May 14, 2025 • 24 mins
(May 14, 2025)
California released 15,000 prisoners early during COVID… new data reveals what happened to many of them. It’s not just a feeling: Data shows boys and young men are falling behind. 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 Bill about good vibrations, buzzing capsule could relieve constipation, patients finding ChatBots more sympathetic than doctors, and Listeria outbreak.
California released 15,000 prisoners early during COVID… new data reveals what happened to many of them. It’s not just a feeling: Data shows boys and young men are falling behind. 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 Bill about good vibrations, buzzing capsule could relieve constipation, patients finding ChatBots more sympathetic than doctors, and Listeria outbreak.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listenings KFI AM six forty The Bill Handles show
on demand on the iHeartRadio f Home Day Wednesday. Some
stories that we are looking at big time. State Farm
has gotten approval from the insurance Commissioner to increase on
an emergency basis.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The rates.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Eighteen percent on top of what they're already asking for.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
And they have no choice.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
What does California say, No, you're not going to get
the rates. Okay, then they're going to move out of California.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And Pete Rose.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
His lifetime ban has been lifted because his life is
been lifted.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I guess that's what works.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Lifetime bans when you die are sort of no longer lifetime.
Now there's a story cal Matters came up with and
for the first time, we're actually getting some real information
about what happened to some of the former prisoners that
the state let out early because of the pandemic. And
(01:06):
here is and the state did not give cal Matters
any information. They finally got it. Freedom of what do
you call it? Freedom of the request? What do they
call that?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Freedom of information? There you go, Freedom Information Act. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
So nearly a third of California prisoners released early during
the pandemic ended back in prison, and that's according to
the Department of Corrections. And at that time when they
were released, the governor and the Corrections Department did not
share the list of the names and the crimes of
thousands of people that were sent home early, and we
(01:42):
were left.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
In the dark.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Now, there may be a reason why they don't in
terms of the safety of the prisoners, but they.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Could have given us numbers.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So between April twenty twenty December twenty twenty one, California
Corrections Department freed fourteen eight hundred people. Forty six hundred
had gone back to prison as of January thirty one,
twenty twenty five. Now, most of the prisoners that were
released here early did not do the serious crimes that
(02:10):
landed him back in prison.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
There's the difference.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
They weren't serious offenders. Only thirty people of all of
them returned for first or second degree murder, a just
less than one percent.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The top three.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Reasons people went to prison illegal possession of a gun,
what a shocker. That was fourteen percent, assault ten percent,
burglary nine percent, vehicle theft, and domestic abuse four to
five percent. So cowmatters looked at a couple of stories
indicative of what's happening. One guy that was interviewed, Isi
(02:45):
Isaiah Alfaro, released in August of twenty twenty, served time
for auto theft.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Two years later, he's back in the slammer for burglary.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And he said in an interview he was doing his damnness
to stay out of trouble and live a better life
after he was released early. I was going to school,
I was staying on the right track, and then I
started using drugs again and it was only a matter
of time before I began having criminal activity in my life,
ended up back in jail, and he wished the counties
(03:15):
had more resources to help people who are struggling with
drug and alcohol addictions.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So therein lies the problem.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
How do you legitimately and successfully keep criminals who are
released from going back into prison and committing crimes Because
a third come back at least in this study or
in this article looking at the prisoners released early, so.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
The recidivism rate is pretty high.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Well, the way you do it is throw a lot
of resources into the prison system, rehab, skill set, learning,
welding classes for example, things that they can do to
get out and earn a living.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
But we don't have the money to do that. And
where do we put our money? And the question I've
had earlier homelessness put it in.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Public service like fire and police departments. Do we do
it in housing support anyway? Outside of homelessness? City services?
How about rehab?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
How about that?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Where do you put the money so people go back
to prison? Because, as Phedroh said, I would have loved
the county to I would have loved the county to
have given me some kind of service to help me
on my way, and it didn't happen. Are there any
(04:49):
upsides keeping people in prison? Well, it costs a lot
of money. That's a downside. They learn to be even
more criminal if they put in the wrong population. I mean,
I guess the good end of it is a medical
issue where they're never going to suffer from constipation again. Okay,
So the New York Times produced a study about boys
(05:15):
and young men.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now not that kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
A study, the kind of study that compared boys and
young men compared them to women to girls in educational achievement,
mental health, transitions to adulthood.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And the male members of the tribe.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Boys and young men are falling behind and females are
surging forward. Now they're trying to look at this, and
researchers are saying there are several economic and social changes
and that has combined all of them to change the trajectories.
School has changed in a way to favor girls. Work
(05:57):
has changed in ways that favor women. Boys are seen
as troublemakers. Men have actually come as society has come
to the point that masculinity is toxic.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
A lot of it has to do with the politics.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Today, the me too movement, the way we simply are
looking at people differently. Now it's been a while since
there are more women than men in med school, in
graduate school, in law school. When I went to law school,
the vast majority of students were men.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
At least I thought they were men. I don't know
what happened to them later on. Today it's well the
other way around.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And by the way, that's not just a feeling about this,
because when as specifically young men say they feel undervalued,
parents and adults who work with children are worried more
about boys. And now they're a ton of data out
there now some boys have been affected more than others.
(07:04):
And you hear something that is going to surprise.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
You, right.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Growing up in poverty exacerbates the problem. Growing up as
a member of a minority group in poverty exacerbates it
even more. But some of these patterns aren't new. Boys
have always lagged behind girls in a certain area. For example,
girls mature faster than boys do. They become tweens and
(07:34):
teenagers faster than boys do. Although my girls, as I said,
have never left the tween age bracket, and up to
this point there's been not very much focus has sort
of been a given. So now social scientists are really
(07:54):
looking at this. School has become more academic earlier, and
that makes it harder for boys who are less mature
than girls, because the harder the school is, the more
mature a kid has to be to deal with school,
The more focus a child has to have, or a
young person has to have, the more ambition, and that
(08:17):
all comes with age or it comes with maturity, and
that gender gap goes through school. Girls score better on
reading tests than boys, because again I think it's a
question of mature maturity, and that's what it said. Girls
for the most part have higher GPAs boys are more
(08:38):
likely to be suspended. Now I don't know if you've
ever been suspended. I was a few times, okay, many times,
but suspension was you stayed after school for a few hours,
you went out of your mind. You could do your homework,
but no one bothered. And if I looked around, it
(08:58):
was ninety percent boys. And the few girls that were
in suspension, we knew what they were going to turn
out to be. That is a sexist thing to say,
isn't it. Yeah, I take that back. Women outnumber men
in college enrollment. Well, here's one graduating high school on time.
(09:20):
Eighty three percent for boys, eighty nine percent for girls.
And here's a stat And I'm not throwing a lot
of stats out here, but I.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Think they're important to understand this story.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
A lot recent male high school graduates, about fifty seven
percent are enrolled in college. That's up from fifty four
percent nineteen sixty. So it's gone up three percent, almost nothing.
Now let's go to women's college enrollment again. This is
from nineteen sixty. Then it was thirty eight percent. Today
(09:58):
it's sixty six percent, almost doubled. Where the men have
gone up three percent in the last eighty years.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Boys just don't do well as girls. Now there are
a couple areas. It's the other way.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
They do have some strengths on math tests. They outscore girls,
especially whites and Asian American boys in high income suburbs.
I don't know if you've ever been to Berkeley. You know,
Asian Americans are considered a minority. You know that officially,
not only in terms of statistics, but according to government policy.
(10:38):
Except when it comes to school, you can't get into
Berkeley never.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
In a million years.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Now, if you're Asian and you have a kid, that's
how you get into Berkeley. Because is it there because
they're smarter than the rest of us? Know, it's because
a cultural issue. And now I've often said this. You
get a kid that comes off of a boat, one
of those boat people that went across the Pacific from
(11:10):
Vietnam or Cambodia, and they spent weeks going across in
a row boat, thirty of them in a small boat,
and half of them were eaten by sharks. So they
finally hit the shore and theyre brought their broad ashore
and you know, their straggly, their starving families barely maked.
Two weeks later, that kid has won the Westinghouse a
(11:30):
scholarship for spelling or a science scholarship.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
It's a cultural issue. Here's a cultural issue when it
comes to Asians.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
I used to live in a neighborhood that was I
would say about sixty seventy percent Korean, and there was
a public school just down the street that I couldn't
put my kids into because there was no way they
were going to compete because you had these kids who
would do all of their homework and then spend five
(12:04):
hours playing.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Violin, and so.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
They got home from school at three o'clock, they'd go
to bed at ten o'clock and it would be all
day studying and practicing.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
You can't compete against that. And there were Korean kids
because it's cultural.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
And that is that's why you're looking at Asians not
being minorities when it comes to school.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
But the bottom line here I digressed on that one,
I understand, But.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
The bottom line here is that women are advancing at
a good clip, men not so much.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
And we have to do something about it. Guys, because
this is a croc.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
You know we're better than they are. Come on, you
know we can do it. It should be ashamed of yourselves.
Wednesday morning, May fourteenth. Tonight, the Dodgers take on the
Athletics at Dodger Stadium, first pitch at seven. You could
listen to all Dodger games AM five seventy LA Sports
live from Gallupin Motors for the Gallpin Borders Broadcast Booth,
(13:12):
and you can stream all Dodgers games at HD on
the iHeartRadio app. The keyword is AM five seventy LA Sports.
And it is time for a medical segment with doctor
Jim Keeney that we do every Wednesday. Jim, you're doing
something with your phone there. Jim is chief medical Officer
for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and
(13:34):
an er doctor, and Jim is always thanks for joining us,
of course. Okay, excellent, well said. Okay, This week is
kind of interesting because, as you may not know, I mean,
Jim certainly does. But my teenage wife Lindsey suffers from
(13:55):
something called the CRPS Complex Regional Pain syndrome and she
lives in pain twenty four to seven. And out of
that came her podcasts, the Pain Game Podcast, and Jim
was a guest that had just dropped and the two
of you were talking about pain, and you and I
have talked about pain before, and pain is one of those.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
One of those things in medicine that.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Are very, very difficult to deal with, and you did
about as good a job as explaining what pain is
and isn't. So there you are in the er, someone
comes in and complains about pain.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Where do you go from there? Because it's all subjective?
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Well, okay, so talking to Lindsay's audience, people with chronic
ongoing kind of a daily problem, it's a little bit
different to the general pain. Right, So when someone comes
into the AR and pain, are you asking me in
the sense of what do I do? Or are you're
asking me specifics?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
No?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
For both, for both. People come in.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I go in there and I hurt, like hell, I
have a huge headache, or I have chronic pain and
it reaches level that are high enough, which I've seen
Lindsay do that. She goes to the er and the
hopes that some massive drug overdose will help her.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So how do you deal with either one?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, pain is a serious you know, people have referred
to that as the stiffest vital as all the you know,
he's learning that that I commit after.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
All, right.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Jim Jim Jim Jim we're losing you. Can you uh
hang up and we'll once again try it. Okay, I
guess he did. I love cell phones, don't you so. Anyway,
while we're getting him back on the phone, I'm gonna
go ahead and pitch Lindsay's podcast because she happens to
(15:46):
be married to me at talk show hosts.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Did we get Jim back?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
It's the Pain Game podcast wherever you hear podcasts. Okay,
fair enough, back to Jim, and we're talking about the
two different kinds of pain, chronic pain and the pain
that is there because of an injury or because of
a headache or because of some issue.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
How do you deal with it?
Speaker 3 (16:10):
So pain again is an important sign. You know, when
somebody's got a new pain, we take that very seriously
because that's your body's way of telling you something's gone wrong.
So pain is a significant reason that people come to
the ear, and it's a good reason to come to
the e R right, you you smack yourself hard, you
know you're using pain to determine hunts. It's hurt enough
(16:30):
that I think I might have broke some just a battery,
you know, sometimes pain and a stomach or in the
chat and it can be because of things like heart
attack or appendicitis or you know, things like that. So
of course when someone comes in with pain, we assess it,
we look for causes and then we try and do
diagnostic testing to narrow down whether you know, whether the
(16:52):
pain is serious, what we need to do about it,
And in that process we may give pain medications to
address the pain. Sometimes by giving pain medicine, you can
calm the pain down enough that it can be more
localized and really pindpoint it better. So sometimes treating the
pain helps us kind of diagnose the problem. Now with Linday,
we were talking about people with chronic pain and they
(17:14):
live with pain every day. A lot of them have
seen pain management specialists in addition to many other specialists
to try and deal with their pain. So these are
people that have an escalation process. They have medications they
use at home, And what we talked about is, look,
if you get to you know, the er is the
last resort in that situation, because we don't have much
(17:35):
more to add, right we don't. We are there for emergencies,
and that's what we're there for. If you come in
with your pain is worsening, we're going to look for
the emergency causes for why that pain might be worsening.
But if it's your chronic pain syndrome that is now
just worse, well, then really all we have are the
are the escalation that your doctor has already given you.
(17:57):
So there's not much more we can add in that situation.
And that's kind of what Lindsay and I discussed.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
All right, So based on the fact that you and
I are on the same page when it comes to
our healthcare system in the United States, and I know
your first piece of advice as an er doctor is
stay the hell out of the er. How are we
doing in general with pain management? And have there been
any advances in the last few years.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Sure, yeah, there's there's been some significant advances, most recently
we did on the show a few months ago. I
believe it's the there's a new medication that is a
non narcotic that treats pain. I'm sure if it's covered
by the insurance, is going to be pretty expensive, you know,
that's the way these things are when they come out.
But there there's a new medication that's non narcotic. We've
(18:47):
also had, you know, all these other processes like interventional
excuse me, interventional radiologists and pain management doctors who can
go in and pinpoint, say a nerve or something like that,
and you know, kind of dead in that nerve or
numb that nerve that's causing your pain. So more focused
approaches by pain management specialists have come to you know,
(19:10):
have improved, especially with imaging and improved imaging and things
like that.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And just as an aside, and I think I've told
people this that I had. I was out two days
last week because I had foot surgery. There was a
really messy surgery with my two toes. They had to
break and put pins through them. So as we seek
about speak about pain, I am ripped out of my
mind on norco as we speak.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
And the reason I know that, Jim, because I really
love you right now.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
I love you man, You're one of my love everybody.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
That's a good point. No, you're absolutely right. I do
love everybody right now. All right.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One of the things about pain, and you're a lot
more generous about pain than I am in terms of
you know, people are subjective. I mean, you look at
a broken bone, Okay, you know that. But if I'm
a headache and you asked me one to ten. How
much it hurts, I'll tell you eight or ten and
it's not or my idea of ten is far different
than yours.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
How do you deal with that?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yeah, I mean, you're right, it's very subjective. You have
to kind of do a lot of trusting that the
patient is not telling you, you know, something that's not true.
And most people don't want to wait in the emergency
room for four to six hours to just you know,
lie to you and tell you something to get a
little bit of medication. So it's going to last maybe,
(20:37):
you know, at these shots last maybe an hour at
the most two hours, so it's you know, you got
to take it with a grain of salt. But at
the same time, you gotta really trust that the patient's
telling you the truth. There's ways we can tell, right,
you know, when you're not talking with the patient and
they're sitting in the gurney, you know, just doing their
normal business and calling friends and doing paper work and
(21:00):
all that type of stuff, and then you walk in
and they're arriving in pain. That does seem like somebody's
putting on a show for you, right, and you notice
those type of things. But short of that, we tend
to just kind of trust that somebody that's there is
there for a legitimate reason.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
All right, I want to go back to the podcast
and having listened to it that you and Lindsey did,
my new teenage wife, who, by the way, we had
to wait until she graduated high school because I didn't
want to go to jail. And you've talked about something
that I thought was really interesting, and that is hope
and then human connection, not necessarily any medical aspect to
(21:39):
dealing with chronic pain, but just the human connection. And
I went, wow, that doesn't sound like a doctor to me.
Do you want to expand on that for a minute.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah, I mean we had kind of a long conversation,
so it's hard to sum it up in just a
few minutes, but you know, we were talking about different
aspects of pain and how you know, even things like
yoga and tai chi and all that have been shown
to reduce pain. And then we started talking about when
you live with pain and it's every day that changes
(22:10):
you as a person. You have something unique and different
to offer other people who are going through struggles and
similar struggles, and we kind of talked about how you know,
and she's created this podcast, and other people have done
other things where you make these human connections and you're
able to help another person. It creates some sense of
(22:33):
purpose to the pain, right, that the pain you're going
through results in some good for somebody else. That definitely
helps reduce the intensity of the pain, because in that
conversation we talked about how your psychological state magnifies the pain. Right.
I've taken care of soccer players playing a final soccer game.
They hit the goalpost with their foot and have an
(22:54):
open fracture of their toe. Play the rest of the game,
don't even notice until they take off their shoe and
look at a blame sock, right, because they're having fun.
It's intense, they're enjoying themselves. And I had people in
an argument with their spouse who stub their toe on
the kitchen table and they come in. That's the worst
pain of their lives because they're in an argument and
a fight. And so definitely, you know, your psychological state
(23:18):
for people who chronic pain can definitely influence how well
you're able to deal with it.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
All right, Jim, thank you as always, great stuff. We'll
catch you next weekend or next week.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Take care, all right?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Jim Doctor, Jim Keeney and by the way, now it's
time for the cheesy plug for Lindsey. It's the Pain
Game Podcast, is what she has, and it's about chronic pain,
dealing with it, living with it. And as Jim said,
it's really strange giving pain purpose. I know that's totally counterintuitive,
but it works. That's the Pain Game Podcast and social
(23:50):
it's at the Pain Game Podcast. So, Neil, how cheesy
was that in terms of.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
A free plug, super super case Oe?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Okay, I thought that's the case. All right, we're done, guys.
Tomorrow morning, we'll do some other cheap stuff right here
on the show.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
It starts again.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Well, first of all, Gary and Channing are up next,
so stay tuned. And tomorrow morning with Amy and Will
that starts. Wake up called Neil and I jump aboard
and is running around someplace and Kono is there staring
at me, and we'll be back Manyana KFI AM six
forty more stimulating talk radio.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listenings KFI AM six forty The Bill Handles show
on demand on the iHeartRadio f Home Day Wednesday. Some
stories that we are looking at big time. State Farm
has gotten approval from the insurance Commissioner to increase on
an emergency basis.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The rates.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Eighteen percent on top of what they're already asking for.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
And they have no choice.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
What does California say, No, you're not going to get
the rates. Okay, then they're going to move out of California.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And Pete Rose.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
His lifetime ban has been lifted because his life is
been lifted.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I guess that's what works.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Lifetime bans when you die are sort of no longer lifetime.
Now there's a story cal Matters came up with and
for the first time, we're actually getting some real information
about what happened to some of the former prisoners that
the state let out early because of the pandemic. And
(01:06):
here is and the state did not give cal Matters
any information. They finally got it. Freedom of what do
you call it? Freedom of the request? What do they
call that?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Freedom of information? There you go, Freedom Information Act. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
So nearly a third of California prisoners released early during
the pandemic ended back in prison, and that's according to
the Department of Corrections. And at that time when they
were released, the governor and the Corrections Department did not
share the list of the names and the crimes of
thousands of people that were sent home early, and we
(01:42):
were left.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
In the dark.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Now, there may be a reason why they don't in
terms of the safety of the prisoners, but they.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Could have given us numbers.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So between April twenty twenty December twenty twenty one, California
Corrections Department freed fourteen eight hundred people. Forty six hundred
had gone back to prison as of January thirty one,
twenty twenty five. Now, most of the prisoners that were
released here early did not do the serious crimes that
(02:10):
landed him back in prison.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
There's the difference.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
They weren't serious offenders. Only thirty people of all of
them returned for first or second degree murder, a just
less than one percent.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The top three.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Reasons people went to prison illegal possession of a gun,
what a shocker. That was fourteen percent, assault ten percent,
burglary nine percent, vehicle theft, and domestic abuse four to
five percent. So cowmatters looked at a couple of stories
indicative of what's happening. One guy that was interviewed, Isi
(02:45):
Isaiah Alfaro, released in August of twenty twenty, served time
for auto theft.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Two years later, he's back in the slammer for burglary.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And he said in an interview he was doing his damnness
to stay out of trouble and live a better life
after he was released early. I was going to school,
I was staying on the right track, and then I
started using drugs again and it was only a matter
of time before I began having criminal activity in my life,
ended up back in jail, and he wished the counties
(03:15):
had more resources to help people who are struggling with
drug and alcohol addictions.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So therein lies the problem.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
How do you legitimately and successfully keep criminals who are
released from going back into prison and committing crimes Because
a third come back at least in this study or
in this article looking at the prisoners released early, so.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
The recidivism rate is pretty high.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Well, the way you do it is throw a lot
of resources into the prison system, rehab, skill set, learning,
welding classes for example, things that they can do to
get out and earn a living.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
But we don't have the money to do that. And
where do we put our money? And the question I've
had earlier homelessness put it in.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Public service like fire and police departments. Do we do
it in housing support anyway? Outside of homelessness? City services?
How about rehab?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
How about that?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Where do you put the money so people go back
to prison? Because, as Phedroh said, I would have loved
the county to I would have loved the county to
have given me some kind of service to help me
on my way, and it didn't happen. Are there any
(04:49):
upsides keeping people in prison? Well, it costs a lot
of money. That's a downside. They learn to be even
more criminal if they put in the wrong population. I mean,
I guess the good end of it is a medical
issue where they're never going to suffer from constipation again. Okay,
So the New York Times produced a study about boys
(05:15):
and young men.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now not that kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
A study, the kind of study that compared boys and
young men compared them to women to girls in educational achievement,
mental health, transitions to adulthood.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And the male members of the tribe.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Boys and young men are falling behind and females are
surging forward. Now they're trying to look at this, and
researchers are saying there are several economic and social changes
and that has combined all of them to change the trajectories.
School has changed in a way to favor girls. Work
(05:57):
has changed in ways that favor women. Boys are seen
as troublemakers. Men have actually come as society has come
to the point that masculinity is toxic.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
A lot of it has to do with the politics.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Today, the me too movement, the way we simply are
looking at people differently. Now it's been a while since
there are more women than men in med school, in
graduate school, in law school. When I went to law school,
the vast majority of students were men.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
At least I thought they were men. I don't know
what happened to them later on. Today it's well the
other way around.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And by the way, that's not just a feeling about this,
because when as specifically young men say they feel undervalued,
parents and adults who work with children are worried more
about boys. And now they're a ton of data out
there now some boys have been affected more than others.
(07:04):
And you hear something that is going to surprise.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
You, right.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Growing up in poverty exacerbates the problem. Growing up as
a member of a minority group in poverty exacerbates it
even more. But some of these patterns aren't new. Boys
have always lagged behind girls in a certain area. For example,
girls mature faster than boys do. They become tweens and
(07:34):
teenagers faster than boys do. Although my girls, as I said,
have never left the tween age bracket, and up to
this point there's been not very much focus has sort
of been a given. So now social scientists are really
(07:54):
looking at this. School has become more academic earlier, and
that makes it harder for boys who are less mature
than girls, because the harder the school is, the more
mature a kid has to be to deal with school,
The more focus a child has to have, or a
young person has to have, the more ambition, and that
(08:17):
all comes with age or it comes with maturity, and
that gender gap goes through school. Girls score better on
reading tests than boys, because again I think it's a
question of mature maturity, and that's what it said. Girls
for the most part have higher GPAs boys are more
(08:38):
likely to be suspended. Now I don't know if you've
ever been suspended. I was a few times, okay, many times,
but suspension was you stayed after school for a few hours,
you went out of your mind. You could do your homework,
but no one bothered. And if I looked around, it
(08:58):
was ninety percent boys. And the few girls that were
in suspension, we knew what they were going to turn
out to be. That is a sexist thing to say,
isn't it. Yeah, I take that back. Women outnumber men
in college enrollment. Well, here's one graduating high school on time.
(09:20):
Eighty three percent for boys, eighty nine percent for girls.
And here's a stat And I'm not throwing a lot
of stats out here, but I.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Think they're important to understand this story.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
A lot recent male high school graduates, about fifty seven
percent are enrolled in college. That's up from fifty four
percent nineteen sixty. So it's gone up three percent, almost nothing.
Now let's go to women's college enrollment again. This is
from nineteen sixty. Then it was thirty eight percent. Today
(09:58):
it's sixty six percent, almost doubled. Where the men have
gone up three percent in the last eighty years.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Boys just don't do well as girls. Now there are
a couple areas. It's the other way.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
They do have some strengths on math tests. They outscore girls,
especially whites and Asian American boys in high income suburbs.
I don't know if you've ever been to Berkeley. You know,
Asian Americans are considered a minority. You know that officially,
not only in terms of statistics, but according to government policy.
(10:38):
Except when it comes to school, you can't get into
Berkeley never.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
In a million years.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Now, if you're Asian and you have a kid, that's
how you get into Berkeley. Because is it there because
they're smarter than the rest of us? Know, it's because
a cultural issue. And now I've often said this. You
get a kid that comes off of a boat, one
of those boat people that went across the Pacific from
(11:10):
Vietnam or Cambodia, and they spent weeks going across in
a row boat, thirty of them in a small boat,
and half of them were eaten by sharks. So they
finally hit the shore and theyre brought their broad ashore
and you know, their straggly, their starving families barely maked.
Two weeks later, that kid has won the Westinghouse a
(11:30):
scholarship for spelling or a science scholarship.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
It's a cultural issue. Here's a cultural issue when it
comes to Asians.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
I used to live in a neighborhood that was I
would say about sixty seventy percent Korean, and there was
a public school just down the street that I couldn't
put my kids into because there was no way they
were going to compete because you had these kids who
would do all of their homework and then spend five
(12:04):
hours playing.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Violin, and so.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
They got home from school at three o'clock, they'd go
to bed at ten o'clock and it would be all
day studying and practicing.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
You can't compete against that. And there were Korean kids
because it's cultural.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
And that is that's why you're looking at Asians not
being minorities when it comes to school.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
But the bottom line here I digressed on that one,
I understand, But.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
The bottom line here is that women are advancing at
a good clip, men not so much.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
And we have to do something about it. Guys, because
this is a croc.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
You know we're better than they are. Come on, you
know we can do it. It should be ashamed of yourselves.
Wednesday morning, May fourteenth. Tonight, the Dodgers take on the
Athletics at Dodger Stadium, first pitch at seven. You could
listen to all Dodger games AM five seventy LA Sports
live from Gallupin Motors for the Gallpin Borders Broadcast Booth,
(13:12):
and you can stream all Dodgers games at HD on
the iHeartRadio app. The keyword is AM five seventy LA Sports.
And it is time for a medical segment with doctor
Jim Keeney that we do every Wednesday. Jim, you're doing
something with your phone there. Jim is chief medical Officer
for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and
(13:34):
an er doctor, and Jim is always thanks for joining us,
of course. Okay, excellent, well said. Okay, This week is
kind of interesting because, as you may not know, I mean,
Jim certainly does. But my teenage wife Lindsey suffers from
(13:55):
something called the CRPS Complex Regional Pain syndrome and she
lives in pain twenty four to seven. And out of
that came her podcasts, the Pain Game Podcast, and Jim
was a guest that had just dropped and the two
of you were talking about pain, and you and I
have talked about pain before, and pain is one of those.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
One of those things in medicine that.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Are very, very difficult to deal with, and you did
about as good a job as explaining what pain is
and isn't. So there you are in the er, someone
comes in and complains about pain.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Where do you go from there? Because it's all subjective?
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Well, okay, so talking to Lindsay's audience, people with chronic
ongoing kind of a daily problem, it's a little bit
different to the general pain. Right, So when someone comes
into the AR and pain, are you asking me in
the sense of what do I do? Or are you're
asking me specifics?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
No?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
For both, for both. People come in.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I go in there and I hurt, like hell, I
have a huge headache, or I have chronic pain and
it reaches level that are high enough, which I've seen
Lindsay do that. She goes to the er and the
hopes that some massive drug overdose will help her.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So how do you deal with either one?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, pain is a serious you know, people have referred
to that as the stiffest vital as all the you know,
he's learning that that I commit after.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
All, right.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Jim Jim Jim Jim we're losing you. Can you uh
hang up and we'll once again try it. Okay, I
guess he did. I love cell phones, don't you so. Anyway,
while we're getting him back on the phone, I'm gonna
go ahead and pitch Lindsay's podcast because she happens to
(15:46):
be married to me at talk show hosts.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Did we get Jim back?
Speaker 1 (15:52):
It's the Pain Game podcast wherever you hear podcasts. Okay,
fair enough, back to Jim, and we're talking about the
two different kinds of pain, chronic pain and the pain
that is there because of an injury or because of
a headache or because of some issue.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
How do you deal with it?
Speaker 3 (16:10):
So pain again is an important sign. You know, when
somebody's got a new pain, we take that very seriously
because that's your body's way of telling you something's gone wrong.
So pain is a significant reason that people come to
the ear, and it's a good reason to come to
the e R right, you you smack yourself hard, you
know you're using pain to determine hunts. It's hurt enough
(16:30):
that I think I might have broke some just a battery,
you know, sometimes pain and a stomach or in the
chat and it can be because of things like heart
attack or appendicitis or you know, things like that. So
of course when someone comes in with pain, we assess it,
we look for causes and then we try and do
diagnostic testing to narrow down whether you know, whether the
(16:52):
pain is serious, what we need to do about it,
And in that process we may give pain medications to
address the pain. Sometimes by giving pain medicine, you can
calm the pain down enough that it can be more
localized and really pindpoint it better. So sometimes treating the
pain helps us kind of diagnose the problem. Now with Linday,
we were talking about people with chronic pain and they
(17:14):
live with pain every day. A lot of them have
seen pain management specialists in addition to many other specialists
to try and deal with their pain. So these are
people that have an escalation process. They have medications they
use at home, And what we talked about is, look,
if you get to you know, the er is the
last resort in that situation, because we don't have much
(17:35):
more to add, right we don't. We are there for emergencies,
and that's what we're there for. If you come in
with your pain is worsening, we're going to look for
the emergency causes for why that pain might be worsening.
But if it's your chronic pain syndrome that is now
just worse, well, then really all we have are the
are the escalation that your doctor has already given you.
(17:57):
So there's not much more we can add in that situation.
And that's kind of what Lindsay and I discussed.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
All right, So based on the fact that you and
I are on the same page when it comes to
our healthcare system in the United States, and I know
your first piece of advice as an er doctor is
stay the hell out of the er. How are we
doing in general with pain management? And have there been
any advances in the last few years.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Sure, yeah, there's there's been some significant advances, most recently
we did on the show a few months ago. I
believe it's the there's a new medication that is a
non narcotic that treats pain. I'm sure if it's covered
by the insurance, is going to be pretty expensive, you know,
that's the way these things are when they come out.
But there there's a new medication that's non narcotic. We've
(18:47):
also had, you know, all these other processes like interventional
excuse me, interventional radiologists and pain management doctors who can
go in and pinpoint, say a nerve or something like that,
and you know, kind of dead in that nerve or
numb that nerve that's causing your pain. So more focused
approaches by pain management specialists have come to you know,
(19:10):
have improved, especially with imaging and improved imaging and things
like that.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And just as an aside, and I think I've told
people this that I had. I was out two days
last week because I had foot surgery. There was a
really messy surgery with my two toes. They had to
break and put pins through them. So as we seek
about speak about pain, I am ripped out of my
mind on norco as we speak.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
And the reason I know that, Jim, because I really
love you right now.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
I love you man, You're one of my love everybody.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
That's a good point. No, you're absolutely right. I do
love everybody right now. All right.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One of the things about pain, and you're a lot
more generous about pain than I am in terms of
you know, people are subjective. I mean, you look at
a broken bone, Okay, you know that. But if I'm
a headache and you asked me one to ten. How
much it hurts, I'll tell you eight or ten and
it's not or my idea of ten is far different
than yours.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
How do you deal with that?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yeah, I mean, you're right, it's very subjective. You have
to kind of do a lot of trusting that the
patient is not telling you, you know, something that's not true.
And most people don't want to wait in the emergency
room for four to six hours to just you know,
lie to you and tell you something to get a
little bit of medication. So it's going to last maybe,
(20:37):
you know, at these shots last maybe an hour at
the most two hours, so it's you know, you got
to take it with a grain of salt. But at
the same time, you gotta really trust that the patient's
telling you the truth. There's ways we can tell, right,
you know, when you're not talking with the patient and
they're sitting in the gurney, you know, just doing their
normal business and calling friends and doing paper work and
(21:00):
all that type of stuff, and then you walk in
and they're arriving in pain. That does seem like somebody's
putting on a show for you, right, and you notice
those type of things. But short of that, we tend
to just kind of trust that somebody that's there is
there for a legitimate reason.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
All right, I want to go back to the podcast
and having listened to it that you and Lindsey did,
my new teenage wife, who, by the way, we had
to wait until she graduated high school because I didn't
want to go to jail. And you've talked about something
that I thought was really interesting, and that is hope
and then human connection, not necessarily any medical aspect to
(21:39):
dealing with chronic pain, but just the human connection. And
I went, wow, that doesn't sound like a doctor to me.
Do you want to expand on that for a minute.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah, I mean we had kind of a long conversation,
so it's hard to sum it up in just a
few minutes, but you know, we were talking about different
aspects of pain and how you know, even things like
yoga and tai chi and all that have been shown
to reduce pain. And then we started talking about when
you live with pain and it's every day that changes
(22:10):
you as a person. You have something unique and different
to offer other people who are going through struggles and
similar struggles, and we kind of talked about how you know,
and she's created this podcast, and other people have done
other things where you make these human connections and you're
able to help another person. It creates some sense of
(22:33):
purpose to the pain, right, that the pain you're going
through results in some good for somebody else. That definitely
helps reduce the intensity of the pain, because in that
conversation we talked about how your psychological state magnifies the pain. Right.
I've taken care of soccer players playing a final soccer game.
They hit the goalpost with their foot and have an
(22:54):
open fracture of their toe. Play the rest of the game,
don't even notice until they take off their shoe and
look at a blame sock, right, because they're having fun.
It's intense, they're enjoying themselves. And I had people in
an argument with their spouse who stub their toe on
the kitchen table and they come in. That's the worst
pain of their lives because they're in an argument and
a fight. And so definitely, you know, your psychological state
(23:18):
for people who chronic pain can definitely influence how well
you're able to deal with it.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
All right, Jim, thank you as always, great stuff. We'll
catch you next weekend or next week.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Take care, all right?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Jim Doctor, Jim Keeney and by the way, now it's
time for the cheesy plug for Lindsey. It's the Pain
Game Podcast, is what she has, and it's about chronic pain,
dealing with it, living with it. And as Jim said,
it's really strange giving pain purpose. I know that's totally counterintuitive,
but it works. That's the Pain Game Podcast and social
(23:50):
it's at the Pain Game Podcast. So, Neil, how cheesy
was that in terms of.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
A free plug, super super case Oe?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Okay, I thought that's the case. All right, we're done, guys.
Tomorrow morning, we'll do some other cheap stuff right here
on the show.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
It starts again.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Well, first of all, Gary and Channing are up next,
so stay tuned. And tomorrow morning with Amy and Will
that starts. Wake up called Neil and I jump aboard
and is running around someplace and Kono is there staring
at me, and we'll be back Manyana KFI AM six
forty more stimulating talk radio.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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