April 2, 2025 • 22 mins
(April 02, 2025)
Neil Saavedra is in for Bill while he is out on vacation. Policies, not greed is driving California’s sky-high gas prices. So. Cal is the auto insurance fraud capitol of the US… how to not fall victim to ‘staged accidents.’ Dr. Jim Keany, Chief Medical Officer at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, joins The Bill Handel Show for 'Medical News'! Dr. Keany talks with Neil about fungus labeled an ‘urgent threat,’ experimental drug nearly wiping out stealthy cholesterol, and anti-amyloid therapy keeping Alzheimer’s symptoms at bay.
Neil Saavedra is in for Bill while he is out on vacation. Policies, not greed is driving California’s sky-high gas prices. So. Cal is the auto insurance fraud capitol of the US… how to not fall victim to ‘staged accidents.’ Dr. Jim Keany, Chief Medical Officer at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, joins The Bill Handel Show for 'Medical News'! Dr. Keany talks with Neil about fungus labeled an ‘urgent threat,’ experimental drug nearly wiping out stealthy cholesterol, and anti-amyloid therapy keeping Alzheimer’s symptoms at bay.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Neil Savedra Happy to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Bill Handle will be back on Monday, and the gang
will all be here as one happy family as we prefer.
You've got John Cobelt coming up at one o'clock, which
our time will be probably the speech from the Rose
Garden and all the tariffs and Liberation Day and all
(00:33):
of that. However, Gary and Shannon will have insights as
to what's coming as well, coming up at nine, So
go know where. We have family in Arizona. So we
drive to Arizona quite a bit. And there is no
greater slap in the face than when you cross the
(00:55):
border from California into Arizona and see the gas prices
cut in half.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
You're like two feet that way, I'm paying five bucks.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, as has been pointed out by John Cobel fort
the entirety of his career here in southern California, it's you, dummy,
you're doing it. I should say I'm doing it too,
but I don't vote for these things. I would never
(01:34):
be the devoting more taxes on ourselves is I don't
understand that. So we suffer disproportionately when it comes to
gas prices here in California, period, the highest in the nation,
most expensive gas in the US is here in California,
(02:01):
and we all know it, and we originally do you
remember when it was creeping up towards five dollars for
the first time, we were like, we're gonna riot in
the streets. No one's ever going to put up with
five dollars. Well, we've been there and we're heading back.
I saw seven dollars in something. There's one gas station
(02:24):
on the west side, right by the Beverly Center, I think,
right in that area there as you're headed towards seaters,
that is always like two bucks higher than everywhere else.
And someone I asked someone and they said, well, Beverly
(02:44):
Hills is nearby, and a lot of the people that
work for them, you know, the hired help, they don't
care what they're paying for the gas. So when they're
filling up their cars and stuff, they take them there.
They're drivers and they don't care. This is convenience.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
It's right there.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
But the reality is that finally someone did a study
really in depth and looked at all this. The USC
Marshall School of Business published a study of California gasoline prices.
They wanted to find out what the driving reason was,
what is this why California is typically the most expensive
(03:22):
in the US. And they looked and what they found
was what some have been screaming about forever. California has
the most stringent regulatory whether it's environmental issues when it
comes to oil and gas companies, and that is in
(03:44):
the world. So the regulatory oversight all of that puts
this cost burden for compliance on oil and gas in
the industry that handles that, the manufacturing, the refining, and
(04:05):
that gets passed on at the pump. So meanwhile we
have Gav Governor Gav claiming that the oil companies have
been gouging California drivers for years and that greed, right,
isn't that the big word? That greed is the problem
because you know what greed means. That points to the
(04:28):
rich folks, That foot points to the business owners. That
points to what is often perceived as Republicans, even though
here in California the richest of the rich.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Are not Republicans.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
There are people in the entertainment industry and things like
that that typically are not conservative. So he comes out
and he says, this even has legislation aimed at increasing
transparency keeping prices in check, and they out it has
nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The data is overwhelmingly compelling and there is no evidence
of price gouging from this study, either by gas station
owners or refiners or oil producers in the state, at
least not widespread. Of course, there may be a little
bit here, a little bit there. So look in the
(05:27):
mirror if you want to know why you pay such
high prices for gasoline, it's not the gas. It's all
the garbage that is tacked on to that cost that
you take your little number two pencil or whatever and
you fill in the dot that whatever that extra tax
(05:48):
is that they tell us is going to help, you know,
the homeless, going to help the refinement or the roads.
For the love of Pete, drive our road. There is
zero money going towards our roads. Those are two things
that I know for sure. In southern California. They're not
putting money into the roads, and they're not putting any
(06:09):
money into the homeless situation, no matter how much they
get for that, and you go to the schools and
the schools look like crap and are beat up and
are old. Where's that lot of money?
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But you, you.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Are the reason why our gas prices are high. So
enjoy whatever environmental or whatever thing you think we're getting
out of those taxes that we are not so if
we didn't have enough garbage here in California, guess what else.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
We're named not only.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
The highest gas cost in the nation, but we are
described Southern California is the fraud capital of California. Wow,
look at that, so says Captain Eric Hood, who works
at the Inland Empire Division of the California Department of Insurance.
Now this the CDI popped into be back in nineteen
(07:09):
ninety nine. That was Assembly Bill ten fifty, and that
was formed because of a death on the seven to
ten freeway. Back in nineteen ninety seven, there was a
group of bad people that staged a collision. They had
this collision ring that worked in the LA area basically
set up, staged this collision and a family father, mother,
(07:33):
and daughter were killed in the collision. They have a
bunch of different names for this stuff, the sudden stop,
the swoop, and squat the drive down. I know you're
probably all curious about that swoop and squad. So that's
where another suspect vehicle cuts them off intentionally. So you
(07:55):
got two cars and so they're forced to stop, and
then the other car drives away and I said, hey,
well we had to stop. If you saw this, I
saw this some time ago. It was viral on TikTok
and made it on you know, all the social media rounds.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Right driver in New York.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Slowed down to stop in front of the victim, right,
and the victim stops, so they throw their car and
reversed to smack him because they he didn't hit them,
And then they all come out holding their neck and stuff.
It was eight thousand dollars in damage. The thing, the
reason why this went viral, though, is what I'm going
(08:37):
to tell you to do. Get cameras on your vehicle front,
back side, Get cameras on your vehicle. You know everyone's
giving up their teslas and all of this business. I
will tell you, teslas have cameras everywhere. So all you
WingNuts that are going around scratching them and denting them
(08:59):
and doing stuff to innocent people, that just happen to
drive Tesla's they're getting you on camera. We all need
to be in that state. And they make great ones.
They make all kinds of great the aftermarket cameras that
you can put on easily. But this is becoming a problem.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
You have.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Captain Eric Hood of course from the CDI there says
the state gets more than twenty thousand reports of fraud
every year. I mean, the vast majority of them we're
dealing with here in you know, southern California, and they
work with bad medical people. So very common scheme is
(09:44):
with the chiropractic and medical treatment. Patient comes in one
or two times, they'll sign in, then they'll sign in
thirty times like they came in on multiple occasions when
they actually didn't, and then the attorney's no negotia, you
eat higher settlements for the insurance claim. So I mean
(10:04):
there's a bunch of scumbags involved in this, attorneys as well,
and sometimes these rings they just get random people to say, hey,
you know, come sit in the car and you can
end up making some money, and they do a certain
scam because those are the ones that pay out big.
(10:25):
So get yourself a camera on your car. Don't be
a victim of this stuff. Having that camera and that
evidence is going to be key, especially here in southern
California as it seems to be a hotbed of stupidity.
And now part of our extended family. Doctor Jim Keeney
joins US chief Medical Officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical
(10:47):
Center in Long Beach.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Hey, Doc, long time, No see.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, how you doing.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
We saw each other at Bill Handle's wedding in Italy.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
That word on the street is, uh, maybe you caught
an illness.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah, you know, I got it.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
It sounded very similar to the illness you had. Yeah,
you know what hit me till the last day thankfully.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Oh I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So I got sick, and I and and then my
wife got sick about a day late, so she was
like a day day to a half behind. And when
for some reason, it's it's very hard to not hug.
I'm a you know, I like to hug and shake
hands and be appropriate.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, So I come down one evening.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I'd been sick and I had been trying to stay
away from everybody, but I came down in a mass
just to say, uh, hello and all of that, and
and the handle came at me quickly, so I think
I hugged him, and then I hugged Lindsay, his bride,
and then Doc came and I was like, I don't
know what it was, but I was like, do not
(11:58):
get a doctor sick.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's such a d move.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So I'm like, hey, good to see you. I don't
want to hunt you already right now. But you ended
up getting sick anyways.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, but it was.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Days later, so I think you gave it to someone
else in Italy and then they gave it to me,
you know, like you said when we met. You actually
said that, you said, look, somebody gave this to me.
I'm likely to give it to somebody else. It's just
the way these things work.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh, I'm sorry, buddy. But it was a blast, right.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
What that was?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That was a wedding, yeow, the capital w.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So my son turns to me and he goes, uh,
was yours and mommy's wedding like that?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
And I go I go know, and he goes bigger no, no, no, like.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Ten people there, no cameras, know nothing, all rights.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, oh don't.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
They don't even get me started on the fireworks, but
pretty spectacular.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
We'll talk with Handle about it when he gets back
into town.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so fungus labeled urgent threat. That's the last thing
I want to see attached to something like a fungus. First,
what is a fungus and what's this threat?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Yeah, so you know, there's a lot of funguses out there.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
I think people actually unnecessarily worry about funguses because of
social media and you know, you have to be tested
for Canada and your blood and all that kind of stuff.
And it is true that when people are deathly ill
and they get certain kind of funguses in their bloodstream,
they will die from them. And it's pretty it's pretty severe.
(13:28):
But the only way something like Canada really gets in
your blood stream is you're either on like severe immuno
suppressants or you're already very sick. So this new one, though,
this one we're talking about is Canada aureus, which is
a drug resistant yeast, is another word for fungus, and
(13:48):
it does cause severe infections, mostly in people that are
already sick and hospitalized. So if you're not in a hospital,
if you don't have a bunch of tubes in you,
the chances of this affecting you are almost zero.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And typically we have like three or four.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Agents we can use that are pretty solid for for funguses.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
This is resistant to all of them. So essentially you're
on your own.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
You need your body's immune system, which typically is very
good at dealing with funguses.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
You need your body's immune system to kick this out.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Well, is this like when I hear that I think
of a yeast infection or like thrush or something.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Is that the same in.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
That exactly exactly the same?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
So this is a different one because that's candida that
I just mentioned, and that's a very common candidate infections.
You know, if you take antibiotics, you're gonna wipe out
your good your good bacteria and then that they protect
they eat all the food that this fungus would normally eat,
so there's nothing left for the fungus to grow. But
once you kill all your good bacteria, well then all
(14:51):
of a sudden, a fungus like this can move in.
And that's why, especially women, after treating them for a
urinary tract infection with antibiotics, they will often get a
yeast infect and so that's but that doesn't go systemic
and people that are otherwise, you know, pretty relatively healthy,
you know, but again people on imminosuppression and things like that,
it can get more severe. This is a different when
(15:13):
we're talking about this sea aureus and it's it's and
it doesn't respond to the to the different medications we give.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
And this gets into the blood stream.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
Yeah, I can get because these are people again with
tubes and ivs and all kinds of things, central lines
and so all those lines are a portal into your
bloodstream and that's how they make their way in.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
I have a doctor friend of mine that always says
a hospital is a horrible place to get better.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
It really is. I mean, it absolutely is. You know.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
It's it's hard to get good sleep, and we all
know you need good sleep. Most hospital food, I mean,
even if it's not horrible, it's not what you like, right,
It's not your home cooked food, you know, and so
it's going to be miserable.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So, I mean, all the basics you.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Think of healthcare, right, you know, you're you're under the
roof of the worst bacteria, the worst fungus, is the
worst everything in your community are all concentrated under that roof.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
So thanks creating. Doc.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Well, that's the amazing thing is when why we keep
you know, patient safety as such a high high This
is you know, just like a nuclear power plant or
flying you know, airlines, that same level of safety is
so critical because you know, you have people slipping up
and you know, cross contaminating or anything else like that,
and you can run into serious problems very quickly.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
All right, Doctor Jim Teeney with us.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
He's the chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical
Center in Long Beach.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So we talked about fungus.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
That made everybody thrilled, by the way, Doc, we're just
really excited about that. But on the flip side, there
are an experimental drug and an anti amyloid therapy that
one might help with the stealth cholesterol we've been hearing
about the past couple of days, and then the other
(17:03):
might be for Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
So you pick.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
All drug is super interesting because so first of all,
lipoprotein A.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Is a is a subset.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Cholesterol is a general collection of different you know, type
of chemicals in your body. So you know you have
hd L L d L. You get those reports. The
HDL is the good kind. It pulls away. It pulls
the cholesterol out of your bloodstream. LDL is and VLDL
is the bad kind. It dumps the cholesterol into your
system and causes damage. So lipoprotein A is a subset.
(17:36):
We don't typically test for it because I mean, a
lot of people want to know these things, and that's great.
I understand why, but we don't typically test for things
we can't do anything about. And until now, lipoprotein A.
It doesn't respond to exercise, doesn't respond to diet, and
there were no meds to treat it. So this company
came up with an interesting way to treat it. They're
(17:58):
they're using RNA modification. Basically, it's called small interfering RNA therapy,
and they put a little sliver of a specific gene
on there to silence licoprotein A production and it stops
your body from making locoprotein A for over at least
a year.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
That's crazy, they think. They refer to it as stealth
and all these things. And there is a way to
test for it. You'd have to request it because like
you said, there's no Yeah, it's there, but there's nothing
you can do about it. So all the traditional methods,
whether it be pharmaceutical or diet or of course exercise.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Did nothing.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah, and you can go down I mean, when you
look at now lab testing, you can go down an
amazing rabbit hole of tens.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Of thousands of dollars worth of testing if you're interested.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
I mean, I think this one's kind of interesting because
card disease, strokes, you know, and peropheral vascular disease, those
are all really big issues for a lot of people,
and people might want to know about that. Again, with
nothing to do about it, you're just finding out You're
not you know, necessarily changing thing.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
But what you could do, as you say, well, I
have this.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Non modifiable risk factor, maybe I should look at the
modifiable risk factors a little more carefully and really bring
those into line as best I can. So things like diet, exercise, smoking,
you know, all those things, weight loss, those are all
things you can control to some extent. And this might
motivate you to say, look, I really need to bring
this under control. I have a very high risk with
(19:31):
this lipoprotein A.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay, real quickly, we have just under a minute. This
is good news.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
First time scientists have evidence that are biologic may help
remove some of this the plaques on people's brain.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yeah, I mean, this is another class of the same
type of monoclonal antibody that basically binds to the amyloid
and then your body sees it as something that needs
to be removed and it works it out. It gets
this amyloid which tangles up the neurons brain, and that's
what they really believe causes Alzheimer's. We have other drugs
that do that. Two other drugs have been approved by
(20:07):
the FDA. This one is still under investigation. There's some downsides.
They can cause brain swelling, which is a pretty big deal. Yeah,
And when you look at it, it's not a cure,
it's a let's slow this down, so maybe in ten
years you will be a little bit better off than
if you didn't take this. Now, for people who've watched
someone decline from Alzheimer's, they're going to say, well, that's
(20:28):
worth it, right, I don't want to You know, long
I can go without losing my mind is great. But
you know, looking at it from a kind of the
thirty thousand foot view, it's like, wow, this is a.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Lot of time, money.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Expense risk for really marginal gains. At this point, The
exciting part about this is that this, you know, portends
a future like maybe in the future we can do better.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well, slowing things down always has this benefit as a
polycystic renal disease patient. You know, one of the things
they did early on was to slow it down. They said,
you know, we find that caffeine exacerbates the growing of
the cysts, you know, so they took me off that
you know, caffeine and all that stuff pretty early when
(21:14):
they diagnosed me in my twenties, and some other things
that my other family members didn't do. And sure enough
I was the last one age wise to go on dialysis.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
So you know, but that's low rip, low cost, right,
And so that's what I'm saying is when it's low risk,
low cost, easy do it right. But in this case,
it's your own decision.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Well, always fascinating, there's so much going on, and man,
we just even more so than technology that jumps every
six months, it seems that they were really making some
leaps and bounds in the medical technology. So always good
to talk to you. Doctor Jim Keeney, chief medical officer
for Dignity Saint Mary's Medical Center in Long Beach. Sorry,
(21:56):
I got you sick in Italy, duck.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't think it.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I appreciate that, all right, pal, have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
You've been listening to The Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Neil Savedra Happy to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Bill Handle will be back on Monday, and the gang
will all be here as one happy family as we prefer.
You've got John Cobelt coming up at one o'clock, which
our time will be probably the speech from the Rose
Garden and all the tariffs and Liberation Day and all
(00:33):
of that. However, Gary and Shannon will have insights as
to what's coming as well, coming up at nine, So
go know where. We have family in Arizona. So we
drive to Arizona quite a bit. And there is no
greater slap in the face than when you cross the
(00:55):
border from California into Arizona and see the gas prices
cut in half.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
You're like two feet that way, I'm paying five bucks.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, as has been pointed out by John Cobel fort
the entirety of his career here in southern California, it's you, dummy,
you're doing it. I should say I'm doing it too,
but I don't vote for these things. I would never
(01:34):
be the devoting more taxes on ourselves is I don't
understand that. So we suffer disproportionately when it comes to
gas prices here in California, period, the highest in the nation,
most expensive gas in the US is here in California,
(02:01):
and we all know it, and we originally do you
remember when it was creeping up towards five dollars for
the first time, we were like, we're gonna riot in
the streets. No one's ever going to put up with
five dollars. Well, we've been there and we're heading back.
I saw seven dollars in something. There's one gas station
(02:24):
on the west side, right by the Beverly Center, I think,
right in that area there as you're headed towards seaters,
that is always like two bucks higher than everywhere else.
And someone I asked someone and they said, well, Beverly
(02:44):
Hills is nearby, and a lot of the people that
work for them, you know, the hired help, they don't
care what they're paying for the gas. So when they're
filling up their cars and stuff, they take them there.
They're drivers and they don't care. This is convenience.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
It's right there.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
But the reality is that finally someone did a study
really in depth and looked at all this. The USC
Marshall School of Business published a study of California gasoline prices.
They wanted to find out what the driving reason was,
what is this why California is typically the most expensive
(03:22):
in the US. And they looked and what they found
was what some have been screaming about forever. California has
the most stringent regulatory whether it's environmental issues when it
comes to oil and gas companies, and that is in
(03:44):
the world. So the regulatory oversight all of that puts
this cost burden for compliance on oil and gas in
the industry that handles that, the manufacturing, the refining, and
(04:05):
that gets passed on at the pump. So meanwhile we
have Gav Governor Gav claiming that the oil companies have
been gouging California drivers for years and that greed, right,
isn't that the big word? That greed is the problem
because you know what greed means. That points to the
(04:28):
rich folks, That foot points to the business owners. That
points to what is often perceived as Republicans, even though
here in California the richest of the rich.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Are not Republicans.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
There are people in the entertainment industry and things like
that that typically are not conservative. So he comes out
and he says, this even has legislation aimed at increasing
transparency keeping prices in check, and they out it has
nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
The data is overwhelmingly compelling and there is no evidence
of price gouging from this study, either by gas station
owners or refiners or oil producers in the state, at
least not widespread. Of course, there may be a little
bit here, a little bit there. So look in the
(05:27):
mirror if you want to know why you pay such
high prices for gasoline, it's not the gas. It's all
the garbage that is tacked on to that cost that
you take your little number two pencil or whatever and
you fill in the dot that whatever that extra tax
(05:48):
is that they tell us is going to help, you know,
the homeless, going to help the refinement or the roads.
For the love of Pete, drive our road. There is
zero money going towards our roads. Those are two things
that I know for sure. In southern California. They're not
putting money into the roads, and they're not putting any
(06:09):
money into the homeless situation, no matter how much they
get for that, and you go to the schools and
the schools look like crap and are beat up and
are old. Where's that lot of money?
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But you, you.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Are the reason why our gas prices are high. So
enjoy whatever environmental or whatever thing you think we're getting
out of those taxes that we are not so if
we didn't have enough garbage here in California, guess what else.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
We're named not only.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
The highest gas cost in the nation, but we are
described Southern California is the fraud capital of California. Wow,
look at that, so says Captain Eric Hood, who works
at the Inland Empire Division of the California Department of Insurance.
Now this the CDI popped into be back in nineteen
(07:09):
ninety nine. That was Assembly Bill ten fifty, and that
was formed because of a death on the seven to
ten freeway. Back in nineteen ninety seven, there was a
group of bad people that staged a collision. They had
this collision ring that worked in the LA area basically
set up, staged this collision and a family father, mother,
(07:33):
and daughter were killed in the collision. They have a
bunch of different names for this stuff, the sudden stop,
the swoop, and squat the drive down. I know you're
probably all curious about that swoop and squad. So that's
where another suspect vehicle cuts them off intentionally. So you
(07:55):
got two cars and so they're forced to stop, and
then the other car drives away and I said, hey,
well we had to stop. If you saw this, I
saw this some time ago. It was viral on TikTok
and made it on you know, all the social media rounds.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Right driver in New York.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Slowed down to stop in front of the victim, right,
and the victim stops, so they throw their car and
reversed to smack him because they he didn't hit them,
And then they all come out holding their neck and stuff.
It was eight thousand dollars in damage. The thing, the
reason why this went viral, though, is what I'm going
(08:37):
to tell you to do. Get cameras on your vehicle front,
back side, Get cameras on your vehicle. You know everyone's
giving up their teslas and all of this business. I
will tell you, teslas have cameras everywhere. So all you
WingNuts that are going around scratching them and denting them
(08:59):
and doing stuff to innocent people, that just happen to
drive Tesla's they're getting you on camera. We all need
to be in that state. And they make great ones.
They make all kinds of great the aftermarket cameras that
you can put on easily. But this is becoming a problem.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
You have.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Captain Eric Hood of course from the CDI there says
the state gets more than twenty thousand reports of fraud
every year. I mean, the vast majority of them we're
dealing with here in you know, southern California, and they
work with bad medical people. So very common scheme is
(09:44):
with the chiropractic and medical treatment. Patient comes in one
or two times, they'll sign in, then they'll sign in
thirty times like they came in on multiple occasions when
they actually didn't, and then the attorney's no negotia, you
eat higher settlements for the insurance claim. So I mean
(10:04):
there's a bunch of scumbags involved in this, attorneys as well,
and sometimes these rings they just get random people to say, hey,
you know, come sit in the car and you can
end up making some money, and they do a certain
scam because those are the ones that pay out big.
(10:25):
So get yourself a camera on your car. Don't be
a victim of this stuff. Having that camera and that
evidence is going to be key, especially here in southern
California as it seems to be a hotbed of stupidity.
And now part of our extended family. Doctor Jim Keeney
joins US chief Medical Officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical
(10:47):
Center in Long Beach.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Hey, Doc, long time, No see.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, how you doing.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
We saw each other at Bill Handle's wedding in Italy.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
That word on the street is, uh, maybe you caught
an illness.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah, you know, I got it.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
It sounded very similar to the illness you had. Yeah,
you know what hit me till the last day thankfully.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Oh I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So I got sick, and I and and then my
wife got sick about a day late, so she was
like a day day to a half behind. And when
for some reason, it's it's very hard to not hug.
I'm a you know, I like to hug and shake
hands and be appropriate.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, So I come down one evening.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I'd been sick and I had been trying to stay
away from everybody, but I came down in a mass
just to say, uh, hello and all of that, and
and the handle came at me quickly, so I think
I hugged him, and then I hugged Lindsay, his bride,
and then Doc came and I was like, I don't
know what it was, but I was like, do not
(11:58):
get a doctor sick.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's such a d move.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So I'm like, hey, good to see you. I don't
want to hunt you already right now. But you ended
up getting sick anyways.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, but it was.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Days later, so I think you gave it to someone
else in Italy and then they gave it to me,
you know, like you said when we met. You actually
said that, you said, look, somebody gave this to me.
I'm likely to give it to somebody else. It's just
the way these things work.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Oh, I'm sorry, buddy. But it was a blast, right.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
What that was?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That was a wedding, yeow, the capital w.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So my son turns to me and he goes, uh,
was yours and mommy's wedding like that?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
And I go I go know, and he goes bigger no, no, no, like.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Ten people there, no cameras, know nothing, all rights.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, oh don't.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
They don't even get me started on the fireworks, but
pretty spectacular.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
We'll talk with Handle about it when he gets back
into town.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so fungus labeled urgent threat. That's the last thing
I want to see attached to something like a fungus. First,
what is a fungus and what's this threat?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Yeah, so you know, there's a lot of funguses out there.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
I think people actually unnecessarily worry about funguses because of
social media and you know, you have to be tested
for Canada and your blood and all that kind of stuff.
And it is true that when people are deathly ill
and they get certain kind of funguses in their bloodstream,
they will die from them. And it's pretty it's pretty severe.
(13:28):
But the only way something like Canada really gets in
your blood stream is you're either on like severe immuno
suppressants or you're already very sick. So this new one, though,
this one we're talking about is Canada aureus, which is
a drug resistant yeast, is another word for fungus, and
(13:48):
it does cause severe infections, mostly in people that are
already sick and hospitalized. So if you're not in a hospital,
if you don't have a bunch of tubes in you,
the chances of this affecting you are almost zero.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And typically we have like three or four.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Agents we can use that are pretty solid for for funguses.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
This is resistant to all of them. So essentially you're
on your own.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
You need your body's immune system, which typically is very
good at dealing with funguses.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
You need your body's immune system to kick this out.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Well, is this like when I hear that I think
of a yeast infection or like thrush or something.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Is that the same in.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
That exactly exactly the same?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
So this is a different one because that's candida that
I just mentioned, and that's a very common candidate infections.
You know, if you take antibiotics, you're gonna wipe out
your good your good bacteria and then that they protect
they eat all the food that this fungus would normally eat,
so there's nothing left for the fungus to grow. But
once you kill all your good bacteria, well then all
(14:51):
of a sudden, a fungus like this can move in.
And that's why, especially women, after treating them for a
urinary tract infection with antibiotics, they will often get a
yeast infect and so that's but that doesn't go systemic
and people that are otherwise, you know, pretty relatively healthy,
you know, but again people on imminosuppression and things like that,
it can get more severe. This is a different when
(15:13):
we're talking about this sea aureus and it's it's and
it doesn't respond to the to the different medications we give.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
And this gets into the blood stream.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
Yeah, I can get because these are people again with
tubes and ivs and all kinds of things, central lines
and so all those lines are a portal into your
bloodstream and that's how they make their way in.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
I have a doctor friend of mine that always says
a hospital is a horrible place to get better.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
It really is. I mean, it absolutely is. You know.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
It's it's hard to get good sleep, and we all
know you need good sleep. Most hospital food, I mean,
even if it's not horrible, it's not what you like, right,
It's not your home cooked food, you know, and so
it's going to be miserable.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So, I mean, all the basics you.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Think of healthcare, right, you know, you're you're under the
roof of the worst bacteria, the worst fungus, is the
worst everything in your community are all concentrated under that roof.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
So thanks creating. Doc.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Well, that's the amazing thing is when why we keep
you know, patient safety as such a high high This
is you know, just like a nuclear power plant or
flying you know, airlines, that same level of safety is
so critical because you know, you have people slipping up
and you know, cross contaminating or anything else like that,
and you can run into serious problems very quickly.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
All right, Doctor Jim Teeney with us.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
He's the chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical
Center in Long Beach.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So we talked about fungus.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
That made everybody thrilled, by the way, Doc, we're just
really excited about that. But on the flip side, there
are an experimental drug and an anti amyloid therapy that
one might help with the stealth cholesterol we've been hearing
about the past couple of days, and then the other
(17:03):
might be for Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
So you pick.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
All drug is super interesting because so first of all,
lipoprotein A.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Is a is a subset.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Cholesterol is a general collection of different you know, type
of chemicals in your body. So you know you have
hd L L d L. You get those reports. The
HDL is the good kind. It pulls away. It pulls
the cholesterol out of your bloodstream. LDL is and VLDL
is the bad kind. It dumps the cholesterol into your
system and causes damage. So lipoprotein A is a subset.
(17:36):
We don't typically test for it because I mean, a
lot of people want to know these things, and that's great.
I understand why, but we don't typically test for things
we can't do anything about. And until now, lipoprotein A.
It doesn't respond to exercise, doesn't respond to diet, and
there were no meds to treat it. So this company
came up with an interesting way to treat it. They're
(17:58):
they're using RNA modification. Basically, it's called small interfering RNA therapy,
and they put a little sliver of a specific gene
on there to silence licoprotein A production and it stops
your body from making locoprotein A for over at least
a year.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
That's crazy, they think. They refer to it as stealth
and all these things. And there is a way to
test for it. You'd have to request it because like
you said, there's no Yeah, it's there, but there's nothing
you can do about it. So all the traditional methods,
whether it be pharmaceutical or diet or of course exercise.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Did nothing.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah, and you can go down I mean, when you
look at now lab testing, you can go down an
amazing rabbit hole of tens.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Of thousands of dollars worth of testing if you're interested.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
I mean, I think this one's kind of interesting because
card disease, strokes, you know, and peropheral vascular disease, those
are all really big issues for a lot of people,
and people might want to know about that. Again, with
nothing to do about it, you're just finding out You're
not you know, necessarily changing thing.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
But what you could do, as you say, well, I
have this.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Non modifiable risk factor, maybe I should look at the
modifiable risk factors a little more carefully and really bring
those into line as best I can. So things like diet, exercise, smoking,
you know, all those things, weight loss, those are all
things you can control to some extent. And this might
motivate you to say, look, I really need to bring
this under control. I have a very high risk with
(19:31):
this lipoprotein A.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay, real quickly, we have just under a minute. This
is good news.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
First time scientists have evidence that are biologic may help
remove some of this the plaques on people's brain.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yeah, I mean, this is another class of the same
type of monoclonal antibody that basically binds to the amyloid
and then your body sees it as something that needs
to be removed and it works it out. It gets
this amyloid which tangles up the neurons brain, and that's
what they really believe causes Alzheimer's. We have other drugs
that do that. Two other drugs have been approved by
(20:07):
the FDA. This one is still under investigation. There's some downsides.
They can cause brain swelling, which is a pretty big deal. Yeah,
And when you look at it, it's not a cure,
it's a let's slow this down, so maybe in ten
years you will be a little bit better off than
if you didn't take this. Now, for people who've watched
someone decline from Alzheimer's, they're going to say, well, that's
(20:28):
worth it, right, I don't want to You know, long
I can go without losing my mind is great. But
you know, looking at it from a kind of the
thirty thousand foot view, it's like, wow, this is a.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Lot of time, money.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Expense risk for really marginal gains. At this point, The
exciting part about this is that this, you know, portends
a future like maybe in the future we can do better.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well, slowing things down always has this benefit as a
polycystic renal disease patient. You know, one of the things
they did early on was to slow it down. They said,
you know, we find that caffeine exacerbates the growing of
the cysts, you know, so they took me off that
you know, caffeine and all that stuff pretty early when
(21:14):
they diagnosed me in my twenties, and some other things
that my other family members didn't do. And sure enough
I was the last one age wise to go on dialysis.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
So you know, but that's low rip, low cost, right,
And so that's what I'm saying is when it's low risk,
low cost, easy do it right. But in this case,
it's your own decision.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Well, always fascinating, there's so much going on, and man,
we just even more so than technology that jumps every
six months, it seems that they were really making some
leaps and bounds in the medical technology. So always good
to talk to you. Doctor Jim Keeney, chief medical officer
for Dignity Saint Mary's Medical Center in Long Beach. Sorry,
(21:56):
I got you sick in Italy, duck.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't think it.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I appreciate that, all right, pal, have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
You've been listening to The Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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