two different things and some women do both, some do none, and some do one or the other, which is where all the confusion comes from. Yeah.

Anyway, hey, Tace, why is a woman like a pinky toe? I don't know. Well, number one, there's three reasons. They're cute. Number two, they provide much needed stability and balance. Number three, you don't appreciate them until you bang them on the coffee table. Yay! That's funny, Steve. All right, very good.

That's the joke for the day. So anyway, do you have any topics today? Well, I have a couple, but I can't remember. It's been a while since we've done a show because of things. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. I have a couple, but I can't remember if I've done common vaginal infections or not. No, you have not.

All right. Okay, we can do that one. 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, everybody. Hello. It is very hot in here, so forgive me. And I've also had two glasses of wine, so forgive me. Excellent.

Vaginal infections can be caused by bacteria, fungi, parasites, or viruses. Some of these things normally live in your vagina without causing any problems. But sometimes they can grow out of control, causing an infection in your vagina and vulva, the area surrounding your vagina. Things that can trigger this or increase your risk include being sexually active, especially if you've recently changed your partner. Mm-hmm.

Using vaginal hygiene products like douches, soup, soaps. Soup? Soups. Bubble baths, deodorants, vaginal washes and wipes. Taking antibiotics. Sometimes contraception, including the IUD. Having a health condition that affects your immune system, like diabetes or HIV. Or taking a long-time steroid medicine. Yeah. Okay. So steroids, you know, um...

suppress some of the activity of the immune system and so that can allow things to start to grow. We'll see people who take steroids get yeast infections in their mouth even. It's called thrush. So that can be a problem. And, you know, the crazy thing is, is I think this is proof that our creator has a sense of humor because the bacteria that makes a healthy vaginal wall is

is the same bacteria that makes yogurt. And it's also the same yogurt, I found out, that makes Tabasco sauce. Because they ferment pickles in lactobacillus. Okay. So don't put Tabasco sauce in your vagina, but you can put plain yogurt in your vagina to try to repopulate the vaginal walls with good bacteria. We've had people do that before.

One of the problems is you get something like bacterial vaginosis, which is a Gardnerella bacteria that sort of takes over and you can treat it with antibiotics, but then sometimes the antibiotic will also kill some of the good bacteria. So it's always good to repopulate that area with good bacteria. And we don't recommend douching at all. Yeah. Yeah, douching is bad. It just...

It doesn't help. And if you have a weird odor down there, you should get that checked because it may just be an infection of some sort. Fishy odor can be caused by bacterial vaginosis. We would diagnose that by getting fluid from the vagina, looking at it under the microscope and seeing if there are white blood cells that have bacteria on them.

all studded on them, you know, just growing all over them are called clue cells. And that's an indication of this bacterial vaginosis that we would, again, you can treat with an antibiotic, but you could try to treat it with a little yogurt and try to just

shift the bacterial flora in the vagina a little bit to something more advantageous. But anyway. Yeah, it seems like sometimes when you're doing things that you hope would help don't seem to help. Sure. Well, it's like that patient I had a long time ago came in and said, well, Doc, I'm galled. And he had an infection called erythrasma.

on his junk and erythrasma is a bacteria can't be treated with an antifungal and when you diagnose it by looking at it under black light and it glows a very beautiful salmon pink unlike jock itch which doesn't glow at all and this person was putting bleach on it and he thought that it was doing something because it burns it must be doing something because it burns so bad and it was like no you were just bleaching your skin

Doesn't do anything for the infection, although you would think it would. But anyway, go ahead. Okay, so a vaginal infection isn't the same as a UTI or cystitis. Correct. A UTI affects your bladder or the tubes that carry urine out of your body. Your vagina is part of your reproductive system. This is separate from your bladder and urinary tract.

Okay, types of vaginal infection. Bacterial vaginosis. This is the most common vaginal infection. It happens when bacteria that normally live in your vagina grow out of control.

Correct. Okay, stop that. Chlamydia. This is the most common STI in the UK. It's caused by a type of bacteria. In the UK? So you got this off a British website? Must have. Common symptoms include increased discharge, bleeding between periods or after sex, and pain when you pee or during sex. No. Genital herpes. These are caused by the human papillomavirus and spread through sexual contact.

The warps appear around your vulva, cervix, vagina, or anus. Genital warts. These are caused by the human papillomavirus and spread through sexual contact. The warps appear around your vulva, cervix, vagina, or anus. Gonorrhea. Would you stop...

An STI caused by bacteria, gonorrhea, can cause an increase in discharge and pain around your lower abdomen. It might hurt when you pee, and you may get bleeding between your periods. So a lot of this is telling me that if you're bleeding between your periods, maybe it's not—it's worth getting checked out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first time, for sure. You can have spotting between periods, and you can have pain. You can have—

ruptured cyst or you can have you know, what's it called? Mittel schmertz, where you have pain between your periods and it's when you ovulate and then you can sometimes have vaginal bleeding from that as well. So if you don't know the cause of abnormal bleeding, whether it's from your rectum, vagina, your nose or anywhere else, you should get it checked at least the first time until you know that it's something benign. Go ahead. Okay.

Thrush, this is a common fungal infection. It includes itching or soreness around your vulva and sometimes a thick, white vaginal discharge.

A bit like cottage cheese. Yes, it is. It looks like cottage cheese. That's one of the ways you can diagnose it. It's white and kind of clumpy. I've never heard it called thrush in the vagina, but maybe in the UK they do. We just call it a vaginal yeast infection. Trichomoniasis. I've seen this. It's an STI caused by a parasite. If you have trichomoniasis, you may have a yellow-green, foul-smelling, and possibly frothy vaginal discharge. It looks like nanner pudding.

Oh, good. If you've ever been in the South and you've ever had banana pudding, that's what it looks like coming out of your vagina. And you look at it under the microscope and you recoil because there are these things in there kicking around. They're bigger than one cell. You know, they're not one-celled organisms. And they, you know, they have legs and they kick around. It's disgusting. Oh, nice. It's possible to have more than one infection at a time.

Correct. You can have vaginal symptoms such as itching without having an infection. It's also normal and healthy to have some discharge from your vagina. The amount and consistency of this discharge can change at different times. See your GP if you think you may have a vaginal infection. You can also book an appointment directly with a, oh, they call it different, janitorinary medicine. What?

Genitourinary. Okay, spell it. G-E-N-I-T-O-U-R-I-N-A-R-Y. Genitourinary. Genitourinary Medicine or Sexual Health Clinic. Right. If you think you have an STI. Lovely. All right. Okay, so they talk about treatments, if you want to go over that.

I didn't think you would. No, that's fine. I mean, for the... What treatment are they? Antibiotics, viral medicines for genital herpes, creams, ointments, and solutions for genital warts, antifungal tablets for thrush. Correct. Trichomonas, we treat it with, if I remember correctly, metronidazole. I have not treated that in a long time. The trick with metronidazole is you cannot drink with it.

And what it does is it causes a reaction called the anti-abuse reaction, where if you drink alcohol, it will not be fully metabolized. It will metabolize part of the way to this intermediary molecule called acetaldehyde. And when you have a buildup of that, it'll make you sick, give you a headache, and make you just feel like crap.

And they'll give people antabuse to keep them from drinking because then when they drink, it's like the Ludovico technique. It makes them feel sick so they have an aversion to it. But if you're taking metronidazole, it can do the same thing, so you can't drink on that stuff. Some people try using home remedies such as live natural probiotic yogurt and tea tree oil to ease symptoms of thrush, but there's no evidence to say whether these things can help. Hmm.

Tea tree oil and other essential oils may irritate your skin and actually make your symptoms worse. Yeah, don't use tea tree oil on mucous membrane. Prevention. Many condom, many, oops, excuse me. Many condoms. Common vaginal infections are passed on through sexual contact with an infected partner.

These include chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomonosis, genital warts, and herpes. Using a condom can provide good protection against many STDs. You should also have a test for these before having sex with someone new, and they should too. There was a study that showed that eating 150 mLs of yogurt...

containing the lactobacillus. It's got to be live culture. For two months, reduced bacterial vaginosis episodes by 60%. But who wants to wait two months? Right. I get it. But if you have chronic bacterial vaginosis, then you would be happy to reduce your incidence by 60%. So...

If you're going to instill it into the vagina, use a vaginal applicator like a monostat applicator and use plain cultured yogurt. Make sure it's got live cultures and it's plain. You don't want to be putting strawberry yogurt in your vagina.

And you can just then suck it up into that applicator like you would monostat and then bloop it into the vagina and hold it there as long as you can.

And it will seep out. So be prepared for that. So either do this at night at home or, you know, you're going to have to wear a pad or something. But I've had a lot of people when I was in primary care, primarily lots of people who swear that they were cured with that rather than taking the antibiotics. I would give them a choice.

Bacterial vaginosis, it's a lifestyle thing. It's not threatening. So if they wanted to try the yogurt first and then it went away, then fine. If it didn't, then we could try the antibiotics. I also have a very scientific article sent to us by Stacey Deloach. Okay. It's maybe a little too much. It's called Brain Goop That Traps Hunger Neurons Drives Obesity. How?

How stupid! Okay, we don't have to do it. Now, what is it? I mean, it's very technical. Oh, well, that is very interesting. Please tell me more. It's time to go to the bathroom, everyone. What? If you want me to do it, it would be a good time for people to go to the bathroom. Oh, I see. Okay, I got it. Well, just give us the Reader's Digest version. Well, there really isn't... Okay. Well, why don't we... I mean, it's so technical. It's almost like... Yeah, don't bother. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, well, what we'll do is we'll feed it into the AI and say, summarize this for, you know, a freshman college crowd. And usually that does pretty good. And then it'll summarize it for you. OK. All right. Good. Well, thank you. Anything else? Nope. All right. Good deal. You want to answer some questions? Sure. Number one thing. Don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you, Ronnie B. Couldn't couldn't agree more.

Good morning, folks. I hope everything's getting somewhat back to normal. We'll talk about that in a minute. Got a little bit of a rudimentary question for you. What does PH stand for? I've heard of PH. I know it's interaction with things, but I don't know what PH actually stands for. Yeah. What's a couple of other, I mean, BP, blood pressure, that one's easy. Yep. But initials that you hear that us...

Poor old stupid layman. Don't know what that really means. Bye. Yeah, thanks, man. Well, pH stands for potential of hydrogen. And what it indicates is, I mean, it's a measure of acidity. And it is a logarithmic scale, so a change of one point, so like going from seven to six, means a tenfold increase in hydrogen ions.

And you can do some math with it. You can do some stuff. So, you know, neutral is a pH of 7. Things that are really, really basic will have a pH of 14. And things that are really, really acidic will have a pH close to 0. And then everything is in between. So stomach acid has a pH of what, Tase, usually? I don't know. Yes, you do. I don't remember. It's been forever. Okay. Well, it's like 3 or 4.

And that is one of our protective mechanisms, too, is having a highly acidic stomach. The problem is it causes acid reflux and ulcers and those kinds of things. And when you take medications to increase the pH, in other words, decrease the acidity of the stomach, you're

You allow more bacteria to get into your intestine than you normally would because they're not being killed by the stomach as efficiently.

And those are people that end up with a thing called SIBO, which is small intestine bacterial overgrowth syndrome, where bacteria from your food and things like that and your environment make it through the stomach into the small intestine, which should be relatively sterile, and cause a slime layer inside the small intestine. When you have that, you can have what we call postprandial distress or postpartum.

symptoms after you eat post meaning after prandial meaning eating. And, uh, those people will have bloating, diarrhea, abdominal pain after they eat.

And that's actually pretty treatable. But as long as you continue to take things like pantoprazole or Prevacid or those kinds of things and keep your stomach pH up, it's prone to recur because the conditions that caused it in the first place, which is the stomach not acting as the complete defense that it could be, are still there. So, you know, your body...

requires a slightly basic pH at 7.4, and it's very tightly held. So if someone comes in with a pH of 7.5 or 7.6...

We know that they are alkalotic, and it could be from respiratory alkalosis. In other words, they're retaining carbon dioxide like COPD-ers do. Or they may have metabolic alkalosis because they're, for whatever reason, peeing out or crapping out acid. And so their body ends up being slightly basic. You know, you can drink alcohol.

acid, you know, acidic things. And for a very short period of time, you may transiently decrease your pH by maybe a tenth of a point, but then it will rapidly come back to normal because the body really likes to maintain that pH at that 7.4 without varying. And if someone comes in with a pH of 7.1, something is really wrong. I think the lowest pH I ever saw in a person that was still alive was 6.8.

and that was a person with severe diabetic ketoacidosis. A lot of times that's how type 1 diabetics are discovered. They come in, and they feel like shit, and they may even be pre-comatose, and they're peeing like crazy, they're thirsty, and you check their blood sugar at 700, and their pH is 7.2 or something, and that is a medical emergency. Back in the day...

And I mean, you know, in Henry VIII's time and up until, you know, maybe, I don't know, 100 years ago, people who had that would die. And now we have the means of treating that using insulin and fluids and lots of fluids. These people are all dehydrated. They're contracted. You dump a lot of fluids in. You get an insulin drip going.

And then when their blood sugar gets back to normal, well, the weird thing is you don't cut down the insulin. You keep it going. You add glucose to the fluids because if you stop the insulin too quickly...

Even though their blood sugar is normal, it will go right back into ketoacidosis. So it seems weird. Why would you add glucose? Well, now you're allowing the body to start working normally again. And so you give them glucose in their fluids and insulin in their drip, and then you run both of those things up and down until you get them normal, and you keep them that way for a day. And then you can start thinking about switching them over to a regular insulin regimen. Remember, type 1 diabetics,

are people that are no longer producing insulin. All right? All right. All right, very good. So that's pH, and there you go. So thank you, Stacey Deloach. That's an excellent question, a very basic science question.

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Begins on October 1st, 2024. Ends July 1st, 2025. Multiple entry periods. Visit mclobalture.com slash courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, and official rules. Message and data rates may apply void where prohibited. Let's do this one because it's come up already. Hi, Dr. Steve and company. This isn't a medical question, but I know that you all are located in East Tennessee, and I and I think a lot of other listeners are curious about

How you all are doing after the hurricane passed through the area? Yeah. I know there's been a lot of flooding and damage. I hope you all are safe. Just like to know an update. Yeah. Love the show. Thank you. All are well and dry. And let us know what the report is from there. Yeah. Thanks. So, yeah, we should talk about this where we are. First off, we were fine. We didn't lose electricity and we never lost Internet.

It rained like crazy, and there was a lot of water around. A lot of wind. A lot of wind. Now, just south of us, two towns south of us, it's not there anymore, basically. And I have a friend who is the spouse of one of my partners. I don't want to say a whole lot, but...

who ended up on the roof of the building of the hospital because the hospital flooded so quickly that it went from a couple of inches of water on the floor of the hospital to completely inundated. In other words, they were on the roof and the water was at the level of the roof and they had to get a helicopter to get them off. They were carrying 600-pound patients up the stairs. Yeah, and had some of them in boats.

And floating them up. And it was nightmarish. I don't know about the 600-pound business, but it was a nightmare. A lot of people who were there have PTSD. There are a lot of people who still have not been found.

Maybe in the hundreds of people, there are towns that don't exist. And these are mountain towns. You would think that in the mountains, the water would just kind of fall off the mountain and you would never have flooding. They had no warning. Right. And there was no warning. The thing about this one was we've heard this all before. We've heard it hundreds of times. You know, we're going to have a bad, you know, a lot of rain from this hurricane that's coming in and we're inland. Right.

So why would we ever worry about a hurricane? But it dumped so much water. And then we had a dam break.

That was just south of us. And that water flowed north. And that was a nightmare. And that really contributed to a lot of this. And, you know, the rivers that we fish in and play in and all this stuff tried to basically kill us that day. So we it's bugged us because these are our brothers and sisters down there. Plus, we have a little bit of survivor's guilt, too.

And the recovery efforts are still going on. And it's really traumatized this whole part of the country. So Upper East Tennessee, Northwest, North Carolina, Asheville area, Weaverville, all those areas. I mean, it's just it was a nightmare. Yeah.

Now, my brother lives in the mountains of North Carolina where I grew up, and they were fine where they were. They just had a lot of wind and stuff. It's just unexpected. Nobody expected this. On Facebook, where a lot of people were getting the text that said, seek higher ground, they

A week after the hurricane actually happened because they had already lost cell power. Right. Oh, and that's the other thing. Thank you for bringing that up, is that I never want to hear anybody make fun of me about my ham radio hobby ever again because ham radio was the only thing and still is in some places the only thing where communication was happening.

Health and welfare, just, hey, I'm okay. I just can't get out of here because there's no roads. They've all been washed out. So one hospital was inundated. We had two others that were closed for that period. And, you know, it's got patients in there. What are you supposed to do? I mean, multiple towns are gone. Yeah. Multiple. Yeah. So it's bad. It's still bad. I'm not going to get into the politics of it.

I'm going to let other people do that. But there's a lot of, you know, there are some conspiracy theories.

talk going around. And then there's also some real, you know, people with real experiences where, you know, the civil air people, some of them said that they were grounded, you know, trying to get supplies into people by, you know, certain groups and stuff like that. So I don't want to get into all of that because I don't know the truth of it. We're not there experiencing that on the ground, but the truth will eventually come out.

Whether it's... It'll be... But it's too late for a lot of people. Yeah. But it's just literally minutes away from where we are. Yeah. Harrowing. The stories that we've heard from the people that survived, absolutely harrowing. And the stories of the people that didn't make it are just tragic. You know, people trying to get out of there and just got swept away. And that was the end of that. And again...

Nobody expected this. I mean, yes, there are warnings. How many times have we had warnings? But not like this. I mean, this was...

I mean, this was an actual hurricane where we live. Yeah, right. Which we never had. Which we never had. Right. It's one in a hundred years. Yeah. And we hear about this. We get these warnings all the time. Oh, you know, there's going to be flash flooding and it never happens. Never. And so people were just kind of blasé about it. Well, here we go. It's another bunch of shit that we're being told by the weather, you know, by NOAA. And this time they were right. Right.

And, you know, the thing I remember, I think when I was a kid, it was probably me, but somebody, you know, well, I'm not lying this time. And if you tell it's like Tacey's mom.

A lot of the stuff out or even if it's just 10 percent out of her mouth is bullshit. You can't trust anything that she says. We taught our kids. If you lie once, then we're always going to wonder if you're lying this time. So just don't lie. And when the weather gets all wound up because they love it.

You know, I've seen it before where there were, you know, tornado watches and they get on there and they're doing their round the clock coverage and they love it. You can tell how excited they are. We've had some bad storms. Yes. But I'm just saying, you know, we've been told this.

And not a hurricane. Never. Right. Never. So everybody just ignored it for the most part until it was too late. I mean, I drove to a town to have a birthday party. Yeah. Because it was sunny where we were. Right. And until it wasn't. And then 20 miles away, it was devastation. Right. Right.

Complete devastation. So anyway, so we're okay. But the area is not out of the woods. No. By any means. It's going to be a long time. It swept the interstate away. Yeah. I mean, how do you sweep away a whole interstate? A whole interstate. A big chunk of it. Now they've got detours so we can go around now. But good Lord. There's no place to go to. Right. Right.

Yep. So anyway, that was incredible to me, just seeing an area that I've driven through hundreds of times. Millions, yeah.

under 20, 30 feet of water, maybe higher than that, and then wondering what's going on underneath there and then seeing it. And it's like, oh, my God, you know, once the water receded. And then, you know, the interstate's just not there. Bridges aren't there. There's a town west of us that for a while didn't have any... It's surrounded by rivers and stuff, and all the bridges were gone, so they were having to drive...

You know, hours to get to places that normally used to take them. That's why we're ATV people. Yeah, that's right. People wonder about that. Yeah. Them Southerners and their ATVs. Well, don't laugh about that either. But no more bullshit about my ham radio. It was literally, and I've said this before, when nothing else works, when the cell towers don't work...

And you don't have satellite. You know, you don't have Starlink. They did bring Starlink in, which was great. And we appreciate, you know, the Starlink people very much for that. But you don't have Starlink set up yet. You don't have cell phones. All the telephone, your landlines are down, power's out. Ham radio is where it's at because it still works. But the saddest thing is how people are helping. Yeah, yeah.

No, I know. I know. It's yeah, it's we're still very emotional about this because these are our brothers and sisters close by. But yeah, people are helping. Were you going to? Well, I mean, I don't want to cry on the radio. OK, it's all right. We've cried before on this radio.

But, you know, I belong to a St. Pete site, and when they got hit by it, they got hit by it, too, and then milled right after. Yeah. They're like, fuck, you don't come. Right. They were like, fuck, tourists stay away. Yeah, and then our place is like... Please come and help us. Yeah. Yeah. So you hear a lot of stuff about FEMA and TEMA and all that stuff. Like I said, I don't have boots, my own boots on the ground, but...

But the truth will eventually come out about whether there were delays in helping us because of politics. That's what some people think. I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not. I think that for the longest time, the extent of the devastation wasn't widely known. No, because you couldn't get there. Right. Right.

When communications are completely wiped out, it's hard for people to know what's going on unless you get up in the air and look at it, which you couldn't do until this thing was completely done. So anyway, it was bad. I used to be over a certain number of hospitals, and now I'm over one less, which is also tragic. Thank God all those people survived. Yeah.

Yeah, because I don't think they thought they would. No, no. Yeah. And there's there's still traumatized by it. So anyway. So, yes. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

And as far as we are concerned, Dr. Scott and Tacey and I and BM John and all the other people that you know, everybody's fine. But we're still you can't be that close to something like this. And it's not like, oh, me too. But you can't be that close to something like this of people that you care about and not be affected by it. So. All right. All right. Let's talk about something more fun. How about a testicle nightmare? OK. OK.

Hey, Dr. Steve, this is Rob again. I wrote to you about having my testicles replaced and then having one replaced after infection with the wrong size. Anyway. Yeah. So, um,

When you have a testicle removed for whatever reason, they can put prosthetics in there so you don't just have an empty sack between your legs because it feels weird and it looks weird. And if you're having intercourse with somebody, it's like, well, where are your nuts, right? So they can put these prosthetics in. Do you think girls care about that? Do you not? No. Really? I wouldn't. So if you were blowing some guy and then you just felt down there and there was just an empty scrotum, you wouldn't wonder about that? I really don't think I would care.

Okay. All right. Good. Well, guys think that you care. So I guess that's why. But anyway. The update. I had to go eventually to the emergency room because I developed such a big infection. It's really about four inches above my left nut. And they had to cut it open and clean it and pack it. And I had to, like, you know, change the dressing every day. It was a pain in the ass. Anyhoo.

The doctor, the neurologist who I saw in the emergency room said not to put any more foreign objects in my body. I'm assuming he wasn't talking about my ass, but that's neither here nor there. Right. So, what's your thoughts? Oh,

He might have had a better way to say that. I don't like really walking around with one nut. Yeah. You know, you put your hands down your pants, kind of like the feel-to down there. Yeah. Should I give it a year or two and, you know, see how it goes? Or do you think I should just never have another implant put in?

The reason that they said that is if they put another foreign body in there while there's still bacteria anywhere within a thousand miles of your scrotum, it's just going to colonize it again and you'll be in the same place that you were. So that's why they're recommending that. It's very difficult to eradicate an infection around a foreign body because it's not living. And so the white blood cells and all the antibodies and all that stuff just can't make it to it.

So that they if you have an infected foreign body, it's got to be removed. And then so I but I would wait until everything is healed up. All of this has completely resolved and there's no sign of infection. I would even probably do.

a C-reactive protein on you, which is an indicator of inflammation, just to make sure. I would repeat cultures and all that stuff, make sure it's all gone. And you've lived with it for a year or two. And then you can talk to the urologist about maybe putting one back in because the ER doctor really didn't have any business. And they don't have any standing when it comes to urologic implants like that. So, I mean, they just literally have no standing.

they're doctors and they know some stuff, but that's not their call. It would be the urologist's call. So talk to them, whoever put the implant in. And, you know, if...

If that person was part of the problem, maybe get somebody else to do it. But these things happen. It probably has nothing to do with the actual urologist that did your procedure. It was just one of those things. I used to tell people when I did Botox, even if you have Dr. 90210 doing your Botox, one in 200 people get a droopy eyelid. And I think...

And that worked out. I did. How many of those did we do? We had one droopy eyelid. One droopy eyelid. Yeah, it happens sometimes. So post-operative infections happen at a certain rate.

It's a very low percentage, but they do happen. And so it's probably no flies whatsoever on the person. Their technique could have been perfect. And there were just some bacteria hanging around from whatever, maybe from your prostate. Always blame the patient, by the way. Or something like that. And it just happens. So give it some time. Let it completely resolve. Then give it some even more time and then go see the urologist. You can also get Spocka from Botox.

You can get spot guy. Yeah, where your eyebrow goes up like spot. That is correct. And some people like that. And that's not – well, I had it once, and I thought that was my normal thing. And my doctor said, no, that shouldn't be like that. We'll do a brow lift on some people. They fixed it. And I've always gotten a brow lift, but –

The Spock eye was... It looked just like Spock. Yeah, yeah. And now your mother, I'm sure she wouldn't mind, she had...

What's the word I'm looking for? An overabundance of eyelid on the top. And I would give her a brow lift and it would lift it up enough so that she could see without having to have surgery on her eyelid. Which she eventually had. Which she eventually had to do because I stopped doing Botox. Turned out very well. Yeah, she did good. Yep. All right. It's called blepharoplasty, by the way, when you have it. And insurance will cover it. Correct. Yeah, it's one of the few...

insurances are one of the few cosmetic procedures that insurance will cover because it actually affects your function. Yeah. Do you want to talk about your nose at all? Oh, I mean, I can talk about that. Yeah. I mean, I had...

What do you call it? Concha bullosa. A concha bullosa, which is like tumor, kind of like a benign tumor. Severe deviated septum, and then it grows around and causes all kinds of problems. And then I walked into the doctor's office, and I looked at this. The doctor was looking at...

his computer and it looked like a patient had a note in their nose was like a train wreck with a big bulb next to it. And I thought, gosh. That person's a mess. Yeah. Well, turns out that was me. And so he said...

You've got a deviated septum. Well, I know everybody says they get nose jobs. Oh, I got a deviated septum in quotation marks. But I really did have one with this contubulosa and it was causing my eyes to close and my face always looked really swollen. And I just looked a mess. And, yeah.

He took it all out, and I asked him just casually, how much would it be if you fixed the knot on my nose? And he was like, oh, I'll do that for free. Yeah, you had your dad's nose. I did get a free nose job out of my actual deviated septum and conchobulosa. Right.

Yeah, because while he was there, he had to open it all up anyway. Yeah, so he just fixed it. So he just shaved it off. And he got very excited about it. When I asked him that, he was like, ooh, we can do this and we can do that. And I thought, well, hell, if you want to do it, buddy, go ahead. Yeah. And he did it. And I can actually, listen, if you've got a deviated septum and you're afraid to get that surgery, I can't tell you otherwise.

How wonderful it is to be able to breathe, actually be able to breathe, because I did not know I wasn't breathing before. And I was breathing through my mouth all the time, like a like a dang. I don't know. Mouth breather. Mouth breather. Yeah. And we know I diagnosed Carl from W.A.T.P. with a deviated septum the first time I ever met him.

I said, you know, I'm pretty sure you have a deviated septum. He said, no, I do. How did you know? And I said, I could tell by just listening to you talk. Because he would say, you know, he'd say kabod instead of come on. You know, there's an obstruction in his nose. And, you know, every once in a while you can diagnose these things. We diagnosed a TV guy with acromegaly once.

What was that? Acromegaly is a tumor that produces growth hormone, and when it does it in adult males particularly, they get huge joints. They'll get a big lantern jaw. And they used to say Richard Keel, the jaws, the guy who played Jaws, might have acromegaly. I don't know if he really did or not, but that's the kind of thing that you look for, that sort of facial thing. They sweat more, and the growth hormone...

Well, I sweat more. Maybe I have that. No, you don't have it. But, you know, what it's trying to do is make your bones grow when you're a kid, when there's cartilage between them. There's nothing, no growth plates anymore. It just piles bone on bone on bone. So it's not good for you. Oh, okay. So, and then the other, not too long ago, and she talked about this on the show, On Normal World, Dave's,

and co-host, her name's Angela, we were working on one of my bits, and she asked me a question, and I diagnosed her with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, you know, type 1. She's got the minimum thing, but she's got hypermobile joints,

And elastic skin and stuff. So some things you can diagnose remotely. Yeah. You know what you can't diagnose easily remotely for me is rashes. People send me pictures of rashes. Yeah. It's like, well, it could be this. It could be that. It's really hard for me to do it. The dermatologist...

In their training, they look at slide after slide after slide of pictures of rashes and they can just whip them off just like that. But it was very difficult for me to do that. Yeah, I bet. But anyway, all right. Very good. Thank you. Let's do this one.

Hey, Dr. Steve. It's your old pal, Diesel Child. Hey, Diesel Child. Good family. Thank you, my friend. Hey, everybody in the studio. How are y'all doing? Hey, we're doing good, man. How are you? Well, that's lovely. Glad to hear that. I'm doing well myself. Thanks. Good, man. So, discovered something. I'm now on a drug called Pantoprozole. Yes. Which I'm now on because of... You can call it that. It's also Pantoprozole. It's a...

proton pump inhibitor for, uh, acid reflux. I had my complete fundoplication. Yes. Okay. So fundoplication for people who don't know is where they seal off the lower esophageal sphincter of the esophagus so that acid can't get up into the esophagus anymore. There's various ways that you can do it. A lot of times they just take, um, uh,

stomach tissue and wrap it around and then stitch it in just to create a more narrow sphincter down there so it's harder for stomach acid to get into the stomach. I have a stomach on my hiatal hernia, which almost killed me twice from the time of bleeding. And what we found out was taking that medicine in the morning,

along with my levothyroxine for my hypothyroidism. Oh, yay. That's fun. This is why I wanted to play this because this may be apropos to you, Tase. That ended up blocking...

So the effectiveness and absorption rate of the levothyroxine threw off my thyroid. And so the doctor that I was dealing with was just increasing my thyroid medication to the point where it was so high that other doctors were like, hey, buddy, pump the brakes. This is a little high. Does this sound familiar to you? And I had a second opinion. And that guy said, hey, you should probably take the...

the thyroid medication in the morning. Yes. You can take the Tantaprozole, however you pronounce it, at night. Exactly. And then you would have this interaction. Correct. Yes. That's what I do. That's what I do. Okay, so you do. So, yeah, taking the levothyroxine, which is Synthroid, thyroid replacement hormone. And then you have to wait. You have to wait 20 to 30 minutes after you take it. So you knew that. Or it will not work. Right. Okay, yeah. It interferes with absorption of...

of levothyroxine when you take pantoprazole with it and reduces its effectiveness. And so he's exactly right. What happens, they keep increasing your dose and increasing and increasing. And then if you stop the pantoprazole, now you're overdosed on Synthroid and now you get hyperthyroidism. Yeah, which is just as bad as low hypothyroidism.

We see this sometimes in people, not this particularly, but people who go to the pain doctor and they say, oh, my pain's out of control. It's out of control. And they keep increasing their pain medication. Turns out they're actually giving it to their son or they're selling it or whatever. They're not taking it. And then they end up in the hospital and you give them what?

They're supposed to be taking. Quote, unquote, supposed to be taking and you overdose them. That's how you diagnose that because you know immediately what happened was you gave them the dose that they've supposedly been taking for years. Now they're overdosed. Nothing else is going on. They haven't been taking their medicine. So you have to have a

what we call a come-to-Jesus talk with them. I would say. I'm curious what you think of that. Yeah, well, that's what I think about it. So anyway. Now, are there other PPIs that do this too? Is it just pantoprazole? I do not know. That was never once in 25 years was it discussed with me. Really? Never. Well, let's look up lansoprazole, and we'll just take a second. Like I said, Carl loves it when I look up stuff on the air. But lansoprazole and synthroid.

I would say it's a pH issue. I would think, okay, could be a pH issue or just a class-specific thing. Yep, same, same. Taking levothyroxine with lansoprazole interferes with the absorption of levothyroxine. Yeah, I wonder what the mechanism is. It might be that, that it's just a pH thing rather than a drug-drug interaction. But anyway, all right. We've got time for maybe one more here. Let's see here. Let's do a poop one.

How about that? Oh, no, I got a better one. Hang on. This is the one we need to do. Hey, Dr. Steve. Yeah. My name's Fred. Hey, Fred. How goes it, man? I might have sex with somebody who has, well, a female that has herpes. You don't have to specify that. I know I'm not going to have intercourse penetration between our bodies, but I'm

Will I catch anything if I just use my fingers on her? Okay. Do you know the answer to this, Tase? No, I do not. It was a thing that GVAC could never remember the name of. And yes, you can get, and you'll see this in healthcare workers sometimes, they will get herpes of the nail bed, and it's called herpetic Whitlow. So yeah, you absolutely can.

So and just because they're not actively having symptoms doesn't mean they're not shedding. So there are some things that you can do.

Number one, if you're not going to have penetrative intercourse, then you can just, you know, you could wear rubber gloves if you wanted to. If you're just going to manipulate them or you could have them, you know, use a toy or something like that. That person, if they have frequent episodes, could be on suppressive therapy. They could take an antiviral every day. It doesn't 100% prevent transmission, but it reduces the risk significantly. Right.

And there are couples out there where one of the people has herpes and the other one doesn't, and they've never gotten it. Now, that could be either from they're lucky or the person who has herpes has been really good at taking their medication, suppressing their outbreaks, and recognizing them when they happen and not having intercourse. Or it could be that their partner has natural immunity. There are people who have herpes cold sores that we feel –

have some natural immunity from getting herpes in their genitals because they already have antibodies to herpes that are protective. So it's always very interesting. So if you're going to be in a monogamous relationship with this person for the rest of your life, call us back. We can talk about things that you can do as a couple to prevent transmission. Anyway, so let's check out what's going on in the fluid family. Myrtle manis.

gifted 20 Weird Medicine with Dr. Steve memberships. A lot of people got their memberships, so don't forget to go to our channel at youtube.com slash at weirdmedicine and click join and then click accept gifted memberships and people will give out memberships from time to time.

Let's see here. Oh, Nick Illig, thanks for the $5 super chat. Said, you mentioned low glycemic diets help reverse type 2 diabetes but not low carb. Any known reason for that? No, I didn't mean that. Low carb diet, absolutely. It's better. I think I've cured people of their type 2 diabetes by getting them to adhere to a low carb diet. I think what I was saying was

It's hard for a lot of people to adhere to. And the low glycemic index diet can be beneficial for people with type 2 diabetes. But I'm not 100% sure what the record is on curing people of their diabetes by using that. Now, this is not type 1 diabetes. These are for people who have insulin resistance diabetes.

So and when I'm talking about low carbohydrate diet, I'm not talking about that might diet where you just ate meat and bacon and mayonnaise and cheese all the time. What I'm talking about is the because that's the telephone game. Right. Someone read the book by Dr. Adkins and told somebody who told somebody who told somebody the next thing, you know, people are just eating steak and mayonnaise and cheese and bacon every day.

So the kind of – I think the healthier low-carb diet is still a carnivore-type diet, but it's lean animal protein. I mean animal fat is not the enemy, but still lean animal protein diet.

So you're controlling which fats you're taking in and then having good fats, monounsaturated fats like olive oil, those kinds of things. And then green leafy vegetables that are low carbohydrate vegetables.

unlike potatoes and corn and yams and stuff like that. Now, a low-glycemic index diet just is not metabolized to sugar as quickly, so you don't get those spikes in your insulin. And that is a diet that is all of the above I just mentioned, but also includes brown bread instead of white bread, brown pasta instead of white pasta, brown rice instead of white rice,

rice and sweet potatoes instead of potatoes. And listen, if you learn how to properly make

sweet potato fries so that they're crispy on the outside and normal on the inside. They're really good. They're tasty. I just don't like soggy sweet potato fries. So there is a way to do it. We can talk about that someday. But that's what that was about, Nick. And please say hello to your brother, Captain Mike, if you want to be in the Charleston area and go fishing with the best

captain out there. Look for Captain Mike Illig. This is Nick's brother. And he's in the

from Awendaw to, I guess, Pawleys Island sort of area, that area, and just go to avidangling.com, or you can find him on Facebook, Avid Angling. Really good guy. He's known my kids since they were little. I mean, Liam is a senior in college now. I think the first time we went out fishing with Camp Mike, Liam was four and Beck was three.

So, you know, he's just he's a naturalist. He knows where all the fish are. And even though we've been out with him twice where we didn't catch anything. And the second time we still caught stuff because we went in to the marina where there's a bunch of reds that not communists, but redfish and that hang out there. And so we caught a few of those so we could take some pictures and just throw them back. But anyway, Cat Mike's awesome.

Let's see if we got anything else here I need to announce. A lot of questions in the fluid family, but I can't read them because they're too far away. So, but check us out. Let me see. I see Amy is there. Talk like a hick to you.

says, I hate hearing my voice. Also, they drag me over there. My accent, hence my name. Well, ain't got one like me, I'll tell you that. When I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, that's how I sounded. And I had to go to broadcast school at the University of North Carolina for them to erase most of my accent, not all. Most people, if I go to Vermont, they know I'm from the South.

But I don't have that Appalachian accent, the deep Appalachian accent anymore. And they did that without my consent, by the way. I wonder if I could sue them for, you know, culturally, you know, not a cultural appropriation. But what would it be when they destroyed part of my image, my self-image by –

taking away my Southern accent without my consent. How did they do that? We talked briefly about that. I don't know if I've ever told this story on the show, but it was speech one-on-one. I was radio, television, motion pictures major. And in speech one-on-one, uh, with, with my absolute favorite professor name was Earl. His name was, uh, Earl Wynn. He was a real character, a brilliant, brilliant, uh, actor. And I just loved him. And, uh,

He and a guy named Paul Nickel. Paul Nickel used to do Playhouse 90. That's how old I am. And he did Playhouse 90. He did live black and white television back when there wasn't any other kind of drama on TV. And those two guys were just such great mentors. Well, anyway, Dr. Wynn would have us read the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has lots of different symbols for every sound that the human body

voice can make, including there is a character which is an apostrophe for the glottal stop. So like if you're going to do some sort of northern UK accent, you say bottle instead of bottle. There's a way that you can write that out. So you could write out any accent that the...

human voice can make. And you learn all these symbols and you have to learn them so that you read them just like you read English or whatever language that you're proficient in without thinking about it. And that was first semester was just learning the alphabet and learning what the sounds were and transcribing them when he would say the sounds, you'd have to write them down, all this stuff. So that was semester number one. And then semester number two, you read script after script after script. We thought that we were reading

Like camera tests. They'd have the camera out there and you would read these scripts. And we thought we were pretending or, you know, practicing to read the news. But what we were doing was we were reading scripts in neutral English and international phonetic alphabet. And by the end of the semester, your accent was gone for the most part. So Dan Rather did this class.

At some point, from what I understand, Charles Kuralt was from University of North Carolina. I know he went through that class because you would never have known. He had a real soft sort of accent, you know, listen to the birds as they go. You know, it wasn't a heavy accent at all. But I didn't realize until later what was going on. And that's what it was because I always said, yeah, I went to broadcast school.

So I don't have my accent. I didn't really think about how it really happened until years later. And I remember thinking to myself, they didn't tell me that that's what they were doing when they did that. It just happened. And I'm not irritated in retrospect. I'm glad that I have the voice and the accent that I have now. But because I think more people will take me seriously this way than if I'm talking like I normally talk.

But always let your adversaries underestimate you, too. So if you have an IQ of 165 and you're talking like this, people are going to think you're a dumbass and you can actually get over on them because they're not expecting you to be smart. But anyway, like Stacey DeLoach, he sounds like an idiot, and he's not. He's actually a pretty smart guy. He does stupid things, but his intellect is there. He's a very smart person, so.

Anyway, all right. Yep. And Stacey says, I did not see any medical questions. Thank you, Stacey. So, all right. I'm going to get out of here. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Tacey. And thanks to everyone who has made this show happen over the years.

Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m., Sunday at 6 p.m., Eastern, 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 drsteve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses, get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thanks, everybody.

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