Interview with a Doctor - Medical Myths

Do you really get a cold by being cold? How long do you have to wait after eating before you can swim? Will you ever wake up during surgery? How does cancer spread? In this episode, we interview a physician to compare medical myths with medical reality.

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⁠⁠(00:00) Debunking Medical Myths with Dr. Daniel Sanders

(3:32) Debunking Myths About Cold Weather and Cold Remedies

(6:34) Debunking Myths About Tryptophan, Brain Usage, and Nervous System

(9:48) Debunking Myths About Swimming After Eating and Water Intake

(12:23) The Intersection of Eastern Medicine and Modern Therapeutic Practices

(14:07) Understanding Cancer Myths and the Importance of Early Detection

(18:44) Understanding Anesthesia Awareness and Its Potential Risks

(20:09) Advancements in Anesthesia Monitoring and Patient Safety

(22:25) Understanding Anesthesia Myths and Realities in Surgery

(27:28) Epidurals and Back Pain: Debunking the Myth

(28:40) The Evolution and Risks of Modern Surgical Techniques

(35:15) Debunking Myths: Natural Versus Synthetic Medicines

(37:55) Understanding Medication Stigma and Long-Term Use

(43:27) Understanding Medical Tests, Surgeries, and Patient Expectations

(50:25) Trust and Skepticism in Modern Medicine and Information Sources

(56:15) Building Trust with Doctors to Alleviate Medical Anxiety

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hello and welcome to another edition of Ideological.
I am your host, Zach Lee. And today I am here with
award-winning actor Daniel Levy.Daniel Levy, thanks for being on
the show. This is my buddy, actually
Daniel Sanders. His name is is Daniel.
He is the stuntman for Daniel Levy.
But more important than that, heis a physician.
He's a doctor. So we're going to be talking
about medical myths today. Doctor Sanders, thanks for being

(00:31):
on the show. What I will say first is that
probably once a month I will have a patient say, do you know
who you look like? Yes.
And I go 12:50 I know what you're going to say.
Yes, see, OK, it works you you need to lean into that.
Like I would feel more comfort if I'm laying in like getting
ready in pre op and I'm like he came to see me.
I think that would be fantastic.But I didn't know he worked at

(00:52):
this. Hospital Oh, he's he's very
talented. OK, so before we jump into this
episode, which is about medical myths with a physician with a
doctor, I do need to give a few caveats for legal reasons and
departments and stuff. First is though the information
here is going to be excellent. This should not be construed as
official medical advice. Always talk to your local
healthcare provider before making any of those decisions.

(01:14):
The other thing I need to say isthat by being on the show,
neither Daniel, I would call himDaniel or Doctor Sanders.
I'll go back and maybe Doctor Dan like a like a like a
children's show. Character.
Well, it was a children's book. Was it Doctor Dan?
Yeah. The bandage man from the 50s.
Oh, dear. It came with a real adhesive
bandage. Just one.
Just one OK. OK, well, I've never just needed
one bandage. I don't hurt myself a little

(01:35):
bit. So they sell you more.
That is how they get me. Yeah.
We'll talk about this episode brought to you by Pfizer.
Just kidding. Don't tell us it's not by
Pfizer. So this is going to be great.
We're going to go all over the place.
I got to finish the the disclaimer.
The disclaimer, though, is that neither Doctor Sanders nor any
groups that he works with in themedical field are endorsing
either this episode or any episode.

(01:56):
So I'm endorsing him. But if I say something that is
offensive or that you don't likehere or in another episode, get
mad at me. Don't get mad at them.
So with all that boring stuff out of the way, tell us a little
bit about your background. All right, so I got my
bachelor's degree at Texas A&M in chemistry 'cause I was
married. You can, people at home can.

(02:20):
And I did my Med school at the University of Texas School of
Medicine in San Antonio and thenmy residency in anesthesiology
at the University of Virginia, and then my fellowship in pain
management at the Carolinas PainInstitute in Wake Forest in
North Carolina. Fantastic.
So I am dual board certified in both anesthesiology and pain
management. Fantastic.

(02:41):
So one of the reasons that I asked Daniel to be on this is
because we're going to go over abunch of different types of
medical myths. But because he specializes in
anesthesiology, that is where I think a lot of people have some
very fearful questions. And so I've got a lot of friends
I've called him before going in surgeon.
I'm like, hey, I'm going to wakeup and he's like, you're not
going to wake up. So so that I thought it would be

(03:02):
helpful to have somebody that can also talk about the surgical
side, that can talk about the anaesthesia side, etcetera.
So should be a ton of fun. Today we're going to jump right
in and just talk about a bunch of different medical myths.
And I'm going to kick it to you and you say doctor things and we
have water. Usually I'm drinking alcohol,
but I'm meeting with the physicians.
So this episode's boxed. You ever know what?
You're going to get called this.Episode's brought to you by
Water. Water.

(03:23):
You're made of it. OK, so let's start with some
medical myths related to old wives tales.
OK, here's the first one. Cracking your knuckles gives you
arthritis. True or false?
OK, It does not. One of the things is, is some
people will crack their knucklesby like torquing across.
That's not going to cause arthritis, but you can like
strain. There's little ligaments that go
across it and you can strain those.

(03:45):
One of the most famous studies, I guess on cracking knuckles,
there was a hand surgeon who decided that he was going to to
terminate on himself. And so in one hand he cracked
the knuckles his entire life, the other hand he did not.
And afterwards he's like. Oh gosh, OK, so I'm going to
keep doing that then. It's just fun.
Here's one that I think we've all heard growing up, that being
cold or going to sleep with wet hair will give you a cold.

(04:08):
My parents would always say wearyour jacket so you don't catch a
cold because the cold, that's why we call it a cold, is
because the cold makes it you cough or whatever.
So what's the deal? I mean so the.
Some of these are serious and some are yeah, yeah.
The basis of it would be that like, oh, you get cold, that
depresses your immune system, soyou're going to get cold.
Well, like you can follow the logic of it.
It just isn't. It's not actually how it works.

(04:30):
What gives you a cold? What is a cold?
We call it a cold. What is it?
Yeah, the most. So the common cold is
technically rhinovirus. That's what is the scientific
common cold. There's a bunch of other viruses
that cause the common cold symptoms, but they're all
viruses. Very good.
So we can. So some people think that being
cold causes the cold. We know that's.

(04:50):
Yeah. Does it weaken your immune
system though? So it's harder to fight off
viruses or not. Cold.
You're about Navy Seals catchingstuff 'cause they're always
freezing and training, but I they're also going to a lot of
other. Yeah, they're also like
aspirating water constantly and like in nasty stuff with in
close quarters and all these sorts of things.
So probably other things. I mean, certainly being in close

(05:13):
quarter in a closed area with a bunch of other people huddled
up, yeah, it's gonna increase your likelihood of getting sick
just because you're in close proximity to somebody.
Cold weather just makes you go inside where the yeah is.
Where the people exactly? OK, that makes sense.
OK, if somebody gets a cold, I, I've heard this, should they
take just way too much zinc and vitamin C?
My mom did that. She's like have 9 billion

(05:34):
milligrams of vitamin C and you're like, but my tummy and so
does that work? I've heard that there's some
studies that say vitamin D mighthelp, but I I I've also seen it
go back and forth. So at the at the end of the day,
your immune system needs zinc and it needs vitamin C to work.
So that's kind of where it comesfrom.
I need a normal amount of vitamin C in order for my immune

(05:54):
system to work. Taking loads and loads and loads
of it. It's all just going to come out.
It's kind of like, hey, I need to fill up this water bottle.
I'm just going to dump a gallon in there and that'll be really
full. Well, I could also just put, you
know, the cup that needs to go in there and then it'll be full
immediately. So yeah.
So should people, if they get a cold, take a normal amount of

(06:15):
vitamins? Yeah, so.
So there's nothing wrong with taking it.
The reason to take it is if I happen to be low for some
reason, if I don't have a good level, let's boost that bad boy.
But it's not, it's not like taking loads and loads of loads
if it's going to suddenly make it go away and that's like a
medicine to cure it. It's just making sure that your
body has what it needs to do itsjob already.
Fantastic. OK, here is one that always

(06:37):
comes up around Thanksgiving time.
Yes, you eat Turkey. It has tryptophan and it causes
you to be extra sleepy and no other food Does that really just
Turkey? Thoughts on that?
So if I gave you a big amount oftryptophan, you might get
sleepy. The real reason why you get
sleepy after you eat a giant meal is because you ate a giant
meal and all the blood's going to digest a giant meal away from

(07:00):
your brain. And you're like, let me go lay
down because I'm tired. So any food would do it.
So if in Thanksgiving we ate. It's happy Turkey.
Then then we would. That would be great.
Yeah, so if you went and stuffedyour face with a bunch of ham,
OK, no tryptophan in there, you still get sleepy.
OK, food. It makes you sleepy.
Fantastic. Again, these ones are kind of
silly, but we'll get to some that are.

(07:21):
They're real. These are real.
How about this one that we only use 10% of our brain?
So that so then there's like movies where it's like, oh, you
can limitless. Yeah, take this pill.
Everything we use, all of our brain, we don't use it all at
the same time. And so maybe on average we're

(07:41):
only using 10% of our brain, butthat doesn't mean that that's
the entirety of our brain that we're able to use and there's
unused parts. It's just as I'm sitting here,
I'm not needing to use the partsof my brain.
They're going to tell me to how to play tennis or whatever,
right? You get the idea.
Yeah. But I'm not, I'm not scared
right now that I'm being chased by a bear.
And so I don't need those parts of my brain working right now.

(08:02):
So those parts are capable of being used, but I don't need
them right now. And so.
Yeah. And, and tell me if this is
wrong is so not all of your brain is used for cognitive
functioning. A lot of it is, you know, it's
heart rate, blood, it's doing all these other things that are
not just thinking, if that makessense.
Yeah. And so this gets into some of
the things we've kind of touchedon.
We can break our immune, our nervous system into two broad

(08:24):
groups. There's one you could control
and one you can't control. 1 youcan control like says, hey, I'm
going to move my arms. The other one you can't control
says, hey, let's digest this food that I just ate.
We can subdivide the one that you can't control again.
And to what's called the parasympathetic and sympathetic.
The sympathetic is like, hey, I'm going to be chased by a
lion, likely just like drop a lion in this room and then

(08:46):
what's going to go? Ahead and bring out the lion.
Bring out the lion. Here we go.
What's going to happen? Right?
Well, I don't need blood going to my digestion.
I need blood going to my, my muscles.
I need my pupils of dilates thatI can take in more visual
information. I need my heart rate to go up so
I can get blood to those areas where it's need like I need to
be breathing fast, like things to get ready to like do the

(09:07):
fight or flight. If you've heard that term
before, parasympathetic kind of does the other side of things.
So it's rest and digest, right? So I just ate a big meal.
I'm going to pull blood away from running away from a lion,
and it's going to go to resting and digesting.
Fantastic. OK, I'm going to combine these
two. One is that you should wait X
amount of time until you go swimming after eating.

(09:28):
We've all heard this, that like if you eat some Cheetos and you
get in the pool, your body will cramp up and you'll die.
And then also related to water, how much water should you have
every day? Because I, I remember having
coaches in high school that would be like, you need to drink
several gallons of water a day. And I'm like, but all I do is
pee. Like that's my new hobby now.
So give me your thoughts on water in your body and out of
your body. Well.

(09:49):
This is brought to you by great value.
Yes, yes, don't sue us off brandcompanies, right?
They take a certain amount of time for the food you eat to get
to a point where you're digesting it right.
Your your intestines are actually doing something with
it. For liquids, it's going to start
leaving your stomach and gettingto that area in about an hour.
So if I were to have my digestion system going in

(10:13):
overtime and then I need to use my muscles, it might be a
problem, right? Because all the blood is going
to there and not to my muscles. And so then you cramp up, right?
The problem is that if you wait an hour, you're like waiting
until it starts. Yeah, the food's actually.
Right. And so it's better to like go
immediately because then you're not, your brain's not trying to
send signals to your gut to digest things.

(10:35):
They can send it to your musclesand go.
All right, let's hold off on in the digestion habit.
Swim and then a few hours later,chill.
So if you're going to wait, you got to wait like a long time.
But like waiting until the digestion is like really amped
up and kicking in, That's when you're.
Yeah, so. And if you were to take in some
of that water by drinking it, how much should you not
chlorine? Right.

(10:57):
So I had every nephrologist thatI've ever interacted.
That is a doctor that takes careof the kidneys from the Greek
word nephroy, ideological. Specifically the medical, like
the internal medicine. Doctors take care of your
kidneys because there's nephrologists and then there's
urologists. Urologists are the surgeon ones.
They're the ones who are going to cut it out if there's a
problem. For all the men out there with

(11:18):
the vasectomies shout out. Thanks Urologist.
Thanks urologist, you're the real hero.
Yeah, that's right. They've always everything I've
ever heard is drink to your thirst right when you're
thirsty, drink if you're not thirsty.
You don't need to be guzzling down water.
Certainly if you're going to thebathroom and it's just dark
brown going in there, there's probably an issue and you're

(11:39):
probably thirsty and so you should have been drinking, but
there's not there. I forget, I looked at it
somewhat recently there. There came a point where
somebody decided that you neededto have like 8 glasses of water.
A day, that's what I've heard. And it was just like this, Like,
there was no rhyme or reason forit.
Someone just picked that number and it kind of got stuck in
people's heads. And it like doesn't actually.

(12:00):
So just drink when you're thirsty.
Drink when you're thirsty, OK? That's that's, that's good.
Like right now. Thanks.
Great. Yes, that's right, you're
thirsty. But right now I'm not drinking.
I want to drink because I was told that I need 8 glasses, but
I'm just going to, I'm going to trust you.
Instead of this thing I randomlyread online, which was a myth
we'll get to in a second, what are some myths related to
Eastern homeopathic or all natural medicine and just kind

(12:21):
of your thoughts on some of those things?
There's nothing like some connection between all of your
body with all the rest of your body and the point that you can
like massage your fingertip and like, it just doesn't.
Yeah, like, you see that chart in the mall where they give
massages and like, if they push on this part of your foot, you
won't have cancer and they push on this.
You're like, I don't. There's a lot of pressure to put

(12:43):
on the foot. So there's a lot of things about
Eastern medicine that that are legitimate in reality in the
treatment of chronic back pain. Acupuncture is one of the few
what we'll call complementary medicines that has actually been
shown to be helpful. It's not because it's, you know,

(13:05):
opening some energy state. It's.
It's not the chakras or the Zen.It's yeah.
It's because it's, you know, helping those muscles relax.
You can do the same thing when you massage, you can do the same
thing with the 10s unit, same thing with a Thera gun, Thera
cane, right? You're helping those muscles to
relax. So there's lots of stuff that
that just like things can be packaged in a bunch of different

(13:26):
ways, but there's truth in them still.
And just because there's other things with it doesn't mean that
the truth isn't still there. So there's, there's, you know,
there's certainly things in plants that are helpful, right?
The way penicillin was discovered was somebody was
growing a Petri disk and some fungus got in an accidentally
noticed that there wasn't bacteria around the fungus.

(13:48):
One, that doesn't mean that you should go eat a bunch of fungus
all the time and that'll get ridof your bacterial infection.
But there's, you know, there's stuff in nature that's obviously
very good, which is why where a lot of medications come from.
But yeah, sometimes they get packaged with things that don't
need to be there. OK.
Very good. Here's one also that is a a

(14:11):
medical myth related to old wives tales.
All forms of cancer at any stagemeans you're going to die.
Talk to us a little bit about because I think anybody if they
hear the word cancer, they don'tnecessarily distinguish
something like stage 4 pancreatic cancer or
glioblastoma or something scary.They freak out the same when
it's skin cancer, prostate cancer, some of these things
that are a little less scary. Give me your thoughts on on

(14:33):
scary types. Not scary types.
Myths related to this. Has our treatment gotten better?
Whatever you want to say cancer wise.
So cancer is another one of those things that people just
don't understand what it even is, period.
When you say what is cancer and they go, how do they have breast
cancer? But it's in their brain.
Like that doesn't make any sense.
All of our cells are capable of replicating, right?
And replacing the dead cells, right?

(14:54):
You Slough off dead skin, you replace it with new skin, right?
Hurray. In order to do that, your cells
have to have some way that they turn on replication and then
some way that they turn that then back off.
Cancer is when something in thatprocess is wrong.
And so the the cells are able tojust go crazy and grow like
crazy, right? And they're not normal because
they're growing like crazy. And so when you've got skin

(15:17):
cancer, it's a skin cell that's going unchecked.
When you've got brain cancer, it's, there's a bunch of
different kind of brain cancers,but it's one of the brain cells
that's going crazy, right? The other thing that happens is
when those cells are, you know, replicating, they can get to 1
of the travel, you know, one of the highway systems in your

(15:38):
body, whether that's your bloodstream or something called
the lymphatic system science. Look.
It up lymph. Nodes, yeah, those are lymph
nodes, right? And so that's what takes the
stuff that doesn't, that gets out of the leaks out of the the
blood vessels. That's how it gets back into the
blood vessels. It goes to the lymph system.
Anyway, if it travels to the lymph nodes or gets to the
bloodstream, it can go somewhereelse.

(15:58):
And now you've got these pancreatic cells that are going
into the blood and now they're in your liver and then they get
to your lungs and they're also in your bone, right?
And there's all these areas thatthese abnormal cells that are
replicating like crazy can then go somewhere they're not
supposed to be and then take over, right?
And so as you can imagine, it'd be bad if I replaced all of the

(16:20):
cells in your bone with pancreascells because then it's not bone
anymore. It's going to break really easy
and there's going to be problems.
So depending on where you are inthat process, right, If it's
skin cancer, and so it's a cell that's growing when it
shouldn't, but it's just growingright there on the back of your
hand, we can just cut that off and that's it, right?

(16:40):
If it's pancreatic cancer and you don't, I don't have any.
Most of us don't even know what the pancreas does, right?
It's a medical mystery. It's not but.
I don't even think I have one. The reason why pancreatic cancer
is always so bad is because you don't have symptoms until it's
spread everywhere, right? Whereas when you see this giant
mole growing on your, you know, on your hand, you're like, hey,
I should do something about that, right.

(17:01):
And so staging, when you talk about staging, it's like where
it's spread, how far it's spreadExactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so something that's spread really far and all over, I can't
go in and cut all of that out because it's still going to be
in your bloodstream and going everywhere.
And so that's where it's bad news, right?
If it's just a little bit of skin tissue that's on one spot

(17:22):
and it's just growing too much, well, we can just cut that off
and we're done, OK. So I'm going to summarize that.
Just make sure I understand. So your body's replicating cells
all the time. You're, you're literally not the
same person materially that you used to be.
There's a more. Bacteria than you are.
See, it's more of an US, I'm more of an US.
And every time that happens, there's a chance that that could
reproduce in a way that's not good.
So This is why like when you smoke, every time the smoke is

(17:43):
killing your esophagus cells, new ones are coming up or
whatever. And what makes cancer dangerous
is really not just the cancer because even if you were to
catch pancreatic cancer right away, it's that because the
things that don't have the symptoms, it'll spread and
spread and by the time you catchit, you're like, it's
everywhere. Versus things that are easier to
catch like skin cancer 'cause you can see it, testicular
cancer cause your doctor can feel it and check it, things

(18:05):
like that, right. OK, OK, just making sure.
OK, time to get into anaesthesiastuff.
This is your jam, dude, this andpain management.
Let's get into this. I think that the anaesthesia and
surgery questions are interesting because I think this
is something that people have a fear around.
I don't think too many people are afraid of tryptophan.
I don't think people are afraid but, but around this there's,

(18:26):
there's a lot of, I think we allget nervous anytime we have a
medical procedure and we're going to have general
anaesthesia. So the first one, a movie came
out in 2007 called Awake where somebody had anesthesia
awareness. It was this murder mystery.
And he's like can feel the pain,but he can't move 'cause he's
paralyzed. And it freaked a bunch of people
out, including yours truly. Give me the give me your
thoughts on will somebody wake up today in the middle of

(18:48):
surgery? Anesthesia awareness.
They actually feel. People say I woke up in the
middle of surgery and I'm like, I think they would.
No. Anyway, give me your thoughts.
Yeah. So then, you know, there's
several components to what is a general anesthetic, meaning like
the one where you go to sleep, one is being asleep, treating
pain symptoms that you have, controlling, you know, the the

(19:09):
issues with like your blood pressure and then heart rate,
things like that, not moving as one of them.
And there are very few of the medications that you'll get for
surgery that do all of them. Kind of the big one that
generally needs its own medication is the one that makes
you not move. And so there's specific

(19:30):
medications that just paralyze your muscles so they can't work.
Which is important, I imagine, if a doctor's about to cut
something and then you do like a, you know, a nightmare.
And there's like, no, no, all right.
Right. So in the past, our ability to
like the alarms that existed on anesthesia machines, like our
ability to know when so. So could it exist a a scenario

(19:53):
where I give you a paralytic, but the other medications that
are keeping you asleep and having you not feel pain and
having you not remember things, something happens and you're not
getting them anymore and you're just paralyzed, but you're awake
and you can't do anything about it.
Yeah, that could exist in the past.
Now, though, the the vast, vast,vast majority of anesthetics are

(20:17):
you're asleep because of the gasyou're breathing.
And our ability to monitor that gas is just.
Better. And so you are constantly seeing
like how much of the gas you're breathing in and how much of the
gas you're breathing out. And that's on a monitor.
And that monitor will scream at you if it's not in the level

(20:40):
that it should be. So like, if you're playing like
a Game Boy or something like this, surgery is boring, it'll
at least let you know, right? OK, Game Boy, that's still
around. Nintendo yes.
So, yeah, in the past we didn't have that continuous monitoring
of the gas levels. And so I could have the gas
turned on and it'll say that it's at six, but it's out and I
don't have a way to see that it's out and you're not

(21:01):
breathing the gas anymore. But I've been paralyzing you
because we needed to. But now the way the monitors are
in the first world are, they're not going to like that's not
going to happen, yeah. I was also, I was talking to an
anesthesiologist before I was going in for procedure, He said
there's also, and I don't know if you always use this or not,

(21:21):
but he said there's something they put on your head that even
looks at brain waves to make. Sure.
And so there are some people whothat's, that's their standard
practice. They'll put little brain waves.
It, it has like a proprietary way that it senses, you know,
it's like a processed EEG essentially.
And it, if it's a, if it's at a certain number range or below a
certain number range, like the likelihood that you're awake is

(21:42):
infinitesimally small, which youcan do that.
And so for people who you're notdoing the gas on, that gets used
pretty much on all of them. But for people with the gas,
like the gas concentration as itcomes out, like if that monitor
works, you don't really need it.Got it.
But it's each their own, everybody.
Some people like to see the number.
Yeah, which I understand. There's numbers that I like to
see that they don't want to see talk.

(22:02):
To me about, OK, so we, we've talked a little bit about this
as well, but people that think that they woke up during surgery
and really what they did is theyhad versed and then they like
saw some doctors and then does that does it.
I had a buddy that was like, I was in the middle of surgery and
I sat up on the table and I was like, you would have been
paralyzed. You would have been asleep.
You didn't sit up on the table and then then freak out and push
you down. They're doctors.

(22:22):
Anyway. Give me your thoughts on why do
people think that. Yeah, so a lot of people get
really nervous before surgery. And so they'll get like you
said, a medication called Versedor midazolam with other it's a
benzodiazepine like Xanax, Ativan, volume, those kind of
medications. Like a chill out cocktail.
It is. It literally works in the same
spot of your brain that alcohol does.

(22:43):
And so your anesthesiologist is like the best bartender you'll
ever have. I realized that when I was
scared going in, I was like, no,the anesthesiologist is the good
guy, the surgeon's the bad guy. The surgeon is hurting me.
I get up and I'm like, I'm goingto threw a car wreck.
I felt great while the anesthesiologist.
You're making jokes. So yeah, that that in some
people that causes amnesia, meaning that you don't remember

(23:05):
what's happening. You are talking to the people
the entire time. So if I gave you Versed and then
we went back to the room, you would be talking to me and
following commands that whole time.
You might remember it. You might not remember it.
You might remember snippets of it and be like, I was awake back
there. I remember seeing the lights
like, well, yeah, because you weren't asleep yet.

(23:26):
Like I I gave you as I essentially gave you a bunch of
shots of tequila and we're like,all right, let's go.
People who get blackout drunk remember parts of it, right?
They don't remember all of it. So that's it there.
It's the medicine beforehand. It's not actually when they're
fully under anesthesia. Yeah, when you're fully under
anesthesia, you're you're fully.Can anybody tough it out so that
you see the things online where somebody's like, you know, I was
in the military, you can't put me to sleep and it's like 2

(23:48):
seconds and they're gone. Does anyone ever beat you?
Do you always? Win.
You always win. Yeah, we always win.
It's kind of like saying if you cut my arm off, I would win and
not die. I would I would will the blood,
blood vessel to not go out. I'm like, well, that's not going
to happen. That's not all medicine.
That's not how Physiology works and pharmacology works.

(24:08):
Yeah, it's it's not something that you can.
Yeah, it's not an issue of will,it's an issue of physics or so.
The people, the people who there's there's kind of a sweet
spot. There are really old people who
you barely give them anything and they're out immediately.
The really like, like fit buff people will go out pretty
quickly sometimes because like, they're sending the medicine

(24:32):
everywhere really quickly, right?
There's people who they're not old enough to like be super
lightweights, but their hearts bad enough and like their blood
vessels are bad enough that likethey they're not, it's not
getting the medicine to their brain quickly enough.
And so they take a little bit longer, which means they're also
going to, you know, take longer to wake up.
But yeah, so the people who I think they're going to win, they

(24:54):
never. Win.
What about if you're if you drink a lot, does that make you
less resistant? It does.
No, it makes you more. Resistant.
Sorry. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Because again, the same like
channels and stuff that alcohol works on are a lot of the same
channels that anaesthetics work on.
And so if you're like a raging alcoholic, it might take more to
put you to sleep. Same thing if if you're on like
chronic opioids or if you're like a heroin addict, it can be

(25:17):
more difficult. Just got to let them know you
tell. So the not knowing what you're
saying is funny. I think you told me a story of
going to put a mask on a guy. Tell the tell the story because
I think it's fun. So there was a yeah, when I was
in residency, there was a guy, Ibelieve he was a respiratory
therapist and we had given him some stuff beforehand.
And then he was just before you get fully put to sleep, we have

(25:40):
you just breathe the mask. If you've had surgery, you'll
remember. And it's just to fill your, your
lungs filled with oxygen. And as he's got the mask on and
I'm standing over his head with his mask over his face, he
reaches up and like, strokes my mask.
And it's like you're doing a great job.
Doing a great job like. And I was like, thanks.
OK, fantastic. He's going under.

(26:04):
Inherently unsafe. I hear a lot of people say, Oh
yeah, but I got to go under. Is that a big deal?
Is it not a big deal? I mean, I'm sure if you're 90
and it's a heart transplant, yeah, but like, sure.
Yeah, just being just going to sleep.
For the average person, is it inherently unsafe?
No. And the reality is that we're
like so good and the monitors are so good that it's like

(26:28):
incredibly safe. It can turn sideways real quick,
right? Because again, there's someone
actually trying to kill you while you're having surgery.
That's right. And so you want somebody on your
side, IE the anesthesiologist tostop that or rather to, you
know, help you while they fix the problem they may or may not
have created. They probably didn't create it.

(26:48):
You know, there's times during liver transplants where they
have to like, depending on how they do it, they'll like stop
blood flow coming back to the heart for a while.
And it, it's kind of part of theprocedure.
Like you can't not do it, but itit's fun for those couple
minutes, yeah. Totally.
Yeah, I mean it. It seems like most of the the
danger is within how risky the procedure is.

(27:11):
Correct. It's more it's more your health
and the procedure rather than the anesthetic itself.
Got it. OK, I want to ask this one.
So sometimes you'll hear. So women that have had an
epidural during pregnancy, sometimes they end up having
back pain later on and they think that the epidural caused
it. Is that an old wives tale?
How's that work? Yeah, it's, there are certain,

(27:31):
certain groups that's prevalent in and it would be something
that would come up a lot to the point I think like in our little
like room that we would wait in on the labour, like labour and
delivery floor. We would like have printouts of
it so we could go like actually take the study to them.
But they looked at, you know, lots of women who had babies and

(27:54):
didn't have an epidural and lotsof women who had babies and did
have an epidural and compared, you know, as time goes on,
what's the likelihood that they've got back pain?
And it was the exact same between the two groups because
people may not realize this, butall those women had a giant baby
inside of them that was pressingon stuff.

(28:15):
So it's it's having a baby that hurts your back.
OK, not the epidural. Gosh, babies always messing
stuff up. OK, that's fantastic.
Let me ask this question. So we talked a little about
anesthesia. Let's talk a little bit about
mis related to surgery. OK, talk to me.
I, I think anytime like the wordcancer, anytime somebody hears
the word surgery, they think allsurgeries are a big deal.
Now, to be clear, some surgeriesare a big deal when we do brain

(28:38):
transplants. I'm kidding, we don't do that
yet yet, but it's coming. Are all surgeries a big deal?
Are the majority of them pretty routine?
What are your thoughts? At the end of the day, there's
nothing but zero risk. Unfortunately the surgical
techniques though, even within the past 10-15 years, are just

(28:58):
significantly better than they used to be is.
This a lot of the robotic stuff,the da Vinci, the laparoscopic?
Or is it just? Is it other stuff?
I mean so laparoscopic stuff forsure.
Da Vinci is just a different wayof doing laparoscopic.
Both of them, whether it's regular, laparoscopic or
robotic, are capable of being done very easily by in the

(29:18):
correct hands. But a lot of people have ideas
of what surgery was like 30 years ago and like, Oh my, you
see? A guy at the gym that your chest
cut open your leg, they can't dothat.
A different right now, yeah. They can't.
Yeah, that's the thing. So I specifically deal a lot
with spine surgeries. And in the past when they do
spine surgery, they cut you downthe middle, scrape everything

(29:40):
off the side, like literally like jab off all the muscle on
the back and, you know, then remove all the boom, put all the
screws and rods in, close you upand be like, all right, now
you're in bed for the next 6 months.
Don't move. And people have that in their
mind, like, oh, my aunt had that.
And that sounds terrible. And so they've got, you know, a
single disc that has a problem and it'll be an incision the

(30:00):
size of 1/4. And they'll walk home the same
day and, you know, that's the end of it.
And they're like, oh, that doesn't sound too bad.
So that doesn't mean that that surgery is without wrist and,
you know, but there are certain surgeries that, you know, we're
just making an decision and cutting something and sewing you
back up, right? And it's it's pretty minimal.

(30:22):
And you probably have hurt yourself worse than what the
surgery is going to do. And you're just like, Oh yeah, I
stabbed myself with this knife accidentally in the kitchen and
had to go have my thumb reattached, right.
While that was you injured yourself more than the
surgeries, you know, some surgeries.
Yeah, don't be yourself. Don't be a self surgeon.
Don't do it yourself. Yeah.
Which is illegal. Oh, is it?
Like to kind of remove your own appendix?

(30:43):
You can. It's America.
I thought, well, you can. You can represent yourself in
court. You can't perform surgery on
yourself if you have no credentials.
OK, well, well, not OK, not bad for community.
Yeah, OK. All right, brought that up.
Another myth related to surgery that you probably see all the
time also doing pain management and such that there are some

(31:04):
people that think kind of one oftwo ends of the the spectrum 2
extremes 1 is that surgery will solve all my problems.
I think Nate Bargatzi has a jokeabout this and he's like, yeah,
they're like, you could probablyjust stretch.
He's like, let's go ahead and schedule.
The surgery. But then there are other people
that think that, OK, I can just it'll get better on it.
So like I, I called you because I had to have double hernia
surgery because I'm a man. I'll just get one hernia.
I've got actually now have I've had three and it won't just get

(31:28):
better like that. I was like, yeah, it it won't go
away. You got to fix it.
And I was like, oh, great. So talk to both sides.
Yeah, So one of the things this,I have this conversation all the
time, if your car breaks down atthe end of the day, no matter
what happens to it, I can probably continue to replace
parts and get you back to the car that you had before.

(31:50):
I could go find, you know, a 62 Corvette that's been sitting in
a dump for years and years and years and restore it, right.
I mean, there's TV shows all about that and it's, oh, it's a
62 Corvette again. And people kind of have that
idea that that can happen with our body, which I can't, right?
I can't replace things in a way that works exactly how it

(32:13):
should. The other thing is that our
bodies are really good at dealing with problems until they
aren't. And so you'll have so much
degeneration, wear and tear and breakdown and dis pushing
backwards and all sorts of problems that accumulate until
you finally have an issue. And then like I can't like when
you get to that point, like there's nothing you can do to

(32:33):
reverse those change like you'vedone them.
I can't take out your spine and give you a new one.
I can't yet, right. I mean, to a degree, like we can
replace organs, right? People have lung, heart, liver
transplants. But that's ask those people if
they feel like it's the same as the one they had before.
Like it's not. You've got a bunch of other
strings attached with that. Yeah, after a certain age,
nothing is getting better. Correct.

(32:56):
And so there's a lot of people who want to reverse damage that
they've done and we just can't. I mean, even when you break a
bone and it heals and you take an X-ray and you're like, oh,
yeah, it's not broken anymore. That where it was broken is
never going to be as strong as it was before it was broken or
would have had the ability to bestrong before it was broken.
Just just our bodies are good, but they're not that good,
right? And so there's lots of people
who want to put things off and say, Oh, no, no, I don't need

(33:18):
this because it'll, it'll, I just do enough of X and it'll go
away. And like, it's just, it's just
not. The reality is we don't know
who's going to respond to what. I've got people all the time who
come in, I'm like, you're going to need surgery.
And like, I just want to do therapy and they go and they
come back like I feel great. I don't need to do.
Anything else? Right, right.
And and so like, I, I can't predict that.

(33:39):
And people surprise me and people come in and their back
looks awful and they're there for their knees, right?
Yeah, Forrest Gump, I think exactly have.
Seen that. So yeah, there's sometimes where
it's necessary, but it's certainly not a cure all.
And and, and kind of in the samevein of all the things we've
been talking about, if I replaceyour knee and put a titanium

(33:59):
knee in there, it's not a normalknee.
It now has been operated on, right?
And it can get infected, it can have other issues, right?
And so it's not. So it's not better 'cause it
sounds better to me to have a like, we can rebuild and like,
give me a Cyborg eye, you know, whatever.
Yeah. I mean, so prosthetics are
getting a lot better. It used to be they had, you
know, five to seven-year and nowthey're like 1015 year.

(34:23):
But you can only do it so many times.
I can only cut the bone, remove something and put something on
it so many times until there's nothing left to attach to
anymore, right. So there there's certainly times
where surgery is needed, but people don't always realize the
strings that are attached to surgery and they just think

(34:43):
everything will be gone and it'll be done and that's usually
not the case You're. Just having to pick the best of
some bad situations. Correct.
OK, correct. That's helpful.
OK, I want to talk some about doctor Dan a myths related to
medicine. Here's the first one and I I
don't have to get controversial on this There there are some
people that think that medicinesare unnatural and therefore
unnatural is bad. The reason that's always been

(35:05):
weird to me is if you look at the chemical composition of some
things in nature and then you take the exact same chemical
composition that was made in a laboratory.
Chemically they're the same, butsome people are like, this is
synthetic, so it's bad. And you're like, there's also
things in nature, I don't know, arsenic that is natural and bad.
So talk to me about this whole natural versus unnatural.
Natural is always good. Unnatural is always bad.

(35:26):
You get this, this concept with some people that just think
anything you're putting in your body using whatever is bad.
Talk to me about that. Yeah, I mean you kind of hit on
the major issue, right? Chemically, they are the exact
same. And to go back to our fungus and
penicillin, it's not all the other stuff that was part of the

(35:47):
fungus that was necessary. It was just the penicillin that
it made. And so I don't want to go around
and give a bunch of fungal infections and people to, to
treat the bacterial infection they have.
I just want the thing that actually works.
And there's, there's degrees of of scalability, right?
If I need to, if I need to have it in a fungus, well, I've got

(36:10):
to grow all that fungus. But if I can find a way to
manufacture the exact same thingmuch easier and much simpler and
on a larger scale, well, now I have the same thing in a in the
same usable form. And I've got it for everybody
rather than just this person once a week because that's how
long it takes me to grow whatever I need, right?

(36:32):
It's like silk, right? And you got to get it from
silkworm. It's going to take forever.
So it is the exact same one thing that has been brought to
me relatively recently, which I thought was interesting when you
take. So say we're going to use some
other natural ingredient, right?Like like the menthol or

(36:53):
whatever in peppermint oil. I'm going to put it on my achy
mussels because the menthol helps and it feels good and it's
cool and thing. Or I could say we'll just go get
menthol patches, right? Or just go get some Bengay.
It's going to be the same thing.People go what?
But there's other stuff that's like, if you pull it up, it says
menthol 5%. So it's not like I'm just

(37:15):
putting pure unadulterated menthol on, right?
There's other things in it. What's the difference between
those other things and the otherthings that are in the
peppermint oil? A lot of it's probably cost.
I'm going to be more expensive to use the same amount of
peppermint oil. But that's, that's a fairpoint,
right? Like there's got it.
There's usually something else in it.
Usually the things in a manufacture product are going to

(37:36):
be things that are known to be inert or things that are going
to stabilize it and make it so that I don't have to throw out
this peppermint oil every six months.
I can leave it on my cabinet forthree years, right?
Some people see value in that, other people don't.
I understand both sides, but it ends up being the same thing,
right? There's some things, again where

(37:57):
that's not the case, right? Got it.
Very good. I also think that people have an
aversion to medicines that affect mood or seizure
medicines. You'll hear a lot of people that
say and it's it's almost a very it's a weirdly like not physical
gnostic view where it's almost like I don't want to take an

(38:17):
antidepressant. I don't want to take anti
anxiety, I don't want to take seizure medicine.
I'll just will myself out of that.
Almost as if your brain isn't real.
And so it can be both, it could be both other things going on.
Brain is not real. No, yeah, no, it can't be both
that your brain is real, not real.
This is a stronger broadcast, meaning there there can be
things affecting you that are not related just to the

(38:37):
physical, chemical stuff. And then other things that are
related to the physical, chemical stuff, stress, whatever
it might be, which affects the physical, I guess.
So should people feel that way? Should it have this stigma to
it? Yeah.
So there's certainly people froma, if we're talking about just
antidepressants for depression and anxiety and different things
like that, there's certainly people who have an actual

(38:58):
chemical imbalance. And if they have that chemical
imbalance, like exercising more isn't going to suddenly make
that chemical imbalance go away for a lot of people.
And so you're just trying to improve.
And it's not like an antidepressant is going to make
all their symptoms go away, but you're just trying to stack the
correct. Exactly.

(39:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other things though, as in
pain management, I use every nerve pain medicine is either a
seizure medication or a mood medication.
It's a lot of people who I prescribe what is technically
also a mood medication and they go and they look it up online
and they're like, Oh no, it's antidepressant.

(39:39):
I don't have depression. I don't want to.
Take this like, your spine's depressed.
Yeah. Like, pay attention.
Yeah, pay attention. But the reality is that there's
there's very few medications, whether they're natural or not
all natural, right? No matter what you put what,
which of those you put in, that just is one thing, right?

(40:01):
The easiest one to think about is aspirin.
Most people have an older. Relative or somebody who takes a
baby aspirin a day and I was asked, why do you think they're
taking that? They go for their heart.
And I'm like, well, why is it helping their heart?
Well, because it's thinning their blood.
It's stopping the platelets frombeing able to work quite as
well. But I, if I got a headache, I
could take aspirin and my headache would get better.

(40:23):
Is it because it's thinning the blood?
No, it's something else. And so one medication is capable
of doing multiple things. And the way pharmaceuticals work
for better or worse, is when we find that, oh, this medicine
helps with mood. If it also causes diarrhea, we
go, oh, that's a side effect. If it also helps with pain, we

(40:44):
go a new indication. Yeah, yeah.
We never say this is diarrhea medicine and the side effect is
less anxiety and you're like, I feel like I'd right.
You got to pick which is the benefit.
So yeah, there's there's lots ofmedications that have multiple
uses. Yeah, you can hopefully trust
that your physician is giving itto you for the curriculum.
He probably knows more than you do.

(41:04):
Not you, Daniel, but like you being this generic patient
that's listening to this. There's also a myth that is it's
bad to keep taking medicine forever, or conversely, it's
good to stop taking medicine when symptoms go away.
You want to talk to both sides of that spectrum.
Yeah. So talking about chronic pain,
like the medications for nerve pain, people will a lot of times

(41:27):
when it be like, well, I feel better now that I've been taking
it, so when can I stop it? You're like maybe never.
Right, if you like, you can stoptaking it whenever you want to
have the symptoms come back. If I get in, if I get an ear
infection because I have some bacteria in my ear, it's an
actual bacterial infection, not a viral.
I go, I get AZ pack. The antibiotic kills the

(41:49):
bacteria. I don't have the ear infection
anymore 'cause there's no bacteria anymore, I don't need
to take the medication anymore, right?
But that's if I've got a nerve being pressed on because a disc
and bone is pressing on it. When I take the medication
doesn't make the disc and bone not press on it anymore.
It's just calming that nerve down.
And so there's lots of medicinesthat are like that in that
they're not, they're not fixing a reversible thing.

(42:12):
They're helping control a symptom, right?
There are plenty of medicines like say I've got diabetes and I
take my metformin or whatever itis Ozympic.
This this method rather this this, Yeah, this episode brought
you by a zippy Get get small. All right, go ahead.
If you lose weight and then it, you know, change lifestyle, then
yeah, you could get to the pointwhere you don't need it anymore.

(42:33):
But not all things are like that.
Conversely, right, If you've gottype 1 diabetes and you just
don't have those pancreas cells that work.
This is totally correct. Diabetes.
OK just making. Sure.
That may I mean if you're not going to suddenly not need
insulin anymore, you kind of always need insulin back to.

(42:54):
The pancreas. Thing.
Correct. What it's?
In my research, yeah, Welcome back to this.
The pancreas, yeah. We actually have here actual
Daniel Levy coming out. All right, right.
OK, that makes sense. Yeah.
OK. I want to ask a few more myths
and then I want to talk about kind of some final thoughts

(43:15):
because there's there's something I've seen in culture
when it comes to medicine that Iwant you to be able to speak to.
PT or surgery didn't make all mysymptoms go away.
So therefore it was worth it. I'm sure you hear this all the
time where it's like I had a spine surgery.
I still have problems. And you're like, see our earlier
conversation about the titanium knee, right?
Give me your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's a lot of it goes back

(43:36):
to what we were talking about, that people don't realize the
strings that come attached. Some of that could be lack of
people trying to sell things right, like you wouldn't do it
if I told you all the things that would go wrong, which I
don't do. Thank you.
Thank you for being a good, honest doctor.
There's there's bad. I don't know if you saw the the

(43:57):
did you see the documentary Bad Surgeon?
No, it's terrifying. Is he a bad surgeon?
Yeah, it's a guy. He's he's at the Karolinska in
like Sweden or wherever it is. And he is, he's a he's replacing
people's tracheas with what he says is a new organ, stem cell,
whatever. And they're just plastic tubes.
And everybody that he does it with dies.

(44:17):
It's really insane. Yeah.
So. So here's here's the thing right
people? Brought you by Netflix and
chill, right? OK, go ahead.
People to to take a quick aside,people believe that there's
something inherently better about doctors.
They're just a cross section of the world and so there are bad
people who are doctors. This case of every.

(44:40):
Bad cops. Right.
Correct. There's good cops, bad lawyers,
good. Lawyers, there's bad, think of
the person you trust them that there's bad teachers, right?
We all love teachers and there'sbad ones.
So yes, a lot of surgeries come with strings attached.
If you've got a disc, several discs pressing on nerves and you
can't walk because those nerves being pressed on, you're going

(45:04):
to need like to not have pressure on those nerves.
We've got to remove those discs and because we're, we're moving
so much, we got to put screws and rods in because otherwise
it'd be too unstable. We're fix the problem that we
did, but because now there's a fusion, the parts that aren't
fused are going to deteriorate faster.
And that's just kind of the price you're kind of having to

(45:27):
pay, right? I wanted to be able to walk
better for this period of time. And so I'm kind of kicking the
can down the road to the to a degree, right?
With physical therapy specifically, especially when it
comes to back in neck pain, people will go and they say, I
did the therapy and my pain didn't get better, to which I
say, yeah, OK, it probably didn't.

(45:53):
But that doesn't mean that it was worthless because
strengthening the muscles in that area is only going to be a
good thing. It's going to slow down on
things quickly. Yeah, it's not.
Done in a vacuum, you've got to compare it to the path you're on
and say this is a 10 of pain, this is a six.

(46:14):
Neither are great. I'd like 00's.
Not an option. Go with six.
Right, OK. And I did this thing and I'm not
really that much better now, butI'm in 10 years.
If I didn't do this thing, I'd be significantly worse versus if
I didn't do this thing, right? And that still again has value
a. 100%, that's great. Which not everybody, not.

(46:35):
Everybody sees cause patients can be mean there.
There's times I've, I've like visited people in the hospital
and they're kind of like yellingat doctors and like, hey, I know
you're in pain, but this human mechanic just kept you alive.
So tone it back, you know? OK, let me do one more and then
I want to get some final thoughts.
So this one is a pretty common myth.
It's that a medical test will tell the doctor everything they
need to know. Or conversely, a doctor can't

(46:56):
know anything for sure about that.
So there's some people that are like, if I just get this test,
I'll feel better. And you're like, maybe not.
And there's others that like thedoctors like, no, you don't have
this. And they're like, until I get
another CT, another MRI, I'm notgoing to trust you.
And they're like, there'd be other symptoms.
Give me again, I'm we're trying to hit, but I'm trying to be
fair, hit both sides of the spectrum.
Bring your thoughts on I always need a test or I never need a

(47:16):
test. So at the end of the day, when
you get a test, the test gives you a picture or gives you a
number. It doesn't, it doesn't say
anything about symptoms. There's interpretation, correct.
When you go through an MRI, there's there's not like the
pain areas brights up as you know, it's bright red.
It's like, oh, here's here's pain, it's red.
That's the MRI shows, you know, I've got a patient who doesn't

(47:40):
have any collage in his knees. Take an X-ray of his knees.
They're just on top of each other and he runs marathons
without pain. Right.
So does the fact that the picture looks a certain way mean
anything? Well, not really.
There was, I have it on my phone.
It's way over there though. There was a study in like 2001
where they looked at the prevalence of findings on spinal

(48:03):
Mris in normal people who don't have any symptoms.
And it's a lot like of just the fluid like degeneration, signs
of degeneration in a disk. 81% of people who don't have
symptoms are going to have that right.
So if you can. Have the problem and not have
the symptom or vice versa correct?

(48:25):
And so if you came in and you were like, hey, I don't have any
pain, but I have this disc that looks bad on the MRI, OK, go do
the therapy, right? Strengthen those muscles.
You'll be better off in 20 years.
And so the fact that that's there doesn't really mean
anything. So at the end of the day, we
treat symptoms, we don't treat pictures.
And so conversely, then if that does, if having a picture looks

(48:48):
certainly doesn't mean you have symptoms, well then you having
symptoms doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to have
the findings that fit with it. And kind of a, an expression
that exists is patients don't always read the textbooks.
And so there's people who come out of the patient recently who
she, they said that their pain happened at these times and it

(49:08):
felt like this and these happensand I was like, you don't fit
anything. I don't, I don't know exactly
what your problem is. I could get all the tests in the
world and it's, they're not going to make sense.
We kind of, there's a degree in which we kind of just have to
start treating things and see ifit sticks.
And that's, that's one of the things that frustrates people,
right. You go to my car has a problem,

(49:30):
I take it to a mechanic, they can tell me it is your
alternator, right? That's what we need.
Oh, this belt is broken. We got to take it out.
Oh, your starter doesn't work. My computer has a problem,
right? They can run diagnostics and do
these things like, oh, you've got this virus and let's just
clean it and wipe it and you'll be back to good, right?
And I can't, I can't do that with the body.
I don't have a way that I can plug in a computer into your

(49:50):
little yet you know, right into your little USB spot that comes.
Yeah, we'll have like a check engine light that will come on
and like Tony Stark. Right.
That it runs internal diagnostics and the computer
spits out what it is like. That's just not.
Yeah, we've all seen the pictureof the guy, like with the stake
through his head. That's alive.
And you're like, you shouldn't be alive.
And somehow it missed all the spots.
I mean, I, I was talking to a guy.

(50:11):
He's a he's a colorectal surgeon.
And he said, and it was a great phrase, he goes, science is kind
of an art. And I was like, what do you
mean? He's like, well, we, we, we
follow science, don't get me wrong, but we're also making
judgements. The judgement side is the art.
I was like, OK, that's good. In light of that here, here's
the thing. This this is we're going to
transition kind of some final thoughts just because we're

(50:31):
we're coming up on time here. But there's something that I'm
seeing and I want to get your thoughts on it.
You're seeing, especially in themedical and science field, kind
of culturally, this is oops, this is more of the see, he
didn't get the spinal surgery. You're seeing this in culture.
You're especially seeing this post the pandemic where there's

(50:54):
this idea that because doctors can get things wrong, because
science can get things wrong, throw it all out.
The whole system's corrupt. I listened to a podcast or I
Googled some stuff or Joe Rogan said X and that's more than 50
years of scientific research. Now, to be fair, and and you and

(51:16):
I would both agree there, like you just said, there are some
bad doctors. There are times science has been
wrong. There are times, I mean, today
is like Presidents Day and he was bled to death to get the hot
blood out George Washington. So it was bad science, right?
But I you you're seeing kind of a throwing out the baby with the
bathwater where somebody is really putting more of their
hope in what they read online, aTikTok thing, a podcast or

(51:38):
research, which usually just means Google.
It's not real research. It's not like detailed, peer
reviewed, studied over many years, falsifiable.
What are your thoughts on all that?
Where, where should we push backand say no?
What I've always said to people is you can totally Christique
the science, but you have to do so from a position where you
know more than them, not where you know less.

(51:59):
But I'm seeing a lot of punchingup right?
What are your thoughts? Yeah, One of the things that's
interesting that I've noticed iswhen people go to various
whatever their information outlet is and there will be
something that they're an expertin, right?
Like I'm a mechanic and then I go to this thing and they're
talking about this car part being the best car part.
They don't know anything. It's got to be this like, what

(52:19):
are you talking about? And then the thing they don't
know anything about, they, they immediately agree with
everything. I'm like, oh, this, this I said
they're like, why do you, you have all this skepticism for the
thing you know about and you're able to go, Oh, no, they're
wrong. This, this information is wrong
on this, but they're obviously right about everything else.
Like if they're making mistakes here, like what makes you think
they're not making mistakes everywhere?

(52:42):
So that's kind of just somethingthat is interesting to me that
people will, like you said, likethey'll they'll decide.
Like they kind of play these my mental gymnastics to say they're
wrong here. But I can agree with him on
everything else because I don't know enough about it and it
sounds logical. The thing about medicine is that
it is a science, right? And by that it means that it it

(53:05):
follows scientific methods, meaning that we have a question,
we come up with a way to try to test that question, we get the
answer, and then we now know a little bit more right?
And that builds on itself over time.
And there are are times what what's unfortunate is that there
are times when that's wrong. And usually the the information

(53:29):
saying, hey, this was wrong is like a tiny little footnote at
the end of everything. And and so it's that that can be
difficult. But yeah, at the end of the day,
it it's moving forward in a way that is positive.
And if you look at, I mean, justcompare any medical statistic
now to 50 years ago and it's better.

(53:51):
It's not better because we, you know, went back to how they did
things in the 18th century. Like it's better because we've
improved our knowledge of how things work, right?
Like cancer survival rates are drastically better, not because,
you know, marijuana got legalized in certain states, but
because we know how to treat it better now.
We've got better medications. We've got better ways of staging

(54:13):
it, better ways of finding it sooner.
And so what's difficult is that on a lot of things, you'll find
people on with multiple opinions.
And it's easy for me as someone who is a expert in a field to be
able to say, oh, no, no, these are bad opinions in this field

(54:34):
because of I've studied it and done this and I've formed this
opinion about it. And it's hard to like.
What it really comes down to is who do you trust and how do you
know who to trust, Which is a bigger question than just
medicine. It's an ideological thing.

(54:55):
It is. Yeah.
I mean, so there's a it's I can Google as much as I want and I
won't know as much about law as my attorney.
I can Google as much as I want. I won't know as much about
medicine as my doctor. I can Google as much as I want
and I won't know as much about finance as my finance guy,
whatever it is. And so there's this weird thing
where people think that because the Internet exists, and I'm
sure you see this with patients all the time.
They're like, well, I've been doing a lot of research and I

(55:17):
think this and you're like, yourshoes are on the wrong feet.
You're not the guy, right? So.
Yeah, I mean, and so you certainly extrapolate, right?
I had a problem with my lawn mower.
It made this sound. It seemed to be doing this.
I Googled. I found a YouTube video where
they told me how to clean the carburetor out.
I did it and it worked. I can learn and fix and do.

(55:39):
And so I can be an expert if I just look it up, 'cause I fixed
the lawn mower. Let's avoid bring up the fact
that it died three months later again.
Right. And that a lawnmower is a bit
simpler, right? Right than replacing a kidney.
And so, you know, the problem isthat everybody, everybody has a
voice now. Everybody can give their opinion

(56:00):
now and everybody is very strongand certain.
Of it a lot of dogmatism, yeah. Very good.
All right, let me ask the last question then.
Any encouragement. So because you're a doctor and
I've got other friends that are doctors and they're not
medically anxious really at all because they understand all the
things. I have a lot of friends that
have some type of medical anxiety.
And I think everybody does a little bit if they're going in

(56:21):
for surgery or they hear they have to take some medicine or we
all know the people that like fill a lump and they're like,
it's, it's should you know, it's, it's armpit cancer and
you're like, maybe, maybe something different.
Any thoughts or anything you cangive to the people that are
medically anxious just as an encouragement?
Now, let me be clear, I, we're not saying any, anytime I ask a
doctor this, the first thing they have to give is the caveat
to say, Hey, listen, if you're hemorrhaging, go see a doctor.

(56:43):
If you have something that seemsto be getting worse, you have
some bad, go see a doctor. But we're talking about the
people that would already do that anyway.
Maybe they're going too much andthey're just always, they're
healthy, but they always kind ofthink something's wrong.
What advice did you give? So when you first talked about
anxiety, I was more thinking of like procedural anxiety, like,
oh, I'm having surgery and I'm anxious, which my first thought
was that before I answer your actual question.

(57:04):
Yeah. Yeah, please.
It's it's the first time it's happening to you.
It's the seventh time they're doing it today.
Yeah. And so it's like they they
probably know what they're doing.
Yeah. It's like surgery, surgery,
lunch, jokes on Twitter. Surgery.
Surgery. Go home, right?
Yeah, so it, it's new, it's new and different and weird and,
and, and that it ends up leadingto a lot of tension between

(57:28):
patients and providers. Because for me, it's normal that
you have this back issue and youyou find out you have a back
issue and you're like breaking down crying.
But you know, it's easy as someone who sees something over
and over and to not be moved by it anymore.
It's not something that certainly are they every doctor
and nurse, whatever they are, can get better at in terms of

(57:51):
like being medically anxious. We're like, oh, I've got this.
What do I do? Yeah, I always have.
You have a headache, it's alwaysbrain cancer.
You have a heart palpitation. You're like, it's a heart attack
for sure. And you're like you're 24 and in
shape, right? So.
And so that's, that's where it kind of comes down to, to who do
you, who you believe, who do youtrust?
A lot of people our age, these are all the people.

(58:13):
By the way, our age, younger andolder, is everybody OK?
Go. Ahead, you know, once you get to
Medicare, you have to have a doctor, right?
Like you have to have a doctor on your Medicare, otherwise you
can't have Medicare. People who aren't on Medicare,
like how many of them actually go to their doctor with any
irregularity? How many of them actually even
have a doctor? And so when you have a question,
who are you even going to ask? You're going to Google, right?
You're going to go to WebMD. You're going to be like, I've

(58:34):
got this lumpus likelihood that it's cancer.
And like this, there's this picture of this guy who had
cancer. It's like.
Oh, it's always the one in. Arkansas, you know how close I
live to Arkansas and, and so like go build that relationship,
right? Like if you're, if you're 27 and
you're like, I don't need to go see a doctor.
Well, who you going to go to askif you don't know a doctor, if
you don't have any of your family or friend, like who you

(58:55):
going to ask those questions to go try to find who that's going
to be, right. And so if you're the type of
person who's medically anxious and you don't have anybody who's
like that, like we'll try to find that.
Like, it's not like you've got all these issues and you got to
see them all the time. And so you've got time to like
find one that you like. So find find your people that
you like and and that that you trust and you can build a

(59:17):
relationship with and then you can have legitimate
conversations with them that aren't just.
They got to know you so they know when you're freaking out
versus when like if you're, if you're somebody who is medically
anxious, the way you're going tointerpret a symptom and the way
the doctor's going to interpret it very different.
Unless they know you're anxious and they're like, oh, you're
freaking out for no reason. My doctor told me this.
Tell me if you agree. I won't give his name that way

(59:37):
if you, if you don't agree, I, Isaid, OK, if I come in every six
months to a year, are you going to catch most of the things that
could kill me? And he's like 99% of the things
we could catch. I was like, what about that 1%?
He's like if you, he's like if you get some sort of crazy
advanced stage cancer and it gets everywhere in under 6
months, you were going to die anyway, so don't worry about

(59:59):
that 'cause you couldn't do anything about that anyway and
just come see me regularly. He's like the people that are
the problem are the people that don't go at least once a year or
they're the people that like go twice a month.
He's like just just be balanced.I was like, I don't do balance.
I'm Zach Lee, like I'm I like extremes.
I'll never go to the doctor or I'll go every day.
Would you say that's generally good?
Counselor for sure. And again, if you're sitting

(01:00:21):
here trying to get your medical advice from Twitter, like what
are those person? Like, who is that person that
that they know? Like they don't know you,
They're not giving you any advice that they don't know your
situation. They don't know anything about
you. You're just trying to fit
yourself with what they're saying.
And so someone who is an expert who can see you regularly and
rather than just being like, oh,I've got this issue.

(01:00:42):
When you bring it up and it's small and then you go back six
months later and it's a little bit bigger, they can go, oh,
I've seen this before. We brought it up, we talked
about it. It has changed a little bit.
Let's do something about it. As opposed to, I mean, the
number of people who come in to me and all they have is one data
point. They're like, how did I get
this? I'm like, I don't know, totally.
Did something big happened to me?
I was like, you tell me, did something big happened?

(01:01:04):
I'm sad. Why am I sad?
Like I don't know you right? What's your?
How did you get in? Here, if I didn't have an MRI
every month for the past 20 years, I don't know how fast
it's happened. I have one picture and you're
wanting me to just, you know, tell you everything that
happened that led you here. I can't.
I can't. That is the problem with Web MD
is they're giving you all the it's like if I said, what does
the word run mean? And you're like, wait, you can
run for office, go for a run. Your nose can run.

(01:01:25):
You could. It can mean all these things,
and I just give you all the definitions.
Like that's very unhelpful for this sentence.
That's what WebMD does. It's like, you have a pain here,
here's 18 things it could be, and I'm not going to know
anything about you or your age or any other symptoms or any
test you've had in the past. Freak out.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
So that that would be what I would say for those kind of

(01:01:45):
people, right. Like it might seem like, oh, I'm
33, I'm healthy, I don't need todo anything.
Well, like start building that relationship.
Have somebody that you can have trust in and, and know that hey,
they've, they've answered my questions, they've done these
things, they've taken care of mewhen I had this issue, they,
they helped treat it and I got better.
I mean, it's like with anything,my car has a problem.
I've got this mechanic that I that I go to, I've got the

(01:02:06):
plumber that I go to, right? Like have your guy right that
you can, that you, you have a, aquestion for them and they can
give you an answer that you're going, that you have some degree
of weight behind who actually knows you right?
Like you can say, oh, I always go to Marge on, on Instagram and
her stuff is great. Like if Marge doesn't know you,
she's trying to get likes. Yeah, that's awesome.

(01:02:27):
Very good. Well, dude, it has been a
pleasure. Thank you for your wisdom.
Thanks for hanging out, chattingabout medical myths, and thanks
for being on the show of. Course, thanks for having.
Me Awesome. Thanks for tuning in,
Ideological, and we'll see you next time.