June 17, 2026 • 10 mins
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 speaks on GLP-1s possibly improving male fertility, the relationship between COVID and cancer, and antibacterial is NOT better than soap.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is time for a medical news segment or two.
Doctor Jim Keeney, chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary
Medical Center in Long Beach, and of course a board
certified er doctor were Jim spent. I don't know what
thirty years in the er? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Jim? Yeah, yeah, yeah, thirty years, thirty crazy years.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
How many people actually died while you were looking at
them in the er? If you ever figure you ever
look at that? Because I love those numbers, you know,
I know, No, yeah, that wasn't at lunch.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
We talked. We talked about this on the air before,
so you know, he did the calculation of yeah, thirty years.
Let's say, you know, two week for you know, for
thirty years, so that's a fifty eight year times thirty
or fifteen hundred people.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You know, I you're my hero watching fifteen hundred people
die right there under my my yeah, under the knife
for whatever you were doing the time. Okay, now let's
get to some medical news, legitimate medical news. And we
talked about this before, but I want to expand on this.
(01:10):
GLP one's the weight loss drug which so many people
are on, I mean almost the magic bullet in terms
of weight loss. We have talked about how it actually
is very beneficial. I mean it's almost like aspirin in
terms of what it can do. Now, male fertility can
(01:32):
be improved with GLP one.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's an interesting connection, right. So basically what they've shown
is that you know that that the glps, when men
are on it, their testosterone level goes up, their sperm
count goes up, the equality of that sperm goes up.
So very interesting. It's not this is not the stage
(01:55):
where we're going to start using glps to treat infertility,
but it's a very interesting connection in a way. It's
not surprising, right, we know that obesity impacts sex hormones.
Sex Hormones are made from a cholesterol molecule, and cholesterol
is fat soluble, and so when people become overweight, what
(02:16):
happens is it creates kind of an imbalance. Right. You
have a lot of your sex hormones are now kind
of absorbed into that excess fat tissue, and then those
get processed in a little bit different way and throw
off different sub hormones and it messes things up. So
that's what we call metabolic syndrome, and it seems to
(02:38):
be that we know that it affects women's fertility, but
you know, maybe obesity affects men's fertility more than we
originally recognized.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Okay, so it's not a question of this affecting fertility directly.
It's a causal relationship. That you lose weight, it helps
you lose weight. Losing weight brings up your fertility factor.
And I have two questions. Question number one is why
would anybody ever want to have kids having done it?
(03:09):
And so that is a little problematic, But isn't almost
you know, I can think of half a deck. Having
been in the business for a long time in reproductive law,
virtually almost anything else that can affect fertility, for example,
sitting in hot tubs, too long, tight underwear, and I
mean that sounds ridiculous, but gim medically that's true. I mean,
(03:32):
the studies have pointed that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Out right, So I mean, but you're talking about small effects, right,
So and no, we have so this is causal study.
This is an association study. So what that means is again,
you know, the sun comes up, the rooster crows, did
the sun you know, the other way around, the rooster crows,
(03:55):
the sun comes up, Did the rooster crowing make the
sun come up, and and so they're associated, but they
don't cause each other necessarily, so we don't know. Once
we see an association, we start digging in to see
is there a cause, But we don't know if there's
a cause and effect type of thing here. And yeah,
we don't know whether it's the GOP drug itself, you know,
(04:16):
is it somehow impacting the testicles where they where you're
making testosterone and you're making sperm in a positive way
to improve things, or is it the weight loss or
is it something else? You know, we just don't know
at this point.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So as we're looking at glps, and you and I
have talked about this, and excuse me, the benefits seem
to increase the more we look at them. Do we
know about the negatives yet? On GLP? Is that that
I'm assuming that's being studied and has anything come out
of that?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You know? The most common negatives that we see from
glps are the side effect uh and and mostly you know,
abdominal cramps and nausea, vomiting. That that's really the main
things that we hear from bloating. Some people say fatigue,
injection site reaction. Those all seem very you know, related
(05:15):
to the effects of the drug. There are more serious complications.
You know that Definitely, gall bladder disease can occur with that,
and it's been associated again, but it's association. It's not
a causal type of thing. And we do know that
when people rapidly lose weight sometimes they develop gallstones. That's
why a lot of people when they get a gastric
(05:35):
bypass will get their gallbladder taken out. There's a there's
a clinical warning that it could cause pancreatitis. Again, people
still debating does it actually cause it? What's going on there.
It can cause these gastro priests kind of symptoms. Gaspropriests
when your stomach just becomes kind of a floppy bag
and it has no ability to contract and squeeze the
(05:57):
food through. Well, that's part of how the drug acts works,
so you know, so these are the type of things.
And then of course hypoglycemia, because that's what it's made for.
It's made to control. It was originally made to control
blood sugar. But it doesn't seem to dry blood sugar
down to a dangerously low level. It takes high blood
sugar and brings it back down to normal. But all
(06:18):
of those are you know, potential negative.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
But it seems but they seem fairly minor you as
seem to be describing. I mean, I'm listening to a
commercial which is thirty percent. You know, you can have this,
you can have that problem, you take LYD, you can die,
you get a lot of that whatever. Again, I really
miss those drugs that cause oily stools.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Whatever happened to us Olestra. Yeah, I just remember I
still remember you saying, you know, people when we talked
about Olestra, you said, the only people that would take
that are somebody hates their dry cleaner. And that still
makes me laugh. I don't know why today.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That we've talked about this before, and that is anti
bacterial versus regular soap, and that seems to be a
big thing. And antibacterial you know, there's a lot of
such a good idea for the manufacturers to do this,
is it?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
No, Yeah, antibacterial soap has been shown to increase antibiotic resistance.
So the FDA took trickles sand out of out of
over the counter you know, soaps for quite a while now,
but they've been replaced with other antibacterial ingredients. Or antimicrobial
ingredients like benzalconium and quatinary amines. But the bottom line
(07:36):
is it's always been known that soap and water that's
the best way to do it. You're not trying to
kill every single bacteria. The goal isn't death to all bacteria.
The goal is to get it off your hands, and
soap is a surfactant. It allows you between the friction
of washing your hands long enough which should be long
enough to sing Happy Birthday, and then rinsing it off
(07:58):
and then drying your hands that whole problem. SYS is
equally as effective or better. In some cases, it's better
because we know for neurovirus, for example, or an infection
called sea diff that these these different chemicals don't kill
them necessarily, and so getting them off your hands is
even more important. And one more thing people confuse hand
(08:19):
washing with the other aspects of you know, cleanliness, which
is in the hospital we have disinfection or high level disinfectant,
and then we have sterilization. You're not going to sterilize
things at home. That's just not the way it goes.
So don't try to with these chemicals. Disinfection is when
you're trying you have an inanimate surface and bacteria can
sit there. So you've cut up raw chicken or raw
(08:42):
beef on your countertop and you need to clean it.
That's disinfection and that's when you should probably use, you know,
bleach or or some other ingredient that would kill bacteria.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So the bottom line on this, and again we talked
about this for want to repeat it, is all of
these anti bacterial ingredients in soap and dishoap and hand soap,
et cetera, they actually do increase the resistance where you
have antibiotics that just aren't working the way they used to.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That's right. Yeah, I mean one out of six common
bacterial infections are now resistant to standard antibiotics and they're
causing about a million deaths a year. So this is
a real thing, and we know that these antibacterial soaps
are contributing to that definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And now there's still a few super duper strong antibiotics
that are kept in volts to deal with this stuff,
aren't there?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Exactly? Yeah, there are, but that's exactly why nobody wants
to develop them. Right. You developed this blockbuster drug that
kills all known bacteria, and what are we going to
do with it. We're going to lock it in a
vault and never use it. So the company is going
to have hard to be making any money off of that.
So nobody, nobody wants to develop new antibiotics. It's just
a recipe for you know, for financial failure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
I think you've just made the argument why government should
be involved in uh getting getting involved in creating drugs,
much like they did polio drugs, you know, the polio vaccine.
A lot of governmental intervention with that.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Well, the kind of coordination between government and universities. So
now we have education happening, we have real research happening,
and and the goal isn't always to make a blockbuster drug,
you know, the goal is to forward science and then
that actually happens.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
All right, Jim, I thank you as always. We'll talk
again next Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
All right, take care, have a good one.
It is time for a medical news segment or two.
Doctor Jim Keeney, chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary
Medical Center in Long Beach, and of course a board
certified er doctor were Jim spent. I don't know what
thirty years in the er? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Jim? Yeah, yeah, yeah, thirty years, thirty crazy years.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
How many people actually died while you were looking at
them in the er? If you ever figure you ever
look at that? Because I love those numbers, you know,
I know, No, yeah, that wasn't at lunch.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
We talked. We talked about this on the air before,
so you know, he did the calculation of yeah, thirty years.
Let's say, you know, two week for you know, for
thirty years, so that's a fifty eight year times thirty
or fifteen hundred people.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You know, I you're my hero watching fifteen hundred people
die right there under my my yeah, under the knife
for whatever you were doing the time. Okay, now let's
get to some medical news, legitimate medical news. And we
talked about this before, but I want to expand on this.
(01:10):
GLP one's the weight loss drug which so many people
are on, I mean almost the magic bullet in terms
of weight loss. We have talked about how it actually
is very beneficial. I mean it's almost like aspirin in
terms of what it can do. Now, male fertility can
(01:32):
be improved with GLP one.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's an interesting connection, right. So basically what they've shown
is that you know that that the glps, when men
are on it, their testosterone level goes up, their sperm
count goes up, the equality of that sperm goes up.
So very interesting. It's not this is not the stage
(01:55):
where we're going to start using glps to treat infertility,
but it's a very interesting connection in a way. It's
not surprising, right, we know that obesity impacts sex hormones.
Sex Hormones are made from a cholesterol molecule, and cholesterol
is fat soluble, and so when people become overweight, what
(02:16):
happens is it creates kind of an imbalance. Right. You
have a lot of your sex hormones are now kind
of absorbed into that excess fat tissue, and then those
get processed in a little bit different way and throw
off different sub hormones and it messes things up. So
that's what we call metabolic syndrome, and it seems to
(02:38):
be that we know that it affects women's fertility, but
you know, maybe obesity affects men's fertility more than we
originally recognized.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Okay, so it's not a question of this affecting fertility directly.
It's a causal relationship. That you lose weight, it helps
you lose weight. Losing weight brings up your fertility factor.
And I have two questions. Question number one is why
would anybody ever want to have kids having done it?
(03:09):
And so that is a little problematic, But isn't almost
you know, I can think of half a deck. Having
been in the business for a long time in reproductive law,
virtually almost anything else that can affect fertility, for example,
sitting in hot tubs, too long, tight underwear, and I
mean that sounds ridiculous, but gim medically that's true. I mean,
(03:32):
the studies have pointed that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Out right, So I mean, but you're talking about small effects, right,
So and no, we have so this is causal study.
This is an association study. So what that means is again,
you know, the sun comes up, the rooster crows, did
the sun you know, the other way around, the rooster crows,
(03:55):
the sun comes up, Did the rooster crowing make the
sun come up, and and so they're associated, but they
don't cause each other necessarily, so we don't know. Once
we see an association, we start digging in to see
is there a cause, But we don't know if there's
a cause and effect type of thing here. And yeah,
we don't know whether it's the GOP drug itself, you know,
(04:16):
is it somehow impacting the testicles where they where you're
making testosterone and you're making sperm in a positive way
to improve things, or is it the weight loss or
is it something else? You know, we just don't know
at this point.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So as we're looking at glps, and you and I
have talked about this, and excuse me, the benefits seem
to increase the more we look at them. Do we
know about the negatives yet? On GLP? Is that that
I'm assuming that's being studied and has anything come out
of that?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
You know? The most common negatives that we see from
glps are the side effect uh and and mostly you know,
abdominal cramps and nausea, vomiting. That that's really the main
things that we hear from bloating. Some people say fatigue,
injection site reaction. Those all seem very you know, related
(05:15):
to the effects of the drug. There are more serious complications.
You know that Definitely, gall bladder disease can occur with that,
and it's been associated again, but it's association. It's not
a causal type of thing. And we do know that
when people rapidly lose weight sometimes they develop gallstones. That's
why a lot of people when they get a gastric
(05:35):
bypass will get their gallbladder taken out. There's a there's
a clinical warning that it could cause pancreatitis. Again, people
still debating does it actually cause it? What's going on there.
It can cause these gastro priests kind of symptoms. Gaspropriests
when your stomach just becomes kind of a floppy bag
and it has no ability to contract and squeeze the
(05:57):
food through. Well, that's part of how the drug acts works,
so you know, so these are the type of things.
And then of course hypoglycemia, because that's what it's made for.
It's made to control. It was originally made to control
blood sugar. But it doesn't seem to dry blood sugar
down to a dangerously low level. It takes high blood
sugar and brings it back down to normal. But all
(06:18):
of those are you know, potential negative.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
But it seems but they seem fairly minor you as
seem to be describing. I mean, I'm listening to a
commercial which is thirty percent. You know, you can have this,
you can have that problem, you take LYD, you can die,
you get a lot of that whatever. Again, I really
miss those drugs that cause oily stools.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Whatever happened to us Olestra. Yeah, I just remember I
still remember you saying, you know, people when we talked
about Olestra, you said, the only people that would take
that are somebody hates their dry cleaner. And that still
makes me laugh. I don't know why today.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That we've talked about this before, and that is anti
bacterial versus regular soap, and that seems to be a
big thing. And antibacterial you know, there's a lot of
such a good idea for the manufacturers to do this,
is it?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
No, Yeah, antibacterial soap has been shown to increase antibiotic resistance.
So the FDA took trickles sand out of out of
over the counter you know, soaps for quite a while now,
but they've been replaced with other antibacterial ingredients. Or antimicrobial
ingredients like benzalconium and quatinary amines. But the bottom line
(07:36):
is it's always been known that soap and water that's
the best way to do it. You're not trying to
kill every single bacteria. The goal isn't death to all bacteria.
The goal is to get it off your hands, and
soap is a surfactant. It allows you between the friction
of washing your hands long enough which should be long
enough to sing Happy Birthday, and then rinsing it off
(07:58):
and then drying your hands that whole problem. SYS is
equally as effective or better. In some cases, it's better
because we know for neurovirus, for example, or an infection
called sea diff that these these different chemicals don't kill
them necessarily, and so getting them off your hands is
even more important. And one more thing people confuse hand
(08:19):
washing with the other aspects of you know, cleanliness, which
is in the hospital we have disinfection or high level disinfectant,
and then we have sterilization. You're not going to sterilize
things at home. That's just not the way it goes.
So don't try to with these chemicals. Disinfection is when
you're trying you have an inanimate surface and bacteria can
sit there. So you've cut up raw chicken or raw
(08:42):
beef on your countertop and you need to clean it.
That's disinfection and that's when you should probably use, you know,
bleach or or some other ingredient that would kill bacteria.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So the bottom line on this, and again we talked
about this for want to repeat it, is all of
these anti bacterial ingredients in soap and dishoap and hand soap,
et cetera, they actually do increase the resistance where you
have antibiotics that just aren't working the way they used to.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That's right. Yeah, I mean one out of six common
bacterial infections are now resistant to standard antibiotics and they're
causing about a million deaths a year. So this is
a real thing, and we know that these antibacterial soaps
are contributing to that definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And now there's still a few super duper strong antibiotics
that are kept in volts to deal with this stuff,
aren't there?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Exactly? Yeah, there are, but that's exactly why nobody wants
to develop them. Right. You developed this blockbuster drug that
kills all known bacteria, and what are we going to
do with it. We're going to lock it in a
vault and never use it. So the company is going
to have hard to be making any money off of that.
So nobody, nobody wants to develop new antibiotics. It's just
a recipe for you know, for financial failure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
I think you've just made the argument why government should
be involved in uh getting getting involved in creating drugs,
much like they did polio drugs, you know, the polio vaccine.
A lot of governmental intervention with that.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Well, the kind of coordination between government and universities. So
now we have education happening, we have real research happening,
and and the goal isn't always to make a blockbuster drug,
you know, the goal is to forward science and then
that actually happens.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
All right, Jim, I thank you as always. We'll talk
again next Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
All right, take care, have a good one.
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