624 - Sour Sop It Up (with a Biscuit)
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Delusions. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. Well, that's because you're an idiot. Can you, like, shut up? 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. Fuck.

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. Think I'm doomed and I'll have to go inside.

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 with my little pal, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medicine provider who gives me street cred with the wacko alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is a show for people who never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you've got a question you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider,

If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-766-4323. That's 347-POOHIT. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at drscottwm. 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 in 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 roadie, R-O-A-D-I-E, .drsteve.com, or you can just go to stuff.drsteve.com, scroll down to see the Roadie Robotic Tumor, tumor, the robotic tumor, the robotic tuner for anyone with a stringed instrument in your life or you yourself. Very inexpensive, and it's cool as hell.

Check out Dr. Scott's website at simplyherbals.net for the best CBD nasal spray on the market.

And check me out at patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. We're doing all classic Weird Medicine episodes from going way back, even before Dr. Scott was here, a lot of them, which is either good or bad, depending on your perspective. And they are unavailable anywhere else but on Patreon. So I want to have a place where I can put them, and they'll always be there, even if I croak. And then cameo.com slash weirdmedicine.com.

I'll say fluid to your mama. That's basically what that's about. Or I'll answer a question, or I'll say code words to your friends that are in jokes that I don't understand. Whatever you want. Cameo.com slash weirdmedicine. All right, very good. I'm getting an error saying that our stream is not receiving enough video to maintain smooth streaming. If someone from the streaming community

In the waiting room, if you want to join the people in the waiting room, it's youtube.com slash at weird medicine. And let us know if the stream looks okay. I'm getting a poor stream health. So anyway, Scott, if you'll keep an eye on that. Sounds like a prostate problem. It certainly is. Well, there you go. There you go. Thank you.

Dr. Scott said a funny there. Made a funny. Well, all right. We've got a, what we would call in medical terms, a shitload of medical questions to answer today. And I vote we don't do any topics. We just do questions. And all of these I'm doing blind because they're on our voicemail. And give us a call 347-766-4323 and leave a message. And we will answer it on the air most likely. Yeah.

So let's try this one and see what we got. I'm calling because I had a question about immunity from sickness after recently being sick. About a month ago, I had what my doctor called normal sick. I didn't have COVID or the flu or anything. Just a cold with a little bit of a fever for a few days. I got over it within a week. And about a month later, right now, feeling much better. But I have a friend who is sick.

having this get together and I'm worried about going because I don't want to get sick. And he said that, well, you were just sick, you know, you probably still are covered in that way. And I was like, you know, I don't think that works that way. I understand that when you have COVID that it's unlikelier for you to get COVID immediately after recovering in a month or two afterwards. But like,

Is that true at all? Do you have a little bit of breathing room? What if my wife, for example, who lives with me, who never got sick, would she also be covered because she was exposed and never got sick to it?

Yeah, it sounds like a crock, but I really don't know. I don't know. But let me know what you think. Really appreciate your insights. Also, just wanted to say thanks for all you've done over the years. It may really be the end. You've been such a great person to listen to. I really respect you and your opinion and everything you've done in answering my questions over the years.

I keep waiting for somebody to yell, psych! From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Oh, thanks. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Phil. And let me speak to that just for a second. The end of weird medicine is the end of the weird medicine world.

serious XM show. That requires me to be on a schedule. It requires us to be on a schedule. I don't want to sound like Howard Stern who always says, well, you know, my show, my show. And it's like, okay, you've got a bunch of people there. Helping you. Yeah, it should be our show. But anyway, so even though I do all the work, which is fine. That's what I do that everywhere in my life. So

But it's the end of the SiriusXM show. And, you know, I was supposed to retire a couple of years ago. And then Beck decided he wanted to go to veterinary school. So I went, oh, now I got to work. Well, I really was kind of looking for a way not to retire, you know, any excuse. But now I can go, oh, because of Beck going to veterinary school, I have to work again.

what is it now, six and a half more years. But deep down inside, I was looking for any excuse not to retire. So I may come up with an excuse not to end it at the end. I have not formally turned in my notice at SiriusXM. I told Lewis Johnson, who, by the way, is one of the

all-time great people on this earth. And he has always been just the best person to work with at SiriusXM, and I really appreciate him. He doesn't listen to the show, so I'm doing all this ball washing for nothing. But yeah, he's the best. I've told him, but I haven't told the big guy.

So we'll see. Now, we've been operating without a contract now going on three years. Without a net. And I think that Jim is probably just carrying us for nostalgia's sake. And if he went to the big bosses with a contract, they would go, what the – what are you doing?

What are you doing? No. Don't be a freak. So, but Lewis and Paul also said if we ever got kicked off 103 that they would put us on a different channel. But then I wouldn't be able to see Longest Running Show on that channel. Although...

I have a funny feeling other than like the hits, you know, the hits on one or whatever, hits on whatever that channel is or some of these music channels that we are the longest running show on the platform at this point. One of them. We have to be. Yeah, I would think so.

You know, Shay's show on Shade may predate us, but I don't think so because, I mean, if we're counting the XM years, which we should, we predate a whole bunch of people. I think Hillbilly Jim's been doing it.

Right at 20 years. He's on the music show. On Outlaw, yeah. Oh, yeah. I apologize. No, no, no. Well, but it's still, it's a personality show. But I think when it comes to talk shows, we may be the longest running show on the whole platform, which is kind of funny. Well, we're resilient. I'll find out. That is for sure. Well, no, you just keep your head down and then nobody notices you're there. All right. Now, back to Phil. I...

remember when I was in medical school talking about general viral immunity after a viral attack. So viruses are obligate intracellular parasites. It means that they cannot live any other way and they have to go into your cells and then they hijack the cell to make more copies of themselves. And in the process, they kill the cell.

And, you know, most viral infections are not lethal, but they can be very lethal to the cells that they infect. And sometimes they're very lethal, obviously. But so when you have this sort of innate immunity to viruses, you know, we have an extensive array of defense mechanisms, right?

And, you know, there are these toll-like receptor family of molecules and stuff like that. But the one I'm really interested in

is this thing called interferon. Now, these are the best known and best studied antiviral protons. It's alpha and beta interferon, and they act by binding to—it doesn't matter how they act. But when those things are floating around in your body, you have this sort of quote-unquote antiviral state that

And you have inhibition of cell protein synthesis and prevention of viral replication. So there may be something, too, if you had a cold that you may be for a while, quote unquote, you know, resistant to other viral infections. Oh, so not just the one you had? Not just the one you had because the interferons are nonspecific. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Interesting. So anyway, okay. So that may be...

Now, let's see here. So I'm just looking at a list, key concepts of major antiviral innate defense mechanisms. And acting to block infection would be natural antibodies, but those will be specific. Complement components, which are not specific. Those things, you know, it's a cascade that helps to destroy foreign proteins in the body.

Now, acting to protect cells from infection are interferon A and B, alpha and beta, and interferon gamma.

And then when you have a virus-infected cell, then the natural killer cells and macrophages and neutrophils, all that stuff kick in. But really, the interferons are the ones that I'm interested in. And then there are these things, interleukins, that are involved in regulating antiviral inflammatory response. But again, that's after you've already been infected. So he's interested in...

if I have a viral infection, am I less likely to get infected with a virus, you know, in that period afterward? And my answer is a qualified maybe and probably yes, to some degree. Right. And then the second part of his question was about his wife. Is his wife protected just being around him? No, hell no. Which is absolutely not. No. No. She, I mean, she might, she might be lucky and just have a better tolerance, you know. Yep. And some people seem to get more, uh,

asymptomatic viral infections than other people do. You know they're getting infected. They just never get sick. Yeah, I've got... Rob's like that. She never, she never... The only time I've ever seen her sick was after she got her Shingrix. Oh, yeah. And it just wiped her out. Yeah, for the Shingles vaccine. The Shingles vaccine. That Shingrix is like...

ass kicker. Yeah, it wore her out. Still worth doing, but I've been getting shingles in your eye. Absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, I'm one of those guys, I'll get the virus and it hits me like a damn Mack truck. Well, the reason we haven't been live for a month is I had influenza. Yeah, right, right, right. And influenza, you know, when I had COVID the first time and it took out an eighth of my lung, I never missed a day of work. I did telehealth every single day.

And this time when I had influenza A, it was like,

I cannot. I could barely drag my sorry ass out of bed. And I'm just now getting back to normal again. Man, it was a bad one. And I was vaccinated. People go, oh, listen, the influenza vaccine is a standard vaccine. Stop it. It's fine. And but it's not perfect. It's never perfect. It can't be because they are guessing that.

What influenza strains will hit us in the northern hemisphere based on

During the summer in the southern hemisphere. And so they look and see, okay, well, they've got this one, this one, maybe this will be it. And sometimes it's as good as 60, 70 percent. And one year it was 6 percent. But you still get it because even if it's not effective at preventing infection and transmission, it's good at reducing hospitalization and death. Right.

And so that's why you do it. That's what we really care about. I mean, who cares if we get sick? I mean, I care. It interferes with your productivity. But what I don't want is to end up in the hospital and end up dead. Exactly. That's counterproductive. So anyway. All right. Right on. It's a good question, man. And the kind words were nice. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And none of them were aimed at Dr. Scott. Not a damn bit. Thanks so much. I appreciate all the hard work.

All right. Let's do this one. Let's see. Okay. This is from old Donna Pittman. She's a good one. She sends me cameos about one or twice a week. And it's like, Donna, I'll answer these questions for free. But I love her because she, you know, sends cameos and pays me. I end up getting like two bucks. But it's fun. I like to answer her questions. They're always good. She's like Stacey DeLoach. Every one of her questions are good.

Yep. All right. Let's see. Hey, Dr. Steve. Hello. What makes your dookie turn brown color? Excellent. And why is your pee-pee yellow? I'll take my answer off the air. Bye. Okay. Well, I'm not going to say... I'm going to say urine.

Rather than that other word. I can't say that. But stool, I'll take the stool question, Scott. You take the urine question. Gotcha. Gotcha. So when I was in medical school, one of the facts that we learned was that the pigment that makes stool brown is a thing called stercobalinogen. And so, of course, I called...

One of my lab partners, that was his new name, was Sterko. And he didn't know why because he didn't study. So he didn't know why we were calling him Sterko. And it's like, dude, why, you know, you would know that if you actually read the assignment. But anyway, so, yeah, Sterko-Bellinigen is the thing. But what causes it or where does it come from? And it comes from bile. Now,

The stercobalignogen itself is created by gut bacteria. It's a bile pigment that's derived from broken down hemoglobin. So if you think of rust, hemoglobin has iron in it, right? And so when you think of rust, it's sort of a reddish-orange-brownish color, right? And so when you have oxidized iron,

iron molecules, you're going to get a brown pigment. And then bilirubin itself is kind of yellowish-greenish. If you mix it with blue pigment, you'll get green stool because it's mostly yellow. But stercobalenogen itself is transformed by the bacteria in the large intestine and

bilirubin. And it reduces what we call conjugated bilirubin to form this stercobalenogen. So until you get to the large bowel, bilirubin

Stool is not really stool. It's just products of digestion. And it's kind of a whitish, you know, gray water looking thing. But when it hits the large bowel, large bowel's purpose is to draw, is to reclaim water. That's really all the large bowel does. There are some other things that it does, but that's the biggest thing, is reclaiming water and protecting the body from, you know, septic, septic,

shit in your bowel. But then the bacteria in there will take the bilirubin that came down from the gallbladder and will form stercobalenogen, which turns the stool brown. Now, if you have a blocked

gallbladder, you can't produce bile anymore. And if there's no bile, there's no stercobalinogen, and you get what we call clay-colored stools. Clay-colored stools are just that. They're sort of a yellowish, maybe slightly orange, but yellow, pale-colored stool. And if you see that, you worry about either a stone obstructing the bile duct, in which case you should have pain. Right.

Or a tumor, you know, something that's blocking that bile duct. Yep. So anyway, if you want to know the chemical formula for stercobalinogen is C33H48N406. Got it. There you go. There you go. It's closely related to mesobilirubinogen and urobilinogen.

And those three compounds, stercobalinogen, mesobilirubinogen, and urobilinogen are referred collectively as urobilinogens. Gotcha. So there you go. All right? Gotcha. Okay.

All right. There's the answer there. Now, what about urine? What causes urine to be yellow there, Dr. Scott? Well, how about the pigment is urochrome, also known as urobilin, which gives it urine. Urobilin. Urobilin. It's Chinese. Yeah.

is what gives urine its yellow color. And I'll accept your own belly. It's close enough. Well, it's Billy Rubin. It sounds like the same thing. But no, so here's the interesting thing. So the Eurochrome is actually produced kind of similarly, but the gut microbiomes...

Use enzymes called bilirubin reductase to break down the bilirubin into the urobilirubin. Bilirubin reductase is also used to make stercobalaminogen. It's a similar process. So this is a cleaved molecule that then is absorbed by the...

By the bowel wall as the water goes through and then it is filtered out by the kidneys and then excreted that way. Pretty interesting. And as you know, urine can change colors too. Different foods can make it smell funny or change colors. And if you – And certain medications can too. Sure. Right. And if you take like a loop diuretic like furosemide or Lasix. Right.

You'll pee out free water. It may have no color whatsoever. Just clear as day. Yep. Kind of like when you do a bowel prep at the very end of the bowel prep. It's nice and clear. Correct. Coming out of a different water. Just pure water. Yes, right. Pure water. It's clear as a mountain stream. So if you are mildly dehydrated...

You will reclaim more bowel water. So you may become more constipated, but also your urine will become darker. It feels thicker, looks thicker. Yeah, looks thicker. Usually I don't think it should feel thicker. If it's like syrup, you've got a problem. Well, yeah. But the other thing is if you have dark, dark brown urine and it doesn't clump,

clear, then that is a sign of elevated bilirubin in the bloodstream. And that's a sign of incipient jaundice. So that would be a reason to get checked as well.

Too much blood in you. You see some people naturally have a little bit of extra hemoglobin in their urine, which gives a little bit of odd color, too. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So, yeah, if your urine changes color and it stays that way, get it checked. Right. You know, you got blood coming out of an orifice and you've never seen it come out of there before, get it checked. Always check it the first time. You have a massive headache that's worse than you've ever had before, even if it's during intercourse and you think it's a sex headache, get it checked. Yeah.

you know, the first time. Now, there is a kind of a fun thing that you can do. If you get a urinary tract infection, a drug that they'll give you a lot of times is peridium. Now, peridium is a dye that is filtered in the urine by the kidneys and

And preferentially, and it also acts as an anesthetic. So when you're burning and you feel like you got pee all the time, they'll give you this pyridium and it'll calm that down. But the cool thing about it is, is it is bright, bright yellow. And by the way, it will stain everything. So if you're a little bit incontinent, you're going to want to wear a pad or something because it's going to stain everything it comes in contact with. But what's cool is,

If you own a blacklight, and this is a reason to buy a blacklight, that and to see if, you know, there's semen in places where there shouldn't be in your house because your spouse is doing something they're not supposed to be doing. But you get the blacklight and

And shine it in the toilet after you've voided your horrible bladder with peridium-dyed urine. It will glow a beautiful bright orange. So it fluoresces. There you go. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

The whole process of fluorescence is pretty cool where you have high-energy photons hit these molecules that excite the electrons into a different orbital. When they drop back down, they'll release a photon at a lower frequency because we can't see ultraviolet light. So it will be in the visible spectrum, but it's almost always very vibrant like that. Pretty cool. That is neat. Yep.

All right. Well, there you go. We answered those questions. Excellent, Donna. Thank you very much for that. I'm going to erase that. All right. Let's answer another one here. Whoops. Okay. Hey, Steve. I just wanted to call. I just was listening to your latest episode and had a few things real quick. Okay. Brain things with the Sudoku you were mentioning. Yes. There's a center for brain health, which is doing. Okay. So what he's talking about is I'm doing this app called.

Called... Shit, it's supposed to help my memory and I can't remember the name. Oh, God. It's Elevate, I think. Oh, no, it's called Elevate. Okay, I got it. Oh, how appropriate. Exactly. It's called Elevate and I'm not so afraid of cancer or heart disease. I mean, I don't want to get it, but I am terrified of losing my mind. Yes. And so...

Because I hate Alzheimer's almost more than I hate cancer because it destroys the person. Whereas at least with cancer, most of the time, unless you have brain metastases, it destroys the person's body. But the person is intact up until the end. So I had read some books.

that showed that actually exercising your brain may help to either delay or stave off dementia. So that's what that's about. And if you guys want to try Elevate, I've got a thing where you can try it for a week if you want. Maybe I'll put it on the link up on this episode. Cool. A long-term study where they follow you –

They have these like brain exercises you can do like once a day, once a month, once every three months. They even have the people if they want to get MRIs so that they can like exercise. Yeah, they do functional MRI on these people. So it's in real time and you can see which part of the brain is working when they do certain problems. It's really cool. And that exercising the brain helps so they –

want to do long-term studies and figure out better ways to do that. And then with that score with the heart calcium score, I had a patient once with over 10,000

Unfortunately, he had to go for cabbage. Okay. Imagine that. And relatively young guy. Okay. He wasn't eating sauerkraut. Cabbage is coronary artery bypass graft. So this guy is, it sounds like he's in the medical profession and he's using jargon. So I used to have to clomp down on PA John about using garbage, garbage, using jargon all the time. The history of heart in the family. Yes.

God. It's a North American record. Yeah. How old are you? 56. Have you ever had a calcium score? You want me to order one for you? I don't care. You know, if we'd done one on GVAC, when we talked about it, he might be sitting there right now. Yeah. You know? Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So let's get one done. I'd be happy to do one. Yeah, and then you can report back to everybody. Maybe you could record while you're there. Good, clean living. Yep. Yep. All right. So, Ethie, you talked about eating healthy. Yeah.

Now, the other thing is you need to have at least one risk factor. Sure. So family history, high blood pressure, diabetes—

High cholesterol. And what did I say? Family history. What's the next one? High blood pressure. Shit, there's five of them and I'm having a senior moment. See that elevated? Spoken. Thank you. Thank you. All right. There you go. Give thyself a bell. Yes. Take out your hand off my penis. Yes. Okay.

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So anyway, all right. There was a Forreston ad for fast food. I don't know what you're – I'm just kidding. All right. Thanks. Great show. I fucked his joke up. I'm sorry. You don't have to run that, bud.

get those scores done. And the calcium score, I had a patient once with over 10,000. That's high. Unfortunately, had to go for cabbage. Yeah. So mine was 275 and they were freaking out. Anything over 400, you start worrying about it. You really want it to be zero. Well, then we changed your medications and we changed your diet and we changed everything and it dropped significantly, remember? Yeah.

Yeah, it did drop. It did drop. You're right. Yeah, because you chewed me out one day, but they had misread it. Correct. It actually went down. Yeah, don't let the technologists read it because they don't know what they're doing. Don't chew out Dr. Scott until you get a second reading. No, I didn't chew you out. Fuck off. You're a beast. I was not. You're like, you're trying to kill me. No. No, it's genetic. And relatively young guy with a history of heart in the family. Yeah.

get those scores done. And then I also, at the year talked about eating healthy. They, uh, sure. They, uh, there was a force in ad for fast food. Oh, okay. I see what he's saying. So on the podcast, uh,

There will be ads that, you know, there's three ads at the beginning, two at the end and five in the middle, which feel free to skip over. Sure. You know, they'll kill me for saying that, but it's fine. Nobody, nobody up there listens to this either. And but yeah.

So we were talking about eating healthy and then they had a fast food ad. That's typical. I remember my buddies at DC on screen, they're big time leftists and there would be ads for like Donald Trump and stuff like that on their political ads. They'd get so mad. It's like, ha ha. Anyway. Okie doke. Well, thank you so much for that call. It was very informative. Excellent.

All right. Let's see here. This is John in Pennsylvania. Hey, Dr. Steve. This is John in Pennsylvania. Yep. Just wanted to ask a question about...

Some things that you might suggest for a guy who is recently turning, having recently turned 40. I don't know if there's like sort of a battery of tests that you would recommend. I don't know when we're starting to get into finger in the ass territory. Just some things that you would suggest, you know, almost like bringing your car to the mechanic every, you know,

Yeah. I don't even know. 3,000 miles? Good God. But you know what I mean. Just some things that you would say, okay, you're 40 now. You want to start taking care of yourself more. It's more serious to you. Too late now. I recommend getting this, this, this, and this done. And I have an even dumber question for you. Oh, good. Let's do this one first. Yeah, go ahead.

If you take the medicine side, I'll take the lifestyle side. Okay. Yeah. So there is this thing called the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force. It's the USPSTF. And for 40-year-olds, it recommends for women screening mammography for breast cancer every other year.

yearly screening for blood pressure. And they also recommend discussing the benefits and harms of prostatic specific antigen screening for men. But they're recommending mammography from 40 to 74 years. And after that, they say don't do it anymore. And then to screen for hypertension.

And then other than that, the big ones are, you know, cholesterol. Just see what your risk factors are. So any sort of risk factors. But mostly at 40, they're going to be counseling you on lifestyle stuff. So that's where Dr. Scott's going to take it. Yeah, right on. And I would focus on just a couple of things. Number one, sleep hygiene. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. If you are not practicing good sleep hygiene, if you have –

chronic familial insomnia like I do. Sleep is a thing. Dr. Steve's got the same problem I do. Sleep would be the number one thing. And the second thing, find things like we found recently with, you know, like the Oculus has meditation apps and memory apps and things like that. Find a way in your life to

to take out something that's taken up time, that's really not being beneficial, and start working in slowly these things that are beneficial. You know, yoga, walking, you know, resistance exercise. There's a huge benefit. So doom-scrolling YouTube every night isn't... Throw that shit in the frickin' trash. I know, I got to do that. Weightlifting and cardiovascular together, you know, if you just do only cardiovascular stuff, not so beneficial. If you only do weightlifting stuff, not so much. But if you put them together...

And then really focus on foods that don't spike glucose. I got to do that. And look for insulin resistance, you know. So that's going to be the big things. Sleep, insulin resistance, and have a really...

healthy way of extracting things that take you too much of your life and start slowly putting in things that are healthy. Stress is the killer. Stress is the killer. But you can do these things. If you'll start identifying those things that take so much time and start easing them out slowly. You can't do it all at one time. But if you'll take those out, then you have time to put something else new in. Because you can't just magically have

time to start a new habit. Correct. You have to remove something that's causing you stress so you can now eat something. It's kind of like having a girlfriend. I can't do that with my budget. One bad one's got to go away so you can get a good one. No matter what money I make, I...

I'm going from paycheck to paycheck. You find a way to spend it. Yes! But that's the truth. But, you know, honestly, Dr. Steve, think about it. But it's not frivolous. It's like my expenses just seem to rise to meet what I'm getting paid. But everything in life, everything in life, there's nothing in simple concept in physics. You can't have two objects occupying the same space at the same time. Well, Pauli exclusion principle.

Well, but in general. You can if they're bosons, but you can't if they're fermions. You're correct. Yeah, but as a general rule, something's got to leave. Right. Something's got to leave, so something else has to come in. I like that. So let's stick with that. Because bosons, we've all married. That's actually pretty brilliant. We've married those and divorced those, too. I'm a boson. Give thyself a bell. I'll give you a bell. All right, man. Thank you. That's good advice.

Thank you. And when I bring up my budget, it's the same thing. I need to take some stuff away so that I can replace it with saving that money instead. But anyway, yeah, that's really good advice. The other thing is, is when you turn 45, that's when they're now recommending that you get colon cancer screening. That used to be 50.

So 45 for your first colonoscopy. And if anybody in your family, say, had colon cancer at age 47, you're going to want to do it at 37. In other words, it's going to be 45 or 10 years before a first-degree relative had colon cancer, whichever comes first.

Right? So if they had colon cancer at age 50, you're going to get your thing at age 40. If they had colon cancer at age 67, you're going to get it at 45. Does that make sense? Yep. Gotcha. All right. Yep. And just get tuned up. And he said he's got a stupid question next. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's do the stupid question. Those are the fun ones.

And that is, is there a way for a position to check for just like,

Okay. So...

This is what I would do in a situation like that where you've got a familial weird rare blood cancer is go to a cancer institute. Any of these cancer centers now will do this and ask to see the geneticist. And they can do genetic screening. I had this done myself because my mother had linitis plastica, which is a stomach cancer. It's horrendous. And it's one of the reasons I'm in the job that I'm in now.

And it turned out that that wasn't familial. I didn't have the gene for it, at least that we know of. So you can do that. That's number one. Now, we don't have just sort of a general test for cancer, but we have specific cancers that we can screen for. So one is if you ever smoked.

you can do a CT low-dose screening test for lung cancer. And if they can find it in stage one, it's almost always curable. We think of lung cancers being a death sentence. That doesn't have to be the case if you catch it early. So they recommend screening for that using the low-dose CT.

Prostate cancer, you know, most everybody knows about that. The digital rectal exam, which I used to push a lot, they're not doing it much anymore. Which to me makes no sense. I know, but they used to say that was the best way because it was really sensitive. But apparently they've now – the pendulum keeps swinging on the PSA test.

But they're mostly just doing PSAs at this point. Now they're back to saying PSAs. Oh, my gosh. I still would trust a qualified family doctor or urologist that's done 1,000 of them to at least have a look. I can't keep up on this. It's always back and forth and back and forth on the PSA. But you have to understand the risk, benefits, and alternatives to doing that because there are a lot of false positives. Of course, yeah.

And a mutual friend of ours had a false positive elevated PSA, and they did a transrectal biopsy, and he ended up getting septic and was in the hospital for a week. So that can happen. It's rare or uncommon, but it happens. So you've got to talk to your health care provider. We don't have a perfect test for prostate cancer.

Breast cancer, obviously, you know, the biannual mammograms are what they recommend. And colon cancer, you get the colonoscopy. So there are tests that you can do. We just don't have one test. Yeah, there's not like it's just a blood. Right. It's common. Yeah. I was going to say, I mean, it's not like we can just test for testosterone or just test

for hemoglobin. We can't just test for cancer. But we can test for inflammatory markers. We can test for a lot of other things that can raise red flags. And cancer DNA is probably going to be something that we'll be able to detect in the future. Right. That's floating around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we'll be able to do that thing. And, you know, we really need a tricorder type thing in Star Trek stuff where you just find a little tumor in somebody's lung and you just transport it out of there. You know, that would be cool. All right.

Okay, excellent questions, both of those. All right. Hello, folks. I hope everybody's doing well. Hey, old buddy. No shit. I'm sorry to hear that. Hey, just fucking with you. Hey, quick question. Might fall more towards Scott. I don't know. Hate to give him any more credit than he gets. Take things, man. Scott, you know I love you. Yes. Have you heard of Sour Soup, S-O-U-R-S-O-P, Fruit? It's also known as...

Fuck me and my hip-billy accent. Graviolo, G-R-A-V-I-O-L-A. Yeah. There's something on WebMD about it holds great possibilities toward cancer. I just found that kind of interesting to see if you all know anything about it. Hope you all have a good day. Yeah, man. Bye, Casey. Love you. Bye. Well, bye. She's not here. Soursop. Soursop.

It's also known as gallabano. Also, like he said, graviola. And in Latin America, it's guanabana. It's a fruit of the anana muricata, a broadleaf flowering evergreen tree.

native to tropical regions of the Americas. Now, listen, I never piss or shit on the ideas that exotic fruits or vegetables or plants might have medicinal properties. You know why? Because every single medicine that we have came from a natural source, almost without exception. The only engineered medicine

Oh, shit. Only engineered medication that we have, I think, was it phyzostigmine? And it was engineered because they were using it for organophosphate poisoning. And it actually displaces...

the organophosphate from the receptors and it was designed that way because they knew if they put these atoms together in a certain way that they would form a bond that was exactly the right distance apart. It was brilliant. And I can't remember if it was physo-stigmine or something, but there is one sort of engineered medication.

And most everything else, like antibiotics, penicillin, we all know the story. There was a mold that grew on a Petri dish, and it killed the shit out of the bacteria that they were trying to grow. And there was a clear area around there, and they cut that clear area out and plopped it on another –

petri dish because this is science and plopped it on another petri dish that had bacteria on it and it killed that too and they went uh oh we've got something here that's where penicillin came from and originally

Almost all bacteria that we came in contact with were sensitive to penicillin, but staph particularly rapidly became resistant to it because they just overused it. But anyway, staph is really good at generating resistance. Mm-hmm.

So anyway, so I don't ever shit on any of these things. So do you know anything about this stuff? This is not a Chinese herb. No. So it looks like it comes from the New World. So I'm thinking. Yeah, but the only thing is I think it's like a lot of natural herbs.

You can use foods for medicines. It has some anti-inflammatory and possibly antiviral properties. But I don't know that it's ever been proven to treat any cancer specifically, especially in the United States. But just like any other fruit or any other medication,

Certain levels of it can be toxic, so you have to be careful what you're taking. I wouldn't use this. I wouldn't use this as my first treatment. I wouldn't use it as any treatment until we can do some. It's like Kratom to me. Kratom is a fascinating drug that deserves to be studied.

But I don't think people should be indiscriminately using it over the counter because we've had a bunch of people calling here over the years, people that ended up worse off using Kratom after they were trying to get off things like Percocet and stuff like that. We've had some other people that had excellent results from it.

But there is help out there. We have actual approved medications that will do these things. So you don't have to go to a head shop for that. But I'm not shitting on kratom. I'm saying it deserves to be studied. And it really does. We need to really look at this because it's going to be a really useful thing. The phytochemicals that are in this stuff, the big one is ananasin.

And it's in the fruit, seeds, and leaves. And the leaves also contain anamine, which is another alkaloid. And these extracted alkaloids may cause neuronal dysfunction. And this is coming from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Anonacin has been shown in laboratory research to be neurotoxic. And the French Food Safety Agency in 2010 concluded it's not possible to confirm that the observed cases of atypical Parkinson's syndrome are linked to consumption of anona muricata. They couldn't tell if they were. So there were some people that presented having Parkinson's-like symptoms, which is

rigidity and tremor mostly can lead to dementia, too, called Lewy body dementia. But people presented after eating this stuff, but they couldn't conclusively say that's what caused it. So for me, I'm saying no on that one until we can study it. It deserves to be studied, no question about that.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission, okay, so some people will go, you know, but the Federal Trade Commission said that the use of soursop to treat cancer was, quote, bogus, unquote. That's pretty strong words. And no credible scientific evidence that the extract sold by this company can prevent, cure, or treat cancer of any kind. So how would we know?

What you would do is you would compare treatment

with standard treatment, which is hard to do when you've got standard treatment that's known to work. So what they would probably do is use this as an add-on therapy. So you'd have some people that have, say, I don't know, gemcitabine and Soursop, and then other people add gemcitabine alone and see if there's a statistically significant difference between the two. If you don't mind, Dr. Scott, go to...

ClinicalTrials.gov and see if there are any ongoing studies on. I would put in Soursop, but also I would put in probably, let's do Anona, A-N-N-O-N-A.

And then I would just put that in and see if there are any studies looking at anything. That's it. And there's nothing on there. Nothing. So that's unfortunate. I think these things need to be studied when they come up like this just to even prove that.

That there isn't anything, you know? Yep. So that we can use evidence-based medicine instead of, you know, just emotional malarkey. Okay. Oh, wait. There is one on the, on the Murakata though. Oh, there is? Yeah. What does it say? There was not one on the, it's on the Murakata, it's on the, I know the Murakata's sheets.

Let's see. For evaluation of an antihypertensive food supplement. Oh, okay. Yeah. Let me see if I can run down. If you want to keep going. Yeah, no, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See what else you can find. Let me read what it says. All right. Very good.

So there is something. Well, I'm fascinated by it. Needs to be studied. All these things need to be studied. But I don't recommend that people just take them. And listen, I know if you've got cancer, you're going to grasp at any straws, particularly if the oncologists are telling you, well, and they should never say there's nothing more we can do. They can say we can't fix this. That I understand. But don't ever say,

doctors who are listening to this, there's nothing more we can do because there's always more you can do, even if the more is transitioning the patient from a rehabilitative approach to medicine to a more comfort-focused approach to medicine. But we can always make people comfortable. We can't always fix a problem. As a matter of fact, if in theory we could fix any problem if we just knew enough—

There would be at least two or three 400-year-old people running around just by accident. And the fact that there aren't tells us that at least with the technology we've got and the bodies that we've evolved into, there is a hard stop. It seems to be right around 120, something like that. And those people, by the way, never go to the doctor.

You see these people that are 120, 115, 118 smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka in the Ural Mountains and stuff. They've never seen a doctor. They don't get sick. So if you want to live to be 120, the answer is don't get sick. And drinking soursop tea. Yeah, they're drinking soursop. You can sop it up with a biscuit. There's only one study of it.

But there have been no results have been published yet. Okay. That's strictly for hypertension. For blood pressure. Okay. So we'll see. I'll keep an eye on it. All right. I'll keep an eye on it for you, Stace. All right. Here's David asking, I've got a friend that has a medical question wondering what's the best way to get a hold of you. Well, the same way you did. So I don't know what to tell you, David. I'll send him a text. I'll just say, tell them to call in.

There you go. All right. Thank you, David.

I don't even know if David's a listener. All right. Let's do this one. My dear friend, Dr. Steve, and I hope associates. Hey, thanks, man. Long time no talk. This is Terry, otherwise known as the Boodmaster. Oh, okay. This is Terry the Boodmaster from Patreon. Very fine gentleman. Hey, I wanted to ask, I had some recent testing done, all as a result of this wonderful heart attack I had.

And one of the things that sort of stuck out for me was monocytes. And it showed that my levels were kind of off the charts being at something like 15%. And I...

Of course, studying online, looking at all that lovely information, it kind of put me still at ease. And so I just wondered what that might be referring to. Sure. So, Terry, here's the thing. When you get an unexpected elevated lab test, the first thing you do is repeat it. If you're not expecting the answer, you repeat it, whatever it is.

Now, having said that, if it remains elevated, it could be a lot of things, one of them being stress. You just had a heart attack. So I would expect stress to be a factor. Yeah.

And so get you an Oculus and do the Trip app every night and then check it again. Or do one of the things that Scott was talking about. Chronic inflammatory diseases can do it as well, including inflammatory bowel. But if you have heart disease, you may have chronic inflammation. And I'm assuming they've done a C-reactive protein on you. If they haven't, have them do a high-sensitivity one and see. It may just be that.

Any sort of infections, any sort of autoimmune disorders, some medications, particularly corticosteroids could do it and other medications. So have them look at your medicine and see if that could do it as well. You won't have any symptoms from monocytosis. But if you do have things like fatigue, night sweats, weight loss, joint pain, stuff like that, you're going to want to get checked because you may have an autoimmune disorder. But I doubt it. Yeah.

Okay. And they don't treat it unless you just treat the underlying cause. Yeah, and really work on those inflammatory foods. Oh, yeah. Because that will help drop those monocytes in addition to the meditations and the walking and things of that nature. Right. Lowering stress, period. But talk to whoever ordered that and get them to repeat it. Yeah. And if it's still elevated, you may end up seeing a hematologist, which they...

This is what they do is, you know, primary care people get these tests and instead of doing the workup, they just send everybody to a hematologist with, you know, these mild anemias and stuff like that because they're terrified that they're going to miss something, which I'm OK with. Sure. I'd rather them do too much than too little. But I mean, you know, come on.

All right. We may have time for one more. And Terry, I'm glad you survived your heart attack because we hate to lose any further listeners. You know what I mean? All right, Dr. Scott. Well, let's take a look at the fluid family. By the way, if you want to join the fluid family, go to...

YouTube.com slash at Weird Medicine, the at sign Weird Medicine, and click like and subscribe, and then hit that notification button. And if you click all, then anytime we go live, and it's going to be erratic going forward, particularly after May 11th, you will get a notification. Okay.

All right. And Tyson Clark asked, will the live streams be posted to Spotify after we stop doing regular SiriusXM shows? And absolutely they will. Let me see here. Let's see. I saw somebody. Oh, Crystal Williams. Welcome to the Fluid family. Thank you for joining. And Crystal became a sponsor. Thank you, my friend. And do you have any questions? I did not see any questions.

Oh, no. Donna Oliver's there. She said, I bought a ticket to Hackamania, but I ain't about to fly no damn where. Come on, Donna. Dad Burnett. You need to come. It'll be fun. You can do it. Yeah, we need to get Lorenzo Ariella to come, too. He's got agoraphobia. I've been trying to work with him, but I can't get him to answer me back. So...

Chris Mack says, I had my yearly physical a few weeks ago. My PCP told me some thyroid marker was elevated, indicating something was low. Okay, I can tell you what that is. Oh, my God. He referred me to endocrine. I'm lethargic and gained weight the past few months. So what they're talking about is a thyroid-stimulating hormone test. Mm-hmm.

And you know how we've talked about the pituitary and the testicles? Well, the thyroid's got kind of a loop that's like that too, although it's a three-stage loop. There's the hippocampus, the pituitary, and then the thyroid. So you have thyroid-releasing hormone, then you have thyroid-stimulating hormone, and then you have thyroid hormone. And so when the thyroid hormone is low...

then you will get elevated thyroid-releasing hormone from the hippocampus, but elevated thyroid-stimulating hormone, TSH. So that is primary hypothyroidism. Now, if you have low TSH and low T4 or low thyroid hormone,

Then either the pituitary has failed or the hippocampus has failed, in which case you've got to do the thyroid-releasing hormone. Now, if all three are low, the problem is in the brain. Okay.

I've seen that once maybe in my career. But if the TRH is elevated but the TSH is low and the T4 or, you know, the thyroid hormone is low, then that is a failure of the pituitary gland because it's not sending the signal to the thyroid. Okay? So that would be secondary hypothyroidism. All right. So primary hypothyroidism is failure of the thyroid gland to produce...

thyroid hormone in the presence of the signal from the pituitary. And then secondary would be the pituitary has failed to send the signal. So this doctor just did a TSH and went, well, it's high, so I'm going to send you to endocrinology. And you're probably going to, if you're in a typical town, it's going to be four to six months. And he is currently saying that he is fatigued, which is a symptom of

hypothyroidism or low thyroid. So I would advocate that you get, have them do a complete thyroid panel and maybe that primary care doctor will be stimulated enough to go ahead and start treating you while they're waiting. Right, right. Okay. Yes, you should ask them to repeat the blood work, but I would have them do the complete thyroid profile if they'll do it.

All right. Grover Washington sends, I'm 51. Urine stream upon arising is very slow. Is this age prostate or what? Morning urine can be slow. It may be prostate. It also can be the clenching of that sphincter because of morning wood. You know, morning wood is there so you're not just...

pissing in the cave at night when you're sleeping. That's what that was for. That's probably not what it is. No, it is. I still don't know. All right. Okie doke. Okay. Donna Oliver says if no more planes fall out of the sky, she will come. So, okay. Yeah. It's just a run of bad luck right now.

Okay, Chris Mack says, I don't know if you remember, Dr. Steve, but I started Clomid a few months ago and anastrozole a few weeks later. Could this be affecting my thyroid? My test levels have skyrocketed above 1,100. So Clomid is a drug that stimulates the testicles to make blood.

And then anastrozole is actually a testosterone replacement. So I can imagine that your test levels have skyrocketed. You're probably irritable. I've had a lot of things shot up with that. Maybe you do need to see an endocrinologist because you're on a lot of shit. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of juice. He also said, I've got a history of concussions. I don't know if that makes a difference.

Well, you know, your TSH is elevated, so your thyroid-releasing hormone and your, you know, the hippocampus and the pituitary are working. So head blows won't affect the thyroid gland. Or the pituitary. Yeah. No, they might affect the pituitary. Depending on where it is, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's probably not that.

All right. Crystal Williams says, I know you can see the pulse in the carotid artery, but my three-year-old's neck pulsating is so noticeable. Okay. Three-year-olds, they have very thin skin and they have very prominent veins because they don't have a lot of fat and a lot of muscle. And so it's usually very obvious. I can't tell you if it's abnormal without seeing it, but just ask the pediatrician next time you're there, Crystal. And...

Says, I've got two other children, never noticed the pulsating and the carotid like with her. So I wonder if those are boys because that could be something different. Yeah, it could be different. Yeah. Okie doke. Anything else? Oh, so and Grover Washington, get your, yeah, just get your prostate checked. That's easy. That's easy. And stay hydrated. Let's see here. Crystal Williams says, I read recently we have a lot of the same DNA as banana. Just curious if this is true. Yeah, we have a common ancestor with plants. That's absolutely true.

And, you know, we have common ancestors with all kinds of other, you know, species. If you go back far enough and the common ancestor is going to be, it might be a single celled thing, but it's still a common ancestor. And DNA was, you know, after RNA was probably first self-replicating molecules, but then DNA, that was a huge advance in DNA.

evolution in this world was the advent of dioxiribonucleic acid. Is that right? That doesn't sound right. Dioxiribonucleic acid. I was thinking of diacetylmorphine, which is heroin, which was another question we didn't get to today. But

That was a big move forward, but we have a lot of common ancestors with, you know, things that, you know, anything that came from that first group of cells that developed DNA, you know. So, yeah. Yeah. I wonder what the—let's see what the percentage is. What's the percentage? Let's ask. Percentage of common DNA between bananas and humans. Wow.

Alright, let's see what it says 50% and that's something 50% crazy now if you look at between bananas and chimps which are closer to us Yeah, we are we our common ancestor is closer is 98% Hmm. Yeah, so 50 to 60 percent here human genomes have recognizable counterpart in the banana gene. I mean that crazy Yeah Wow

Unbelievable. Yeah, when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimpanzees share 96% sequence identity. That's wild. Anyway, I knew it was high. I didn't know it was that freaking high. That's crazy. You got any other questions for them? That was a good one. We got time for one more, then I got to get out of here because I got to beat the boss home. We're not going to play? I've got to. Hoover called before, took up our 20 minutes of playing.

Hey, the last one. The one pun. Yeah. Chronic pain even when trying to sleep. Sleeping in an RV bed full time. That is bowing in the middle. Anything recommended to help get to sleep? Yeah. First, let's figure out what's causing the chronic pain.

I mean, that's number one. And the bed is bowing in the middle? Yeah. Is that what they said? Yeah, bowing in the middle. You've got to fix that. Yeah, I mean, a little piece of plywood underneath might help. Yeah, mine was doing that, and it turned out that the slats had fallen down. Yeah, that was a plywood. And it wasn't from vigorous intercourse either, by the way, just in case you were wondering. I see.

Real quick, real quick, let's see. The pain comes from shoulder blade injuries and back problems from car accidents. Okay. When I fell down these stairs and I had chronic pain for about four or five months, it was very difficult to sleep at night. Go ahead.

Well, go see Dr. Scott. Yeah, I was going to say, find somebody who might help you with the pain with the shoulder blades in his back from the car accident. You know, some things that can help with sleep at night with pain. Magnesium is a good thing to take. You know, that might help a little bit. They've shown, you know, curcumin, turmeric is a nice anti-inflammatory, natural anti-inflammatory. So there's some things that might help. But yeah, I would really focus on...

Physical therapy. Yoga. Yeah. Especially if it's shoulder blades and maybe tension and back pain. There's a number of things. I would really work on that and check and see if your slat's broken. Yeah. And you can see a physiatrist, too. They're called Physical Medicine and Rehab. That's the name of their specialty. And they can do trigger point injections and all kinds. That's what fixed me up was physiatry. You can get some imaging if you need it. Between Dr. Scott.

And physiatry, I am now completely pain-free, knock on wood. You know? All right. Good deal. Well, listen, pun, take care. Good luck. All right. And hopefully try some of these things we said and see if that'll help you if you can't find someone to help you. Okay. 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. We may be relegated to Sunday nights right now because of sports, but just listen to it on demand. That's the way to do it if you're going to listen on SiriusXM. 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, and check out Dr. Scott's website at

simplyherbals.net. 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.