February 4, 2026 • 21 mins
(February 04, 2026)
Hotels have anti-cat bias. 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 new Measles cases, new studies regarding marijuana and pain, and Savanana Guthrie's mom's pacemaker last detection.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listenings kf I AM six forty the bill Handles
show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Bill Handle Here
it is Aday, Wednesday, February fourth. Bottom of the hour,
Jim Keeney talk about what happened to Samantha gut Thrie's mom.
One of the questions medically what's going on? And a
(00:22):
quick word about ask Handle Anything, which we do every
Friday at eight thirty and we need your help and
you ask handle Anything during the course of the show.
You go to the iHeartRadio app and then you'll hear
this broadcast. Click on the microphone in the upright hand
corner and ask your question, recording your question. Then Neil
chooses the best one to embarrass me. Also, you can
(00:44):
listen to any segment of this show via our podcast,
So if you missed a segment, miss part of the show,
feel free to go to the podcast. Just did a
really fun story about with the Donald J. Trump Kennedy
(01:04):
Center for Performing Arts. Okay, now here is a story
about cats and dogs. And we set it up because
Anne is a dog person, two dogs. Amy is a
cat person, two cats. I am a dog person, two dogs.
(01:27):
Will I forgot I didn't ask you last time because
you weren't there dogs or cats and I can't hear you.
You also have to press the button. Kono, here we go. Okay,
I was Cona's fault. No dogs or cats. I love
them both, but my last pets were cats until they died.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Okay, and you don't even keep them. That is a
great pet. A dead cat. They're in a box I've
got on a shelf. Oh that's great. Stuffed but ashes,
Oh okay. I've always thought of stuffed dogs the way
you want to keep in memory of dogs. So let
me tell you what's going on with this, and that
(02:05):
is hotels that are pet friendly, but pet friendly really
means pro dog, anti cat. There's a story in the
Washington Post about this rescue cat, Leipchin from the Netherlands,
who travels on an EU pet passport. You actually get
(02:26):
a passport for your pets in the European Union. And
so the owner want to try to check in the
Max Brown hotel in Amsterdam, and the property refuse to
honor the reservation because Leibchin is a cat, not a dog.
(02:48):
Hotels will stay will say they're pet friendly, but they
really mean dogs. According to the Guelderman's who adopted Leib's
Leipchin in Colorado. So we'll up with our cat and
they say, oh, sorry, cats aren't allowed. So travelers who
vacation with their cats, and I don't know who they
(03:09):
hell would ever do that? Amy, was you ever travel
with your cats? I actually have before. Great, how'd that
work out?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
It worked great, except when you had to take the
cat out of the carrier and carryer through the the
X ray machine at TSA.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Oh and the cats get fried through the X ray machine. No,
they go through it with you.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I thought you put them on the car.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You don't put them on the conveyor belt and have
the X rays so you can see cat cat skeleton. Okay, exact.
So anyway, travelers who vacation with their cats say they've
encountered anti cat bias around the world. There are people
that actually travel with their cats. Okay, I was traveling
with my cat. And this is discrimination on a very
(03:56):
high level. Discrimination in airport, on planes, at hotels, vacation reynolds,
even ones that say they're pet friendly and of course
what they really mean dog friendly. And so these folks
who travel with their cats. Can you imagine what a
cat must look like after has gone through a few
of those X ray machines at the airport. That cat
(04:20):
does a lot of wobbling when walking. I'll tell you anyway,
the owners have to overcome all these hurdles and have
to gain the same trust and have the owners of
properties accept cats to the same level they do dogs. Now,
according to Anna Carston, who is a French blogger and
(04:44):
has faced this double standard over and over again, she
says this is discrimination and she travels with her cat Poofy.
Now I want to stop the story right here. Okay,
anybody who names their cat Poofy has more problems than
simply discrimination at hotels with the cat. I mean, there's
(05:05):
a real issue about the sanity of this person. So Poofy,
She says, Well, the standard is somehow Poofy is a
higher risk if you think about it's outrageous because Poofy
literally goes to sleep and a dog could destroy an
entire room if it's stress. So she goes to the
(05:27):
Dutch city of Leiden. During a check in at a rental,
she has to provide references that Poofy was a model guest.
Now she had a previous experience involving cat pee. The
apartment owner, and this is I'm talking about. The department
owner had a previous experience decided that poofy can be
(05:53):
brought into the room, but only in a cage. Now,
dogs domesticated thousands of years before, cats have much better optics.
Why because cats stereotyped this homebodies territorial and familiar settings,
timid and new ones. A productive day may involve sixteen
(06:14):
hours of sleep and shredding the sofa, and a cat
that feels wrong may express this indignation by intentionally missing
the litter box. Now has that ever happened to you,
Amy with your two cats? Maybe once or twice? See
there you go. I had a dog once and when
(06:35):
we would leave, would get really pissed off. And we
had this literally ray No, no, she would right there
on our runner, this persian carpet runner, just to let
us know. Or she would do her duty in a
shoe and smile. I caught her a couple of times
and she was just gringing when she did that. So now,
(06:59):
cat owners dispute all these tropes because they describe their
pets as outgoing, curious, sociable. But the generalizations still shape
the whole industry's policies. So there was a survey that
was done and the majority of respondents opposed cat guests
(07:19):
feeline kess we're talking about property owners because they cited
the cat's claws and urine and dander which could trigger
allergic reactions in future travelers. The Cleveland Clinic reports it
up to three out of ten people in the United
States are allergic to cats and dogs, but the likelihood
(07:42):
of being allergic to cats is twice as high. If
they pee there one single time, you're going to have
a ridiculously hard time to get the smell out and
maybe never will. And one cat can murder your couch
in one weekend. So you got a new gen generation
of cat experts owners attempting to recast cats. They have
(08:06):
tidy habits now if you are committed to training and
have the proper gear, cats with the right disposition, curious
issuing to go outside can start racking up their miles
in their carrier and actually deal with international time zones,
which is pretty impressive. And airports, by the way, I
(08:30):
don't know if you've ever been in airport with your cat,
certainly with your dog airports. A lot of airports are
very pet friendly. You've got pet relief areas and airports,
but they're all about dogs, artificial grass, poop bags, treats,
fake fire hydrants. I once peed on a fake fire
hydrant thinking that it was nevermind. A few airports have
(08:53):
started catering to cat's needs, but very few. Ottawa International Airport,
for example, has added a public litter box. Come on,
that's good. Stuff is done. Bull has several of these,
but the cat has to wear a veil. You can't
actually see its face. Plus is Stumble has a cat
(09:15):
tree scratching post, kibble dispensers. Now all the airlines require
that non service pets stay inside their carriers. There's such
thing as a service cat. I'm sure that somebody has
claimed it at some point, but I don't. I don't
know if you can get a service cat. I really don't.
(09:37):
I'm trying to think. I mean the emotional support business,
which is now crapola. I mean the airlines have done
away with a whole emotional support. You need a service dog,
a certified service dog. I mean it got to the
point where you could say anything. You could say, I
have a seeing eye chicken at one point it was
(09:59):
a summer a peacock board or a pet pig or whatever.
Do you know that there are service Shetland ponies that
I didn't know. You can actually bring a horse onto
the airplane with you, not a big horse, but a
small horse. In the meantime, at this point, the only
(10:22):
dogs you can bring in have to be in those cages.
And how do you travel with a big dog? That's
the other thing. I mean, big dogs are really rough
and you have to give them all kinds of drugs
because they're going to go in the cargo hold. And
the cargo hold, of course is non pressurized, so there's
a good chance that you put the dog into a cage,
(10:44):
the cage goes into the cargo hold, and then the
dog explodes because of the air pressure is very different. Okay,
we're done. Okay, it's time for medical news. Doctor Jim Kiney,
cheap medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Clinic Medical
Center in Long Beach. Jim, thanks for joining us as always.
(11:07):
Big story of course about Savannah Guthrie's mom who disappeared
and what broke today on this is that her pacemaker
was last detected Sunday at two am on her cell phone.
And would you explain how that works? Where the information
from a pacemaker goes to the phone, and does it
(11:30):
go to a provider, does it use the internet? How
does all that work?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Yeah, so these latest pacemakers are great. I mean you
used to have to go into a dodgor's office and
have the pacemaker kind of evaluated and monitored to see
how it's working. And you know, everything from the battery
life to the quality of the impulses, to how often
your heart uses it, you know how effective it's being.
(11:56):
So nowadays, through you know, Bluetooth another connectivity, you can
either have a device in your home that links that
is so basically the pacemaker links to that device and
then that device links to your phone or I believe
there's some pacemakers now that link directly to your phone
through Bluetooth. But a link has to be there first,
(12:17):
So it's not like this thing will connect to any
Wi Fi signal or any Bluetooth signal out there in
the world. You know, it has to already be paired.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, that if it has
interconnectivity with the Internet, then it would be really significant
that the last signal was at two am, So it
really doesn't mean anything other than her phone was too
far away and she could then the pacemaker could very
well be working just fine, correct, right.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
So once yeah, once she was removed from you know,
bluetooth distance from that from that device, then absolutely it
wouldn't connect. But what I think is more interesting is
I've heard reports the family as saying that she's some
medication that if she doesn't get it, she could die.
When you put that information together with the fact that
she's on a pacemaker, I'm going to assume she has
what we call a tachi arrhythmia where her heart goes
(13:11):
too fast like atrial fibrillation. You've seen in movies where
they're about to shock somebody and they say they l
V TAC you know, clear, and the persons can die. Right.
So what we do is we use medicines to slow
down tachi arhythma means fast, irregular rhythm and so like
an attack. And what we do is use medications like
fleckanide or sodolol, or the beta blockers or things like
(13:33):
that amiodorone. Those slow down the heart rate enough so
you don't get into that trouble anymore. The problem is
it slows down your heart rate too much to actually
survive without passing out. So then we put a pacemaker
in to protect the low level. Right, So we protect
the too high a rate with medication, and we protect
to lower rate with a pacemaker. So if she's off
(13:53):
her medicine, she could go into one of those super
high fast rate rhythms and die from that. We're here
in conjecture. I don't know, I don't know what medicine
she's gone, but you no.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
I understand. I first glance, I thought it was insulin.
That to me, But I'm the layman thinking in those terms.
Obviously you understand this far deeper than I do. Even
though I play a doctor on radio, you happen to
be a real one. So assuming that that medication you're
talking about, and if it wasn't taken with her, and
(14:28):
it was a fair amount of medication, that does not
bode well for survivability, does it.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Well? It puts you at high risk. I mean, people
with these kind of irregular rhythms, they don't always go
into them, and they may not go into them as
soon as the medicine drops. But they're there to protect you,
and if you're in a stressful environment like a hostage situation,
I would imagine that raises the risk as well. So
you know, it's not good for somebody in their eighties
(14:54):
to suddenly have a you know, sudden withdrawal from these
type of medications.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Fair Enough, back we go to jim KINI we are, however,
going to talk about the measle cases that have broken
out in LA County. And should I be probably scared
of the measles as I am, and not necessarily getting them,
but just seeing what's happening to our society measles wise.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Absolutely, I mean this is a clear breakdown to the
clearest breakdown in public health that you can just point
a thing or two and identify. I mean, we know
that measles super highly contagious. Ninety percent of unvaccinated people
who get exposed will get infected, and about one out
of five kids are going to need to be hospitalized
when they get it. You know, about two out of
(15:39):
a thousand will die or two out of a thousand
kids will die from it, and about one out a
thousand will get encephalitis with permanent brain damage. So this
is not just you know, a common coal. This is serious.
It also, I don't think people realize it erases your immunity,
so things that you were previously immune to you now
are able to to get. So it has a kind
(16:02):
of a long term but temporary erasure of your immunity
for months to years. So this thing is just not good.
And we got what now almost three thousand cases across
the country in the last year if you combine twenty
twenty five with the first few months of twenty twenty six,
and you know, that's unheard of. So we may be
(16:25):
back in endemic territory where measles is a regular thing.
It's out there, people are getting it regularly. Hospitals are
dealing with it regularly. By the way, requires negative pressure
air room when you're hospitalized, and we know from COVID
we only have so many of those. You can only
run the air conditioner backwards in so many rooms in
(16:46):
the hospital before you know, all you're doing is sucking
air everywhere and you're not actually blowing air into anything.
So you know, those are limited physically, so it can
be a big mess.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And measles was basically eradicated here in this country and
that's a scary part. Much like polio. Who the hell
gets polio anymore? I mean, you don't hear about that.
But measles making a comeback and the blame lies entirely
on lack of vaccinations. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, that's fair to say. I mean, we were getting
so measles was completely eliminated for endemic cases in the
United States, but we were getting people that would fly
in that had measles and then it would just burn out.
Now a few people would get infected in the US,
and that's the troublesome part. So yeah, of course, we're
always going to get cases from other countries where they
(17:41):
don't have the ability to vaccinate to the level we do.
But you know here now we are looking like a
third world country.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I so I it was the question I was going
to ask you about this in terms of have there
been extrapolations done by the medical community as to where
this is going to go? How many people are going
to be infected in the next two, three, five years,
and how many deaths and how many hospitalizations you looked
(18:10):
Have you seen anything like that?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
No, I mean I haven't seen anything like that, because
we can barely deal. You know, right now, the American
health system is teetering, right. You would think with all
the money when you go to the hospital and those
bills you get, and how much money you see flowing
into the system, you would think that this would be
a stable system. But it absolutely is not. People are
(18:37):
you know, hospitals are barely surviving as it is. And
really these type of things are exactly what keeps us
in the dark, case, keeps us being able to move forward,
because we're spending money on you caring for diseases that
we shouldn't have to care for if simple preventative measures
were taken. So, I mean, the concern here is again
(18:59):
that we'll you know, will this be something that strains
the system so much that people can't you know, people
don't have access to healthcare.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The other thing is just people in general who this
affects mostly the vulnerable in the society. Right, So children
under twelve months, people that are immunal compromised, suddenly feel
even less confident about going out in public. People with
heart disease or other issues that put them at higher risk,
they just you know, can't live as good a life
(19:29):
as they could have.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Have You seen any measle cases at your hospital.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Not that I'm aware of at my hospital, but I
am aware of other hospitals in the area who have
had measles cases, both in Orange County and in La
Long Beach area.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And I'm assuming that really does scare hospital staff that
measles has arrived. That's not something that you don't talk about.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
No, I mean, most of us are immunized, so honestly
taking care of measles cases isn't as concerning.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, I'm not talking about personal safety. I'm talking about
just the fact that measles has arrived, and is it
taking the medical community for a loop saying, oh my god,
not again kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Right, And you know, we've talked about the problem of
holding in the emergency department, where patients are held in
the er because there's no beds in the hospital. There's
no place to put them, and that is severely impacting
our hospital bed situation and our er capacity. So we
lose our capacity, and then the paramedics who deliver those
patients to the ear have to stay with their patient
till a nurse can accept them, and now it's impacting
(20:35):
the ability to deliver nine to one one service because
those paramedics are out of commission. So the trickle down
effect of this is significant.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And let's not forget we in the United States have
the best medical system in the world, right, Yeah, yeah,
you know, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I used to think that, and I started traveling and
seeing other healthcare. Yeah, fucking how good other countries are doing, right,
and yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Then you started really looking at us. Okay, Jim, thank you.
We'll catch again next week and that's it. We're done
for the Wednesday. Take care of Jim. You've been listening
to the Bill Handle Show. Catch My Show Monday through
Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listenings kf I AM six forty the bill Handles
show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Bill Handle Here
it is Aday, Wednesday, February fourth. Bottom of the hour,
Jim Keeney talk about what happened to Samantha gut Thrie's mom.
One of the questions medically what's going on? And a
(00:22):
quick word about ask Handle Anything, which we do every
Friday at eight thirty and we need your help and
you ask handle Anything during the course of the show.
You go to the iHeartRadio app and then you'll hear
this broadcast. Click on the microphone in the upright hand
corner and ask your question, recording your question. Then Neil
chooses the best one to embarrass me. Also, you can
(00:44):
listen to any segment of this show via our podcast,
So if you missed a segment, miss part of the show,
feel free to go to the podcast. Just did a
really fun story about with the Donald J. Trump Kennedy
(01:04):
Center for Performing Arts. Okay, now here is a story
about cats and dogs. And we set it up because
Anne is a dog person, two dogs. Amy is a
cat person, two cats. I am a dog person, two dogs.
(01:27):
Will I forgot I didn't ask you last time because
you weren't there dogs or cats and I can't hear you.
You also have to press the button. Kono, here we go. Okay,
I was Cona's fault. No dogs or cats. I love
them both, but my last pets were cats until they died.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Okay, and you don't even keep them. That is a
great pet. A dead cat. They're in a box I've
got on a shelf. Oh that's great. Stuffed but ashes,
Oh okay. I've always thought of stuffed dogs the way
you want to keep in memory of dogs. So let
me tell you what's going on with this, and that
(02:05):
is hotels that are pet friendly, but pet friendly really
means pro dog, anti cat. There's a story in the
Washington Post about this rescue cat, Leipchin from the Netherlands,
who travels on an EU pet passport. You actually get
(02:26):
a passport for your pets in the European Union. And
so the owner want to try to check in the
Max Brown hotel in Amsterdam, and the property refuse to
honor the reservation because Leibchin is a cat, not a dog.
(02:48):
Hotels will stay will say they're pet friendly, but they
really mean dogs. According to the Guelderman's who adopted Leib's
Leipchin in Colorado. So we'll up with our cat and
they say, oh, sorry, cats aren't allowed. So travelers who
vacation with their cats, and I don't know who they
(03:09):
hell would ever do that? Amy, was you ever travel
with your cats? I actually have before. Great, how'd that
work out?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
It worked great, except when you had to take the
cat out of the carrier and carryer through the the
X ray machine at TSA.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Oh and the cats get fried through the X ray machine. No,
they go through it with you.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I thought you put them on the car.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
You don't put them on the conveyor belt and have
the X rays so you can see cat cat skeleton. Okay, exact.
So anyway, travelers who vacation with their cats say they've
encountered anti cat bias around the world. There are people
that actually travel with their cats. Okay, I was traveling
with my cat. And this is discrimination on a very
(03:56):
high level. Discrimination in airport, on planes, at hotels, vacation reynolds,
even ones that say they're pet friendly and of course
what they really mean dog friendly. And so these folks
who travel with their cats. Can you imagine what a
cat must look like after has gone through a few
of those X ray machines at the airport. That cat
(04:20):
does a lot of wobbling when walking. I'll tell you anyway,
the owners have to overcome all these hurdles and have
to gain the same trust and have the owners of
properties accept cats to the same level they do dogs. Now,
according to Anna Carston, who is a French blogger and
(04:44):
has faced this double standard over and over again, she
says this is discrimination and she travels with her cat Poofy.
Now I want to stop the story right here. Okay,
anybody who names their cat Poofy has more problems than
simply discrimination at hotels with the cat. I mean, there's
(05:05):
a real issue about the sanity of this person. So Poofy,
She says, Well, the standard is somehow Poofy is a
higher risk if you think about it's outrageous because Poofy
literally goes to sleep and a dog could destroy an
entire room if it's stress. So she goes to the
(05:27):
Dutch city of Leiden. During a check in at a rental,
she has to provide references that Poofy was a model guest.
Now she had a previous experience involving cat pee. The
apartment owner, and this is I'm talking about. The department
owner had a previous experience decided that poofy can be
(05:53):
brought into the room, but only in a cage. Now,
dogs domesticated thousands of years before, cats have much better optics.
Why because cats stereotyped this homebodies territorial and familiar settings,
timid and new ones. A productive day may involve sixteen
(06:14):
hours of sleep and shredding the sofa, and a cat
that feels wrong may express this indignation by intentionally missing
the litter box. Now has that ever happened to you,
Amy with your two cats? Maybe once or twice? See
there you go. I had a dog once and when
(06:35):
we would leave, would get really pissed off. And we
had this literally ray No, no, she would right there
on our runner, this persian carpet runner, just to let
us know. Or she would do her duty in a
shoe and smile. I caught her a couple of times
and she was just gringing when she did that. So now,
(06:59):
cat owners dispute all these tropes because they describe their
pets as outgoing, curious, sociable. But the generalizations still shape
the whole industry's policies. So there was a survey that
was done and the majority of respondents opposed cat guests
(07:19):
feeline kess we're talking about property owners because they cited
the cat's claws and urine and dander which could trigger
allergic reactions in future travelers. The Cleveland Clinic reports it
up to three out of ten people in the United
States are allergic to cats and dogs, but the likelihood
(07:42):
of being allergic to cats is twice as high. If
they pee there one single time, you're going to have
a ridiculously hard time to get the smell out and
maybe never will. And one cat can murder your couch
in one weekend. So you got a new gen generation
of cat experts owners attempting to recast cats. They have
(08:06):
tidy habits now if you are committed to training and
have the proper gear, cats with the right disposition, curious
issuing to go outside can start racking up their miles
in their carrier and actually deal with international time zones,
which is pretty impressive. And airports, by the way, I
(08:30):
don't know if you've ever been in airport with your cat,
certainly with your dog airports. A lot of airports are
very pet friendly. You've got pet relief areas and airports,
but they're all about dogs, artificial grass, poop bags, treats,
fake fire hydrants. I once peed on a fake fire
hydrant thinking that it was nevermind. A few airports have
(08:53):
started catering to cat's needs, but very few. Ottawa International Airport,
for example, has added a public litter box. Come on,
that's good. Stuff is done. Bull has several of these,
but the cat has to wear a veil. You can't
actually see its face. Plus is Stumble has a cat
(09:15):
tree scratching post, kibble dispensers. Now all the airlines require
that non service pets stay inside their carriers. There's such
thing as a service cat. I'm sure that somebody has
claimed it at some point, but I don't. I don't
know if you can get a service cat. I really don't.
(09:37):
I'm trying to think. I mean the emotional support business,
which is now crapola. I mean the airlines have done
away with a whole emotional support. You need a service dog,
a certified service dog. I mean it got to the
point where you could say anything. You could say, I
have a seeing eye chicken at one point it was
(09:59):
a summer a peacock board or a pet pig or whatever.
Do you know that there are service Shetland ponies that
I didn't know. You can actually bring a horse onto
the airplane with you, not a big horse, but a
small horse. In the meantime, at this point, the only
(10:22):
dogs you can bring in have to be in those cages.
And how do you travel with a big dog? That's
the other thing. I mean, big dogs are really rough
and you have to give them all kinds of drugs
because they're going to go in the cargo hold. And
the cargo hold, of course is non pressurized, so there's
a good chance that you put the dog into a cage,
(10:44):
the cage goes into the cargo hold, and then the
dog explodes because of the air pressure is very different. Okay,
we're done. Okay, it's time for medical news. Doctor Jim Kiney,
cheap medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Clinic Medical
Center in Long Beach. Jim, thanks for joining us as always.
(11:07):
Big story of course about Savannah Guthrie's mom who disappeared
and what broke today on this is that her pacemaker
was last detected Sunday at two am on her cell phone.
And would you explain how that works? Where the information
from a pacemaker goes to the phone, and does it
(11:30):
go to a provider, does it use the internet? How
does all that work?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Yeah, so these latest pacemakers are great. I mean you
used to have to go into a dodgor's office and
have the pacemaker kind of evaluated and monitored to see
how it's working. And you know, everything from the battery
life to the quality of the impulses, to how often
your heart uses it, you know how effective it's being.
(11:56):
So nowadays, through you know, Bluetooth another connectivity, you can
either have a device in your home that links that
is so basically the pacemaker links to that device and
then that device links to your phone or I believe
there's some pacemakers now that link directly to your phone
through Bluetooth. But a link has to be there first,
(12:17):
So it's not like this thing will connect to any
Wi Fi signal or any Bluetooth signal out there in
the world. You know, it has to already be paired.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, that if it has
interconnectivity with the Internet, then it would be really significant
that the last signal was at two am, So it
really doesn't mean anything other than her phone was too
far away and she could then the pacemaker could very
well be working just fine, correct, right.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
So once yeah, once she was removed from you know,
bluetooth distance from that from that device, then absolutely it
wouldn't connect. But what I think is more interesting is
I've heard reports the family as saying that she's some
medication that if she doesn't get it, she could die.
When you put that information together with the fact that
she's on a pacemaker, I'm going to assume she has
what we call a tachi arrhythmia where her heart goes
(13:11):
too fast like atrial fibrillation. You've seen in movies where
they're about to shock somebody and they say they l
V TAC you know, clear, and the persons can die. Right.
So what we do is we use medicines to slow
down tachi arhythma means fast, irregular rhythm and so like
an attack. And what we do is use medications like
fleckanide or sodolol, or the beta blockers or things like
(13:33):
that amiodorone. Those slow down the heart rate enough so
you don't get into that trouble anymore. The problem is
it slows down your heart rate too much to actually
survive without passing out. So then we put a pacemaker
in to protect the low level. Right, So we protect
the too high a rate with medication, and we protect
to lower rate with a pacemaker. So if she's off
(13:53):
her medicine, she could go into one of those super
high fast rate rhythms and die from that. We're here
in conjecture. I don't know, I don't know what medicine
she's gone, but you no.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
I understand. I first glance, I thought it was insulin.
That to me, But I'm the layman thinking in those terms.
Obviously you understand this far deeper than I do. Even
though I play a doctor on radio, you happen to
be a real one. So assuming that that medication you're
talking about, and if it wasn't taken with her, and
(14:28):
it was a fair amount of medication, that does not
bode well for survivability, does it.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Well? It puts you at high risk. I mean, people
with these kind of irregular rhythms, they don't always go
into them, and they may not go into them as
soon as the medicine drops. But they're there to protect you,
and if you're in a stressful environment like a hostage situation,
I would imagine that raises the risk as well. So
you know, it's not good for somebody in their eighties
(14:54):
to suddenly have a you know, sudden withdrawal from these
type of medications.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Fair Enough, back we go to jim KINI we are, however,
going to talk about the measle cases that have broken
out in LA County. And should I be probably scared
of the measles as I am, and not necessarily getting them,
but just seeing what's happening to our society measles wise.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Absolutely, I mean this is a clear breakdown to the
clearest breakdown in public health that you can just point
a thing or two and identify. I mean, we know
that measles super highly contagious. Ninety percent of unvaccinated people
who get exposed will get infected, and about one out
of five kids are going to need to be hospitalized
when they get it. You know, about two out of
(15:39):
a thousand will die or two out of a thousand
kids will die from it, and about one out a
thousand will get encephalitis with permanent brain damage. So this
is not just you know, a common coal. This is serious.
It also, I don't think people realize it erases your immunity,
so things that you were previously immune to you now
are able to to get. So it has a kind
(16:02):
of a long term but temporary erasure of your immunity
for months to years. So this thing is just not good.
And we got what now almost three thousand cases across
the country in the last year if you combine twenty
twenty five with the first few months of twenty twenty six,
and you know, that's unheard of. So we may be
(16:25):
back in endemic territory where measles is a regular thing.
It's out there, people are getting it regularly. Hospitals are
dealing with it regularly. By the way, requires negative pressure
air room when you're hospitalized, and we know from COVID
we only have so many of those. You can only
run the air conditioner backwards in so many rooms in
(16:46):
the hospital before you know, all you're doing is sucking
air everywhere and you're not actually blowing air into anything.
So you know, those are limited physically, so it can
be a big mess.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And measles was basically eradicated here in this country and
that's a scary part. Much like polio. Who the hell
gets polio anymore? I mean, you don't hear about that.
But measles making a comeback and the blame lies entirely
on lack of vaccinations. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, that's fair to say. I mean, we were getting
so measles was completely eliminated for endemic cases in the
United States, but we were getting people that would fly
in that had measles and then it would just burn out.
Now a few people would get infected in the US,
and that's the troublesome part. So yeah, of course, we're
always going to get cases from other countries where they
(17:41):
don't have the ability to vaccinate to the level we do.
But you know here now we are looking like a
third world country.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I so I it was the question I was going
to ask you about this in terms of have there
been extrapolations done by the medical community as to where
this is going to go? How many people are going
to be infected in the next two, three, five years,
and how many deaths and how many hospitalizations you looked
(18:10):
Have you seen anything like that?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
No, I mean I haven't seen anything like that, because
we can barely deal. You know, right now, the American
health system is teetering, right. You would think with all
the money when you go to the hospital and those
bills you get, and how much money you see flowing
into the system, you would think that this would be
a stable system. But it absolutely is not. People are
(18:37):
you know, hospitals are barely surviving as it is. And
really these type of things are exactly what keeps us
in the dark, case, keeps us being able to move forward,
because we're spending money on you caring for diseases that
we shouldn't have to care for if simple preventative measures
were taken. So, I mean, the concern here is again
(18:59):
that we'll you know, will this be something that strains
the system so much that people can't you know, people
don't have access to healthcare.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The other thing is just people in general who this
affects mostly the vulnerable in the society. Right, So children
under twelve months, people that are immunal compromised, suddenly feel
even less confident about going out in public. People with
heart disease or other issues that put them at higher risk,
they just you know, can't live as good a life
(19:29):
as they could have.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Have You seen any measle cases at your hospital.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Not that I'm aware of at my hospital, but I
am aware of other hospitals in the area who have
had measles cases, both in Orange County and in La
Long Beach area.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And I'm assuming that really does scare hospital staff that
measles has arrived. That's not something that you don't talk about.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
No, I mean, most of us are immunized, so honestly
taking care of measles cases isn't as concerning.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, I'm not talking about personal safety. I'm talking about
just the fact that measles has arrived, and is it
taking the medical community for a loop saying, oh my god,
not again kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Right, And you know, we've talked about the problem of
holding in the emergency department, where patients are held in
the er because there's no beds in the hospital. There's
no place to put them, and that is severely impacting
our hospital bed situation and our er capacity. So we
lose our capacity, and then the paramedics who deliver those
patients to the ear have to stay with their patient
till a nurse can accept them, and now it's impacting
(20:35):
the ability to deliver nine to one one service because
those paramedics are out of commission. So the trickle down
effect of this is significant.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And let's not forget we in the United States have
the best medical system in the world, right, Yeah, yeah,
you know, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I used to think that, and I started traveling and
seeing other healthcare. Yeah, fucking how good other countries are doing, right,
and yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Then you started really looking at us. Okay, Jim, thank you.
We'll catch again next week and that's it. We're done
for the Wednesday. Take care of Jim. You've been listening
to the Bill Handle Show. Catch My Show Monday through
Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app.
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