Shownotes Transcript
Well, that's because you're an idiot. You see? You see? You're stupid minds. Stupid. Stupid. If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirius XM 103 and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of a, you know, a clown. Like?
You give me the respect that I'm entitled to! I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got Ebola vibes dripping from my nose. Up the leprosy of the heart valve, exacerbating my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and blast it with the wave, an ultrasonic, echographic, and a pulsitating shave. I want a magic pill for all my ailments, the health equivalent of Citizen Kane. Now in the tablet.
From the world-famous Cardiff Electric Network Studios in beautiful downtown OJ City, it's Weird Medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show on the History Broadcast Radio, now a podcast.
I'm Dr. Steve, and this is a show for people who'd never listened 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-POOHEAD.
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 you hear with a grain of salt. Don't act on anything you hear on this show without talking it over with your health care provider. I guess I'm speaking in the royal we today. Don't forget stuff.drsteve.com. That's stuff.drsteve.com.
And if you have a friend or if you have a stringed instrument, get the Rode Robotic Tuner. R-O-A-D-I-E dot DrSteve.com It really is the greatest thing ever invented for a stringed instrument, particularly if you want to restring the damn thing, because this thing will really help you with that. I had to restring my bass, and it was a godsend. Check out Dr. Scott's website at SimplyHerbals.net.
Check out our Patreon. We've got a bunch of classic episodes going up right now, and they see everything first. And when we go into the new mode...
We're going to be shuttling a lot of stuff to Patreon before it gets seen anywhere else. So patreon.com slash weirdmedicine. And still, for five bucks or less, I'll say fluid to your mama or any other damn thing you want me to say within reason. I mean, come on. Cameo.com slash weirdmedicine. Yes, Cameo still exists. And I'm still on there. I think Shout Out didn't make it.
So you can go to shoutoutone.com slash weirdmedicine, but I don't think there's anything there anymore. You know, you got Cameo kind of going down the toilet and then, oh, let's make a Cameo clone website. It didn't really have any differential advantage.
So anyway, but they were very nice over there. I will say that. And if they're still there and they're flourishing, then I'm the asshole. All right. Don't forget Dr. Scott's website. It's simplyherbals.net. That's simplyherbals.net. Home of the world famous...
CBD and peppermint oil nasal spray. It's pretty good for nasal inflammation and what ails you. Check that out at Dr. Scott's website again at simplyherbals.net. And check me out on Normal World with Dave Landau. I just did one on why certain vaginas smell fishy. And it seems like, look, it seems perhaps that could be disrespectful. But in fact...
It's a real phenomenon. There is a thing called bacterial vaginosis, and when good bacteria in the vagina called lactobacillus, which, by the way, is evidence that the creator of the universe has a sense of humor because lactobacillus, which makes healthy vaginal flora, also is the bacteria that makes yogurt. So there you go. Also,
Pickles, pickled peppers, those lactobacillus, those are lactose fermenting bacteria. Anyway, so yeah, lactobacillus. And when the lactobacillus dies off or is displaced by quote unquote bad bacteria, often
gardenerella, but there are other bacteria that can do it as well. The vagina will now sort of sour and take on a more fishy odor. And you can detect this by getting a sample of vaginal fluid and looking at it under the microscope. You'll see things called clue cells, which are basically mucous membrane cells that are covered in bacteria.
And there's also a test called the WIF test. And the WIF test is just exactly what it sounds like. You take that same sample of vaginal fluid. You put a strong base on there like potassium hydroxide to lyse the cell membranes of the – or the bacterial membrane there.
And then you take a whiff, hence the name. And the whiff test gives you a smell of fish if bacterial vaginosis is present. Very often they'll treat this with antibiotics like metronidazole, which kind of sucks because you can't drink on that stuff. I mean, that may be actually good considering one of the topics we're going to cover in a little bit.
Alcohol and metronidazole interact, and the metronidazole prevents the full metabolism of the ethanol, and it makes you sick as a dog because you get an overload of intermediate products of metabolism.
So, ethanol goes to acetaldehyde and then is further broken down. The acetaldehyde is what makes you sick. And there are some people that can't metabolize alcohol and they will get stuck at acetaldehyde as well. And they'll get flushing and malaise when they drink. And if you take a certain drug called Antabuse,
It also does the same thing that the metronidazole does. It prevents the full metabolism of alcohol into its broken down products and makes you sick because you have a buildup of this acetaldehyde, which, by the way, when my dad made wine, he thought he was –
He wanted to be a vintner, but he wanted to use grapes that were growing on his property. These were fox grapes. They're not really made to make wine out of, but he tried it.
And it tasted terrible. And so I was an organic chemist at the time. I was working in an organic chemistry lab. And I took a sample of his wine, and it had a preponderance on the gas chromatograph of acetaldehyde and also acetic acid. So acetic acid is—
Basically vinegar, which alcohol will, if exposed to oxygen, will degrade into. And, you know, obviously he was getting oxygen into his barrels when he was trying to age his wine. So anyway, so, God, why was I talking about this? Anyway, I got to go back and listen to this.
Good God. See, I'm too old for this shit. This is what happens. You get these senior moments and you start wondering why you're even walking the earth. Hang on just a second. I'll be right back. Okay. Oh, for God's sake. Okay. We were talking about vaginal flora and the whiff test. Right? That was it, wasn't it? What a damn idiot. What in the hell?
I just really just, yeah, lost my mind there for a second. Anyway, so check out the normal world thing and don't make me talk about that. All right. Thank you very much. Is there anything interesting here? Yeah. Did you hear about the guy that got rabies from a transplant? Yeah.
So this person got an organ transplant and then subsequently died from rabies. And this is not the first time this has happened. And I am a little bit concerned how this happened. This was a Michigan patient. I'll just read you. Michigan patient dies of rabies from a transplanted kidney.
And then the donors, other recipients got preventative shots. So they went and found everyone that got organs from this donor and gave them rabies shots, which the good news is the rabies vaccine is very protective very quickly. So you can wait till you're exposed to rabies to get the vaccine. And by the way, anyone that...
thinks that I'm anti-vaccine because I'm not in favor of mandating a vaccine that has not been approved.
approved by the FDA. There you go. Rabies vaccine is awesome. Measles vaccine is awesome. Everyone should take the measles vaccine unless you've got a reason not to. Measles kills one in a thousand kids. I happened to bring up RFK talking about vitamin A and got a dunning email from someone saying that I've drunk the Kool-Aid.
Vitamin A is proven to improve and reduce mortality in people who have severe case of measles. That's what I was trying to convey. Not that you should take vitamin A instead of taking the vaccine, for F's sake. Anyway...
All right, enough of that anyway. See, I got triggered talking about rabies vaccine. Okay, a Michigan resident who received a transplant in December died after having been infected with rabies from the new organ. Public health investigation determined they contracted rabies through the transplanted organ. That's just horrible. You know, you need a kidney transplant.
You've got kidney failure. You get a new kidney, brand new kidney. And then the next thing you know, you got rabies and you're dead.
It says, based on the concerning symptoms of the kidney recipient who died, the CDC worked with Missouri health officials to intercept a fourth corneal graft before it could be implanted into a Missouri resident. How many corneas did this person have? Even before rabies was confirmed in the donor. All corneal tissue recipients have gotten post-exposure prophylaxis shots to prevent rabies and are currently healthy.
The donor did not show traditional rabies symptoms, according to the agency. But this donor donated their organs, which means that they were brain dead. So they had something happen. What did they think caused this person's brain death? I'd be very interested to know that. The organ donors were exposed to a wild animal in Idaho five weeks before death, likely a skunk.
They notified close contacts of both the donor and the kidney recipient. Those with potential risk for getting rabies have been advised to start rabies post-exposure prophylaxis. I'm just trying to see if there's, yeah, the Michigan Health Department declined to provide additional information. Potential organ donors in the United States are screened for all kinds of viruses, bacteria, and other infections, but rabies isn't among those tests.
for a couple of reasons. One, the test takes a long time and the organs are only viable for a limited window. And because the infection is so rare in people, so you just take your chances. The responsibility for screenings falls on the organ procurement organizations. Now, I will... Listen, I'm going to get a bunch of... I'll get dunning emails about this too.
I am very pro-organ donation. I do think that we need to come up with a different system, and the perfect system would be that we are able to quickly grow our own organs. What if you could take stem cells from someone's foreskin and grow them a new kidney in the laboratory, if you could do it quickly enough? You know, some people wait a year for a transplant. Well, what if you could grow a new kidney in two months?
then that would be a perfect scenario. We are not anywhere close to being able to do that yet. But artificial kidneys are kind of unsatisfactory. They might work for a while, but not for a long time. And we have artificial pancreases, sort of. We've got sensors that sense blood sugar and then a pump that pumps insulin in response to that. It's external.
But it would really be nice if we could just grow our own organs. Until then, we need organ donation. People should be organ donors. You're done with your organs at that point. And they can only take this, these organs from someone who is, whose heart is beating and oxygen is being pumped through their lungs, but their brain, but they're dead.
So this would be someone who is what we call brain dead, which means there's no brain function. It's unrecoverable. And when worked up properly, we don't make mistakes on that. But the times that you've heard of stories where people were declared brain dead and then they woke up.
Either it was a miracle from above or they were, which is more likely, they were not declared brain dead properly. There is a method for doing that. There's a protocol from the American Academy of Neurology that is pretty ironclad. No one who has gone through the full protocol and been declared brain dead, if it's been done properly, has ever woken up again.
So I can outline the procedure for you a little bit because we do this quite a bit. The first thing you have to do is determine that there's no brainstem function. So brainstem is part of the brain –
I'm sorry, part of the spinal cord just under the brain. Okay. And it does lots of different functions in there. A bunch of brainstem reflexes, one of those being the corneal reflex. So if you get a speck of dust in your eye and you feel it, you blink and you jerk, that's a corneal reflex. Pupillary reflex, when you see light and your pupils contract and get smaller. There are others, gag reflex reflex.
There's several of them. And so we go through and look at all of the brainstem reflexes, including putting cold water in someone's ear and trying to see if you can make their eyes jiggle.
And it's called calorimetric testing. If there's no brainstem function, and that includes not breathing, if the person is breathing, they're not brain dead. So they'll be on the ventilator. If the ventilator is set at 12 breaths per minute, but they're breathing 15, they're not brain dead. Okay? So...
Now, when someone's on a ventilator, it's really hard to tell if they're able to breathe. So you have to do a thing called an apnea test. The apnea test is basically a test where you oxygenate the patient for 10 to 30 minutes at 100% oxygen. This will get their blood oxygen higher than it's ever been in the patient's life.
And the cool thing is, is that hemoglobin can hold on to that and release it in a controlled fashion for a long time. And I'm talking 10, 15 minutes. So you put the patient on 100% oxygen, you oxygenate them up, and then you do what we call a blood gas, which is where you stick a needle in an artery, often in the wrist.
And you get the values. You know, what's the pH? What's the blood oxygen? What's the carbon dioxide? Now, you turn off the ventilator and you take an oxygen cannula and you put it into the tube that's going in there just to keep oxygen in the general vicinity.
And now you wait. And you do vital signs every minute if the patient becomes unstable, which they almost never do. It's crazy. It's the longest 10 minutes as a doctor you'll ever spend. But you do vital signs every 10 minutes, I mean every minute. And if they become unstable, you have to terminate the test and do this another way.
But, you know, one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and then, you know, you go all the full 10 minutes.
When you're sitting there watching someone who has no ventilator on, that you have taken the ventilator off of and you're trying to determine if they're brain dead, and you sit there for 10 minutes, it is excruciatingly long. And I'm sure even more so for the patient, although these patients are not aware of their surroundings.
So anyway, at the end of 10 minutes, you get another blood gas and you hook the ventilator back up. And if the blood gas shows certain changes, you know, a certain level of increase in carbon dioxide, which is a product of metabolism and a decrease in oxygen of a certain level, then you can—and there was no breathing.
It's key that you watch the patient for breathing. If they take a deep breath at any point, you terminate the test because they're not brain dead if they're breathing. So no breathing and you get these changes, then you can declare the patient dead. Now, that really – well, let me back up.
then that is a positive apnea test. The declaration of brain death requires another step. And this demonstrates, assuming that the patient isn't on a drug that can mimic brain death and they're not, you know, their vital signs are otherwise normal. In other words, you didn't just now pull them out of ice-cold water. So their temperature is normal, blood pressure is normal, they're otherwise stable.
and you've done all of this, that shows that there truly is no brainstem function.
Then the thing that you have to do after that is to prove that it's permanent. And there's several ways that you can do that. You can do another apnea test 24 hours later, or you can send them down for what's called a nuclear cerebral blood flow study. And that actually looks for activity in the brain and blood flow in the brain. And if there isn't any, then you can declare the patient deceased. And then once you do that,
They're still on the ventilator. Their heart's still beating, but they're gone. And that's when the donor services comes in and takes them back to the operating room and harvests organs if they're an organ donor. There is also a thing called donation after circulatory death where you take the patient back into the – it's a patient that is not brain dead yet.
But the family has decided they want to donate their organs, and the patient is very soon going to pass away. You take them into the operating room. You make sure they're comfortable, and you wait for them to pass.
pass away. Then when they do, you hook them back up to the life support and then they harvest organs there. And harvesting organ sounds bad, but it's, I don't know, they procure the organs, might be a better way to put it. But it is a life-saving procedure.
I had one of my really good friends get a heart transplant and it was – he was maybe the greatest portrait artist I've ever known or that I've ever seen. I've seen a lot of portrait artists but this guy could capture the essence of the person. It was incredible. And
And because of that, and he was a little bit over the age, the university where he went agreed to do his transplant. And he lived for quite some time after that and continued to make art. So that's the procedure.
Now, the thing is that you need to know what caused this. Was it a heart attack? Was it a drug overdose? Was it some bacterial infection that caused the patient to lapse into a coma and then all of a sudden they just died while they were on the ventilator? In this case, it sounds like this person had...
Some infection of some sort died, but it turns out that the infection was actually rabies. It's not just something you're going to just test for if you don't have symptoms or a history of being exposed to an animal. They found out about that after the fact. So it's just very tragic for the person affected.
the other person who died that got the kidney. Everybody else apparently is okay. And I'm assuming that they did not implant any more organs from that collection in anybody. It's not like they could go, well, we'll just give people the other kidney and give them a rabies vaccine. They're not going to do that. So anyway, rabies sucks. When I was a kid, rabies was still a thing. And
And there was no treatment for it. And there...
Well, let me back that up. They weren't vaccinating animals for it yet, but they did have a treatment for it. If you watch that show 1923, you know, spoiler alert, one of the wives got bit by a rabid wolf and they had to give her 12 abdominal –
And so they did have rabies vaccine even in 1923. So we had treatment for it if you caught it in time. You got bit by a dog and you went and got taken care of. And they would want to capture the dog if they could so that they could tell if it had rabies or not. Anyway, it was a big thing. But anyway.
stray dogs were like monsters back then. And I have a friend who's from India, and she grew up in a village where they didn't have rabies vaccine for dogs. And wild, you know, just dogs walking through your neighborhood were terrifying because they were, you know, they didn't know if they had rabies or not. So to them,
were monsters. And when she would come over to my house, I'd have to put my dogs up because she was just terrified. I mean, you never saw anybody that scared of a dog. I mean, the dog would just be sitting there and she couldn't breathe.
So that's how bad or, you know, how intensely it was beaten into her as a kid. Don't mess with dogs that you don't know or dogs at all. But anyway, it's a very tragic case. I'm not sure what they can do to prevent this unless they're going to start screening everyone who's an organ donor for rabies, which doesn't seem to make sense either. Screening tests should screen for things that are common.
But we do have in oncology, there's a sort of a somewhat analogous thing. There's these people that have a deficiency in a certain enzyme. And when they get certain chemotherapy called 5-fluorouracil, it will almost kill them. And it causes the mucous membrane to slough off. And, you know, it's just it's awful.
But they don't screen for it because it's rare. But every single person that I've ever known that this happened to said if I had known about this, I would have gladly paid the $250 to get screening in retrospect.
You know, if you ask somebody up front, hey, it's one in a million. Do you want to pay $250? They're going to go, no. But then if it happens to them, then they're going to look back in retrospect and say, yeah, I should have done that. So anyway, these rare complications are really kind of terrifying. It's like getting hit by lightning. It's terrifying. Or get, you know, a tornado. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I had a girlfriend who was in Oklahoma, California.
In the early 90s when the F5 went through and her house was completely gone, it was gone. And her kid, she saved her kid's life by just laying on top of him. And she said she could feel the tornado trying to pull.
And this is teleologic, meaning that we're assigning meaning to something where there's no meaning. But she could feel the wind and the tornado trying to suck the kid out from under her. But she saved his life, and they're both great. So good for them. Anyway, all right. Well, let's do some questions. I've got some questions just from your voicemail.
And if you want to, send in a message at 347-766-4323. And let's try this one. All right, sir.
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That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash Spotify. Hey, Dr. Steve. I am watching Rich Voss on Rogan. Oh, Rich Voss. And you're talking about a... Wait, Rich Voss was on Rogan? I missed that. I got to watch that. Metabolic or some type of...
cancer panel. Yeah. Like, there's a comprehensive cancer test that'll tell you if you have any type of cancer out there at all. But is that true? No. Is there really a cancer...
Well, I guess what I'm asking, is there cancer that wouldn't show up on a blood work? Yeah, there's all kinds of them. So it's not going to show every single cancer because what it's doing is looking for specific cancer. So the old school way is doing things like complete blood count. You do a complete blood count. If you have a blood cancer, it'll show up.
You have way too many white blood cells or you have way too many red blood cells or you have weird looking lymphocytes or something like that, you know, that's leukemias and those sorts of things. So that's one blood test that would detect a specific type of cancer.
Then there are these tumor marker tests. You can do CA-125, looks at things like ovarian cancer, the prostatic-specific antigen, looking for prostate cancer. And then carcinoembryonic antigen is a sign of colon cancer and some other cancers.
You could screen for those. Those are expensive tests. And remember, we've talked about this before. The definition of a good screening test is that the test is sensitive, meaning that it'll cast a wide net and catch everything. You'll have a lot of false positives, but you'll catch all the true positives. And...
So you want it to be sensitive. You want it to be inexpensive. The disease needs to be treatable, and the disease needs to be prevalent, in other words, relatively common. So you don't want to screen the whole population for some rare-ass disease, right? So these tumor marker tests are pretty sensitive.
And they, you know, the disease is common and it's treatable. But the problem is the tests are not inexpensive. So they may fail on that. There are some people with a lot of money that will compel, you know, somebody to do these tests for them. And that's OK. There are blood protein tests that look for abnormal proteins.
which are expressed in diseases like multiple myeloma. Now, the interesting one to me are the circulating tumor cell tests. These are looking for cancer cells or cancer DNA. There's circulating tumor DNA that it's emerging that looks for abnormal DNA that is indicative of certain cancers.
because these cells are abnormal. They grow in a disorganized way, and they'll die and release their DNA into your bloodstream, and you can detect that.
There are multi-cancer early detection tests, and that's what I think they were probably talking about. They look for traces of multiple types of cancer in a single blood sample. They may use urine or saliva or other body fluids. There's a test called GALLERY. That's an example of a multi-cancer detection blood test. Let me see. I can pull up the GALLERY test.
Okay, it says here cancer is growing in the body, shed DNA into the bloodstream. So ding, ding, ding. I give myself a bell for that. The DNA fragment is going to act like a unique fingerprint of cancer and the gallery test screens for many of the deadliest cancers before they become symptomatic. And every time you take the test gallery screens for more than hundreds of thousands of DNA sites of the most informative DNA regions to screen for many of the deadliest cancers before they become symptomatic.
So, you know, I wonder how much this is. Let's look here and see what you have to do to get this. Okay, let's look at the frequency, frequently. Okay, here's cost. Okay, the cost, $949. Of course, if you catch something really early, you know, early detection, you know, what's it worth to you?
I could buy travel BiPAP or I could get the gallery test. You may be able to use pre-tax dollars in your flexible spending account or health savings account. See, I don't have that. I'm too old for that. They won't let me donate to it anymore.
Let's see. What are my options if I can't afford it? Well, there's a flexible payment plan. 0% interest for 12 months. So what would that be? Okay, 0% interest for 12 months. Let's see if my echo's still on. Echo, what's 949 divided by 12?
949 divided by 12 is approximately 79.0833. Okay, so, you know, 80 bucks. 80 bucks a month for 12 months. That's not too bad.
Is it covered by health insurance? It says a limited number of health insurance plans. So I'm okay with this. As long as there are not too many terrifying false positives with it, I would have to look at the data. I'm okay with it. Listen, I'm okay with any sort of early detection thing.
And this one is relatively new to me, but I'm, you know, the science is emerging. It's there for a lot of this stuff, and I'm cool with it. Anything we can do. But that's not really, it's not...
a screening test in the traditional sense. In other words, it's too expensive to screen everybody. And that's when you're talking about screening tests. So what happens is only people that can afford this can get it. And that kind of sucks balls, too, because we've already got somewhat of a two-tier or three-tier system in this country. And
But if you can afford it for right now, now, if more and more people do it, the price will come down and we may get to the point where we're just screening. You get to be 50 and you have, you know, this early detection cancer test.
It's not quite a Star Trek tricorders, but if I decide to do it, I'll let you guys know. And remember, just because the SiriusXM show is going away, the podcast and live streams and one-offs at youtube.com slash at weirdmedicine will continue. As a matter of fact, I'll be doing more and more of those. This would be the perfect kind of thing.
And, you know, to go over how it works, how much it costs and go do it and and then share the results with with everybody. So and, you know, hell, if it shows that I've got an early cancer or something, which is unusual, it's my age.
You know, walking everybody through the treatment and stuff made Disney demystified. You never know. So I appreciate the question. I wonder if that's Mike. That sounds like Mike from New York, but I'm not sure. Anyway. All right. Very good. Let's see here. Let's try this one.
Hey, how you guys doing? Good, man. How are you doing? Good. Glad to hear it. Yeah, thanks. Hey, Dr. Steve. Yes. Just want to say, been a fan of yours, been listening to you since, what, 07? Yeah. When you sent your shitty homemade wine to Opie. I just want to say thank you. If you want to hear me get shit on...
for 45 minutes or however long it was, look for Suck My Pino with Dr. Steve on, you know, one of the, it's on YouTube. The guy spelled it wrong, but it was, the bottle of wine said S-U-K-M-A-I-P-I-N-O-T, like suck my pinot noir. And, you know, Opie didn't get the joke right away. And
And the guy that did the video didn't know how to spell Pino, but it's okay. It's in there. And yeah, that's the first time I knew that I was kind of
one of the team was because they shit on me for 20 minutes straight. I happened to be listening when they did it and I was laughing my ass off. It was pretty funny. Anyway, sure. Oh, you're done. Thanks, man. Uh, I've called in a couple of times. Excellent. You've always answered my question. Uh, usually by text, never been on the air. Oh, well, okay. So, uh,
Now I'm not texting. I'm just answering questions on the air. So there you go. So you've...
attained Valhalla, my friend. Two questions for you. Yeah. With my work schedule, I sometimes have to go up to six weeks without ejaculating. By about week three, when I urinate and empty my bladder, I feel something more in there and I get a little propulsion out
outcomes, what I assume is seminal fluid. I'm sure this is just a normal process, but I was wondering. I think it's going to be prostatic fluid, to be honest with you. You may have prostatic congestion. If you were here, I would ask you if you feel pressure, do you feel pain in the lower pelvis? Prostatic congestion is caused by lack of sexual activity. It's a
as opposed to blue balls, which is epididymal hypertension.
And they're two separate things. But prostatic congestion can then lead to a fluid overload in that part of the body. And passing a large bowel movement can express out some fluid or you may be able to just do it with pelvic pressure. Just like everything else in the medical world, does that have a name? Oh.
Oh, well, I think it's prostatic congestion and just you're just expressing fluid. We don't really have a name for that that I'm aware of, of the actual process of expressing fluid. Although here's a fun trivia question for you or trivia answer for you. The medical term for urination is not urination. It's micturition, M-I-C-T-U-I-N-T.
U-R-I-T-I-O-N, micturition. Their name for that process. I'd be interested to know what that is. Also, second question. By the way, if you're on the road, you can beat off. It's fine. If you go in six weeks and this is happening, then try beating off at least once every three weeks. Just empty out the pipes. This will stop. That's true.
How common is it for a woman to be orgasmic with just nipple stimulation?
I'm curious of how many people can do that. My wife was that way, but unfortunately she has the breast cancer. Oh, no. Got them all, got them both whacked off. Oh, my goodness. I'm sorry. Anyhow, just curious. Again, thanks again, Dr. Steve. Love you guys. Bye. All right, man. Hey, listen, regarding your wife, she had bilateral mastectomies. In other words, she had to have the breast tissue removed.
There are plastic surgeons out there that are geniuses at breast reconstruction. If that's something she's interested in, email me. I'll hook you up with a guy down in Atlanta. And I'm telling you, if you look at the before and after images of women who have had double mastectomies or
You wouldn't believe it. And this guy, I mean, it's disrespectful to say that, you know, his results are jack worthy and stupid shit like that. I'm not trying to be funny. This guy is a genius and I will hook you up with him. So and anybody else out there that's interested now, he ain't cheap. I mean, you don't get Michelangelo for nothing, but insurance may pay for the biggest portion of it.
But anyway, just email me if she's interested in that. So nipple orgasms, it's really hard. 80% of women have an increase in orgasm satisfaction with nipple stimulation, and there's probably a reason for that.
You know, when you stimulate the nipples, there is a release of a hormone called oxytocin. And it's sort of the trust hormone. And men get it right before they, you know, bust a nut. And that's why no matter who you're with, right at that moment, they're the most beautiful person in the world. And then as soon as you're done ejaculating, you're like, oh, my God, what the fuck did I just do? But it's oxytocin is the thing that does that.
But 12% of women, estimated 12% of women, can actually achieve orgasm through stimulation of non-genital zones. In other words, not just clitoral stimulation, but things including the nipples. Now, there have been cases of people who were quadriplegic and had no feeling below the waist that could have orgasmic problems.
experiences when, say, their arm was rubbed a certain way. So it is, you know, orgasm is a really interesting phenomena, not completely understood, obviously. It does seem to be a spinal reflex, but there's a lot of nerves and things involved. And there's mental stuff involved, too. There are times when you're thinking about something that you can't bust a nut no matter what you do.
And women have the same thing. If they're grossed out by some guy, then they may find it very difficult to have an orgasm at that moment. There's a lot of individual variation in this. But anyway, yeah. So I'm sorry to hear about your wife. But like I said, email me if they're not hooking her. And if they're going to hook her up with someone local, just look at
The pictures, they will have a portfolio. You want to see their results. And if you're not satisfied with their results, then you're going to want to shop around. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Let's see. Who is this? Hey, Dr. Steve, Casey, Dr. Scott. Oh, hi. And at an Austin studio. It's your good friend, Tom. Hey, Tom. I just wanted to start the call off firstly by...
Thanking you for the years of this show. Thank you, man. All the way back to the XM Saturday Night Virus. Now, the Saturday Night Virus, that was the shit. That was... Those were the golden days, because we would...
If we weren't in New York doing the show and then partying afterward with all the XM folks, we were sending it in and then having parties at the house and listening to it on XM on Saturday night because it was so cool to hear yourself on the radio. And if you remember, I used to have my buddy Karthik come in, and he –
I want to tell you a story about him. So those who have listened for a long time, I used to have another doctor on the show named—I don't remember what he went by, but I think it was just Karthik. And he came to my poker class. I don't believe he had ever touched a deck of cards before he showed up at my poker class.
And by the time he left, he was really good. He started practicing, playing online a lot. The guy is now ranked on the WSOP, like he's, you know, 4,000 in the world, but that's a big deal. He's won half a million in career winnings just playing poker, and he's a doctor. So it's just, you know, extra money to put in his retirement account, I guess. I don't know what he does with the money.
But anyway, I just wanted to let you guys know about that. It was kind of cool. So one of my students actually made good. Jefferson the shyster that used to be in this studio.
and went with us on one of the New York trips to do Weird Medicine. It was the one where double vasectomy Todd tasted Big A and Pat from Unaki's urine. And we just did that to make him taste urine. I mean, just come on. The experiment worked. He was able to detect the diabetic urine, but we just did it to make him drink piss. But...
Jefferson the shyster would have been the true star because he was the best poker player I'd ever seen. And he was even better than Karthik. And if he had wanted to be a poker star, he could. He was an attorney and he had a young, beautiful wife and want to mess with it. So he just plays for fun and destroys in the local games. But he could have been nationally wrecked. But anyway. All right. Let's see here.
era of Weird Medicine. Yeah, thanks, man. You've been a staple in my listening. Well, the reason I was talking about Karthik is he used to come over and then we would do the show and then go downstairs and listen to it as it played on SiriusXM. It was really cool back then. Me and my wife both. And I just want to thank you for the dedication and years of knowledge you've shared with everyone. Yeah, thanks. I'll tell you what, COVID fucked the whole thing up.
And I'm still pissed about that. You know, we had two years in there where we talked about nothing else but this asshole virus.
And it got more and more political. And people are still mad about it, about the virus. And, you know, I tried to stay on the middle path, just talking about the science. But you don't know everything and you, you know, anyway, it's just I'm glad that shit's over. But to me, that's when the show got ruined. Now, listen, it did allow me to...
have my spouse in the studio for two years and she'd never really shown much interest in it before, but she knew that I needed a co-host and, you know, Tacey's time of topics and all that stuff came out of that. And it was, it was fun. And of course, you know, she was the kind of, oh, you guys, no guys, don't be saying, you know, that kind of stuff.
I'm not going to call her any name like Opie might have called her, but, you know, that behavior. But it's still fun. And, you know, whenever she and Dr. Scott would gang up on me, I could use the Lord and Lady Douchebag.
Lord and lady douchebag drop. So, you know, some fun things came out of it. But, you know, this used to be just a fun show where we were shoving vodka tampons in orifices and doing breathalyzer tests and stuff and talking about dick cheese. The next thing I know, we're thrust into this situation where I got to talk about a really serious topic where people are dying. It really did kind of suck. But anyway, here we go. Question. Yeah. Alcohol. Yes. All right.
You read about how bad alcohol is. You read about how alcohol has benefits. It is a large staple of our society. Most everyone drinks alcohol.
But if you read up on it, it's terrible. Yeah. Colarchal cancer, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer. Now they're saying it's bad for the pancreas. Yeah. Obviously, I know you like to drink. I did like to drink. But what is your opinion on alcohol? Yeah, I'm – it is – listen. Yeah.
Alcohol is a part of our life. It's, you know, it's weird that a yeast that we have a common ancestor with can produce a waste product that makes people feel good and then feel really shitty the next day.
Alcohol consumption does significantly increase the risk of various cancers, and there's no known safe level, but we do know that it is dose-dependent. In other words, the more you drink, the more likely it is that you're going to get some disease from it, and very often it's cancer. Now, there are some studies that showed a potential protective effect of light to moderate drinking on cardiovascular disease.
So, how do you weigh those two? It's very difficult to do. Alcohol is a known carcinogen. The World Health Organization advises that there's no level that they can say, "Well, this is safe," just like smoking. You can't say, "Well, you could have two cigarettes, but you can't have 10." We just don't know. But like cigarettes, there's a dose-response relationship. The more alcohol is consumed, the higher the risk of cancer.
The alcohol, like we talked about earlier, is metabolized into acetaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen, damages DNA. It also affects hormone levels, and that may affect cancer development as well. There is some contradictory evidence. Some studies suggest light to moderate alcohol consumption may offer some cardiovascular benefits.
It's not universally supported, though, but it kind of is. I think if you talk to most researchers on this, that they'll say, yeah, there is some cardioprotective effect. It may be from the resveratrol in red wine.
because there are those that will say that if you drink red grape juice, you get the same benefit as drinking. But heavy or binge drinking is associated with a definite increase in cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke.
So, that's the double whammy, you know, cancer and heart attack and stroke. Again, dose-dependent, the more you drink, the more likely it is. You know, for cardiovascular health, a lot of experts recommend limiting alcohol consumption or abstaining altogether.
And it is, as I said, it is very, very difficult to determine the risk benefit ratio between alcohol and preventing heart attack and stroke and alcohol and contributing to cancer. But we do know just, you know, if you're not a heavy everyday drinker, your risk is lower than if you are. That's the best thing I can say. All right. Let's see here.
Hey, Dr. Steve. This is Dave from Delaware. Hey, Dave. Listening to your episode right now, talking about your arms and your hands falling asleep. Yeah. My arm that I'm not laying on falls asleep at night. Interesting. Quite often. And it doesn't matter which arm it is. It's always the arm that is towards the ceiling. Yeah. Any ideas? Question mark?
This guy must dictate a lot at work because listen to this. Any ideas? Question mark? I do that too. I dictate a lot in my job and sometimes I'll be talking to somebody and I'll say, you know, is that really something? Question mark. Throwing in parentheses and quotation marks and stuff. Anyway, I'm wondering...
if you're laying on your side, how you're holding that other arm. Now, people who wake up with their arm asleep, sometimes they have carpal tunnel syndrome. So I do want you to get that checked. But I wonder if you're throwing your arm behind your head at some point when you're sleeping. There is a thing called Saturday night palsy where people will pass out
from alcohol and they'll lay on their arm in such a way that now all of a sudden not only is their wrist and hand numb, but they can't move it. People think they have a stroke, but it's really a thing called radial nerve compression neuropathy. And it's really kind of disturbing when it happened. All right, very good. Well, thanks always. Go to Dr. Scott, even when he's not here. Check out his website at simplyherbals.net. Thanks to everyone who's made this show happen over the years.
including Lewis Johnson and Jim McClure and Roland Campos, Travis Teft, Sam Roberts, Jim Norton, Anthony Cumia and Greg Opie Hughes. Who am I forgetting? Dennis Falcone, Paul Ofcharski, who's not there anymore, Lewis Johnson, all those fine fellers over there. And if I forgot you, I'm sorry, I'm just doing this off the top of my head. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel.
Sirius XM channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern, on demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at drsteve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses, get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Don't forget hackamania.com.
Offer code WEIRD. See you there.