622 - Influenza and the End of an Era
01:01:39 Share

It's Intern John. The holidays take a lot of effort. Shop at Safeway.com to save time and make the holidays easier. Safeway simplifies your party prep when you order for delivery right to your door or pick up where an experienced Safeway associate will carefully select, bag your order, even pick up your prescriptions from the pharmacy and bring it all to your car. Spend less time shopping, more time together. Shop now at Safeway.com or download the Safeway app. Safeway, fresh foods, local flavors.

Delusions. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. You see? You see? You're stupid minds. Stupid. Stupid. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirius XM 103 and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of a clown. Why?

You give me the respect that I'm entitled to! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola vibes dripping from my nose. 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. The dough in the tablet.

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 with my little pal, well, me, I guess I'm my own little pal today.

This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the Internet. If you have a question you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider, if you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call. 347-766-4323. That's 347-POOHEAD. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at drscottwm. Visit our website at drsteve.com for podcast medical news updates.

Stuff you can buy. 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 healthcare provider. Yeah, I got influenza. I'm doing the best I can. Sorry, everybody. Good Lord. I don't wish this on my worst enemy. Check out roadie, R-O-A-D-I-E dot drsteve.com for the roadie robotic tuner.

Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. And patreon.com has been quite a bit more active lately, so patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. Playing old, old archival stuff that hopefully will be there forever. Can't hear that anywhere else because everything below 300 is considered too risque for...

regular podcast. But anyway, but it's all up there. And more coming out every day. And if you want me to say fluid to your mama, check out cameo.com slash weird medicine. More people have been doing that lately. I appreciate it. It's very inexpensive. I charge the least they'll let me, which is $5. I just like doing it. So check out cameo.com slash weird medicine.

Very good. Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net. That's simplyherbals.net. And check me out on Normal World with Dave Landau. I just did one on ass play. It's Ask Dr. Steve. And I do these three-minute videos. And this one was deemed so extreme that they couldn't run it.

So it had to be edited, and the more horrifying and arguably much, much funnier version will be played live at Hackamania, May 9th through 11th in Las Vegas. Go to hackamania.com. Use promo code WEIRD.

Get 10% off on your tickets. Sorry I wasn't around last week. I thought I had whooping cough. Turned out I had influenza A, and it sucked. God, I've had influenza before.

And it sucked, but really only for a day or two. And I'm a week in and I'm supposed to go to work tomorrow. We'll see. I think I'm going to be able to make it. But yeah, it was an MF-er. And had the flu vaccine and the whole thing. And people are like, you're vaccinated. It's like, okay, fine.

We're not shitting on every vaccine, okay? For F's sake, rabies vaccine is a great vaccine. Without that, stray dogs are monsters. I remember when I was a kid...

Before the rabies vaccine came out, they would run these commercials about stray dogs and people who weren't careful and got rabies. And they would just show strobe lights and people foaming at them. And so it was awful. And actually, one of my teachers had a friend who was a missionary in India, got bit by a rabid dog and died there.

So, yeah, rabies vaccine is good. Measles vaccine is good, demonstrably good. And I hear people say, well, oh, the you know, there's more harm done by the vaccine now than there is from measles. It's like, yeah, because because we're

fully vaccinated. So anytime you have a vaccine that's nearly as close to perfect as you can get it to where there are no cases or very few cases because a few knuckleheads decide that they're going to chance it, then of course the adverse effects from the vaccine are going to outweigh

any damage that's done by the virus itself. But let me remind you that one in a thousand kids who get measles will succumb. And I had my kindergarten friend die to measles before the measles vaccine came out. That's how old I am. So I'm looking up efficacy of influenza vaccine 2024.

40 to 60 percent. And so you go, well, why isn't any better than that? Well, it's because they have to guess. One year it was only 6 percent. That's the year I got it so bad. But the thing is, is that even if it misses, as it did for me, I was vaccinated for influenza A, but I got it anyway. It reduces hospitalizations and deaths.

So, you know, the thing is, is that they have to guess from the southern hemisphere. During our summer, there's flu floating around in the southern hemisphere. And they go, OK, well, it looks like this is what's going to hit us next year. And if they guess really well, then you have a really good flu vaccine that year. If they miss the mark, well,

because these stupid viruses will mutate, then it's not so great. And that illustrates why we need a universal influenza vaccine. But anyway, you know, there's two types of influenza virus, A and B. A is kind of the shitty one.

And it but even if the vaccine isn't 100 percent effective, which it almost never is, it still provides significant protection against flu, reducing the severity of illness and the risk of complications, which is what we really care about. But anyway, we had one of our listeners who was an anti-COVID.

Flu vaccine persons, oh, the flu is no big deal. Barry the Blade, if you remember him, he passed away during the swine flu epidemic. And we had another friend, R.D. Richard David Smith, who died.

God, I hope I got your name right. I'm sorry. And his wife, Shittai. They are the owners of Hyperphysics, H-Y-P-E-R-F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S. I hope they're still in business because it was the best energy drink ever made. It's an energy drink for nerds. But he almost passed away. He ended up on the ventilator.

And he is now quite the vaccine proponent. Thankfully, he survived. So anyway, yeah. So this sucked.

And, you know, it was just crappalicious. And I got the fancy one for old people, too, you know, the double strength version. So, God, I don't know what this would have done to me if I hadn't had it. Maybe I would have been fine. There's no way to run it back. But anyway, so, yeah, that's why I haven't been around. And I appreciate Lewis Johnson from SiriusXM covering for me.

this whole time and making sure that shows were up and everything. So anywho, yeah, so Flu Bad. But yeah, check out the Normal World episode. It just came out and I don't know what number it was, but it was about ass play and

And we've discussed this, one of the first things that we ever discussed on the show was if you have receptive anal intercourse, whether you're male or female, does that put you at risk for rectal incontinence? In other words, are you just going to be dropping logs while you're walking around?

And hence, some of the images I used that were not okay for a broadcast on Blaze TV. So Sam Farr, who is the producer who puts all this stuff together, sort of modified the images. And like I said, they were more acceptable, but definitely not as funny. But yeah, so the answer is, if you want a spoiler alert,

They used manometers, which are balloons with pressure gauges on them. You shove them up somebody's rear end and you have them squeezed down doing a Kegel maneuver. And you determine how much pressure they can exert keeping the sphincter closed. And then you have them go do receptive anal intercourse.

And you do it, you know, several times and then you come back and you shove the manometer up there and you see whether there's a difference in the amount of pressure that they can apply. And it turns out that there is. There's a statistically significant decrease in rectal tone in people who have regular receptive anal intercourse. But it's not enough to

of a decrease to induce incontinence. In other words, there's plenty of redundancy there, which is good. It's almost as if we were designed to be able to engage in ass play. And because it's when you're, the reason that we have rectal continence isn't just because, you know, turds are gross. It was because if we were walking around in the Savannah area,

It was a lot easier for Sabretooth Tiger to track us if we were just dropping turds everywhere when we were walking uncontrollably.

So the fact that we could control it and defecate in one place and then get away from there real quick, the saber-toothed tiger might be able to stalk that area if we were dumb enough to go there too many times. But it couldn't just track us around. It actually became a survival advantage. And the creatures back then who are our ancestors who had the tighter sphincters were

lived longer or more of them lived to transmit their genes to the next generation of tight asses. So there you go. So pretty interesting. But that was the one that we did for Normal World. Check it out. All right. Very good. Don't forget to check out Dr. Scott's

It's simplyherbals.net. Still time for CBD nasal spray, and I use mine every day. It really does help. It helped a lot to soothe my nose while I was having all these issues with influenza. Okay. Well, I've got a couple of interesting articles that I wanted to read.

share with you. And this one is very exciting. We've been talking about this kind of crap since day one of Weird Medicine back in 2000, whatever, 2007, 2005, whenever we started. And this is a new class of painkillers.

non-opioid pain medication, which they are saying, and this may be hyperbole, so we'll have to see that this heralds in a new era in pain management. We'll by God see. But this is the first new painkiller class approved by the FDA the first time, I mean, in the last 20 years. So this drug is called suzetrogene.

It's a novel non-opioid medication for short-term moderate to severe pain relief. The reason it's short-term is because they haven't studied it long-term yet. That's really the only reason why. It may not be safe long-term. There are some medications that we have that are not safe long-term. One of those is Ketorolac. Ketorolac is also sold under the brand name Toradol.

And it is just as potent as some of the lower-dose oxycodone preparations. And so when you've got a sprained ankle or something or you just came out of surgery, every once in a while they will use Toradol instead of an opioid so that people can stay alert as long as there are no contraindications. And it works really, really well. I've got some patients with...

kidney stones that swear it's better than getting, say, a half milligram of Dilaudid or something. The problem with it is, is if you give it more than five days, you run the risk of actually literally killing your kidneys. So we don't recommend that you take Toradol for a long period of time, more than five days. All right. So they'll approve these things short term, and then if they're proven safe...

through post-marketing or phase four studies, then they may approve it for long-term use.

So, it says, "Unlike traditional opioids, which act on brain receptors and lead to addiction, suzetrogene works through a different mechanism. It targets a specific sodium channel," this is cool stuff, "in the peripheral nervous system, preventing pain signals from reaching the brain." So, it doesn't even go through the blood-brain barrier, apparently. It just stops pain signals from being transmitted.

from the source of the pain to the brain where it's actually perceived. And it offers effective relief without the euphoric effects. Ooh, boo. That's a boo.

That lead to opioid dependence. It's not the euphoric effects that lead to opioid dependence. It's a stimulation of the mu opioid receptor and upregulation of same that results in the, you know, the condition we call addiction. But OK, so, yeah.

You know, people will seek these things out because they cause euphoria. But ketamine causes euphoria, but it does not cause addiction. You can overdose on it. Bad things can happen, but it doesn't cause an addiction syndrome. So it's not just the euphoria. But that is why people seek it out. And then the fact that you get this...

In other words, you're blocking, you're attaching to these receptors and the body's making more of them. And that's where the addiction appears to come from because you've got more and more and more of these receptors that are seeking to be stimulated. Anywho, it also causes tolerance.

And by tolerance, I mean that the patient will require more and more drug to get the same effect. So in phase three trials, the Suzetradine demonstrated its ability to reduce pain effectively in patients recovering from surgeries like abdominoplasty. They say tummy tuck in here. I refuse to use that word. Abdominoplasty and bunionectomies.

So why they say tummy tuck, which is a, you know, just sort of a...

with a vernacular, and then say bunionectomy, which is the correct term for removing a bunion in the foot. But anyway, patients treated with the suzetragine reported pain relief comparable to opioid treatment, but with fewer side effects. So fewer headaches, fewer nausea, and less constipation. So opioids have lots of effects. One of them is to reduce pain.

But also can, in high doses, can reduce the drive to breathe, which is what happens during an overdose. People become somnolent and they also stop breathing. But also it'll do things like paralyze the bowel or cause the bowel to be lazy and slow down transit and therefore cause constipation.

So it says this makes cezetrogene a viable option for those seeking strong pain relief without the risk of opioids. Well, that's very interesting. It says the approval of cezetrogene is a major step forward in the fight against opioid misuse.

This medication provides a safer option for patients who cannot take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs due to health issues like kidney disease or for those who are at risk of opioid addiction. There are lots of times when an opioid is the safest drug for somebody. You have like a little old lady. You can't give her...

A non-steroidal necessarily because they can increase heart attack and stroke or can increase bleeding. And for the same reason, you may not want to give them a steroid. And a steroid can increase somebody's blood sugar.

And so those two things could be contraindicated. So really in those people, the opioid is the safer choice even though it has a slew of adverse effects that can be a problem. So this stuff could be a real game changer for people for whom only opioids are the safe alternative. So this is actually a safer alternative than that.

By targeting the peripheral nervous system, in other words, not the central nervous system, but the nervous system out in the body, it blocks pain signals without affecting the brain's reward system, which reduces the chances of addiction. So, yeah, the brain's just never getting that pain signal. So it's pretty cool. Now.

It's $15 per 50-milligram tablet. You've got to take it twice a day. So it's $30 a day right now. So if you're going to get a month's supply of this stuff, it's going to be almost $1,000. Vertex Pharmaceuticals is conducting additional studies to evaluate the drug's effectiveness for other pain conditions, such as diabetic neuropathy.

And lumbosacral radiculopathy, that's pain from pinched nerve in the back. One variety of a lumbar radiculopathy is sciatica. It says with its promising safety profile and efficacy, suzetrogene may help reduce the reliance on opioids offering a—okay, they're just saying the same shit over and over again—

Let's see. So it's been approved. Can I prescribe it yet? So looking online, it looks like it already has a brand name. It's Jurnavax, J-O-U-R-N-A-V-A-X. And there is a Jurnavax savings card. Let's see where you have to go to. Usually you're going to go to jurnavax.com. Yeah, that's exactly it.

And then you're going to click in the upright hand corner, savings card. And usually those things do not work if you have government insurance, although I'm hoping with the new administration that they'll change that BS because it's ridiculous that for whatever reason—

Medicare will not allow the use of discount cards. I can't think of a reason. I know their thing is they want everybody to be equal, and that's great, but everybody can get a discount card too. So I just don't understand it. So I'm hoping that that's something that will get fixed. But yeah, you can get a discount card right now.

Eligible patients with insurance will pay as little as $30 per prescription and you don't have to activate it. So isn't that something? Well, all right. I'm going to start prescribing this stuff and I will let you know.

What we find out. Okay. Now here it says a patient with government-sponsored insurance can only use this card when their insurance does not provide coverage for journal backs. So if it's like tier four and you've got to pay $1,000 for it, but they consider it quote unquote covered at that high tier, then this will not work. But if it says we absolutely will not pay for it, then the card will work. So I guess that's something. Yeah.

But even then, sometimes like my mother-in-law has Medicare and Medicaid and she's talked about it. So she can sometimes get help with her copay.

So even if you have government insurance, always ask to see if you can get some help. And you just call a company. But you always want to go to the—if it's a brand drug, it's almost always going to be thebrandname.com. And then somewhere on there, usually in the upper right-hand corner, will be a little box that says patient assistance. So check that out. All right. Very good. So I'll keep you in the loop. Now—

Speaking of opioid addiction, here's a weird one. Boosting the endocannabinoid 2-alpha-GOLF in the brain can counteract opioid addiction while preserving their pain relief. How about that? They use this chemical JZL-184, Jizzle, Jizzle-184, mainly to save for treatments for pain management. Yeah, okay, well, guess what? We may not need you at all.

The natural enhancement of chemicals produced by the body known as endocannabinoids. In other words, these are cannabis-like molecules that are produced in the body itself, which is why we have those receptors, which is interesting that, you know, it's always interesting to me how nature is efficient in the sense that it, you know, we have...

These receptors in our brains and other parts of our body that are stimulated by these molecules called endocannabinoids. But then you've got the cannabis plant that makes cannabinoids that will stimulate those same receptors. And it's just because there's just a finite number of receptors out there. And we are related to...

We have a common ancestor with plants and we have a common ancestor with yeast, too. So it's interesting that yeast shit causes us to have, you know, really wild Saturday nights sometimes, a.k.a. alcohol. So it's very interesting to me how all of these things sort of are...

reused by nature. But anyway, the natural enhancement of these endocannabinoids may mitigate the addictive properties of opioids like morphine and oxycodone while preserving their pain-relieving effects. So just more evidence that cannabis is medicine and needs to be legalized, at least for medicine. Now, we do have legal THC

in the form of dronabinol, which is laboratory synthesized delta-9-THC. It's sold as marinol or dronabinol, and we use it in cancer patients for nausea and vomiting, and also patients with HIV.

and wasting syndromes where they're losing weight like crazy and need to stimulate their appetite. So we do have that, but we need more than that. You know, there's way more than just Delta-9 THC in marijuana, and marijuana, different strains are good for different things.

Some strains of marijuana are good for sleep and others are good for nausea and appetite. Others are good for just getting high. And through genetic manipulation, and I'm speaking of Mendelian genetic manipulation, in other words, crossbreeding, not doing genetic splicing and that kind of stuff.

You can come up with different strains that do different things. If you go to a dispensary and say, "This is my goal. I want to reduce anxiety," they'll have something there for you. Or if I need something to give me a little more focus or whatever, they've got hybrids and different crossbreedings of plants that will produce these different effects.

And as far as I'm concerned, this needs to be legal. We need to quit dicking around. The DEA has, for the last year, been talking about legalizing medicinal marijuana by making it Schedule 3. And Schedule 3 drug—so Schedule 2 drugs are things like—

hydrocodone and oxycodone and those kinds of things. And then schedule fours are your benzodiazepines, Xanax and Ativan and stuff like that. So schedule three's got to be in between. And it's mostly things with codeine in them or let's see, I think...

If I remember correctly, testosterone is also Schedule 3. Let me see. Schedule 3 drugs. This is something I should really know off the top of my head. I lecture on this all the time, but I am having some brain fog from this stupid influenza. Yeah, ketamine.

And, uh, well, this is wrong. Wow. Lysergic acid. That is incorrect. Oh, that's the AI got that one wrong. Maybe it's schedule three somewhere else, but okay. So schedule three drugs are, um, uh, Tylenol with codeine ketamine. Yeah. Testosterone. Good. Phew. I'll give myself a bell on that one. Um,

Antibiotic steroids, testosterone, any products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine per dosage unit. So it'd be like Tylenol number three and stuff like that. The schedule four drugs, as I said, are Xanax, Valium, Ativan, that kind of stuff. And then Tramadol is schedule four as well. Although it does stimulate the opioid receptor, I'm surprised that it's still schedule four, if that's even correct.

And then Schedule IIs are the stronger opioids like oxycodone, fentanyl, hydromorphone, a.k.a. Dilaudid, and Demerol, which is myparidine, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Oh, and then the stimulants, the strong stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. Okie doke. So they were going to make marijuana Schedule III, and they're just dicking around, right?

And enough's enough. I mean, we have the evidence that we need to at least make this medication, right? Because why would we deprive, say, a hospice patient in Tennessee from a drug that people in Virginia can just go buy, right?

Right over the line. It sucks. This disparity between states is unjust for patients who really need these medications. So that needs to stop. So let's get with it. Okay. I'll be very interested to see how this administration handles that because there have been –

people, this isn't a right-wing, left-wing thing. There have been plenty of people on the right who have advocated for the legalization of marijuana, if only to get it out of the hands of the black market so it's not crossing the border and then bringing other things with it like fentanyl. So anyway, there you go. All right. Well, let's answer some questions.

Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Oh, hearing Ron Bennington's voice, by the way, reminds me, I need to let you guys know, the old school folk will remember Brooklyn Blowhard. His name was Gary Hansen. He was also known as the Heckler, and he passed away a couple of days ago. I kept in touch with Gary.

He used to be on my show a lot, if you remember. And my friend Ahmed Zarbon reminded me that he—

I pulled a prank on him and I told his sister this when she called me. We were just talking about Gary and reminiscing and I said, you're going to hate me for this one. But he swallowed an expensive crown. It came loose and he accidentally swallowed it. And I had him sifting through his own stool for at least two, maybe three weeks, knowing good and well Gary.

it passed through him day one and he just missed it. And it was really kind of a shitty thing. No pun intended to do to somebody, but it was a funny bit. But anyway, poor old Gary, his last few years were pretty rough and without going, you know, going into it too, too heavy. He just, it was very difficult for him. And, uh,

He passed away very suddenly. He had some heart rhythm changes and they were going to try to maybe consider doing a procedure. And he sort of felt like,

He wasn't well enough to do it and all of a sudden he just died suddenly. So very sad. At least he's at peace now because he was not at peace for the last quite a bit of his life.

And I just I felt really bad for him all this time. So I'm sorry that he's that he's gone. But I'm also glad that he's not suffering anymore. But he was a classic Ron and Fez.

He was originally the heckler, and then he became Brooklyn Blowhard, and he and Pepper Hicks would get into it. And there's some great old Ron and Fez classic stuff on YouTube with Brooklyn Blowhard. If you remember him and you want to send a message to his family,

Go to my website at drsteve.com. And up on the right side, it'll say, you know, a memory book for Gary Hansen and just leave some

You know, a story or condolences or memories or anything that you would like to say. It's all moderated. I'll curate it and send it to his family. Right now, I just put it up about an hour ago and Tukey was the first person to say anything. Rocco Burrow from Tukey Soup.

because he was a huge Ron and Fez fan and a big fan of Brooklyn Blowhard. So anyway, I talked to Ronnie B as well, and I think he did a bit of eulogy on his show as well. So it was very sad, but I just wanted to let you guys know because Blowhard used to be part of this show too way back in the beginning. Matter of fact—

I believe he was on the very first episode we ever did. And I remember Danny Ross saying, OK, now you get him on here and you tell him he's got to— I was supposed to say something like, oh, they're telling us you got to go because Gary liked to talk. And I remember his call was about irritable bowel syndrome. And what he wanted to hear about is diarrhea.

And I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. I remember saying, Danny, I just can't. I can't. I can't do it. So I let him talk for a while. And that's how we ended up being kind of friends. So it was either first or second Weird Medicine show that Gary was on. But anyway. All right. So very sad. Let's do a couple of questions.

Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live,

You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox Internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox Mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U.S. to age 2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions apply. Of course, here we go. Here we go with this.

Hey, Dr. Steve. Hello. Dr. Scott. My name's Colt from West Virginia. Hey, Colt. I'm going to try to help you out with your question, quantity need. I hope you guys are doing well first, I guess. Yeah. The question is, I've been on testosterone replacement therapy for about a year and a half. Yep. And I was just wondering, how long will the testicles continue to atrophy?

So a year and a half in, it's definitely happening. They're way smaller than what they were. I feel like is there a headroom there? Does it just stop at some point? Well, yeah, it does. I mean, they don't just disappear, but they'll get to the point where there's just hardly any matrix left. And so they'll become much smaller than they were.

And it's just because when you take testosterone therapy, the testicles, they just feel like, well, what do you need us for? So there's this feedback loop between the pituitary, and it's a little more complicated than this, but the pituitary and the testicles themselves. And the pituitary...

Sending signals to the testicles, make testosterone. Make testosterone. And then when it makes enough testosterone and there's a...

a surplus of testosterone, then the pituitary will stop sending that signal. And then the testicles will kind of slow down on production. And then when it gets down to a certain level, the pituitary will send the signal again. Hey, let's go, let's go, let's go. And so you always have this undulating, just up and down, up and down, but right around sort of circling, circling, uh,

a midline so that you get an average amount of testosterone that the body needs. And it's a really good system. And when you start to lose testosterone, either because the testicles become lazy, and you can tell that because the hormones from the pituitary are increased because now they're starting to shout at the testicles, come on, come on.

Let's make some testosterone and the testicles are like, oh, yeah, okay, whatever. So when you have primary testicular failure, you'll have low testosterone but elevated pituitary hormones.

Or you can have a tumor or a lapse or something in the pituitary that causes the pituitary to not produce that signal, to not place the order for testosterone, in which case both of them will be low. You'll have low testosterone and low pituitary hormones there.

and that is secondary hypogonadism. Primary hypogonadism being failure of the testicles to make testosterone. Well, anyway, let's just look at primary hypogonadism. So you've got testicles that are lazy, but they're still making some testosterone. They don't just drop to zero. Well, when you now you replace testosterone

testosterone, testicular hormone, artificially, and you bring those levels back to normal, but you're doing it through exogenous, in other words, testosterone from the outside of the body, and

The testicles go – well, first off, the pituitary goes, well, we got plenty of fucking testosterone. So you guys can just calm down. And the testicles go, well, you know, we didn't make it. So they just shut down completely.

So you got no signal going to the testicles and you've got this overwhelming amount of testosterone that's just telling the testicles, you know, you're no longer needed. And so the matrix start of the testicle starts to atrophy because there's no it's not doing anything. It's not working anymore. Right.

And so the testicles begin to shrink. Now, there are ways around this. One of the things that that does is it makes you infertile. When you start taking testosterone replacement, you're also, when you stop, the testicles shut down, they're going to stop making sperm too. So one thing that you can do is use a drug called Clomid or Clomiphene citrate and

And really what it does is it stimulates the testicles to make testosterone. And when that happens is instead of getting that shutdown, the testicles wake up, they start producing more testosterone, they continue to produce sperm, and they don't atrophy. So this is something that you can use in men who want to retain fertility but who also have low testosterone.

And clomiphene citrate is a great drug. They also use it in women with polycystic ovary syndrome.

to normalize their ovulation. So it's a pretty cool drug. It is prescribed by fertility specialists for the most part. So if you are a young person and you've got low testosterone, first they got to sort of figure out why and is it something reversible? And if not, they can give you clomiphene if you want to maintain fertility.

So that's the answer. They will continue to shrink until really there's just tissue left and there's very little matrix. And so they will reduce, you know, to a minimum size, but they don't disappear altogether. All right. How about that?

Oh, this one looks interesting. Hi, Dr. Steve. Hello. This is Kate from Philly, and you answered my question about sex headaches, which was very helpful. Thank you. Excellent. But today I'm calling about taurine, and I've seen some conflicting studies on its effects with colorectal cancer. Yeah. So I'm wondering if you could offer any insights. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Yeah, okay.

This is an interesting one because taurine is in energy drinks, right? But it's an amino acid. And it may be linked to colorectal cancer risk, but not necessarily drinking energy drinks. The taurine levels tend to be higher in colorectal cancer patients. And low taurine levels may indicate a poor prognosis. However...

Taurine can also suppress colorectal cancer growth and suppress metastases, in other words, the spread to other parts of the body. So it is a complex relationship. But if you do blood samples on people with colorectal cancer and you test for taurine, it'll very often be elevated.

You know, diet high in meat and fat is also associated with higher taurine levels. So people will make that association. But gut bacteria metabolize taurine into hydrogen sulfide, which causes inflammation and also can increase the risk for colorectal cancer. Also makes your farts stink.

And, you know, taurine-conjugated bile salt, which is called torocholic acid, may be a key component in linking diet and colorectal cancer risk. So it may just be a biomarker for colorectal cancer prognosis and not a cause at all. And because, I say that because these taurine holoamines

effective in treating some cancers that are caused by cancerous changes in the mucous membrane. And supplementing taurine may play a role in anti-cancer therapy. So it's very interesting. We're still looking into it. There's no, for me, there's not enough evidence to say don't drink taurine or

because there's taurine in, like I said, meat and fat anyway, mostly meat, fatty meats.

But, you know, there are – here's an article, Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Taurine and its Association with Colorectal Carcinoma. It says these findings highlight the potential of using taurine as well as other bile acid metabolites to diagnose colorectal cancer and to illustrate the link with microbiome interactions.

Overall increased taurine concentrations are associated with significantly increased odds of colorectal cancer, but mostly an increase in relative expression of taurine in colorectal cancer samples. So like I said, it may just simply be a marker rather than a factor.

We see this in other things already. Vitamin D is a good example of that, where...

If you have low vitamin D levels, you are at risk of certain cancers and certain cardiovascular events. But there's no evidence that supplementing vitamin D changes that. So it's more likely a marker of disease rather than a cause of disease. Although some of the newer studies now do show some small benefit in vitamin D. And I've always said from the beginning that it may help and it

doesn't hurt. So if you want to supplement with vitamin D, I don't have a problem with that. Just don't expect it to be a panacea. You know, people say, well, you know, does vitamin D work? And it's like, well, for what? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to live longer? We don't have real good evidence that vitamin D supplementation does that.

You want to prevent rickets? Hell yeah. It's the number one way to prevent rickets is to make sure your vitamin D levels are normal. But there are probably some subtle effects and most of them beneficial and very few negative effects as long as you're not mega dosing. Remember, vitamin A, D, E, and K, ADEC,

are the fat-soluble vitamins that can cause real problems if you megadose on those, particularly vitamin A. But there is such a syndrome as hypervitaminosis D, too. So just take it the way it's recommended on the bottle, and you should be okay. All right. All right. Let's see. Uh...

Here's a good one. Hey, Dr. Steve. Fluid gang here. Number one, your website stinks. Need some updating. Number two, put your phone number out there more because I searched way too long for that bullshit. Number three. Okay, it's at the beginning of every show. I brought this woman home from the bar who is voluptuous. Excellent. She has some nice fluid. Excellent. I ended up eating her out. Okay.

And subsequently, the days following, my throat is sore. Oh. And I have the constant taste of pussy in my mouth. Uh-oh. My question to you is...

Is there any reason to be concerned because she was kind of gross and then is that normal or is that all in my head? Thank you. I will listen off the air fluid. Okay. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Well, you may have gotten some contaminated fluids, my friend. So if you now have a sore throat and you taste the taste that you have, maybe yeast. So this may simply be thrush.

She may have had a yeast infection, and that's what you're tasting. But if you look in your mouth, you should see a whitish exudate in your throat or a whitish sort of, you know, just coating. But you've got to go get checked. You need someone to stick a swab in your throat and test you for gonorrhea and chlamydia and

And then if it just turns out to be yeast, easiest thing in the world to treat. But don't walk around with this because now if it goes untreated, it could get worse and then you're causing yourself problems. And the next time you bring somebody home and you're having lunch at the Y, now you're giving it to them. So you're spreading it. So go to your primary care doctor.

Or go to the health department. If you don't want to go to your primary care because they're like a family friend or something like that, I get that. It is embarrassing. But those are places where you really will not be judged. But if you're really worried about that, go to the county health department or go to an urgent care.

and just tell them what happened. They'll swab your throat. They'll look. They'll give you some Nystatin, which is a liquid anti-yeast medication that you can swish around that'll get rid of that yeast taste and get rid of any sort of thrush that you may have. And they'll also test you for gonorrhea and chlamydia and then treat you appropriately if you have it. Herpes also possible but unlikely. Most of the time that's going to be

blisters on your tongue or your mouth and you're not going to miss that. So, all right, my friends. Well, that'll do it for this week. Thanks for indulging me and hanging in there during my brain fog. I'll be better next week, I promise. Thanks to everyone who's made this show happen over the years. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM channel 103. I'm thinking now, Sundays at 7 p.m. only.

I don't know. They're not keeping me in the loop on that, but that's okay. I appreciate being there. 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.