617 - Soul Coffin'
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Open the moment. Shop now at lululemon.com. Stupid. Oh, well, that is very interesting. Please tell me more. I don't care.

My jokes don't go over, I don't care. Everybody, I don't care. Man, you are one pathetic loser. Well, that's because you're an idiot. 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 clown. Why?

You give me the respect that I'm entitled to! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola virus dripping from my nose. I've got 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. Put it now in the tablet.

I want a requiem for my disease, so I'm paging.

From the world-famous Cardiff Electric Network Studios in beautiful downtown Tukey 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, and 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 at 347-766-4323. That's 347-POOHEAD.com.

Follow us at Twitter on Weird Medicine and drscottwm. Visit our website at drsteve.com for podcasts, medical news, and stuff you can buy. I'm also on Instagram as weirdmedicine. Most importantly, we're not your medical providers. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your health care provider. All right. Check out stuff.drsteve.com. It's gift-giving season.

And if you have someone who plays a stringed instrument, you're going to want the Rody Robotic Tuner for them for whatever holiday you happen to be buying gifts for. It's roadie.drsteve.com or just go to stuff.drsteve.com and scroll down. You'll see it. And it is amazing. And if you want someone, if you're going to give somebody a guitar and they don't know how to play, get them a Rody Coach.

The roadie coach will teach them how to play their instruments. So check that out. R-O-A-D-I-E dot Dr. Steve dot com. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. And check me out on Patreon dot com slash weird medicine. Going to do a live stream tonight and some other stuff. We're going to get a little bit more active on the Patreon side. And I have decreased...

All of the tiers down to one $3 tier. Now, there are some people that are still on the other tiers, but you can't sign up for those anymore. And they're welcome to drop down. I'm not doing this necessarily to make money. I want as many people to hear it as possible. And I want to be free to say whatever the hell I want to say. And I can be a little bit more free on Patreon. So check that out. Patreon.com slash Weird Medicine. $3 a month. And you get access to...

All kinds of stuff, including the whole archive. If you guys want it, you just have to tell me if you want episodes going way back and I can put those up too. Right now, that was a special tier, was a $20 tier. I'll see what I can figure out on that. Cameo.com slash weird medicine. I'll say fluid to your mama. I did a couple of those this week and I'm

Priced them so cheap that it's basically nothing. They won't let me charge zero. I would do it for free. So cameo.com slash weirdmedicine. Every penny on that, by the way, goes toward a good cause, which is my ham radio hobby. So if you want to support ham radio in my house, go to cameo.com slash weirdmedicine, and I'll do a cameo for you. Okie doke.

Don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. He'll be back next week. And check me out on Normal World, Normal World with Dave Landau. You can go to youtube.com slash at normal world or you can subscribe at Blaze TV. Now, I did want to issue a correction and I appreciate this. You know, I always learn something new.

People say, well, you're always right. And it's like, no. I mean, I don't have to be always right. It's just I usually am. But I like being wrong because it means that I learned something and I like learning things. So last show, I said that in England they put lead and I – if you could –

threatened my life and I would have sworn that this was true, that they put lead salts in bread to make it white. And what they actually did was use alum, which is aluminum,

And it probably tasted like hell, too, because, you know, alum is really kind of sour. But what they did was they used it to age the flower rapidly rather than letting it just sit and age.

So they were doing bleaching and the, you know, I'm looking at an article in Technology and Culture called Pure White Bread Bleach Flower Contestations. What? And Regulation in Great Britain, 1900 to 1950. And they said, why was bleaching, despite early concerns about this new food technology, left unregulated for over half a century? Right.

This article focuses on the processes developed to artificially whiten flour in the first half of the 20th century. It shows how, instead of circumscribing adulteration to practices that could identify precisely, most scientists, in fact, foregrounded the limits of their expertise and called for a precautionary approach when dealing with new food technologies and the attendant risks.

Setting the British case within a more international context provides a window into the difficulties that regulatory regimes faced. So anyway, not a lot of research into food safety and toxicity, at least back in the past, for sure. And we're going to be hearing a lot about this in days to come as RFK takes over Health and Human Services.

and hopefully get some of the chemicals out of our diet. Listen, BHT and other preservatives have been linked to increased lifespan because they are antioxidants, and people like antioxidants. But there are a lot of things that are in our food that are not in food in other countries, and particularly food coloring.

And cereal in many other countries is, you know, the orange comes from carrots and blue comes from blueberries or blackberries, you know, and purple and stuff like that. And then we have red dye number four and, you know, yellow dye number whatever. And, you know, they mix these things together to make orange or green or whatever. So I think, you know, I want to see the evidence that actually harms us politically.

But if there is evidence out there and we can demonstrate that it actually is harmful, which probably isn't the best thing for you, then I would be very interested in that. Now, when you use, quote unquote, natural things, you have to be careful about processing them, too, because...

If they're not processed correctly, they can get infected with bacteria like listeria and other things like that that can cause problems. So we need to make sure that we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we switch to all natural oils and all natural food colorings, et cetera, et cetera.

But anyway, it says here concerns about potential toxicity of bleaching agents led the European community to forbid their use in 1990s. Well, China and Turkey banned them in recent years. Benzoyl peroxide, which is zit medicine. It's a highly oxidizing substance.

molecule remains legal in Canada and the United States. And, you know, many countries still allow the use of benzoyl peroxide. And the reason is not simply because it seems to meet consumer demand, but because evidence demonstrating its toxicity in the doses typically used is mostly controversial. But if it's controversial, why don't we use something that's not controversial? And what I was...

A hippie back in the day, we called white bread robot death bread just because it was bleached and seemed devoid of nutrition. But let's see here. Let me see. So consumer demand for white wheat bread deemed easily to digest and imbued with great symbolic and cultural value grew steadily in Britain from the mid-18th century.

First in cities and then throughout the country, gradually becoming a, quote, necessary luxury, unquote, alongside tea and sugar. To meet this increasing demand, bakers use various products, in particular alum, to whiten flours deemed of lesser quality.

And so they would get lesser quality flour and they would put alum in there and they would turn into, at least outwardly, a more high quality flour and people could buy it cheaper. And so people who didn't have the money to buy the really fancy stuff could buy this stuff. Now, by the end of the 19th century, new legislation and powers of inspection had progressively eradicated the use of aluminum. And, you know, it came to a halt.

in, let me see, sometime in the early 1900s. Then they used chlorine gas. And a miller called Frichot invented a process to bleach flour using ozone.

So none of these processes were ever used industrially, but can you imagine being in a factory where you're using chlorine gas to bleach flour just so that it looks more palatable to the consumer? But anyway, alum, let's see here. What is alum? Is it like aluminum chloride or something like that? Let me see. Components. Components.

Let's see. Alum is naturally occurring mineral made up of the following components, aluminum, water, sulfates, and other metal other than aluminum. Wow. Okay. It is extremely tart when you put it to your tongue. They say here it has a sweet taste. The alum sticks that I've seen before were extremely, you know, bitter, tart kind of thing. The general formula for alum is...

Don't worry about it. I didn't realize that it was naturally occurring. I've never seen an alum mine anywhere. It says here it's a type of chemical compound, usually a hydrated double sulfate salt of aluminum. Okay. Yeah. What are you going to do? So I don't want that in my bread. There you go. How about that? I'm really sticking my neck out on that one.

Okie doke. So thank you for correcting me on that. Aluminum in the diet is...

considered a risk factor for dementia, but it mostly comes from people with high aluminum levels having dialysis that end up with dementia. And so people got freaked out that aluminum in, that's where aluminum chloride is, is in deodorant or antiperspirant, that that also caused dementia. And my understanding is that the research does not bear that out.

But anyway, yeah. And anytime you hear me say something stupid, feel free to let me know because I like learning things. I learned something on that one. OK, so the House COVID-19 panel released its final report criticizing public health response to the pandemic. And this was Republican led House Committee.

Well, it just depends, doesn't it? The pandemic and contagion really required lockdown. If you've seen that movie, he got a lot of stuff right on that.

But it required a lockdown because it was rapidly deadly and had a high mortality rate. If we had an airborne Ebola virus, for example, that had the

mortality rate that Ebola has, it would also be a virus that may require a lockdown, maybe even a long-term lockdown, maybe even, you know, apocalyptic type thing. But, you know, for a virus, a coronavirus like this, not so much. Now, MERS had a, I believe, you know, a 15 to 20 percent mortality rate.

That was the Middle East respiratory virus. That was a coronavirus as well. But it died out quickly because it just it couldn't transmit far enough because it killed too many people. It was hard to transmit to. But once you got it, it was trouble.

But anyway, on this 520-page report, the House Select Subcommittee concludes the coronavirus most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. We're still arguing about this, citing factors like biological characteristics of the virus and illnesses among researchers at the Wuhan Institute in 2019. Most U.S. intelligence agencies say the virus was not genetically engineered. But, okay, so that means just...

inserting genetic material into its DNA, you can still do Mendelian genetics on these things where you pass it through different vectors and try to increase its function if that's what you're doing. And gain-of-function research doesn't always have to be for bioweapons. It can be for vaccine research, for

But anyway, most U.S. intelligence agencies think that it was not genetically engineered, but it's still unclear how it started. One U.S. intelligence analyst released last year said either a laboratory or natural origin was possible, and that community remains split on the issue.

The U.S. Department of Energy said it had low confidence in the lab leak theory. Talk about stepping out of your lane. I don't care what the Department of Energy has to say about this. But none of the agencies right now believe that it was created as a bioweapon. Most likely, if it was created, it was created in gain-of-function systems.

Research to try to in an attempt to develop vaccines or treatments against these things and simulating a pandemic and a really highly contagious virus. And then maybe it got out. We don't know. We don't know. We probably will never know.

The subcommittee said that if the evidence of the virus' natural origin existed, it would have surfaced by now, which is great, except that it took forever to find the origin of the first SARS outbreak. And the reservoir for Ebola still isn't fully elucidated. So, and that's been years. And there's a lot more urgency about that one than there was about COVID. Yeah.

So anyway, the WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Vankerhove, criticized China's lack of transparency over the pandemic. Lack of data disclosure is simply inexcusable, she said. The longer it takes to understand the origins of the pandemic, the harder it becomes to answer the question. Well, I mean...

If we funded that, there's a lot of blame to go around, isn't there? So I can understand why everyone at that level may be saying, hey, let's just slow our roll on figuring out where this thing came from.

But anyway, the report says health officials oversold the power of vaccines to prevent transmission or infection, possibly contributing to the public's lack of trust in COVID shots and in vaccines overall. I do believe that that is true, that –

If you go back and look at what they said, and we're talking about people in the legacy media and on cable TV, oh, if you get the vaccine, you won't get the thing, you won't die. If you get it, you can't transmit it. All of that had some truth in it, but it was not true.

If you got the vaccine, just like the influenza vaccine. I don't know why they would say things like this. Influenza vaccine helps prevent hospitalization and death. But I got influenza, had a fever of 105 on having had the vaccine. And that year, I think it was only 6% effective vaccine.

And so no vaccine is 100 percent. But you see people like Rachel Maddow saying, you know, definitively, if you get the vaccine, you won't get the illness. And if you don't get the illness, you won't die and you won't be able to transmit it. I mean, they just came out and said that as a definite fact. And it was incorrect.

And it did contribute to the public's lack of trust on this stuff. So I am a little concerned when the next thing comes along that whether people will even listen even to good advice given out by government agencies or others like that. Research has shown immune protection after infection seems strong but wanes over time. Experts say COVID-19 vaccines help to fill that immunity gap. Well,

what they're talking about the immune protection is antibodies. The, there's two types of immune protection. There's humoral, uh, uh, protection and their cellular protection. So humoral protection of circulating antibodies. And when it comes to Corona viruses, they just go away. We don't know why. That's just how it happens. That's why Corona viruses can infect us over and over and over again. And we get colds all the time. And, um, the, uh,

Humeral protection is transient in this case, but cellular protection,

immunity never forgets. And those are the cells that know how to produce the antibodies. And so when you're exposed to a similar virus, again, those plasma cells will begin to produce antibodies. And, you know, the antibodies then signal to the white blood cells in the body that there's an infected cell over here. Come here and kill it.

And that's a very simplified explanation of the immune system, but it's serviceable. So, yes, immune protection, i.e. circulating antibodies, decreases, but cellular immunity remains, and it is very strong. When I got COVID the second time, it was a much milder immune.

syndrome than it was the first time I got it. And that's been most people's experience. So if you want to read this thing, the main takeaway for me is that the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership and trust is earned and accountability, transparency, honesty and integrity will regain this trust.

Now, those are not my words at this point. The future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. And if there's something else comes out, we need to...

true things to the public, and then the public hopefully needs to recognize these things as true so that they will follow the correct recommendations to get us through the next one when it comes. So I'm still in favor of destroying all viruses, but nobody's gotten any heat on that one yet.

Here's one. Dementia reports shocking signs. Shocking. Shocking. Signs at age 60 that you'll develop the disease by age 80. So they're talking about Alzheimer's. And then the subtitle on this is, Southerners have a higher chance of developing dementia. So thank you. Another way to just shit on the South again.

The onset of dementia can come as a shock, but various science could predict the condition as long as 20 years before the symptoms. So this was a study published by the RAND Corporation and identified several predictors occurring around age 60 that are likely to lead to cognitive impairment and dementia in individuals by age 80.

And so they looked at 180 potential risk factors, including, you know, where they live, any socioeconomic status, you know, class changes, lifestyle, health behaviors, things like that. And the strongest predictors are these. Number one, poor physical health.

Number two, history of stroke. Well, that makes sense. You've had an insult in your brain and then it reacts and it doesn't like it. Genetics, if you have a strong family history of dementia in your family, you may be at increased risk. There are some familial dementias, whereas regular Alzheimer's tends to be what we call sporadic, meaning it just happens.

Being born in the southern United States is a risk factor for dementia. Not having private health insurance at age 60, never working or only working for a few years, history of diabetes, having a body mass index of 35 or more. So being obese is a risk factor for dementia. And here's the one that the reason I brought this up. Never drinking alcohol is a risk factor for

for dementia. Never drinking alcohol is a risk factor for dementia, but also drinking excessively. So you got to drink a little bit, but not too much to prevent dementia. And I'm not advocating drinking. Please drink responsibly and don't drink and drive. Never exercising. Uh-oh.

Scoring low on physical tests. Even though I don't exercise, I score pretty high on physical tests. Being less conscientious. Well, when it comes to this show, I'm not that conscientious, but everything else I am. Low engagement and hobbies. I got no problem with that one. If I retired tomorrow, I would never be bored. I've got so many hobbies between ham radio, electronic music, doing this, doing my videos and all that stuff. And I used to like to snow ski and...

I would like to do that again. Low cognitive function and engagement. Well, when it comes to me, you would be the judge of that, not me. I was stupid Steve in my family. That tells you anything about my family. Parental health, family size, marital history, and demographics were the weakest predictors according to the research. So anyway, of course, it's all about me.

And so I do pretty well on those scales. The only thing I don't do that I should be doing is exercising. And I'll tell you, you buy a Peloton or a NordicTrack X15, and it becomes a really good coat rack, unfortunately. That's part of the problem. All right. Let's take some phone calls here. Come to me. Focus Features invites you to succumb to the darkness.

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Because without you, your business is just business as usual. Take control. Go to Wix.com. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. All right. Thank you, Ronnie B. Yeah. Matt Charleston. Hey, Matt. How you doing? Good, man. How are you doing?

Good. I'm doing good, too. Oh, good. Thanks. Hey, listen, peptides 1B, whatever, 1, 5, 7, like a performance-enhancing kind of drug, what does it do? And what are the downsides to taking it?

And is it dangerous or who should take it, who shouldn't take it? What's the deal? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information available online that is like kind of painted by the people that are selling, you know. Okay. All right. Thanks. Bye. Yeah. So what he's talking about is pentadecapeptide 157. And what this is is it's a –

It's 15 amino acid long oligopeptide. Oligo just meaning smaller than, bigger than microbe and smaller than macro. So oligopeptide, it's a small peptide discovered during a research on human gastric juices. And it's stable at room temperature.

And it is resistant to enzyme digestion. So if you took it orally, presumably it would pass through the stomach unimpeded.

And there has been some preclinical research. That means they haven't done it on humans yet. As indicated, BPC-157 may have cytoprotective, in other words, protecting cells, neuroprotective, protecting the nervous system, and anti-inflammatory effects. It may also accelerate tissue and organ healing.

Now, people are using it in functional medicine despite it not being approved by the FDA or anybody else, to be honest. But it is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which bans things based on whether they feel that they are performance enhancing. So let's look at some of the research here.

I have the promoting effect of pentadecapeptide BPC-157 on tendon healing involves tendon outgrowth, cell survival, and cell migration. Good Lord, the abstract is longer than the most papers are. It says the mechanism by which pentadecapeptide-157 accelerates healing is not clearly understood. It's been suggested to include an upregulation of growth factors.

and pro-anginic effects and modulation of nitric oxide, which is good. And it may control functions of collagen fragments shown to have a connection with bone growth proteins. However, none of these functions have been proved experimentally in tendon healing. So what they were looking at was tendon healing. And they said that...

You know, tendon injury is one of the most common injuries in sports activities. And so they, let's see here, experimentally it was demonstrated to enhance the healing of different wounds such as gastric ulcer, skin, cornea, muscle, colon, anastomosis. In other words, when they chop part of your colon out and put the two ends together, that's called an anastomosis.

fistulas and different bone defects. It's found to accelerate the healing of transected rat Achilles tendons and also a ligament in the knee called the medial collateral ligament. And it's in clinical trial for treating inflammatory bowel disease right now. Let me see if I can find that one. Let me see if I can find that one. Gastric pentadecapeptide 157, safe in clinical trials for inflammatory bowel disease and

has particular cytoprotective and adaptive cytoprotective activity. In other words, protecting cells. Let me see. Given it counteracts the consequences of... Come on, give me something here.

The therapeutic potential as a healing agent is seen in its capability to heal various wounds given directly into the stomach. It instantly recovers disturbed lower esophageal and pyloric sphincter pressure in rats after 12 to 20 months of untreated esophagitis. All of these could be suggested laterally.

for its role as a natural protectant in gastric juices with particular function throughout the stomach distension cell. So anyway, I think this is a really interesting peptide. I can't, I'm like you, I can't find a whole lot in the medical literature that is clearly written enough to say this stuff actually works.

Um, it seems to, they're testing it for everything. Uh, cataplexy, all kinds of stuff. I'm looking at articles here. Let me see if I can find a better article on, okay, there's tendon healing, transected rat Achilles. We talked about that one. Um, okay, let's try brain gut access and pentadecapeptide 1BPC157. So, uh,

They think, yeah, that BPC-157 protects sensory nerves and peripheral nerve regeneration even after transection. And so, in other words, they're saying, you know, these are rat models again, where they would cut a nerve and they would give them this BPC-157 and they would grow the nerves back more rapidly than if they didn't.

They also thought that it may have some effectiveness in traumatic brain injury. So let's look and see if you can buy this stuff over the counter. I'm going to be very interested in seeing if this, because like they said, people in functional medicine are using it already. But there it is, $30 for a bottle of this stuff. Before I can recommend it,

Here's, okay, now this is just somebody's, someone's opinion. This is Prisk Orthopedics and Wellness saying the dangers of using BPC-157 as prescribed peptide for musculoskeletal injuries. It says body protection compound 157 is a peptide derived from protein found in the stomach.

Translating these findings from rats into human applications is far from straightforward. That I agree with.

So they also say that the available clinical literature on BPC-157 is sparse and fraught with methodological weaknesses. In other words, they're crappy studies. Most of the studies that are often cited to support the use are preclinical, conducted on animal models. I agree. So let's do some human clinical studies. So let's go to clinicaltrials.gov.

And let's put in BPC-157. Let's see. BPC. Let's do musculoskeletal. Skeletal. There we go. Musculoskeletal injury. And then we'll put in BPC-157. 157. See if anybody is doing any research on this stuff. Nothing. But that is under other terms. Let's go under interventions. Okay.

BPC 157. There we go. Nothing. So now let's take out musculoskeletal injury and see if there's just anything on BPC 157. And let's apply these filters. Okay. Now one safety and pharmacokinetics trial is going on right now.

So not a whole lot. It says phase one pilot study in healthy volunteers to assess the safety and pharmacokinetics of BPC-157, a pentadecapeptide. So one study that I could find on humans right now, and they're just looking, is this shit safe in humans? And it's not.

And if it is, then, you know, more studies will be forthcoming. But that's my problem with this stuff is we look at rat studies and we want to jump on it because the data is great in rats, but rats are different than humans. And so I'm not as high on this one as I would be if these were human studies. All right. There you go. So there's the best answer I can give you on BPC 157.

Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Matt and Charleston. Hey, Matt. Good, man. How are you? That's good. I'm doing great. Okay, good. Hey, when I was a kid, we took CPR, first aid, did lifeguarding stuff through Boy Scouts and other organizations. And the use of a tourniquet was like strictly like last resort. Oh, yeah. Now as an adult. It's because you were fucking kids. And the updated courses are like...

all day long. Like, they love tourniquets. They wanted tourniquet, tourniquet, tourniquet. Yeah. What changed? Like, why are they so super pro tourniquet now? Nothing about them changed. You changed. You became an adult. When you're a kid, what you don't want when you've got a kid in Cub Scouts is

taking a first aid course is putting a tourniquet on somebody when they didn't need it and then they end up losing the limb because they applied the tourniquet incorrectly. So they'll teach tourniquet use, but they scare the shit out of you. You better not use it unless somebody's bleeding out.

Whereas, I mean, we still don't use it frequently. The orthopedists will use it and they'll take like a blood pressure cuff like thing and pump it up so that no blood can enter into the arm, for example, if they're doing hand surgery.

so that they have a bloodless field. They can just open it up, and it's like working on a cadaver. And then when it's all over, you take the tourniquet off, and it's amazing how long the limbs can last without any blood supply. But for people who don't know, in first aid, a tourniquet is used to apply extreme pressure to a limb to stop severe life-threatening bleeding from a wound.

Typically an arm or a leg. You wouldn't want to apply a tourniquet to someone's neck, for example. That would be stupid and you will kill them. So don't do that. It is still considered a last resort to control bleeding in emergency situations and should really only be used when you're trying to prevent blood loss that could possibly be fatal. But when you're a little kid, that's hard to know. Yeah.

So you want to put the tourniquet two to three inches above the wound between the injury and the heart, and you tighten it until the bleeding stops, which ensures that it's tight but not too tight. Never apply one of these over a joint, and always write down, write on the person's arm the time that you put the tourniquet on so that it can be removed in a timely fashion. And then make sure you go see somebody right then.

Okay, so that's the deal with the tourniquets. It's not a big mystery. They just didn't trust you guys as kids to apply a tourniquet correctly. All right. Let's try this one. Hey, Dr. Steve. Hey. This is Spencer in Alabama. Hey, Spencer.

I have this thing that just started here recently where I'm blowing my nose and it's just tons and tons of blood. Okay. Like caked up blood. I don't have nosebleeds, but I keep blowing my nose every morning, every evening, all throughout the day, and it's just tons of blood. Okay.

I take an Analegra every day. That actually may be making it worse, but we'll get to that. With allergies. And I'm just curious if you had a thought on that, and then just go see my doctor or what could possibly cause it. Always a good idea. When you have blood coming out of an orifice and you haven't identified where it's coming from yet, it's always good to seek help at least the first time.

You may have, and listening to your voice, I wouldn't be surprised if you had a deviated septum. And so if you remember Bernoulli's principle, so the septum is that thing in the middle of your nose that separates the two nostrils. And it goes back. And if you look at a chimp's nose, they don't really have a nose. They just have two openings. And that thing that bisects that opening that creates a right and a left nostril is the septum.

And that thing should be straight. It should go straight back. Now, if it's curved, remember your Bernoulli's principle. Bernoulli's principle says that air that has to go around a curve is going to have a decreased pressure because it's having to move faster to get around that curve to cover the same distance in the same amount of time. And when you have air running around an airfoil like that, you're going to get...

drying out of the mucous membrane and it will start to crack and it may bleed and it may just bleed right there. And then when you blow your nose, you see chunks of blood or brown, you know, flecks of dried blood, et cetera, et cetera. So, and the Allegra may be making it worse because if it's drying of the mucous membrane, well, what is Allegra's function is to dry the mucous membranes up. And so that may be making things worse.

Get some Simply Saline. And I like the one that – and you can get the CVS or Walgreens or Walmart brand if you want –

But the ones that actually have the propellant in it and you stick it's buffered saline and you stick it up in your nose. Or you could use Dr. Scott's nasal rinse. It's simply herbals.net. But you spray this stuff up your nose and you suck it back and get it all over in that mucous membrane in there. And then you can blow your nose and you keep doing that until it's clear. And then you want to do that several times a day.

Particularly during the winter when the air is drier, it can't handle as much air. I'm going to bet during the middle of summer this isn't as big of a problem for you, although it may still be. Just because the air tends to be more humid because warmer air can hold more water in it.

All right. So good luck with that. But do let somebody look up there. If your primary care is savvy enough to look up there and try to figure something out, great. Otherwise, you're going to want to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor. And if they confirm that you have a deviated septum, please let me know that I'm right. But they may want to fix it. So that'll be a decision only you can make with them. All right. Good luck with that. Okie doke.

Hey, Dr. Steve. It's Mike from New York calling. Hey, Mike. Hopefully you guys made out well during the hurricane. Horrible deal down there. Well, yeah, we covered that on a previous episode. And I can't say we fared very well, to be honest with you. I used to be...

privileges in 21 hospitals and now I have privileges in 20 because one of the hospitals doesn't exist anymore. So yeah, we had a pretty rough time, although Tacey and I and Dr. Scott and Mel B and the rest of the people who come on this show were actually not directly affected by the hurricane as far as our houses and property and lives and family members and stuff were concerned.

But we had a friend who was stuck on the roof of one of the hospitals. And I think he was pretty sure that there was a good chance he wasn't going to get out of that. And he did. Thank God he did.

And actually, everybody survived in that incident at the hospital. But it's still just very traumatic for this area. And we still don't have an intact interstate to get out of here, although the detours now are all in place so we can travel again. But it was rough. But thank you for asking, Mike. Thank you.

I ordered online for a free delivery from the government COVID test. They arrived with an expiration date of January 10th, 2024. It's October 2024 now. Oh, no. They have a little card here that says the expiration date has been extended. Okay. What kind of nonsense is that? Do they just make way too many tests and they want to get them out there? Yeah. Why would they have such a short time?

Expiration date, if there's nothing wrong with that date. Seems like a scam, another COVID scam. Well, see, we'll get back to that distrust thing. What it was, was when they rushed these things out, they just kind of made up an expiration date, and then they found that the things were still good. The government didn't want to throw those away. So I actually appreciate that because government waste is one of my biggest pet peeves.

pet peeves, you know, just paying $80,000 for a bag of bushings that you could buy at Home Depot for $10. Those kinds of things drive me nuts. And the fact that they didn't just throw these away and buy new ones and send them out, I think was great. And they gave them to people. So there was some benefit to that. I don't think that the original

date probably meant anything. And so they presumably tested these things, found that they're still accurate. And so they extended the expiration date and then gave them to people. So I think that's OK. I'm not too freaked out about that, but I do understand that

when you already don't trust the government response to stuff, and then they send you these things with these expired dates on it and go, oh, no, they're totally fine. I do understand that. But I think in this case, they're legit. All right. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Mike in Buffalo. Hey, Mike. I just have a question about coughing. Okay. This may sound weird.

Well, you called the right show.

And then also, like, even if I get an actual cough, like with bronchitis or, you know, if I'm sick or whatever, sometimes that's happened like three or four times in my life. The cough just I can't shake it for months. Yeah.

It hasn't happened, knock on wood, in like five or six years. And it usually happens every, like I said, I'm 45, so it happens every few years. Well, maybe every decade, once a decade or so. Since I've become an adult, really. It never happened as a kid. Well, you may have had whooping cough. So whooping cough will cause a cold-like syndrome.

And even if you treat – and this is one that does respond to antibiotics because it's a bacteria that causes it. And if you treat the bacteria and kill it, the cough can persist for up to six weeks afterward. Some people may remember when Anthony had it, and he had to be out of work for some time. And at that point, I advocated –

And, you know, I'm against some certain mandates for vaccines, but I wasn't against this one. The pertussis vaccine is very well studied. And I suggested that they mandate pertussis vaccines at Sirius XM because if you've ever been to that place, everybody is in, you know, just in these cubicles and in these little tiny studios, you know,

And I was surprised that more cases of pertussis didn't happen. Anthony was very careful not to infect other people and not to come back to work till he was ready. But it was it was rough. And so you may have had that. And every 10 years, that sounds about right. So ask your primary care if you're due for a pertussis vaccine. That's when I can advocate.

And as far as the spasms of cough, particularly when you're drinking, that may be reflux. And yes, you're right. Everyone responds to stimuli differently, and there may be a genetic predisposition for you to be more of a cough-type person. But any time that you have sensory nerves in the respiratory tract or stimulated by dust, acid, cigarette smoke, or other irritants,

or any activation of those sensory nerves in the airways from whatever, then you have a cough. And it can be initiated voluntarily too, so there's involuntary activity and voluntary activity. And if you have coughing spells when you drink alcohol,

You may try to take some Mylanta before you start drinking to suppress the acid in your stomach and see if that helps. Or even a famotidine, which is sold over the counter as Pepsod, that might help. And just see, if that helps decrease the frequency of your coughing when you drink alcohol, then it is probably reflux. So lots of things can trigger this cough reflex. There are these...

C fibers, which are nerve fibers, a specific kind of fiber. And there are these mechanically sensitive cough receptors. And then you activate one or both of these nerves, vagal nerves from the vagus nerve that can stimulate contraction of the diaphragm. And things like capsaicin,

cigarettes, smoke, aerosols. There's a molecule called bradykinin that can also increase cough, and that's what's responsible for people who cough when they take an ACE inhibitor or an ARB. Also, are you taking any medication that could stimulate cough? That would be certain blood pressure medications like Losartan,

or captopril or lisinopril. So if you're on those, you may want to talk to your provider about switching to something else. All right? Okay, here's one on, well, here's one that just says advice. I don't know what the hell this is. Hey, Dr. Steve, Jonathan here. Hey, Jonathan. I just want to say thanks for all you've done over the last 15 years. Well, thanks, man. I've been listening to your podcast for a whole time. This must be an old phone call. We started in, what, 2000, was it 2007? Good Lord, 2007.

We'll be – or was it 2005? I think the first time I was ever on Opie and Anthony was 2005. But I think our first show was October something of 2007, which means that we're working on our 18th year. It inspired me to have a career change here. Oh, cool. So I started going to college at night, going to night school, and –

And after six long years of going to college and working part-time at ENT to get my face care hours, I was finally accepted to physician assistant school. Oh, awesome. We started next year at 42 years old. That's amazing. I think we did this call a couple shows ago, and I forgot to erase it. But still, we all like goodness. It's never too late to start. Agreed. There was a lady in my class that was 44 years old in medical school.

Our friend Ahmed Zarban, who was here in studio several years ago, listened to us in Saudi Arabia and got turned on to go to medical school. So I love that. I went and did a talk. He got his medical school to invite me to do Grand Rounds up there.

And that was loads of fun. Ahmed is a good guy. And anybody, if we can influence anyone to be a not just a good, you know, a health care provider, but be a good one, one that thinks about what they're doing, using a little bit of cognition and having some skepticism, a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to modern medicine, because, of course, we're all going to be

Beta blockers in congestive heart failure were considered malpractice back in the 80s, and now it's malpractice if you don't prescribe them. So we always have to realize that there's new information out there that can radically change the way that we think about things, and we need to always have an open mind and be skeptical about

So anyway, good. Well, that's awesome, man. Let me see if he has anything else. But anyway, I just want to say thanks for all the for opening my eyes to a field I didn't think I would be qualified for. Yeah. And I've got that a question for you. What what advice would you give to somebody becoming a new provider? OK, yeah, we we did do this one earlier, but yeah, it's let's see. Let me say here there was something that I've got that a question for you. Open my eyes to a field I didn't think I would be qualified for. Oh, yeah. Speaking of that.

I was stupid Steve in my family, and I always wanted to go to medical school, but I thought I was too dumb. So it took a dumb doctor who didn't know how to put up a ham radio antenna coming to me in my ham radio store where I was wasting my life to show me that I could probably do it too, because I figured, well, hell, if he could do it, I could do it. Now, he...

He wasn't dumb, dumb. I mean, I'm just... He was... But he was not smart when it came to that stuff. And I had learned all this physics through osmosis in dealing with ham radio and radio and electronics and stuff. And Physics 102 was nothing but just resistors and capacitors and stuff in series and in parallel. And I already knew all that stuff. So once I realized that, I decided...

You know what? I can probably do this too. And I went and took my prerequisites, took the MCATs, and here we are. So, yeah, it's never too late. Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. That's a cliche, but it's absolutely true. All right, my friends. Well, join the Fluid family at youtube.com slash at weirdmedicine.

And you can get gifted memberships if you click the Join button and then just click the Accept Gifted Memberships. Myrtle Maness gives out a gifted membership every time that we get on there. And in addition, we're usually there on Saturdays. We haven't been lately. A lot has been going on. I have a real job. But we're going to try to get back into that schedule. So...

and try to make it more fun, too. It's been a little bit of a drudge going through the House COVID report and, you know, the seed oils last time. Let's get back into Dicks and Nuts. But thanks to everyone whose show happened over the years. 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.

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, and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thanks, everybody.