June 18, 2025 • 20 mins
(Thursday 06/18/25)
Conflicts of interest like we’ve never seen before in the White House. Inside the Trump merchandise empire. 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 the latest viral trend of taping your mouth shut when you sleep, a measles outbreak In Long Beach, and the new Covid sub variant ‘Razor Blade’ throat.
Conflicts of interest like we’ve never seen before in the White House. Inside the Trump merchandise empire. 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 the latest viral trend of taping your mouth shut when you sleep, a measles outbreak In Long Beach, and the new Covid sub variant ‘Razor Blade’ throat.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty am.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Six forty Bill Handle here on a humpday, Wednesday, June eighteenth. Now,
I want to share with you how you are going
to be burnt to a crisp this summer. How it's
going to get so hot that well, let me put
it this way. You're probably not going to survive, but
(00:27):
let me tell you how you're going to die. We
are continue to reel from the firestorm that just decimated
Pacific Palace Aides Altadena in January, and now we're facing
the prospect of what is described as an exceptionally active
wildlife wildfire season. YEP, this is not good news combined
(00:54):
global warming climate change, and we know what have you
seen every night when it talks, when the news is
reporting on the storms and what's going on across the
eastern part, the Midwest and eastern part of the country,
people are dying like crazy. The storms are going out
of their minds. I mean they're not talking even inches
(01:16):
per hour. It's feet per hour of rain coming down.
It's crazy. So we are looking at the Trump administration
budget cuts, layoffs, office closures, restructuring the US forest Service,
the National Oceanic and Administrative Administration NOAH FEMA. And as
(01:38):
all these cuts are being made and they are decimating
these organizations, keep in mind, and I love this and
I'm not going to stop saying this. As each cut
is being made, we are told it is better for
us and they will be doing a better job with
fewer people. And if forty percent of the workforce is
(01:58):
let go, that's a good thing for us because there
are no people that have not been cut out, that
are not there because of waste and fraud.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That is why so much is being cut.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, in the meantime, we're looking at well, it's gonna
be we have a bone dry winter that we had,
we have a spring snow melt early rapid, this hot
summer coming up.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
We're looking at intense fire activity.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Coupling that with new federal policies that decrease the ability
to even foresee.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
What's going on.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
National Weather Administration that's been cut like crazy. Sey.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I think it's the National.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Weather Service that's been decimated. It's very, very difficult. We're
going to see it just a whole different world. The
US Forest Service overseas, more than half of all the
Forestland in California sixty three percent budget cut and employees
are going to be cut. That's thirty percent of its workforce.
(03:04):
But that's better to have thirty percent. Fewer people involved
in forestry is good for us.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It's going to make us safer.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
To have fewer firefighters and firefighting equipment is better for us.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Than not.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Because we have enough and the rest of it is
all waste and fraud. Now, obviously you know where I'm
sitting on this one, but you are going to see
some massive problems involved this summer with fires, and it's
not going to be fun at all. It really isn't.
And sometimes you just say, what's more important? You look
(03:44):
at priorities. I have a hard time with not so
much saying a priority administration is one versus the other.
I may disagree, I really might, But when it comes
to an administration and peeing on my leg and telling
me it's actually raining, you know, maybe not.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
All right, We're done with that.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
This is no surprise. So we've been talking about this
for a long time. We here at KFI and iHeart
are in the middle of all this. And this has
to do with US public companies reducing workforces and have
over the past three years by three point five percent.
That is a huge number if you look at the
(04:33):
number of people that are actually working. And this is
beyond cost tremming. It really is a difference in philosophy.
It used to be that you had sales and you
had great business and you added people. Well, now it's
a different philosophy. As a matter of fact, adding people
(04:54):
or keeping the same number of employees, there's something wrong
with the company. You shouldn't add people. You should take
additional work that's coming in or has to be done,
and have fewer people do it. And what really is
influencing this big time is a I companies are able
(05:19):
to do a whole lot more with a whole fewer,
a whole number of fewer, a whole number of fewer people,
or without with fewer people.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I'll get that.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
And the message from many bosses right now, anyone still
on the payroll could be should be working harder. And
by the way, that's exactly what happens here and did
happen few And that's across America, across corporations all over
the place, and that is look at the work has
(05:50):
to be done. We have X number of employees, tell
you what, let's cut it ten percent and we'll have
the same work being done by fewer people. That is
the mantra. There was a note to employees yesterday. Amazon
chief executive Andy Jasse wrote that this once in a
(06:12):
lifetime rise of AI will eliminate the need for certain jobs.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
And it does.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
I told you earlier about how difficult it is for
recent college grads to get jobs. Entry level positions really
don't exist anymore because entry level positions involve so much
scut work. And I've talked about how it's a real
problem because you're going to have you have mid level management,
and you have upper level management that are going to
(06:39):
leave and there's no one coming in to take over.
It's going to really hurt business big time. And there
are well how many people want to keep business the
way they do unions do. That seems to be the
(07:00):
ass bastion of saying, oh no, don't use technology, don't
make it harder for people to do work. We want
as many people as possible. Great story I want to
share with you, and that has to do with one
of the strongest unions in the country, and that's the
rail workers. And I don't know what they call American
Federation of Railroad Employees or whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And very powerful union.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And you've seen films with the trains that have cabooses.
Remember the old cabooses that were on trains. Okay, there
were caboozmen, caboose people, because I don't think you can
use cabouse men, cabouoses, cabusenas.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
I don't know in any case.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, so there were caboosmen that used to work on cabooses. Well,
you don't need cabooses anymore. It's been generations where you
didn't need cabooses. The union still had contracts where the
railroads had to pay for caboosemen with no cabooses, and
(08:07):
that went on for decades because they were ludites. You
keep people working when technology disappears. Pair of legals Where
there used to be pair of legals working at a firm,
now you just have one instead of a pair of legals,
(08:27):
just one.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
See how that works. That was slick.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
The point is that AI does so much of the
job and they're losing entire swaths of the employment sectors
and there's no way around it. It's a different world,
it really is today, and how we're going to deal
with it. We're going to be just swinging left, right,
up and down, try to deal with new technologies. And
(08:52):
this isn't philosophy. This isn't forcing people to go one
way or the other and cutting jobs because you simply
want to cut the amount of money that you spend.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
This is a whole new way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
We're seeing such major major changes going on with AI
and a philosophy where employees used to have well, let
me put it this way. We've gone from a corporations
not treating their employees very well, to the unions coming
in having lots of power, and then the union's losing
(09:28):
a lot of power, and now you have corporations gaining
more and more power, and now it's going the other way.
But the philosophy of as our employees are the biggest
resource we have and we have to treat our employees
as well. Those days are gone. It's not the same
you work for a Google or an Amazon. You go
into the office, you're not going to get free food.
(09:49):
You're not gonna have ping pong tables anymore. You're not
going to have what is it bean chairs? Is that
what they call them? Where everybody sits around in bs
IS those days. It's a different world, a different place.
All Right, it's time for doctor Jim Keiney, which we
do every Wednesday, our medical segment. Jim is a chief
(10:10):
medical officers for a chief medical officer for Dignity Saint
Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and an er doc.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And good morning Jim.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Good morning Bill.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Okay, here's you know, when this came up, a new
fad about taping your mouth shut when you sleep, I
was thinking of not just taping your mouth shut, but
also using a ballgag, and I was wondering, does this
actually work, taping your mouth shut when you sleep.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
I'm assuming this has to do with sleep apnea, right.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, it's one of the things. So it's a really
interesting phenomenon that's popped up, I mean, and it appeals
to people on a lot of different levels. Right. There's
you know, biohacking is a really popular thing and it's
it's considered a bio hack.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
What is biohacking?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You know, that's Andrew Huberman and a lot of other
people who do that kind of you know, here's here's
a bio hack that you do this kind of simple thing,
low cost thing, and it'll improve the quality of your health. Right, so,
you know, drink tea in the morning and it'll you know,
it'll improve your blood flow something like that. So that's biohacking,
(11:24):
and it's it's very popular, and it's it's really social
media driven as well. And then you've got this obsession
with sleep. Everybody's wearing sleep trackers and quality of sleep
is a big issue right now. And then anxiety reduction
as well is another kind of social media big thing.
So this all all feeds into that. Then you add
on top of that, a guy wrote a book in
(11:46):
twenty twenty Andrew or James Nester. He's a journalist who
wrote a book called Breathe, and it was very popular
and it talked about a lot of these things. It
talked about, you know, breathing through your nose was a
critical part of it talked about how in ancient times, right,
the Pranayama breath that they talk about in yoga is
(12:07):
breathing through your nose and it helps relax your body
and improves your sleep and improves oxygenation, all kinds of stuff,
and so mouth breathing became kind of a not cool thing, right,
and then the thought is okay. So he brought that up,
Andrew Heverman brought it up, a lot of different people
brought up. Now people are taping their mouth shut while
(12:28):
they sleep because it's forcing nasal breathing. And there are
a few studies that show that for mild sleep APNA
it may improve slightly, so small studies mild condition people
with severe sleep ABNA. This is probably not going to
work at all, but it's one of those things that
is gaining popularity.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah, how much you let me put it this way?
Do you buy into this?
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I mean, not enough to tape my mouth shut. But
if somebody came to me and said, look, I have
really mild sleep ATANA, do you think this might help?
I'm like, you know what, just use the right tape.
Don't don't use duct tape. You know.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Duct tape?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yea. By the way, do they have a tape that
is manufactured for this kind of thing?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
What the hell kind of tape do you use?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Well?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
I think medical tape, you know, the one of the
brands called micropoor, and it actually it doesn't stick the
skin so hard. You know, it's the same tape they
use to tape down your ivs and things. Like that.
I like paper tape although because it comes off very easily,
but that may come off too easily on people with
like facial hair, and it might just come off in
the middle of the night. If you can get away
(13:32):
with that with the paper tape, that's the best. And
these are all medical like paper tape and and micropoor
paper tape.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
All right, moving over to what's going on in Long
Beach and this and that's your area where you live
basically work wise, and measles. How big a deal is measles?
Is it growing like crazy? And that's connected right into
Robert Kennedy, How the measles vaccine really doesn't help or
(14:02):
it's not that effective. Let's talk about that. Should we
be afraid of what's going on with measles?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I mean measles is highly highly contagious, way more
contagious than even COVID, and it has a lot of complications,
you know, and it can cause hospitalization, and you know,
people end up missing work because their children are ill.
It's a major, like social problem in addition to a
(14:28):
major health problem. And you know, I was in med
school during an outbreak in nineteen ninety and I got
to see all these kids being hospitalized with measles who
hadn't been vaccinated, and it kind of is a wake
up call like, wow, you know, these vaccines do make
a difference. And you know, public health is all about
like building public trust, and I know public trust has
(14:51):
been eroded for a lot of different reasons, but I
think that the current approach towards vaccines is adding to
undermining that public with trust. And that's really going to
be critical for getting that vaccine level up high enough
so that we prevent outbreaks like we're seeing right now.
So this is going to go on probably for years,
you know, until we can get adequate levels of vaccination,
(15:14):
and that takes again regaining the public trust when it comes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
To measles vaccines and the kids who do get the measles.
I am assuming that people who have gotten the measles,
either all of them or the vast, vast majority, have
not been inoculated.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Is that fair to.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Say, Yeah, that's right. I mean, you can get measles
after the vaccine. We call that atypical measles. It looks
a little bit different and it's definitely much more mild.
It's pretty rare to hospitalize somebody with atypical measles, but
straight measles, and a person who's unvaccinated they can get encephalitis,
swelling of the brain that can cause brain damage issues
(15:55):
things like that in the worst most of your cases.
And the same thing it can pneumonia, So it really
causes serious problems. It's not just people think it's a
childhood illness that most people just get and get over,
and that's not the case. A lot of people end up,
you know, having to be hospitalizing and having complications.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And there's still people out there and lots of them go,
oh no, I'm not going to vaccinate my kids, because
vaccination is far far riskier than for example, measles and
encephalitis and getting brains coming out of your ears. Let's
talk about something called razor blade throat.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
What is that about.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so razor blade throats referring to the kind of
symptoms people are getting with the latest strain of COVID.
So it's still the omicron variant, but there's two predominant substrains,
and one of them, called nimbus, is causing these symptoms
where people get severe sore throats as if like there's
(16:54):
shards of glass in their throat when they swallow, so
they're calling it razorably throat.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
That is horrific.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I mean, there's nothing more uncomfortable. It's plenty more uncomfortable, but.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Sore throats really do really do it.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I mean it is constant and even you know, lozenges
and nothing seems to really help with sore throat other
than throwing in some pretty severe topical anesthesia. When it
comes to this new subvariant, it almost sounds like we're
talking every year now we have the flu where it's
(17:31):
just become endemic, and are we going to be able
to take vaccines against these sub variants that are coming up.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yes, it's still it's still the omicron variant, so the
vaccine still works for this. But you know, people are
getting less concerned about it because it's not this version
is not really causing the hospitalizations like what we've seen
and the severe complications like what we saw the first
go around. Right every every strain or every year, it's
(18:02):
gotten more and more mild or form of a disease.
And maybe that's because we've all had some level of
exposure now and our immune systems are ready for it.
Or it may be just that the virus, you know,
to be more successful and to propagate is becoming less severe.
And that you know, if you make someone too sick
as a virus, you don't spread very well because the
(18:23):
person is immobilized. But if you make somebody you know,
moderately sick so they can still go to work and
still go out in public, well, then you spread more effectively.
So it kind of makes sense that we're getting more
and more mild conditions.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And when when COVID first came out, of course, he
killed a million Americans and killed I don't know how
many millions throughout the world. And it's nothing like it
was in terms of danger. Is it simply because we've
gotten better immunity, because the uh, the the COVID virus
itself isn't as dangerous. Why is it so much better
(19:00):
today than it was a few years ago?
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I mean, yeah, I think it's a combination of both.
I think it's a combination of we've seen it, our
body is not. You know, when your body has never
seen this foreign object before, it doesn't know to attack it,
and so it has the ability to replicate freely in
your body and cause all kinds of havoc. Then you're
you know, now we have immunity to it to some extent.
(19:24):
So almost everybody has probably gotten some form of COVID now,
so they either have some natural immunity or a boosted
immune system from a vaccine, and now they're you know,
we're able to fight it off a lot better. But yeah,
it's going to be with us probably for you know, forever,
for the foreseeable future, and hopefully it's days like this.
(19:45):
It's just like it's going to be like the flu,
where every once in a while we get a shift
in the flu and it's deadly, right and it and
it starts killing a lot of people. But right now
we're not in that situation. So let's let's hope it
stay that way, all.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Right, Jim, thank you. Catch again next Wednesday. Oh ahead,
and kill some people all right, as always, have a
good one.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
No, he loves that. He loves hearing that.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
We're done, guys, that's it. It starts again tomorrow with
the same group of people. It's Will and Amy at
five am to six wake up call, the Neil and
I jump aboard and tomorrow and does come back and
is the producer and Kono never goes away up in
a few moments, Cary and Shannon, and we'll get out
(20:34):
of here until tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
This is KFI Am sixty. You've been listening to the
Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
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 am.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Six forty Bill Handle here on a humpday, Wednesday, June eighteenth. Now,
I want to share with you how you are going
to be burnt to a crisp this summer. How it's
going to get so hot that well, let me put
it this way. You're probably not going to survive, but
(00:27):
let me tell you how you're going to die. We
are continue to reel from the firestorm that just decimated
Pacific Palace Aides Altadena in January, and now we're facing
the prospect of what is described as an exceptionally active
wildlife wildfire season. YEP, this is not good news combined
(00:54):
global warming climate change, and we know what have you
seen every night when it talks, when the news is
reporting on the storms and what's going on across the
eastern part, the Midwest and eastern part of the country,
people are dying like crazy. The storms are going out
of their minds. I mean they're not talking even inches
(01:16):
per hour. It's feet per hour of rain coming down.
It's crazy. So we are looking at the Trump administration
budget cuts, layoffs, office closures, restructuring the US forest Service,
the National Oceanic and Administrative Administration NOAH FEMA. And as
(01:38):
all these cuts are being made and they are decimating
these organizations, keep in mind, and I love this and
I'm not going to stop saying this. As each cut
is being made, we are told it is better for
us and they will be doing a better job with
fewer people. And if forty percent of the workforce is
(01:58):
let go, that's a good thing for us because there
are no people that have not been cut out, that
are not there because of waste and fraud.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That is why so much is being cut.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, in the meantime, we're looking at well, it's gonna
be we have a bone dry winter that we had,
we have a spring snow melt early rapid, this hot
summer coming up.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
We're looking at intense fire activity.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Coupling that with new federal policies that decrease the ability
to even foresee.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
What's going on.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
National Weather Administration that's been cut like crazy. Sey.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I think it's the National.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Weather Service that's been decimated. It's very, very difficult. We're
going to see it just a whole different world. The
US Forest Service overseas, more than half of all the
Forestland in California sixty three percent budget cut and employees
are going to be cut. That's thirty percent of its workforce.
(03:04):
But that's better to have thirty percent. Fewer people involved
in forestry is good for us.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It's going to make us safer.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
To have fewer firefighters and firefighting equipment is better for us.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Than not.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Because we have enough and the rest of it is
all waste and fraud. Now, obviously you know where I'm
sitting on this one, but you are going to see
some massive problems involved this summer with fires, and it's
not going to be fun at all. It really isn't.
And sometimes you just say, what's more important? You look
(03:44):
at priorities. I have a hard time with not so
much saying a priority administration is one versus the other.
I may disagree, I really might, But when it comes
to an administration and peeing on my leg and telling
me it's actually raining, you know, maybe not.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
All right, We're done with that.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
This is no surprise. So we've been talking about this
for a long time. We here at KFI and iHeart
are in the middle of all this. And this has
to do with US public companies reducing workforces and have
over the past three years by three point five percent.
That is a huge number if you look at the
(04:33):
number of people that are actually working. And this is
beyond cost tremming. It really is a difference in philosophy.
It used to be that you had sales and you
had great business and you added people. Well, now it's
a different philosophy. As a matter of fact, adding people
(04:54):
or keeping the same number of employees, there's something wrong
with the company. You shouldn't add people. You should take
additional work that's coming in or has to be done,
and have fewer people do it. And what really is
influencing this big time is a I companies are able
(05:19):
to do a whole lot more with a whole fewer,
a whole number of fewer, a whole number of fewer people,
or without with fewer people.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I'll get that.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
And the message from many bosses right now, anyone still
on the payroll could be should be working harder. And
by the way, that's exactly what happens here and did
happen few And that's across America, across corporations all over
the place, and that is look at the work has
(05:50):
to be done. We have X number of employees, tell
you what, let's cut it ten percent and we'll have
the same work being done by fewer people. That is
the mantra. There was a note to employees yesterday. Amazon
chief executive Andy Jasse wrote that this once in a
(06:12):
lifetime rise of AI will eliminate the need for certain jobs.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
And it does.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
I told you earlier about how difficult it is for
recent college grads to get jobs. Entry level positions really
don't exist anymore because entry level positions involve so much
scut work. And I've talked about how it's a real
problem because you're going to have you have mid level management,
and you have upper level management that are going to
(06:39):
leave and there's no one coming in to take over.
It's going to really hurt business big time. And there
are well how many people want to keep business the
way they do unions do. That seems to be the
(07:00):
ass bastion of saying, oh no, don't use technology, don't
make it harder for people to do work. We want
as many people as possible. Great story I want to
share with you, and that has to do with one
of the strongest unions in the country, and that's the
rail workers. And I don't know what they call American
Federation of Railroad Employees or whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And very powerful union.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And you've seen films with the trains that have cabooses.
Remember the old cabooses that were on trains. Okay, there
were caboozmen, caboose people, because I don't think you can
use cabouse men, cabouoses, cabusenas.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
I don't know in any case.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, so there were caboosmen that used to work on cabooses. Well,
you don't need cabooses anymore. It's been generations where you
didn't need cabooses. The union still had contracts where the
railroads had to pay for caboosemen with no cabooses, and
(08:07):
that went on for decades because they were ludites. You
keep people working when technology disappears. Pair of legals Where
there used to be pair of legals working at a firm,
now you just have one instead of a pair of legals,
(08:27):
just one.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
See how that works. That was slick.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
The point is that AI does so much of the
job and they're losing entire swaths of the employment sectors
and there's no way around it. It's a different world,
it really is today, and how we're going to deal
with it. We're going to be just swinging left, right,
up and down, try to deal with new technologies. And
(08:52):
this isn't philosophy. This isn't forcing people to go one
way or the other and cutting jobs because you simply
want to cut the amount of money that you spend.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
This is a whole new way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
We're seeing such major major changes going on with AI
and a philosophy where employees used to have well, let
me put it this way. We've gone from a corporations
not treating their employees very well, to the unions coming
in having lots of power, and then the union's losing
(09:28):
a lot of power, and now you have corporations gaining
more and more power, and now it's going the other way.
But the philosophy of as our employees are the biggest
resource we have and we have to treat our employees
as well. Those days are gone. It's not the same
you work for a Google or an Amazon. You go
into the office, you're not going to get free food.
(09:49):
You're not gonna have ping pong tables anymore. You're not
going to have what is it bean chairs? Is that
what they call them? Where everybody sits around in bs
IS those days. It's a different world, a different place.
All Right, it's time for doctor Jim Keiney, which we
do every Wednesday, our medical segment. Jim is a chief
(10:10):
medical officers for a chief medical officer for Dignity Saint
Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and an er doc.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And good morning Jim.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Good morning Bill.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Okay, here's you know, when this came up, a new
fad about taping your mouth shut when you sleep, I
was thinking of not just taping your mouth shut, but
also using a ballgag, and I was wondering, does this
actually work, taping your mouth shut when you sleep.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
I'm assuming this has to do with sleep apnea, right.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, it's one of the things. So it's a really
interesting phenomenon that's popped up, I mean, and it appeals
to people on a lot of different levels. Right. There's
you know, biohacking is a really popular thing and it's
it's considered a bio hack.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
What is biohacking?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
You know, that's Andrew Huberman and a lot of other
people who do that kind of you know, here's here's
a bio hack that you do this kind of simple thing,
low cost thing, and it'll improve the quality of your health. Right, so,
you know, drink tea in the morning and it'll you know,
it'll improve your blood flow something like that. So that's biohacking,
(11:24):
and it's it's very popular, and it's it's really social
media driven as well. And then you've got this obsession
with sleep. Everybody's wearing sleep trackers and quality of sleep
is a big issue right now. And then anxiety reduction
as well is another kind of social media big thing.
So this all all feeds into that. Then you add
on top of that, a guy wrote a book in
(11:46):
twenty twenty Andrew or James Nester. He's a journalist who
wrote a book called Breathe, and it was very popular
and it talked about a lot of these things. It
talked about, you know, breathing through your nose was a
critical part of it talked about how in ancient times, right,
the Pranayama breath that they talk about in yoga is
(12:07):
breathing through your nose and it helps relax your body
and improves your sleep and improves oxygenation, all kinds of stuff,
and so mouth breathing became kind of a not cool thing, right,
and then the thought is okay. So he brought that up,
Andrew Heverman brought it up, a lot of different people
brought up. Now people are taping their mouth shut while
(12:28):
they sleep because it's forcing nasal breathing. And there are
a few studies that show that for mild sleep APNA
it may improve slightly, so small studies mild condition people
with severe sleep ABNA. This is probably not going to
work at all, but it's one of those things that
is gaining popularity.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Yeah, how much you let me put it this way?
Do you buy into this?
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I mean, not enough to tape my mouth shut. But
if somebody came to me and said, look, I have
really mild sleep ATANA, do you think this might help?
I'm like, you know what, just use the right tape.
Don't don't use duct tape. You know.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Duct tape?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yea. By the way, do they have a tape that
is manufactured for this kind of thing?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
What the hell kind of tape do you use?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Well?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
I think medical tape, you know, the one of the
brands called micropoor, and it actually it doesn't stick the
skin so hard. You know, it's the same tape they
use to tape down your ivs and things. Like that.
I like paper tape although because it comes off very easily,
but that may come off too easily on people with
like facial hair, and it might just come off in
the middle of the night. If you can get away
(13:32):
with that with the paper tape, that's the best. And
these are all medical like paper tape and and micropoor
paper tape.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
All right, moving over to what's going on in Long
Beach and this and that's your area where you live
basically work wise, and measles. How big a deal is measles?
Is it growing like crazy? And that's connected right into
Robert Kennedy, How the measles vaccine really doesn't help or
(14:02):
it's not that effective. Let's talk about that. Should we
be afraid of what's going on with measles?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, I mean measles is highly highly contagious, way more
contagious than even COVID, and it has a lot of complications,
you know, and it can cause hospitalization, and you know,
people end up missing work because their children are ill.
It's a major, like social problem in addition to a
(14:28):
major health problem. And you know, I was in med
school during an outbreak in nineteen ninety and I got
to see all these kids being hospitalized with measles who
hadn't been vaccinated, and it kind of is a wake
up call like, wow, you know, these vaccines do make
a difference. And you know, public health is all about
like building public trust, and I know public trust has
(14:51):
been eroded for a lot of different reasons, but I
think that the current approach towards vaccines is adding to
undermining that public with trust. And that's really going to
be critical for getting that vaccine level up high enough
so that we prevent outbreaks like we're seeing right now.
So this is going to go on probably for years,
you know, until we can get adequate levels of vaccination,
(15:14):
and that takes again regaining the public trust when it comes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
To measles vaccines and the kids who do get the measles.
I am assuming that people who have gotten the measles,
either all of them or the vast, vast majority, have
not been inoculated.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Is that fair to.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Say, Yeah, that's right. I mean, you can get measles
after the vaccine. We call that atypical measles. It looks
a little bit different and it's definitely much more mild.
It's pretty rare to hospitalize somebody with atypical measles, but
straight measles, and a person who's unvaccinated they can get encephalitis,
swelling of the brain that can cause brain damage issues
(15:55):
things like that in the worst most of your cases.
And the same thing it can pneumonia, So it really
causes serious problems. It's not just people think it's a
childhood illness that most people just get and get over,
and that's not the case. A lot of people end up,
you know, having to be hospitalizing and having complications.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And there's still people out there and lots of them go,
oh no, I'm not going to vaccinate my kids, because
vaccination is far far riskier than for example, measles and
encephalitis and getting brains coming out of your ears. Let's
talk about something called razor blade throat.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
What is that about.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so razor blade throats referring to the kind of
symptoms people are getting with the latest strain of COVID.
So it's still the omicron variant, but there's two predominant substrains,
and one of them, called nimbus, is causing these symptoms
where people get severe sore throats as if like there's
(16:54):
shards of glass in their throat when they swallow, so
they're calling it razorably throat.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
That is horrific.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I mean, there's nothing more uncomfortable. It's plenty more uncomfortable, but.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Sore throats really do really do it.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I mean it is constant and even you know, lozenges
and nothing seems to really help with sore throat other
than throwing in some pretty severe topical anesthesia. When it
comes to this new subvariant, it almost sounds like we're
talking every year now we have the flu where it's
(17:31):
just become endemic, and are we going to be able
to take vaccines against these sub variants that are coming up.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yes, it's still it's still the omicron variant, so the
vaccine still works for this. But you know, people are
getting less concerned about it because it's not this version
is not really causing the hospitalizations like what we've seen
and the severe complications like what we saw the first
go around. Right every every strain or every year, it's
(18:02):
gotten more and more mild or form of a disease.
And maybe that's because we've all had some level of
exposure now and our immune systems are ready for it.
Or it may be just that the virus, you know,
to be more successful and to propagate is becoming less severe.
And that you know, if you make someone too sick
as a virus, you don't spread very well because the
(18:23):
person is immobilized. But if you make somebody you know,
moderately sick so they can still go to work and
still go out in public, well, then you spread more effectively.
So it kind of makes sense that we're getting more
and more mild conditions.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And when when COVID first came out, of course, he
killed a million Americans and killed I don't know how
many millions throughout the world. And it's nothing like it
was in terms of danger. Is it simply because we've
gotten better immunity, because the uh, the the COVID virus
itself isn't as dangerous. Why is it so much better
(19:00):
today than it was a few years ago?
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I mean, yeah, I think it's a combination of both.
I think it's a combination of we've seen it, our
body is not. You know, when your body has never
seen this foreign object before, it doesn't know to attack it,
and so it has the ability to replicate freely in
your body and cause all kinds of havoc. Then you're
you know, now we have immunity to it to some extent.
(19:24):
So almost everybody has probably gotten some form of COVID now,
so they either have some natural immunity or a boosted
immune system from a vaccine, and now they're you know,
we're able to fight it off a lot better. But yeah,
it's going to be with us probably for you know, forever,
for the foreseeable future, and hopefully it's days like this.
(19:45):
It's just like it's going to be like the flu,
where every once in a while we get a shift
in the flu and it's deadly, right and it and
it starts killing a lot of people. But right now
we're not in that situation. So let's let's hope it
stay that way, all.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Right, Jim, thank you. Catch again next Wednesday. Oh ahead,
and kill some people all right, as always, have a
good one.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
No, he loves that. He loves hearing that.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
We're done, guys, that's it. It starts again tomorrow with
the same group of people. It's Will and Amy at
five am to six wake up call, the Neil and
I jump aboard and tomorrow and does come back and
is the producer and Kono never goes away up in
a few moments, Cary and Shannon, and we'll get out
(20:34):
of here until tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
This is KFI Am sixty. You've been listening to the
Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Catch my Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
The Bill Handel Show News
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