615 - Dead Limbs
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This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. There's nothing sweeter than bacon cookies during the holidays. With Prime, I get all my ingredients delivered right to my door, fast and free. No last minute store trips needed. And of course, I blast my favorite holiday playlist on Amazon Music. It's the ultimate soundtrack for creating unforgettable memories. From streaming to shopping, it's on Prime. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to get more out of whatever you're into.

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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. Why do you give me the respect that I'm entitled to? I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got to bowl if I'm dripping from my nose.

The Leprosy of the Heartbound. Exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and blast it with the wave. An ultrasonic, echographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill for all my ailments. The health equivalent to Citizen Kane. Now in the tablet. I think I'm doomed and I'll have to go and say Requiem for my disease. So I'm paging. For me, you'll take it.

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, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medicine provider. Gives me street cred with the wacko.

alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dr. Steve. And Lady Diagnosis. Hello, Lady Diagnosis. Hello, Dr. Steve. And my partner in all things, Tacey. Hello, Tacey. Hello. This is a show for people who never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 347-766-4323. That's 347- POOHEAD. Follow us on TwidMedical.com.

of twid medicine. Follow us on Twitter at weird medicine and at D or Scott WM and at lady diagnosis. 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 here with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your health care provider.

All right. Check out stuff.drsteve.com, stuff.drsteve.com. And it is gift-giving season, so go there and buy things for people, as you will. But also check out the roadie.

robotic tuner at roadierody.drsteve.com or you can just go to stuff.drsteve and scroll down. And they also sell the Rody Coach, which is a device that will teach someone how to play the guitar or other instruments like that. I haven't checked. Scott, did you ever notice do they have bass lessons on that thing? I haven't looked yet. I need to look at that. I might want to play with that. Then I can report back.

Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. That's simplyherbals.net. And patreon.com slash weirdmedicine.

That's patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. This show goes up there immediately after we record it in its entirety with all the, you know, warts and everything included, a little HPV included there. And also any of our YouTube shorts, any of my appearances on Normal World, that kind of stuff all end up on that page.

So patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. And I'm also really highly considering just dropping it down to one tier and making it unbelievably affordable, like a book 99 or something like that. Because we've got a $5 tier, a $10 tier, a $20 tier. I'm not interested in really making money off of that. I just want a place where I can put stuff that's not just out there. But I want to make it affordable. So we might be doing that after the first of the year. So stay tuned. Thank you.

If you want me to say fluid to your mama for the holidays, cameo.com slash weird medicine. All right? All right. Okay. Liam was supposed to be here with us today. We were going to talk about our new channel where we're doing a gaming channel. And, of course, he's still asleep. Well, it is afternoon. That is correct. It's not quite time to wake up yet.

Well, I remember being 21 and I could sleep till 2 in the afternoon. I never. You were up at 6 a.m. No, no, no, no. Doing some kind of chemistry experiment. That's incorrect. Or rewiring some radio. Or making a little rocket ship. I fight my nature every single day when I roll out of bed. My normal status was to sleep and

you know, as late as I possibly could. But you're a night owl, right? Yeah, that too. Yeah, that is true. I do better in the evening than I do in the morning. But yeah,

Yeah, I mean, I remember one time, this is so dumb, I fell asleep. I guess I was drinking or, you know, what a surprise. And I slept with my hands behind my head and my arms went to sleep. And then these people came in my house. Now, it turns out they were friends of my dad's. But did you ever see the...

the kids in the hall thing about that song about the guy who slept on his arms. He slept on his arms last night and he's walking around. He's just got jiggly, jelly arms. Well, anyway, that was me. I could not move my arms. I couldn't sit up. I couldn't do shit. It was like if they had just come in there, if it had been Zodiac, they could have just done me in. What if you do that for a really long time? Can your arms like die and fall off? It's weird that they still get some

Some

circulation when you do that. What's going on is the nerves are not getting the circulation that they need. And so the interesting thing, and Scott's probably seen this too, is when you do arm surgery in the orthopedists or the hand surgeons, they'll put a tourniquet on the arm and they'll cut off the circulation for hours. Total knees, they'll do that too? Yeah, to have a bloodless field so that there's no blood when they do stuff.

And people do just fine. It's crazy. It's sore as shit when they pull that tourniquet off and the anesthesia wears off. That's what I tend to see the most pain with are the tourniquets on the quads, on the upper leg for total knees and on the upper arm when they do an elbow or a

Usually it's an elbow surgery. Have you ever had your foot fall asleep in like the movie theater and then it comes back to life and all of a sudden it's just pins and needles. And if you just touch it, it shoots up into your brain. Oh, yeah.

That's called hyperalgesia. Wait a second. Wait a minute. Hyperalgesia. Hyperalgesia. Okay, there's aledinia and hyperalgesia. Okay, let me see. Hyperalgesia we'll get a lot of times that people take a lot of narcotics. It changes their pain threshold. Right, right, right. But it's a hallmark of...

Neuropathic Nerve damage and neuropathic pain And one of them

is exaggerated pain response. And then the other one is a pain response to an otherwise non-noxious stimulus. And so that would be allodynia. So I misspoke. So allodynia is because when your foot falls asleep, you just touch it. Normally that wouldn't cause pain. But in that situation, it does. And it shoots these pain sensations up into your brain until the brain kind of tamps them down. Yeah.

And, yeah, that's called allodynia. And then hyperalgesia is when you have an exaggerated response to pain. So now there is a thing called, you know, opioid-induced hyperalgesia. That's what you're thinking about. And so some people, let's say they're taking Percocet for a bum knee. And then they bump up the dose and all of a sudden they start hurting all over. Right.

And you increase the dose and it gets worse. That's actually where the opioid is inducing pain. And it's crazy because even just the slightest touch on some of those people, I mean, they'll like scream like, oh, God, why are you hitting me or touching me so hard? And it's just a bizarre thing. That's always good for your staff to hear outside the door. Dr. Scott, why are you touching me? Why are you hitting me?

Like that. And then the crappy part of the discussion is trying to explain to them why they're going to have to come off of the opiates. Because. Yeah. But that's what they give me for pain. Right. Yeah. It's what's making you worse. It's a tough discussion. Yeah. It is not easy. But anyway. Well, there you go. That's when we get the big bucks.

I've already forgot what we were talking about. You fell asleep with your arms. All I could imagine was Dr. Steve pulling a big Lebowski when those guys came in saying, hey, this is a private residence, man. But yeah, my dad gave them the key because they were going to do some work on my house or something. And here I am at one in the afternoon saying,

Laying in bed, can't get up because my arms are, I finally wankled my way up. Back then I was lighter. I had a little bit more core strength and so I could just sit straight up even without my arms and finally just let them lay there until the function came back.

It's the worst. Anyway. But, yeah, it's a good question, lady diagnosis. And it is amazing how long they can just deprive the limb of blood supply. And when they're done, they just take the tourniquet off and, you know, see if there are any little bleeders that they missed, get rid of those, and then the patient goes back to normal again. It's crazy. All right. Very good.

So, yeah. So Liam was supposed to be here and I don't know where the hell he is. I mean, he's a goober. He's a goober. So I did want to talk today. We are recording this on November 23rd of 2024. And Trump has nominated RFK as his, you know, health and human services czar. And

He knew this was coming because RFK was nominally a Democrat. He became extremely critical of the Democrat Party and then just flipped and supported Trump. Now, I'm sure his wife, who is Cheryl Hines, right, from Curb Your Enthusiasm, she must be shitting herself because if I remember correctly, she is a, you know, Trump deranged woman.

left-wing type person, I think. I'm not sure. But she must be graphing herself. And, you know, we have all this... We have people on TV...

And psychologists and commentators on a certain network saying, oh, yeah, it's fine if your family voted for Trump. It's OK to just shun them at Thanksgiving. Really? Oh, yeah. No, this is what they're recommending. It's totally fine. You know, you don't have to give them your space and stuff. And it's like, well, wait a minute. It's your family. Yeah.

And now you're breaking up Thanksgiving? I mean, at a time when people are depressed anyway at the fucking holidays? Just don't talk fucking politics. Can't hide class. Can't hide class. Jesus. But anyway.

So there's an article, and I'm bringing this back to health care because it's really a political show and it's not about politics. But it says what – this is from the New York Times. What Kennedy gets right and wrong about nutrition, we fact-checked five of his most repeated claims. Well, I mean, there are people out there that are constantly fact-checking the New York Times articles.

Because their bias is constantly showing. But let's just see what we get out of this. So it says, in interviews on social media, Mr. Kennedy has made a number of claims about the country's food supply and eating habits. We fact-checked five of his most repeated refrains. Okay, number one, ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods are driving the obesity epidemic, and they should be removed from school lunches.

Now, the research suggests that many public health and nutrition experts agree that ultra-processed foods, which make up an estimated 73% of the U.S. food supply, are probably contributing to the obesity crisis in the United States. It would be beneficial to cut back on them.

Oh, and now here, but the category is wide ranging. It's not clear if all ultra processed foods are harmful. Just the term ultra processed. Right. What's that differentiation from processed? Right.

There may be downsides to avoiding some ultra-processed foods like flavored yogurts and whole wheat breads and cereals. Are those really ultra-processed? Is bread considered ultra-processed? I think they're talking about chicken nuggets that aren't identifiable and things like that. Right. And ding-dongs and ho-hos and shit like that.

The problem with obesity in this country isn't necessarily the processing of the food, in my opinion. It's the USDA making this food pyramid bullshit in the 60s to sell more U.S. grain. That's why they did that. So they had this pyramid where at the top was sugar and then there was protein. Now at the bottom, the biggest part was grains. Mm-hmm.

And if you take video from people before the food pyramid came out, like at a football game or something, and compare it to video of people now, not that – you can't say necessarily that it was the only thing. Obviously, correlation doesn't necessarily mean –

causation. But it's amazing how obese we've become since the food pyramid started. And we know that all those carbohydrates were not in our environment when we were evolving as a species. And so it was a political thing. And, you know, there were all these nutritionists and politician types who were saying that a low carb diet is unhealthy.

When, in fact, we know that we can cure diabetes with the low-carb diet, type 2 diabetes, and you can actually improve people's health.

cardiovascular risk if it's done properly. So if it's more in that sort of paleo type thing where it's lean animal protein, which is what our ancestors had, and green leafy vegetables, and then some grains and some carbs. But when did our ancestors have grains? When did they have

When the grains were done, you know, forming, which was in the late summer. And then the rest of the time they didn't have it. And if they were hunter-gatherers, they weren't storing it, you know. So they had – and then they would have berries and stuff sometimes or if there was a fruit on a tree or something, they could eat that. But that was always just very short-lived period of time.

And their bodies were so attuned to storing the carbs that they had that now we are so efficient at it that when we have carbs unlimited in our environment, we consume them, we crave them because evolutionarily speaking, you know, that provided us with energy when we had it. We store it so efficiently that we just become a bunch of fat-sows, you know. So now a lot of these, quote, unquote, ultra-processed foods have a lot of carbohydrates in them too. Yeah.

Now, this is somebody from my alma mater, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said it would be transformative to remove ultra-processed foods from school lunches, but they would need more resources to prepare meals from scratch. No shit.

This business of buying food from these services and just slopping it out there, I mean hospitals are doing it and schools are doing it. When I was in Vermont, they had a school that actually had a chef and he went out every day and went to the market and bought stuff and made things. And it was really cool. Like if they were studying –

Eastern Europe, in one of the classes, he would make, like, Polish food or something. You know? Like, Polish kielbasa and kolachkis and stuff like that. And say, you know, you could do all kinds of interesting things like that if they're not pre-programmed by some food service just bringing them shit, you know, the same thing every Monday and the same thing every, you know, every day of the week. It is more work, and it probably is more expensive. Well, it is more expensive. But what's it worth, you know,

to us to feed our children properly. School food is, you just can't eat it. It's disgusting. Yeah. Well, it is here. Now, it may not be everywhere, but yeah, it's, I know that the boy, we always, for the first time,

I don't know, six, seven years of them going to school, we packed their lunch every day. And then they started wanting to, you know, they were in high school, eat with their friends and eat what their friends ate. They loved spinach until they went to school. And then, oh, all their friends said spinach is yucky. And so now all of a sudden they think spinach is yucky. Peer pressure. Well, yes.

Tase and I went to the same high school, and I know that for our lunches it was pizza and fries about every day. Well, see, fries is a vegetable. And the ketchup was a vegetable too, thankfully. We had plenty of ketchup. You had two vegetables. Yeah, it was good stuff.

All right. Now, here's another one. Food dyes. His claim, food dyes cause cancer, ADHD in children. Now, there are some clinical trials that suggest that synthetic food dyes may increase hyperactivity in children. There's no real evidence that they directly cause ADHD. But if they increase it, you know, why would we expose them to that? Now, if you go, my understanding is if you go to Europe and you have Froot Loops,

In this country, they use red dye number 40 or something like that. They banned red dye number three in this country. So we know that some of those dyes were, you know, at least determined to be bad enough that even in the United States, we got rid of them. But my understanding is like they use blueberry juice to dye the blue fruit loops and things

different juices and extracts to color the different colors, you know, the rainbow colors of Froot Loops, whereas in this country, you know, we're using these artificial dyes. So why is it

Is Europe, are they more advanced than us? Are they stupid? I don't think so. You know, some of the greatest science that's going on in the world comes out of Europe as well. So I think it's something worth looking at. And if we have these natural changes,

And you know I'm not one of those guys. But if we have it, why wouldn't we use it? Because it's more expensive. It's a lot easier to just make a dye in the organic chemistry lab than it is to extract it and use it in things. The FDA is currently reviewing the safety of red dye number three. They banned it in 1990 in cosmetics after research in animals linked it to cancer.

And they also said they would work to extend the ban to food and drugs, but they've not yet done so. Okay, so red dye number three is still on the market. All right, another one, raw milk. Mr. Kennedy has said he only drinks raw milk and suggested that restrictions on small farmers from selling raw milk should be reexamined. He's not saying that we should convert our whole supply to raw milk.

But I would not drink raw milk because of things like listeria and E. coli and things like that in there because you can't tell if it's in there when you drink it. So I'm okay with pasteurized milk. I don't have a problem with that. Raw milk is risky in people with weakened immune systems. So he just says, let's just reexamine it. And this is what I do. So he's a free country. Let him do what the hell he wants to do. Sugar.

He's suggested consuming too many added sugars, especially from high fructose corn syrup, contributes to childhood obesity and cardiovascular disease. I wish I had...

Carl saying no shit, Sherlock, on here. Because it's like no shit. Yes, that's exactly a problem. Now, it's not high fructose corn syrup itself isn't a problem. Because, okay, so sucrose, which is table sugar, is fructose and glucose molecule bound together with a covalent bond. It is a disaccharide.

So if you have table sugar, it's 50% fructose, 50% glucose together. And if you broke it up, that's what you would get. High fructose corn syrup is anything north of 50%. So sometimes it's 51%, 52% fructose compared to table sugar.

So it's not the high fructose corn syrup that's the problem. It's sugar. Sugar is the problem. Highly processed, you know, white sugar particularly is easily absorbable by the human body. It spikes insulin levels, which then does a whole lot of things, including increasing atherosclerosis and increasing the storage of energy as fat and fat.

Turning down insulin sensitivity so that people end up with diabetes type 2. Not everybody, but some. And so the research. And then the New York Times is fair on this one. They just say this is correct. Okay, good for them. Let's give them a bell. Give myself a bell. All right. Seed oils. Seed oils.

His claims, Americans are being unknowingly poisoned by seed oils like canola, soybean, and sunflower oils. Be healthier for restaurants to fry food in beef tallow instead. Okay, does he have stock in the beef industry? Because this would definitely boost them. Olive oil is also not a seed oil. Right. Coconut oil, not a seed oil. And coconut oil, not a seed oil either. Thank you, Dr. Scott. I'll give you a bell for that. Give thyself a bell. Look at you.

Now, those oils have been pushed because they have, quote-unquote, heart-healthy unsaturated fats. But there is this movement about seed oils. And, oops, where I have seen – there's whole subreddits about it. Yeah, a lot of people don't like the seed oils at all, canola oils. So what's the evidence is the question, though. Is there evidence –

So seed oil toxicity. Let's look at that. I'm on PubMed.gov. I ain't going to no government website. Hereby is too. Yeah. This is just a repository of medical literatures. So, yeah, let me see here. Avocado seed is a sort of, let me see, safety assessment of oil extracted from lacquer. Yeah.

Well, I can't really. Okay. Here's some acute toxicity effect of croton pendiflora seed oil. Okay. Let's find, can somebody, one of you guys, while I'm sitting here struggling. Swimming upstream. Look at canola oil toxicity. Let's just look at canola oil toxicity. Okay.

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It says 13-week toxicity study was subsequently conducted. No adverse effects were noted in clinical observations. These studies support the food and feed safety of canola oil. So I'm not sure where this is coming from. I know that there are – I mean, Vinny Tortorich talked to us about seed oils. Maybe we should have him back on just to talk about this one thing because I know he is not a fan of seed oils. He doesn't like seeds anyway. He's got the no-seeds thing.

No sugar, no seeds or whatever the shit he's got. He doesn't know what he's missing. Now, here we go. Rape seed, which is canola oil. It's also called rape seed, by the way. Aggravates metabolic syndrome-like conditions in male but not female stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats. So it's a rat model. Here we go. Canola oil influence on azoxy methane-induced colon carcinogenesis.

Dietary soybean oil, canola oil, and partially hydrogenated soybean oil affect testicular tissue and steroid hormone levels differently in the miniature pig. Now, I know that that was one of the things that I believe Vinny was talking about.

So we'll look into this. I want to actually do a deep dive on seed oils and see because, listen, this guy has had a bunch of lawsuits that he has pursued, and he's won a shitload of them when looking at things like this. So to a lot of people, he sounds like a lunatic, but that's just because we've become –

inured in this idea that, you know, certain things are true and he's just an iconoclast. So I think that's okay.

And as health and human services director, he can't just go, OK, vaccines are illegal. He's not anti-vax. He was from what I hear him saying is that he was concerned about the mRNA vaccine because there were harms being done. I mean, we're very aware of vaccines.

myocarditis in young men from the vaccine. He just was saying it hasn't been FDA approved. Let's not mandate it. And I'm not 100 percent sure he went beyond that, but we'll do a deep dive on that, too. I just saw this article today so I could be better prepared to talk about it. But I'm

I'm okay having an iconoclast in HHS. We need to do something. The health in this country is not where it needs to be, and our diet is not where it needs to be.

But I also don't want to do like Bloomberg was trying to do and saying, well, you could only buy a certain size soda and all that stuff. We need to change how we educate people on eating, let them make their own choices, but have stuff more available that, you know, if we tell people you shouldn't be eating red dye number three.

for whatever reason, then we need to have fucking alternatives to it. But then they put it in medicines. Yes. Is it not toxic in a medicine, but we can't eat it? That makes no sense. Listen, they've done stupider shit than that before with our medicine, but why do we have to be entertained with our medicine? I don't need it to taste like grapes, and I don't need it to be a pleasing color. Just make it the color it is. We've gotten used to everything having to...

Americans smell and...

orders a magnitude more than everybody else in the world on just things to make their houses smell better. It's like, just clean it better. Yeah. Put your dirty underwear in the laundry. Yes. It's like, you know, the fish study where people who ate a lot of fish had fewer heart attacks. So we just took a bunch of fish and put it in a vat and render them down to essential oil and then take the pill instead of just eating the fish. Mm-hmm.

So our houses smell bad because we have too many cats or whatever. And like Dr. Scott said, they're not cleaning their underwear properly. And so we buy all these air fresheners. I'm tired of – you know, when I call someplace, particularly the pharmacies – and, Tacey, you've experienced this too –

Like, for example, CVS, at least around here, has the most depressing piano music. It's all in a minor key. And then it just gets ready to crescendo and resolve to the tonic. And then the voice comes in and says, you know, the pharmacist is helping other customers. Your call is very important to us. And then it starts over at the beginning again. And it's like, oh, my God, I want to...

Jump off a cliff. And I don't have to be entertained every minute of every day. You can just have two beeps that go every 10 seconds just so I know that you didn't hang up on me. It's totally fine. Now, our ear, nose, and throat doctor has an old school, like a music box. It must have gotten it back in the, and it has this really electronic tinny music, and it's awful. Oh, no. Do, do, do, do, do, do.

And I just, every time they pick up, I say, you've got to do something about that. But that would cost money. I just want to slam the phone down. It's so bad. But, you know, but the truth is that every single thing that the kids put in their mouths and adults, not everything should taste like sugar. You know, you're right. It's like I said, your cereal should not taste like your protein bar. That shouldn't taste like your glass of tea. Right. That shouldn't taste like your coffee. Not everything has to have sugar in it.

It's like, God, just start there. That was one of Vinny's things is that, you know, these protein bars, they're just candy bars. If you look at what's actually in them and how many calories and how many carbohydrates and stuff. And compare that to a Snickers, yeah. It's about the same. Let's really have a Snickers. Yeah, I know. Yeah, just putting sugar in everything. So I drive to this place in the mountains to a little hospital up in the mountains in Virginia, and I stop at this place.

Zoom or Market or whatever, Roadrunner, whatever it is. And I wanted to get tea because I like iced tea, but I only like unsweetened tea, which if you go up north, by the way... Which up north, we just call that tea. They just call it tea. That's right. I discovered that when I went up there and I was in Michigan and I ordered unsweet tea and they said, well, honey, that's all we've got. So apparently if you want sweet tea, you have to put sugar in it.

But here in the south, they take sugar and water and they concentrate it and they boil it down to a thing called simple syrup and they just dump it in there. And so at this place, they don't have any unsweet tea. What they have is sweet tea and extra sweet tea. Oh, God. And that is one of the things. If I put that in my mouth, it's not being swallowed. I have to spit it out.

I'm with you there. It's so cloyingly sweet. You don't drink sweet tea. You almost have to chew it. It's so thick. Yeah, yeah. It's disgusting. It's awful. But, yeah, so Scott's right. Everything's got sugar in it. And even— Even the unsweetened things—

Like, what do you mean? Like, they'll say unsweetened milk, and you'll look at the flavored almond milks. Oh, yeah. Still got sugar in it. Yes. I'm like, well, why even put unsweet on there? Right, because I didn't add as much sugar. As much, I guess, yes. And you can put zero calories on something as long as each unit is less than, I think, three calories, something like that. Does anybody know the answer on that one? I don't. So, like, Tic Tacs can...

You could eat 100 of them, you'd be getting 300 calories, but you'd think you're getting zero calories. So there's all kinds of tricky little things. Now, those sorts of loopholes we can also exploit. For example, if you extract hemp to make CBD oil, the states, particularly – let's just use Tennessee as an example –

They want to be able to allow people to sell CBD that's extracted from the hemp plant, but they know that you can't extract it without getting a little bit of THC in there. So they will allow 0.3% THC in those products as long as it's extracted from hemp. So the law is as long as each dose or whatever that you have has 0.3% THC in it, it's legal. Right.

Well, it doesn't say it has to have CBD in it. That's the thing, right? So what some enterprising geniuses did is they ran this oil through like a liquid chromatography system or something and separated out the CBD from the THC.

And now if you put 10 milligrams of pure THC in a gummy bear that is 3 grams, which is a normal-sized gummy bear, that's 0.3%. And now it's legal. Thank you.

So it's a loophole. Better living through chemistry. Never underestimate the ingenuity of people wanting to get high. It's the truth, isn't it? Keep a geek in your back pocket. Love it. Yeah. So anyway, I think that's brilliant.

I love that. Anyway, so sometimes that loophole can work in the direct benefit. Funny. There are some differences in dyes used in cereal in the U.S. and Europe. I'm looking at this. Red 40. This dye is used in some U.S. cereals, but it's banned in several European countries. It's alleged to be linked to hyperactivity and cancer. BHT. This is a chemical preservative.

but it's banned in several European countries and Canada. And animal research suggests it may increase the risk of cancer. However, some of these preservatives are actually antioxidants. That's how they work. And some people think that they may actually benefit people. So the research on that one is still out there. But I think it's interesting. I mean, we have to look at all sides of these things.

Titanium dioxide. It's added to U.S. foods. It's hidden in nutritional labels under the terms like artificial color or added color. It's banned in Europe, can accumulate in the body, potentially damaging DNA. Now, it's like a white dye.

Back in England, they would take brown bread and put lead in it, lead salts in it, to turn it white. And then they could sell it because back then the people who had less money or people living in poverty –

Still wanted to eat bread, and they wanted to eat it like the nobles, but the nobles all had this highly processed white bread, which was actually bad for them. And then the people in the underclasses just had rough brown bread, which we now know probably was way better for them. But to make it look like the other, they would put lead salts in it, and then they would get lead poisoning, and it would actually harm them. Oh, my gosh.

So anyway, so, you know, and back then that made sense. We learn things and we change our mind about them. Low-carb diet was considered a harmful diet. And now we're really, the data is there that says that if it's done properly, it's actually probably pretty good for you. And vegan diet even better, you know. So a lot of people just can't do vegan diet and they can't stand vegans. Right.

For a large part, but the vegan diet's actually got some pretty good data behind it. Here's brominated vegetable oil. This additive is used in citrus drinks in the U.S., but it's banned in Europe. The FDA recently proposed a ban on brominated vegetable oil. Why would they put the – what's that for? Yeah.

I don't know. It always makes you wonder why they put all this stuff. But it has to be just to preserve it so it lasts longer on a shelf. Or something. Give it some consistency or some damn thing. Or color. Yeah. I don't know. Make it pretty. But things that we used to think were good do sometimes are proven to be bad. We used to think cigarettes were good for your lungs, you know. So things do change as data accumulates.

We used to – when I was a medical student, if you had someone on – who had congestive heart failure, in other words, pump failure, and you had them on a beta blocker, which decreases the contractility of the heart –

But it does a lot of other things, too. It was thought to be malpractice if you had them on. If they came into the hospital with acute congestive heart failure and they were on, say, metoprolol, it was considered to be malpractice. Now it's malpractice if you don't have them on a beta blocker. Because it actually improves oxygenation and the efficiency of the heart. And that's something. So, you know, these things change. And that's what science is about. When...

I have journalists saying, oh, he questioned the science. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what science is about. If scientists blindly followed, quote unquote, the science, we would still be in Marconi's day. We wouldn't know anything about science.

about wave functions and quantum physics and any of that stuff. All of that came about by questioning the current scientific thought. Right before Planck came up with the quantum theory of energy theory,

There were scientists, physicists back then that said, we're about done. There's only one or two things left to figure out. This weird blackbody radiation thing, that's kind of weird, but everything else we've got to figure out. Well, that turned out to be the key.

to the quantum revolution. You have to question this stuff. It's fine to question science. Just don't be stupid about it. Use evidence, though. You can't just go, well, some scientist said that, so I don't believe it. Some of the science is correct.

It is. And every scientist that's a true scientist that does a study knows that it's got to be peer-reviewed. Correct. It's got to be proven. It's got to be reproduced. It's got to be replicable. And if you can't do that, you know, you can't just have some shithead and say, well, this can't be right because such and such. Yeah. It's got to be proved over and over and over. Well, my friend Joey Gay sent me an article or a paper that a friend of his wrote that was to revolutionize science.

quantum wave theory. And he named it after himself, which is the first...

Caveat, by the way, if you, you know, if you wrote something called the Dr. Scott effect, you know, other people have to name it. You can't name it that yourself. So that was the first thing. But the second thing was, I don't understand. This may be the greatest advance in physics of all time, but you won't know until he submits it to a professor.

a physics journal, gets it peer-reviewed, let it get published, and then let people try to pick it apart. And if they can't do it, then yeah, you've revolutionized physics. That's what Einstein did. You know, his theory of special and general relativity, which, by the way, he didn't win the Nobel Prize for either one of those. Does anybody know what he won the Nobel Prize for? No, I don't. It was for the photoelectric effect. So that's what he won his Nobel Prize for.

But the – which I would love to talk about, but we've gone down too many rabbit holes. But he published those papers and then people read them and looked at the math and then they experimentally confirmed them. Einstein did this all in his head. But Eddington went into a solar eclipse experiment.

and took pictures of a star before and after the eclipse where it was grazing. They knew this star was going to be right grazing the corona, so it was close enough to the sun to show an effect. And there was a displacement of that star that perfectly matched the prediction that Einstein's theory put forth about curvature of space and time around the sun.

And Eddington sent him a telegraph,

telegram just going, yeah, bro, you're right on the money. But that's how science is done. And we're still questioning Einstein. They're experiment after experiment after experiment looking to see if they can tease out a little tiny effect that would lead to new physics that would show that Einstein's theory was incomplete. And they still haven't been able to do it. It's not reconcilable with quantum physics, which is weird.

You know, that you've got this theory of big things and this theory of teeny tiny things, and they do not meet. There's no way that you can reconcile them with the mathematics that we have right now. But it's every time they've looked at it, they even looked at the cosmic balance.

background radiation and it conformed to there were certain parameters that conformed to what Einstein's theory predicted and Einstein wasn't even thinking of that he was just trying to figure out how the moon goes around the earth and why Mercury's orbit doesn't quite conform to what we think it would using Keplerian math

And just what gravity was. He was just doing it in his head. If you're in an elevator in space and you're accelerating at 10 meters per second per second, you can't tell the difference between that and being on Earth. If there were no windows, you would never be able to tell. There's no experiment that you could do that would say, okay, I'm not on a planet. I'm actually in an elevator in the middle of space. Right.

And because of that, if you have a hole in the elevator and a beam of light comes in because you're accelerating, the beam is going to hit the other side of the elevator slightly lower because the elevator is going to have moved in the time that that beam entered the elevator.

elevator until the time it hit the back wall. So he said, well, okay, so that means light curves in the presence of a gravitational field and shit if he wasn't right. All because he was thinking about a guy floating through or flying through space in an elevator. That's something. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. All the experiments done in his head. Anyway. All right.

So, yeah, science changes. It's OK to question science just but you can't just say it's bullshit and not have a reason for saying that. Right. Right. You know, when people came to me about the mRNA vaccine for the coronavirus, I said, you know, if you come to me saying I'm concerned about the cat studies that showed autoimmune enhancement, it's not.

when they were exposed to this vaccine so that the next time they were exposed to a coronavirus, they actually died. That would be a valid argument to me to say, hey, I'm a little concerned about taking this. Maybe I'm going to hold off. And but just to say, well, you know, and just to make up things, that's a whole nother thing. So there was there were some really good arguments. And then there were some that were just, you know, made up out of whole cloth for, I think, probably for political reasons on both sides.

You know, Stephen Colbert can kiss my ass with just his blind, you know, adherence to sort of the party line on that. But anyway. All right. So enough of that. You guys have anything? I have a question. Yeah. So I was flying and this lady in front of me was trying to go through the what do you call it where they.

Test you for metal, I guess. Oh, yeah. Right. And it went off. Okay. So they pulled her to the side and they wandered her and it kept going off. This woman had on a Lululemon tight, you can see her breathing. Yeah. No. Oh. She had taken a probiotic.

And they asked her finally. I mean, they're like, we cannot figure out what's setting it up. And they asked her, they said, have you taken it? She says, well, yes. They said, that's what it is. It sets off the alarm. Have you heard that? No. Or is there anything that would make that true? I'm looking it up. That's crazy. Probiotic bacteria can be used to detect heavy metals. No. Let's see. Metal detectors in food and nutraceutical production.

Let's do TSA probiotic and see. I've never done that. Yeah, they kept her aside, and she was right in front. And they pulled me also, so I was standing there with her, and I looked at her. I said, yeah, what are you hiding in that tight outfit? And she goes, ah. She goes, right? And then they finally just said, oh, well, then go ahead and go through. When they figured out she had taken that probiotic, yeah. TSA screening and medication. I'm going to do a little bit broader search.

And see, nope, wow, and that's something. I thought that was quite interesting. And I'm getting ready to fly this week, so I thought that's just something good to know. Yeah, so they're just saying TSA screening and medication. How about ingested medication? TSA, well, it just said that you can bring on, you know, probiotics, and they're sometimes good to take before you travel for a stomach upset, which makes sense. Mm-hmm.

And I don't know if they were just frustrated in saying that so that they could legally let her go. But that's what they said, and I've always remembered. Okay. So, Scott, will you send me an email on that? I'll do a deep dive on that one as well. Okay. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. Oh, where'd Tase go? She got a call. Okay. All right. You guys got anything?

That's all I got. All right, all right. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Now, I rambled a little bit long. Dr. Scott, you got anything from the Fluid family out there? If you want to join the Fluid family, by the way, we generally record around 1 p.m. on Saturdays.

But just follow me on Twitter at Weird Medicine or go to YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine and click subscribe and the notification button. You'll get notified. And if you click join.

And you don't have to pay to join. Just click join and then click accept gifted membership. Sometimes Myrtle gives away, you know, 10 or 20 gifted memberships every Sunday. Bless her heart. She's a good one. Well, I like giving them gifted memberships, don't you know? All right. What do you got? Yeah. So let me go back up here to Drew. Drew was asking, why was Coumadin stopped being made?

I take warfarin because I had an artificial heart valve since I was in the second grade. The side effects are far worse and a lot worse with the generic. And he's also wondering, Drew's also asking if since he's been on blood thinners for 30 years, is the alcohol tolerance higher than other people that drink?

They're not on a blood thinner. Once you look that one up. But branded Coumadin isn't currently available on the market. It was Bristol-Myers Squibb that made it. And they just discontinued it. They couldn't make any money on it anymore.

And I used to always insist that people take branded Synthroid and branded Coumadin. But what happened was they came out with these other drugs like Eliquis and things like that that really ate into the Coumadin market. Because when you are on Coumadin, although it is really efficient anticoagulant, you have to monitor the levels of anticoagulation through these blood tests regularly.

And you have to do it periodically, and then you have to keep adjusting it. I had some people, I would have to adjust the damn thing every single time that I would test them. And if they ate spinach, it would go up and all this stuff. Well, with these new drugs, you don't have to do that. You don't even have to monitor them, and they work just about as well. Mm-hmm.

So anyway, so yeah, that's the answer I've got on that. It's not saying anything about alcohol, you being able to drink more alcohol if you're on a blood thinner, but certainly you could potentially be more susceptible to alcohol because the alcohol will also thin your blood. So you have to be careful if you're on a blood thinner and drinking alcohol because it can make it too thin. Yeah. Yeah. It says here, you know, you should limit your intake of warfarin.

And it increases the effect of warfarin, and it raises your risk of bleeding. And therefore, it makes it harder for your blood to clot properly, et cetera, et cetera. So Dr. Scott's correct. So you said alcohol does that as well? So you could drink instead of taking it?

No. No, no, no. A little different mechanism. Is it? Okay. Yeah, and it's not. Yeah, it's really that the alcohol is increasing the effect of the warfarin. Ultimately, it's a drug-drug interaction more than anything else. That's the way I understand it anyway. Okay. All right. What else? That's all from the fluid family right now. Okay. I thought I saw another question on there that somebody asked. And I said, we need to ask this question, Dr. Scott. It was early on. I'll go back up top.

Oh, OK. Oh, here we go. It's Chris Mack. He said, hey, Dr. Steve, I double checked that thing from last week and I saw they definitely recommend giving newborns hepatitis vaccine. So I remember if you remember, it's been a long time since I delivered a baby.

And I wasn't aware of this because I'm an idiot and I don't do peds anymore. So I hope I didn't definitively say that. I think I hope I said I don't know. But it is true. And I've confirmed this as well, Chris Magan. Thanks for bringing it up, that the CDC recommends all infants now receive the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth.

And if you remember, we were talking, oh, and we know that they give vitamin K, but I wasn't so sure about that. Now, they usually, it's usually given in a series of two to four shots with the final dose administered between six to 18 months of age. And, you know, 95% of infants develop immunity after receiving the full series. This does, this will prevent certain cancers, hepatocellular cancer from people that have chronic hepatitis B. So.

Tacey, you got anything for us today? No. You're being awfully chatty. No. Shut up, Tacey. I haven't given anybody a chance to talk. I've been running my stupid mouth. All right. That is your show. Yeah, so thank you, Chris Mack, for pointing that out and for allowing me to correct the record on that one. All right.

Hello, Fluid family. I hope everybody's doing okay today there in the studio. Doing all right. Thanks, buddy. Should we ask a question here? Is it possible for your fingernails to build up or to have a memory? And what I mean is, like my thumbnails, I don't care what I do to them. I don't care how close I cut it to the quick or cut the sides of it.

The center of my fingernails, right down the very center, is eventually going to split. And that just has to grow back out. And then three or four months later, it's going to split. And it's a painful split. And they have done this for probably 20 years. You would think that if you cut that section out. Well, you could remove the nail if it really bothers you that much. But split nails can be caused mostly by trauma.

But there are other things that can do it as well. You know, just physical stress. But those are people that mess with their nails. I can't stop messing with them. But there are some nail products that will weaken the nail and it'll cause it to split. But one that you cut...

And then it continues to split is almost always because of previous trauma. And there actually is a trick that you could try is by putting a Lee press on nail to make that nail bed conform back to being sort of, you know, a curve like that. And that may allow the nail to grow out normally again. All right. They can fix that at the nail salon. What can they do? They add fake nail to it. Yeah.

And sand it down, and then when it grows, it— It grows back normal. Yeah, it stops. I had a toe that was doing that. Oh, yeah? Okay. I had a case where somebody came in, and they were using a table saw, and they weren't protecting themselves properly. And when they ran the thing up there, they cut their thumb in half. And it went down not quite to the bone.

So when I say in half, it was just the tip. But it went down pretty far. I mean, the bone is embedded deep in there. It's deeper than you think. And so there was a bunch of meat and a nail bed that was split in two and a nail that was split in two. And then you had the meat of it was split in two, too. So it was just forked at the end. So I came up with this brilliant idea. I sewed up the, you know, after cleaning it out, sewed up the thumb.

Or, you know, this is what you would do in this hypothetical case. And then took an 18-gauge needle, which is the biggest one, and drilled two holes on either side of the split into the nail. And I took a suture and ran it from the one nail to the other and then tied it to bring the whole thing together, the nail bed and the meat, which I'd already sewed up, together. And then after it...

healed up enough so that it would stay, I'd put a Lee-Presson nail on there. Or I would, like I say in this hypothetical case. And that Lee-Presson nail would cause the nail bed to conform back to its normal shape. And people go, well, what are you putting? These are for girls and all that stuff. But that's what it's for. And it's like...

When kids have a square, a flat head, and they put those helmets on them to make their head grow back out into a circular shape, if you know what I'm talking about. So it's the same thing. You're just forcing the thing to grow back. And when you do that, those people's nails will look absolutely normal. It'll take a year. It takes a year for that to all grow out. But when they do, it's totally normal. No split, no nothing, no abnormality if you do it right.

So anyway, all right, let's see here. Okay, yeah, I do want to do this one. Hi, Dr. Steve. How are you? Good, man. How are you? I assume everyone else is doing well as well. They're delighted. I was listening to an episode where you were talking about basically Andy at night when you're sleeping, you know.

Well, we were talking about artificial lights in the room. You know, things that increase. He's right. The ambient light in the room. Like from your chargers or your alarm clock or your television. Correct. And you said that it's best to sleep in pitch black. And I just feel like Dr. Scott there is giving you a little hint.

Dr. who? Scott. Oh, Dr. Scott. Okay. Our ancestors slept under a sky full of lights. Okay, correct. I like to talk about how our ancestors...

you know, environment affects our environment. So let's take this further. Because the stars were much more visible. Right. They're also not nearly as bright as an LED. I don't think that we're meant to sleep in pitch black. And I don't think that these small lights really affect our sleep as much as people like to say they do. Yeah. I hear what you're saying.

There is some data on this, but really what people are looking at is more of a hypothetical thing, that there is this night-day circadian rhythm. And the pineal gland is definitely involved in this sort of sleep-wake cycle, light-dark cycle. And we have these internal clocks that sort of govern our bodies.

And what I'm talking about, more than just the LEDs, although that's something too, is people sleeping with their TV on or with their tablet on, and it's this bright light, and it's going through their eyeballs or their eyelids, which is going to their pineal gland. It's telling them it's daytime out. That's the problem. I think if your room is basically very dark and you've got –

you know, a red LED somewhere, that's not a big deal. The blue ones are more of a concern, but even then, just a little bit is not a big deal. It's people that are never getting full dark, you know, that difference between the light and dark.

And so, you know, there are I have some studies here that we can look at here. Twenty twenty two sleep researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine found exposure to even small amounts of ambient light during the night can harm cardiovascular function while sleeping and increase insulin resistance the next morning.

The study demonstrated even a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting while asleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and obesity. They looked at night shift workers, and they found a relationship between exposure to light at night and dysregulated glucose. We've seen this in the hospital when you have someone in the ICU who,

And there's someone always visiting with them, you know, very conscientious family members will sit in the room with the patient and they'll take shifts. And the night shift person is, you know, sitting up reading or something. And the lights are never turned off in the room completely. And those people are more prone to anxiety.

delirium than people who get eight hours of darkness in their room in the ICU. That's been demonstrated as well. So I don't disagree with them. We can't go too far with this. It doesn't have to be absolutely pitch black, but we are sleeping with too much ambient light, according to these studies. And obviously everybody's different, too. If you're having a problem, try it and see if it helps.

And I'm not a... Have you ever tried the sleep goggle things that you put over your eyes? I know there are people that sleep with those. No, I haven't. Have either of you guys ever slept with them? I started wearing the... What do you call them? Just the wraps around your head. Yeah. Yeah, because you told me this. Yeah. So I started using those. Do you think it makes a difference? I mean, that's an N of one, but... I mean...

It seems like I'm sleeping okay, but I was sleeping okay before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I want to, when I open my eyes, be able to see what the hell's around me. I think that would freak me out if I woke up and I opened my eyes and I couldn't –

see anything. I had to pull this thing off. I guess you get used to it. Well, you feel it, so you know it's there. I hear you saying that, but I don't feel my CPAP or my BiPAP all the time. I'll wake up and say, oh my God, I must have taken my BiPAP off, and then I go up to scratch my nose, and there's a big face mask there. Very sexy face mask, by the way. It's very attractive. But anyway. Yeah, so I think, yes, of course, like everything else, we can go too far.

A lot of our ancestors slept in caves, but a lot of our ancestors did sleep with a fire going. But I think that's mostly red light as opposed to the sort of artificial light and blue light that we have now that is demonstrably different. And I think sleeping by a fire is probably good for you. But it's still light, but it's, you know, the embers particularly are more radiating in the infrared and the, you know,

red part of the visible spectrum. All right. Very interesting. All right. Let's see here. Let me do this one. Dr. Steve! Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I think this is John Field. He's baked again. Hey, I got a question about testosterone. Yeah.

Can you tell me what kind of, I know you were talking recently about what testosterone you used. Now you changed how you administer it. Yeah. Are you trying the cream or a pellet or what are you trying? And your personal opinion, not your educated opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. Yeah, my personal opinion is I don't know what it's doing for me, to be honest with you. I know that...

When I took too much, it made me a pure son of a bitch. But I've never, since I started it, had the balls to just stop taking it altogether. So, you know, I'm relatively young for my age, so I think something's helping. And I feel like the testosterone is probably helping in that regard. I do the gel. I put the gel on my chest and shoulder every morning.

And I do two pumps. When I was doing four pumps, it was just too much. And I was very argumentative and prickly. More so than normal. I get it. I'll say it before you assholes have to say it. We would never say that. Never. Never say that. I saw how you were looking at me. I knew it was coming. You're precious. Yeah, I'm whatever. Fuck off. He's a sweetie pie. All right. He will.

Well, all right. Thanks to the... Oh, wait. Do we have any super chats or anything to talk about in there? No. That's fine. We don't require that at all. It's appreciated when it comes, but we don't sit here and beg for super chats. That's not why we're here. But we appreciate everyone in the Fluid family for joining us. If you want to check them out again, go to youtube.com slash at weirdmedicine.

And usually 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, but you just, you gotta, you know, we gotta do it based on our schedule. So sometimes it's on Wednesday, sometimes it's earlier, sometimes it's later, sometimes we don't do it at all. So just click that notification button and we'll get back to you. And check out our Patreon too because the live sort of behind the scenes video that we record while we're doing it goes up there the day, the

the minute after we finish recording. So they get that first. And then if I cut anything out, the regular YouTube channel will only have, you know, clips and shorts and stuff like that. All right. All right. Well, thanks. Always go to Dr. Scott. Thank you, Lady Diagnosis. Thank you, Tacey. Did a lot today. That's okay.

That's, you know, I don't know. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night and I'm a little punchy and so I'm just kind of very talkative. I probably said a bunch of stupid shit today. We weren't listening. Good. That's probably good. And like everybody else. Like everybody else.

Thanks to everyone who's made this show happen over the years. It has and continues to be one of the most fun things that we get to do and that I get to do anyway. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern, on demand and other times at Jim McClure's Pleasure.com.

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. Thank you. Thanks.