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Aug. 29, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:07
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Health: A Doctor Weighs In
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom and Hope you're doing well here with Dr.
Kevin Wicasse. He waited in the past on Jeffrey Epstein's neck and now we're moving to Ruth Bader Ginsburg pancreas.
So let's just start off with the usual caveats.
You've not examined her and all that kind of stuff?
Correct. I've never met Justice Ginsburg.
I've never examined her.
But I have read the news reports.
I have not seen her medical records or her chart, but I have read the publicly available news reports, and I think we'll have the links below.
Right. We will put those in below.
So, you know, when I started looking up her medical history, and listen, I'd love to live in a world where we didn't have to care about the medical history so much of, what is she, 86 or something like that?
Yes. An 86-year-old woman.
But we don't live in that world.
We live in the world where the Supreme Court has enormous sway, and if she does decide to retire or nature retires her for us, this has very big imports.
So I felt just kind of odd looking through somebody's medical history who's that old.
But, you know, A, she's old, which is good.
It means that she's kind of lasted, and we'll get into some of the reasons why.
But, man, she's had some illnesses.
Yeah, she is, what we would say in medical terms, an extremely unlucky person to have had what she's had.
Just in the terms of cancer, I'm not sure of what else she has or may have suffered through in her lifetime.
But as far as cancer goes, man, this is her fourth strike, we would say.
It's really bad, really unfortunate.
And what... So four times for cancer, you'd think you'd be staring more at a headstone than somebody still doing their workouts.
What do you think has been the big difference, the big takeaway that people can get as to why she probably survived, why she has survived all this stuff?
Well, I would say that it has to be, obviously, an incredible testament or a testament to her incredible fortitude.
I mean, her physical stamina and just her ability to heal, her ability to...
Go through these kinds of procedures, operations, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and survive is the testament to, I would say, without sounding smarmy, good genes, although that might be countered by the bad genes if it is genetic.
And of course, which again, I'm not certain that it's genetic, but, you know, something has predisposed her to having three different types of cancers, one of which is on two occasions now.
That's why it's a fourth strike.
Something has predisposed her to that, but by the same token, she has an incredible amount of fortitude, I would say, to survive this and to do as well as she has.
The other thing, though, I have to mention is the fact that the screening process...
And going through her history, as we'll get into here in a minute, going through the detailed history, it's pretty obvious that Justice Ginsburg has received medical screening tests that mere mortals just don't get in the United States.
In fact, nobody gets them in the world, I would say.
Now, these are screening tests like CAT scans, blood tests, etc.
That, you know...
Gosh, you know, would they have been done on mere mortals?
I don't know, because it sure sounds like some of these things were found very fortuitously, and I'll get into that in the details of the history.
Well, this is one of the things that's certainly frustrating about the Canadian healthcare system or any socialist healthcare system is it generally makes its money off cures rather than prevention.
And so you kind of have to wait till something's wrong rather than do preventive maintenance like you do on your car.
And the fact that, as you say, mere mortals don't have signature access to the kind of tests that can really save lives is actually quite frustrating.
Yeah, I've written several things on my blog about this that we have here in America, which is supposedly a capitalist system, which it's really not.
It's a crony capitalist system.
Of healthcare and health insurance coverage.
But what we have is really a reactive healthcare system.
It's not proactive by many stretches.
And that's another different podcast episode, and I'd love to get into it, but believe me, the regular Joes and Janes out there don't get the kind of screening that I'm pretty sure these high officials do.
And I'm not saying that the officials should not.
My whole point about this is that probably we should all have access to affordable, routine testing that would help save lives.
So just before we dive into her history, I just wanted to sort of make a general comment.
I'll keep it really, really brief. I don't know, obviously, what it's like to be in my 80s.
Maybe I'll still be doing what I'm doing now in my 80s into my 90s.
Maybe that would be the most fantastic thing ever.
But when you're facing a kind of life-threatening illness, and I remember this with John McCain, right?
John McCain had this brain tumor and he showed up.
At the Senate, I think it was, he showed up with this big giant lump coming out of his head and, you know, I mean, you know, work is good.
I get that, but I just wonder sometimes if when you're facing this kind of life-threatening diagnosis, if, you know, calm, nature, contemplation, time with loved ones, reflecting upon your life, maybe writing a little bit of an autobiography so people can learn from your wisdom, rather than going back to the grind of daily work, it just surprises me how people just kind of hang on to that Labor rather than, I think, do the rest and sit in the simmering embrace of your loved ones, which I think helps to heal.
Well, I'm only 50 and I'm looking for an excuse to retire that I can get right now.
But that's not to say I want something, you know, medical catastrophe to happen.
I just had a tooth pulled the other day.
That's why my right side of my face looks like I got busted in the chops, but it's the swelling from the tooth removal.
But anyway, that's painful enough.
And I certainly wouldn't want any medical catastrophe.
But yeah, you're right. I mean, Lots of people just keep going and going and going.
And, you know, when you're talking about politics, like Senator McCain or Justice Ginsburg, there's a lot politically at stake if they were to bow out of their positions prematurely or without fighting until the bitter end, as we would say.
But I guess that, you know, politics drives it.
I know that in one case, at least, there was kind of an involuntary forced retirement, and that is the Pope.
Pope Benedict was taken out of commission.
As far as I know, he's still around.
He's still alive as the first ever Pope Emeritus.
But that's not to say that he could have done the job.
It's just that I think he got probably a little too old.
I think his mental faculty started slipping in the church, took a stance and said, hey, look, we've got it.
We can't let him be the leader of the church anymore.
And good for them.
Good for him.
I hope he's doing well.
But, you know, there doesn't seem to be any kind of test for that when it comes to Supreme Court or congressional or even running for president.
I mean, Joe Biden, they used to be gaffes.
Now they're looking like the kind of senior moments that have someone chase you around the park with a giant butterfly net.
And, you know, it's like, why, why?
I mean, if your cognitive faculties are declining, you know, it's going to happen.
And, you know, just enjoy the time that you have this sort of being on the road and kissing babies and eating too many hot dogs while misremembering who Barack Obama was and getting decades wrong from 50s to 60s.
This doesn't seem like a wise approach in your declining years.
Yeah, I don't know that that's...
I don't think these are gaffes.
I think this is a really strong sign.
Again, I have never examined Vice President Biden, not saying anything nasty, but I think medically speaking, there's little question in most...
Physicians' minds, what's really going on with him, and it has very little to do with gaffes as much as it has to do with slipping of his mental faculties.
All right, so let's get to Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg.
This is the news.
The Supreme Court has said that she was treated for a tumor on her pancreas, did not specify which kind of cells were involved.
A biopsy performed in July confirmed that the tumor was malignant and localized, meaning it had not spread To other parts of her body.
She's previously been treated for colon and pancreatic cancer as well as for cancerous growths found on her lungs.
And that's not great.
And the fact that, well, I'll let you talk a little bit more about the treatment, but with pancreatic cancer, what are we talking?
Well, so let me dive into her history, if I may.
First of all, and this is what I talked about in the first part of the video, she's very unfortunate in that she's had three different types of cancer that, as far as I can tell, based upon what I've read, none of these are related to each other.
In other words, this is not one cancer that has spread to different parts of her body at different times.
These are three separate cancers occurring in three separate organs.
All three of which, all three of which are very, very deadly if they're gone too far.
So again, this goes back to the- This is the kind of odds you'd expect from somebody with their noble childhood, not someone in America.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Someone, and I don't know about her smoking history.
I do know that lung cancer and pancreatic cancer are related to smoking.
I'm not sure if she's a smoker or not.
I've not been able to find any information about that.
Looks like probably a former smoker or current smoker, but, you know, I've not seen any pictures of her puffing away or anything like that.
But certainly that would be a risk factor that she would have.
But, you know, to get three different types of cancers in one's lifetime, I know what I would be saying.
I would be like, come on, are you seriously?
But yeah, she was first diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999.
Now, when they found that, which again is a huge, I've written a couple of blog pieces about it, Twas the Night Before My Colonoscopy.
Everybody ought to read that. It's a funny poem about my colonoscopy that I had, checking for colon cancer.
But colon cancer is an extremely preventable disease that is the number two killer amongst cancer deaths in the U.S. amongst men and women.
It's extremely deadly.
I know a 39-year-old brother of a friend of mine died at 39 from colon cancer.
So this is a very deadly disease.
She was found to have it in 1999 and underwent major treatment for it.
She underwent a surgical resection, which is where they do an operation, and they take out part of the colon.
I'm not sure how much of hers they took out.
Not sure at all. Never have found any information about that.
But they remove the part of the tumor.
Sometimes they remove the whole colon.
But then she also underwent chemotherapy for that tumor as well as radiation treatment for that tumor as well.
And as far as I know, it worked.
I mean, she survived it.
She did well. As far as I know, she's not had a recurrence of colon cancer since then.
So either they took her whole colon out or she said very diligent, rigorous colorectal cancer screenings like colonoscopies every few years, which I, again, I'm all for in the general population.
I think everybody ought to have that routinely to check for colon cancer.
But colon cancer is a deadly enough phenomenon.
But then in 2009, 10 years after the initial diagnosis, she was found to have pancreatic cancer.
Oh my gosh!
Now, you want to talk about a deadly disease, pancreatic cancer is right up there near the top.
It's horrible.
It's a terrible disease to have because the prognosis is so poor.
Well, for one of the two kinds, right?
Yeah, for one of the two kinds.
There's two kinds of pancreatic cancer.
There's the kind that's called the neuroendocrine type that involves the actual, for lack of a better term, Steph, I would say the juice-making cells, the cells that make the hormones in the pancreas.
These are tumors that largely produce insulin or they produce something called glucagon.
And they're not by and of themselves that deadly.
They're not that... Bad of a type of cancer to have.
The bad type of pancreatic cancer to have is the kind that it seems that Justice Ginsburg had.
Again, I'm not sure, not seen any PATH reports or anything like that, but it seems like this is the one she had.
And this is where you get cancers involving the tissues of the pancreas that make up the pancreas.
They don't produce these hormones.
They don't produce any secretory juices that we use to digest food or regulate our metabolism.
So these cells, when they go crazy and start forming cancerous tumors in the pancreas, they're bad.
They go crazy, they go hog wild, as my grandmother would have said here in Texas, and they go nuts and they start spreading and they start metastasizing and it causes all kinds of problems.
The pancreas sits in a very specific strategic spot within the abdominal cavity where it's heavily involved in digesting food, it's connected to via duct work, it's connected to the small intestine, It's right there next to the gallbladder and the liver.
So if the pancreas goes bad, if it starts developing cancerous cells, they can travel far and wide and metastasize early on.
And this is part of the difficulty of picking it up.
This is why the prognosis is so poor.
In other words, less than 5%, I would say 5% to 10% of people who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are alive five years later.
The type of pancreatic cancer we're talking about, the adenocarcinomas.
The reason for that is, the reason that the prognosis is so poor is because it's very hard to detect it.
There are no lumps to feel.
You generally don't have any feelings of sensation of a disorder of your digestive tract until the cancer is fairly large and involved.
It's had time to spread, to metastasize, and that's where the real danger comes.
I've heard the case being made that the more survivable form of cancer has some likelihood because she had it 10 years ago, right?
And maybe it came back, and because she had it 10 years ago and it survived, it probably was the more survivable form of it, and maybe that's just what's returned.
It could be. Again, I've not seen any of that, but I will say this, that the neuroendocrine tumors, to my knowledge, generally aren't treated by surgery.
Let's get into what Justice Ginsburg had.
She underwent, as far as I can tell, what's called an exploratory laparotomy.
She had exploratory surgery back in 2009.
Let's back up a little bit further even and talk about what I alluded to in the beginning about her screening, the screening for the Justice.
She had, for some reason, in 2009, she had a CAT scan.
I'm not sure why.
Who knows why?
But she had a CAT scan of her abdomen that showed a one-centimeter nodule right smack dab in the center of her pancreas.
That's what got everybody's antenna tingling and set her on the course of having an operation.
After that, she had an exploratory operation during which the surgeon found that this one centimeter mass that was sitting in the center of her pancreas, according to the news reports, was actually benign.
So, again, you could say, well, gosh, that was an awful lot to go through just for nothing.
Well, not really, because it could have been cancerous, and if it were cancerous, it would have been best to take it out.
But during that procedure, during the operation, the surgeon apparently also found a smaller, no size was given in the news reports I read, But found a smaller, previously unidentified, in other words, it was not seen on the CAT scan, found another tumor that was biopsied, and that one turned out to be malignant.
That one did turn out to be cancer.
Now whether that was neuroendocrine or not, or whether it was an adenocarcinoma, I don't know.
I have no idea. Whether it was the, in other words, let me say this, whether it was the extremely dangerous and deadly form of pancreatic cancer, I don't know.
Or if it was the neuroendocrine type, again, I don't know.
But either case, it was removed.
And what's interesting is when they removed that cancer, they did not do...
In other words, when you're in the belly, when you're in the operating room, you're a surgeon and you're taking a biopsy of something.
You send it for a fresh frozen analysis.
You send this tissue sample into a pathologist who's waiting right there in the operating room.
They look at it under the microscope.
They tell you, Yes or no.
They tell you whether it's cancer or not, and then you plan the rest of your surgery accordingly.
You can't just operate on somebody one day, wait for the path results to come back and go back in and do another operation.
So this all happens in real time.
And apparently, when the surgeon was told that not the first tumor, but the second mass was cancerous, they elected to do something that's rather...
I wouldn't say unusual. I'm not a surgeon, okay?
I've never done this.
But they did not do the standard procedure for pancreatic cancer, and that procedure is called a Whipple procedure.
Just like it sounds, Whipple, like whipped cream.
It was named after the surgeon who invented it.
Whipple procedure. That's a very major, majorly involved surgery where you remove most of the pancreas, you remove the gallbladder, You remove the first and part of the second part of the small intestine.
And then you sew everything back together.
You also remove a part of the stomach in a Whipple procedure.
So you're talking the loss of parts or all of four different organ systems there.
Again, the pancreas is located right in the middle of the belly of the abdominal cavity.
Major operation.
Lots of mortality.
A lot of people die from Whipple procedures.
A lot of people do poorly after Whipple procedures.
For some reason, which again, let's Make this clear.
Whipple procedure is the standard surgery to do for pancreatic cancers involving the head of the pancreas or part of the pancreas.
What they did though was not a Whipple procedure for Justice Ginsburg.
In fact, they took out another part of her pancreas, and I'm not sure if it was the head or the tail, but they took out part of her pancreas and her spleen, which is to the left of the pancreas and is typically not touched as part of a Whipple procedure.
So I'm not sure why they took out the spleen.
If any of the viewers out there want to tell me why, that'd be great in the comments.
But I'm not sure why they would only take out half of her pancreas and the spleen.
I'm not saying that any wrong was done.
What I'm saying is we don't know exactly what the tumor was.
What I can tell you also is that after this procedure, though, in 2009 we're talking, after that procedure she did not undergo, as far as I can tell, any chemotherapy or any radiation.
So that sets the stage for the pancreatic tumor that we've got now.
But in the meantime, since between 2009 and now, actually in last year, November of 2018, Justice Ginsburg fell.
Probably all remember the story.
She fell and she fractured several ribs.
During that time, and let me say this, that is a horrible injury.
I mean, that's a terrible injury.
At 85 years old, or 86 years old, to suffer broken ribs, major, major risk of developing pneumonia, major risk of developing lung complications if you bruise the lungs during the process of a fall.
So the fact that she survived that and continued working, I mean, just an incredible, she's an incredible person to have suffered all that and kept going the way she has.
That being said, during the workup, during the procedure to determine what exactly was going on, she had another CAT scan to evaluate these broken ribs.
And as part of that, they found some cancerous nodules on her lung.
They found some suspicious nodules on her lung, her left side of her lung.
So they went in and biopsied those, found out again, they're cancerous.
Removed that part of her lung, did not do, as far as I can tell, a major operation, sewed her back up, and then after that she did not again have any chemotherapy or any radiation treatment, as far as I know, for the lung cancer.
So that tells us that that lung cancer was either A fairly non-aggressive type of lung cancer, which lung cancers come in very many different shapes, sizes, and colors, some of which are extremely deadly, some of which can be treated pretty easily, not easily, but much more easily than the deadly types.
So maybe she had one of those types of tumors.
Maybe she had a very non-aggressive type of lung cancer, or maybe it was just localized.
But for whatever reason, they decided not to treat her with chemotherapy and radiation.
So that brings us up to this year.
Again, in December of last year, she had the lung cancer surgery, removed the cancer, said, okay, she's cancer-free.
Again, for some reason, well, okay, let me back up and say this.
Apparently, they did a blood test on her.
A blood test was done, and there are blood tests out there that screen for pancreatic cancers.
I mean, there are blood tests out there that screen for a lot of different cancers, a different episode we should get into.
But the bottom line is that they did a test on her, and I'm pretty sure the test that they ran was something called a CA19-9.
This is a particular type of protein that's produced, and it's produced in higher amounts when pancreatic tumors are present.
So it's called a tumor marker.
In other words, if you have elevated levels of this particular protein floating around in your blood, then there's a chance.
It's not definite, but there's a chance that you have the particular cancer that that protein is associated with.
And in this case, I'm pretty sure it was a CA19-9 that they did on Justice Ginsburg.
But they found that it was elevated back in early July.
So, again, they go back in.
They do a CAT scan.
They find a nodule.
So they do an – I'm sorry.
They elected not to do an operation at this point in time.
They found a mass.
No details are given on where in the pancreas it is.
Remember, they only took out part of her pancreas back in 2009.
So no details are given on what part of the pancreas this mass is in or the size or the shape of it or anything like that.
But what's interesting is they did what's called a bile duct stent.
Let me get into that, if I may.
The gallbladder, the liver produces bile, okay, which is very necessary in digestion.
It helps us to digest fats and fatty substances.
And the liver is constantly producing it, and it's normally stored in the gallbladder.
Now, the gallbladder is not that important of an organ, obviously.
People have their gallbladders taken out all the time in the U.S. But the liver still needs a way of dumping the bile that it's producing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, into the intestinal tract.
It doesn't need the gallbladder.
The gallbladder is like a bag to store this stuff in.
But it needs what's called the bile duct.
Which is where the bile goes from the gallbladder and the liver normally into the intestinal tract.
You can take out the gallbladder.
You always leave the bile duct.
A duct just means a tube, basically.
And that duct is very important.
And so as part of, I guess, the prophylactic treatment of Justice Ginsburg, instead of doing surgery, they did place, they didn't do surgery on this tumor, but they did place a bile duct stent.
In other words, this is a rigid little, imagine like Can we say plastic straw these days?
Is it illegal to say plastic straw?
Okay, I don't want to say paper because that wouldn't last very long.
But they insert a piece of plastic akin to a straw, a small tube, it's called a stent, and they put it into the bile duct to keep it open.
Why would they want to do that?
Obviously, this tumor that she has, this mass, is either very close to the bile duct Or it's in danger of growing large enough to block the bile duct.
And you don't want that to happen.
So a bile duct stent was placed.
Again, I don't know any characteristics of this tumor.
I don't know if it was big.
I don't know where it's located.
But they did place a bile duct stent that tells me a lot about this cancer.
So then, instead of doing surgery, they opted to do radiation treatment this time.
No chemotherapy, no surgery, just radiation.
And they're doing a special kind of radiation treatment.
Stereotactic ablative radiation therapy.
And what's really interesting about this, I didn't know this until I started researching it.
You know, we all hear about radiation therapy and cancer and things like that.
Well, if you're going to irradiate something, it would be nice to focus, to concentrate the radiation, the actual beam of radiation on the tumor itself.
You don't want to just Just shoot a bunch of radiation at somebody and have it just wash their body over, which is what used to happen.
They weren't very good at coning this down, at pointing it and aiming it like a laser beam, let's say, onto a tumor.
Well, now we've gotten really good at this, but what's interesting about treating these types of tumors is the actual process involved because what do you do 24 hours a day, seven days a week that you can't stop until you die?
And that's breathe. You're breathing all the time.
Well, look down at your tummy when you're breathing.
What's happening? It's moving quite a bit.
So radiation that's done, say, in the brain.
When we have a brain tumor, they put you in this thing.
I don't know if your viewers have ever seen what's called a gamma knife.
It's this gigantic helmet.
It looks like something out of Star Wars.
It looks like one of those probe droid things.
And it's got all these apertures on it.
And they point and they focus the radiation beam very, very precisely onto a tumor.
Easily done in the head because you can keep the head still.
You can breathe all you want to.
Your head's not moving. Your brain's not moving.
So in three-dimensional space, they can computer model this and find out where to point the laser beam exactly.
Quite a bit different thing involved when you're talking about pancreas that's sitting in the middle of the abdominal cavity that's right below the lungs that are causing it to move several centimeters with each respiration that you take.
And we breathe 14 to 16 times a minute.
That's hundreds of times an hour, thousands of times a day.
Very, very difficult to point that radiation in the right spot.
So in order to do this, she underwent a three-week course of stereotactic ablative treatment.
In order to do that, they have to place, and I'm not sure that this happened in Justice Ginsburg's case, but they have to place these little gold markers, and then they calibrate, and they figure out, they do all these calculations, and they try to get that beam focused on the tumor itself.
Apparently they did all that.
Apparently it was successful.
They now claim that the cancer...
They don't give any details about the pancreatic tumor again, mind you, in this news report that I read, several news reports that I read.
But what they do say is that the rest of her is cancer-free.
You be the judge. Now, when it comes to this kind of, the power that is invested in people like this, do you think that there should be any procedure by which people can say, you know, hey, you know, great, great job, you know, thanks for your service, you know, and she has obviously served the Supreme Court for many, many years.
It just seems like, you know, that old, well, Texas image, right, the sort of riding off into the sunset, job well done, you know, pass the torch or something like that?
Well, you know, one would hope, one would think.
I think when the framers, when the founders of the nation established all the rules and regulations regarding congressional appointments, elections, etc., You know, people, I think the average age, I think if you were 40, you were an old man. I think you and I would be wise and old men back then in our 50s.
So, you know, this idea of the physical body outlasting the mental capacity, really, I don't think it existed back then or it was very few and far between.
So this is just something, this is an oversight maybe or somehow, but certainly, you know, the 25th Amendment was passed that allows for the president to And we saw it being used.
We saw it being talked about, not used, but talked about quite a bit recently about President Trump, that if the mental capacity, mental faculties go down, then you can remove a sitting president.
I think something definitely, not that Justice Ginsburg has any mental deficiencies.
I'm not saying that at all.
But physical ailments, physical...
Think about the emotional...
I mean, again, I don't want to get into too many...
Wild ass theories here or just jumping off the train and going down different tracks, but think about how grumpy you are when you're in a lot of pain.
Think about what a toothache, what a tooth will do to you as far as your decision-making capacity.
You get grumpy, you get testy, you get short-tempered, you can't focus, you can't concentrate.
Now imagine going through cancer treatment and all that entails and the worry, etc., You know, I'm not saying that Justice Ginsburg is not qualified to sit on the court and make decisions, but I'd have to really question the ability of the average human, the mere mortal, cloaked in Supreme Court justice robes.
I'd have to question the ability of someone undergoing that kind of trauma, you know, to fulfill that task adequately.
Well, it's hard for me to imagine You know, a brain in its 80s, like, I'm sorry, like, I mean, yes, you've gathered wisdom as a rock gathers moss and so on, but as far as reflexes and acuity and just basic neurons connecting and firing rapidly and so on, I, you know, everything ages, everything gets a little bit slower.
And I know brains aren't like knees and backs and so on, but it's just hard for me to imagine...
That a brain in its sort of mid-80s is going to have the same vim and vigor as a brain in the floor.
I mean, everything starts declining after middle age.
Well, it's interesting you say that, that actually, now again, there's two ways of looking at any organ.
I like to tell patients, look, we've got a picture of it and it looks great, but, you know, even a great looking air conditioner cannot work properly.
You know, so you have the picture, you have the structure, then you have the function of any organ in the body.
And the brain is no different.
What I'm getting at is if you do CAT scans of people's brains throughout their lives, and I've seen lots of these, by the time you reach your 60s, 70s, 80s, you start seeing what's called cerebral atrophy.
You start seeing the brain literally shrink.
And when you see an 18-year-old kid's brain on a CAT scan, that thing is just crammed.
The skull is crammed with brain material.
There's very little shrinkage.
There's very little atrophy, let's say.
But as we age, as we get up in the 70s and 80s, there's definitely physical, physical changes to the brain that make it not like younger brains.
Again, that's how it looks as far as the structure goes.
Again, I told you that even a terrible looking air conditioner or an oil pump may look terrible on your car, but it works just great.
So maybe the brain is working just fine and firing off.
The estimate is that we use just a fraction of our brains anyway.
So maybe the part that we lose, we don't need.
It's the gallbladder of the human brain.
Yeah, maybe we lose the gallbladder as part of that atrophy process.
But, you know, it's...
You know, the real test of somebody whose whole entire career, their entire job consists of intellectualism is, you know, to see how they're doing.
And as far as I know, Justice Ginsburg hasn't failed anything like that.
She's certainly not acting like Joe Biden.
She's certainly not, as far as I know, showing overt signs of mental decline.
But physically, just physical trauma, the physical just sheer Again, I don't want to take away from this lady's absolute fortitude, her strength, her durability.
She's an amazing testament to what the human body can undergo and take and still make it.
Would it be time for me to retire?
I think, yeah, absolutely.
I'd have been long gone, sitting on the beach, you know, waiting for my daiquiris to show up or what have you.
So yeah, maybe it's time for her to as well.
And that's the funny thing, because I'm, you know, outside of the politics and the content of her legal judgments, I'm sort of torn between, like, admiration for these sort of Nietzschean wills of power that she has to get up and survive all of these onslaughts through her body and the radiation and the surgeries and this and that and the other and get in there and shape the law of the land and so on.
I'm sort of torn between admiration for all of that and, like, it's starting to look like Gollum at the Ring at some point.
Okay, so let's talk about her prognosis.
What's the prognosis for this?
Again, you bring up two fascinating possibilities.
She's had at least three different types of cancer.
She had colon cancer.
She had a first bout of pancreatic cancer that may or may not have been neuroendocrine.
We don't know. Then she had lung cancer.
That's three types. Now she's apparently had a fourth occurrence of cancer and it involves her pancreas.
Is this a different type of cancer from the original pancreatic cancer she had in 2009?
That's a possibility. In any case, either case, the fact that they put a bile duct stent in, in addition to not treating this surgically, and in addition to treating this with ablative radiation, tells me that they're very concerned about tumor growth, because these are mostly palliative measures.
And what I mean by palliative, just designed to keep someone comfortable while they're alive, not intended to prolong their lives at all, just to keep them comfortable.
So I would say that these are palliative measures, and I would, again, make the guess without ever having examined her or her records in detail, I would make the guess that she doesn't have very long as far as prognosis goes.
It would be an amazing, amazing occurrence if she were to survive in the next few years.
Well, this is the Supreme Court, right?
So this is what the Supreme Court put out a statement that concluded with, no further treatment is needed at this time.
Now, you know, everyone's like, yay!
And I'm like, you know, maybe just because I went through one of these things too, you know, it could be good news or it could be the worst conceivable news other than a school bus is about to run you over.
Well, as you and I've talked, screening, she may not need any further treatment as of this moment, but she definitely needs to be screened.
She definitely needs to be watched diligently to see how this thing progresses.
Because if it does progress, there's one of two things that can be done about it.
Either it can be retreated, something else can be done to help alleviate it, or maybe at that point in time, if she does have a recurrence of the tumor and it does turn out to be something that's going to be terminal, then I think it would definitely be time to...
As we say here in Texas, hang up the boots.
Okay, well listen, I really, really appreciate that because I know people have been talking about this topic and it's good, although you've not treated her, not examined her, these are all speculations based on evidence, it's really good to get someone who knows what they're talking about on the show.
So for people who want to find out more about your books, we'll obviously link to everything below, but for those who are just listening and too lazy to click on the damn link, what is it that you would like to tell people about how to find you on the web?
Click on the link, please. The blog is called Healthcareonomics.
That's a mouthful. It's healthcareonomics.com.
I have a Twitter, HConomics.
I'm on Parler, as people call it.
That's Healthcareonomics.
And I also have a YouTube channel, that's Healthcareonomics, that you and I are on now.
Yeah, I have a couple of books.
The first book I wrote is called The Guide to Buying Health Insurance in Healthcare.
It's not as dry as it sounds.
It's a history of health insurance, how it took over the healthcare system.
How it's changed. Health insurance has now changed with high deductibles and what you as a consumer can do, as a patient, can do to save money on your health insurance and your health care.
Then I also wrote a book of a group of a thousand things designed to make you laugh and think at the same time.
It's called Healthcareonomics, A Thousand Crazy Ways American Health Insurance Took Over American Health Care.
Well, it is really, you know, I mean, marketing-wise, it's fantastic because you're one of the few authors who make the solemn promise that if people read your books, they will achieve and sustain immortality, which is really quite an important thing.
Just kidding. Just kidding.
All right. Well, thanks, Dr.
Ocasey. A great pleasure to chat, and I hope we can do it again soon.
And remember, check out the links associated with the show.
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