@BillHandelShow – ‘Medical News’ with Dr. Jim Keany

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 dangers of Kratom and the baby formula being recalled after botulism outbreak.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is a Wednesday morning, and it is time for
well medical news. Doctor Jim Keeney, chief medical officer for
Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach. Jim, we
were just talking about you, and we were discussing whether
or not you're legal here in the United States because
you look pretty brown.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
I might be I might be taken off. Jim. It's Neil.
This is an intervention, Keeney. Is that Hispanic or Mexicano. Yeah,
depends on how you spell it. But I see.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's very funny too. All right, Jim, A couple of
things I want to ask you about kra tom or
krat tom k R A T O M, which I
never heard of, and it's become big news. And of course, uh,
is it legit? Is it not legit? Because it's one
of those non FDA approved whatever's right?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Right? Yeah, this is a dangerous kind of drug potentially,
but it's got this wide range of what we're talking
about when we talk about kretom. So it's used in
Asia and a lot of times workers use it. It's
a leaf and they can chew the leaf, they can
make a tea out of it, and in those cases

(01:21):
it's in low doses, with all the other chemicals that
are found in the leaf altogether, it becomes kind of
like a stimulant, so it's like their morning coffee. They
get up early in the morning to avoid the midday
sun to when they're going out to work, so they're
getting up at four in the morning taking a little
of those kretom tea and then they might do it
again in the afternoon a little bit. In higher doses, though,

(01:45):
it has opiate like effects, right, so it reduces pain,
and that's where it kirked the interests of people in
the United States, and for a while there we thought
maybe this could be an alternative or an aid to
get people off opiate addiction. But the higher doses and
these are now we're making it synthetically, so the stuff
you buy it in a gas station, the synthetic cretom

(02:08):
doesn't have all the other chemicals leaf has in it.
It is super high doses, like one hundred times the
dose you would get in the t of the active
ingredient that actually reduces pain, and it has these opiate
like effects. It is even more addictive than opiates that
we have on the market area, and it is legal.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
I can buy it at a gas station.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, right now it's it's legal in the state of California,
but in LA they're talking about removing it and they're
going to they're going to start going into gas stations
and citing them if they're selling it, so it'll people
can still buy it online. It's illegal in six other states,
but it's legal here. The SDA hasn't come out with
a stance on it, so federally it's still legal. H So, yeah,

(02:51):
it's it's still available for purchase and it's kind of
a scary drug because the people who take it, they say, wow,
it's you are quickly addicted to it. Wow.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
And you know, you think, when this sort of thing happens,
and you've dealt with this for a long time, Once
something is deemed dangerous, how quickly does it take the
FDA to jump on it and make it illegal and
that translates into some kind of legislation.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, it depends. I mean you've seen designer drugs took decades,
you know, to get outlawed, where the designer they were
just designing. They were outlong one specific chemical and then
a chemist would change it by one molecule and suddenly
technically it wasn't illegal anymore. So it took them decades
to sort that out and get it so they could

(03:37):
make the whole class illegal. So they can be very
slow on this stuff. And the other thing is the
reason you haven't heard of it, and the reason that
flies under the radar is because it's often mixed. The
people who use this often are mixing it with alcohol
or other drugs. So and this doesn't come up on
a drug test. So the problem is when we see
them in the er and their final cause of death

(03:59):
is listed, tom is usually not found in there. So
this has kind of been flying under the radar for
a long time.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
All right, big story that happened, and it looks it
seems pretty problematic the baby formula recall because they are
a botulism outbreak and it looks like it's getting worse
that the numbers are just starting to come in. You
want to talk about that, please?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Sure? Yeah, First let's talk about botulism. That's Botulism is
as a disease that you get when you have the
toxin from the bosulism organism in your body. That's the
same chemical we use for botox, right, That's what Botox
is short for as botulism toxin, and it works by
blocking a nerve conductor asidylcholine and paralyzes your muscles. So

(04:44):
when you get sick from this, that's what happens to
these babies is the botulism. Now, botulism can't grow in
an acidic environment, and so babies their stomach isn't quite
it isn't as acidic as adults yet, and that's why
when they ingest these, they can actually grow in their stomach,
in their body and create an infection. If for normal adults,

(05:06):
if you just ingested the spore, nothing would happen. If
you you have to ingest the actual toxin for you
to get paralyzed from it. So that's what we're finding
in this baby formula. More common story that we get
is honey honey has botulism spores in it has nothing
to do with it. Whether it's raw honey or commercially
processed honey. All honey has the potential have this botulism spores.

(05:29):
They can survive in crazy environments. They're they're hard to kill.
You can't you know, boil up to one hundred degrees
and celsius. It still won't kill them. You need to
auto clay things to get to kill this toxin or
the spore. It can live for decades in the soil
it you know, UV doesn't kill it, it's infectants don't
kill it. So it's hard to get rid of.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
And is that why it's so dangerous because once it's there,
is there and it's not leaving.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, it's in the environment already. I mean, if you
want to out and grab some of your potting soil
and then created the perfect environment for botulism to grow,
you could probably grow your own bosulism in your backyard.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
No, and I know I'm talking about once it's in
your body.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
What's in your body? Yeah, it's so for again for adults.
Once the toxins in your body, it'll eventually break down
and we can use antibodies to kind of to latch
onto it so it's ineffective, and then we can support
you through you know, breathing mechanisms, you know, being on
a ventilator, that type of thing, until it all comes
out of your body and people do just fine afterwards.

(06:31):
There's usually no long term effects for babies because it's
growing in their body. It comes on more slowly, and
what happens is they get a little floppy. You know,
they lose muscle tone, they're not eating real well, they're drooling,
they're not having good bowel movements. Everything just slows down.
And as they get more floppy. That's one of our
differential we go. I wonder if this baby has botulism,

(06:55):
and that we can do the same thing, give them
the antibody and also put them on ventilate if they're
not breathing well or that type of thing.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
And so this baby form, the whole thing has been recalled.
And I noticed that the word organic is there, and
that kills you every time. I think the takeaway here,
I think Jim is behind this. Never ever you buy,
or use or ingest anything that has the word organic
on the label.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Is that fair?

Speaker 1 (07:26):
No?

Speaker 2 (07:26):
I don't think Organica says sometimes organic has nothing to
do with it. Sometimes raw or past your eyes or
process doesn't have anything to do with it. It just happened, all.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Right, Jim, we'll talk again next week. Have a good one.
Take care,