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Feb. 5, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:38
Rush Limbaugh Cancer: An ER Doctor Responds
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine, here with a good friend, Dr.
Kevin Wieckese. Thank you so much for taking the time today.
What brings us together, other than Ranked Friendship, is the news, of course, that Rush Limbaugh has released that he has been diagnosed with, I guess it's a bit of a vague term, advanced lung cancer.
And, you know, whenever something medical comes up, you're on my speed dial.
So when you heard about it, which I think was through me, what were your first thoughts and where did you rush to get additional info?
Well, I checked out his statement.
You know, I watched his admission on air.
He had a video recording on his website of him discussing his diagnosis, and he's not giving a lot of details.
So, we're really shooting in the dark here, as we seem to always do when it comes to celebrities and famous folks having these bad diagnoses.
So, I'm not really sure what kind of cancer he has, and we'll discuss those as we go through.
It seems to me that it's pretty bad, to be honest.
I hate to say that, because I've been a Rush fan for a long time.
But I will tell you that I went back and looked at some video of him just from a few months ago, and it's really apparent to me that he's lost a lot of weight.
Now, whether that was intentional or not, who knows?
He's always been a bit of a portly fellow, so this is the slimmest I've ever seen him.
In making his announcement yesterday, if you look at him, his shirt just seems to be hanging off of him.
In fact, he grew a beard, which I've never seen him grow as well.
And I'm not sure if he's trying to hide some facial gauntness or not.
I'm taking a total shot in the dark on that.
I could be wrong. I hope I am.
But it looks to me like he's lost a significant amount of weight.
And with the news that it is an advanced lung cancer, to me that means that it's pretty devastating news.
So the prognosis, of course, for lung cancer as a whole, as far as I understand it, and listen, just a note, this is just us speculating.
There's no medical advice, no facts here.
We don't have any inside scoop on anything.
We're just jawboning about possibilities.
But diagnosis for lung cancer as a whole, it's never...
Particularly good.
There's not a lot of recovery and particularly of course if you're older and the damage has been done by many years perhaps of bad living or just bad luck.
So what is the general diagnosis and what might be going on with Rush?
Well, do you mean prognosis?
The general prognosis or how things are going to turn out is universally bad.
Over 70% of people In the United States, die from lung cancer within a year of diagnosis.
The survival rate is very, very abysmal.
And mostly that's due to a number of factors, but mostly that's due to the late stage at which the lung cancer is caught, in which case it seems to be that way with Rush.
I mean, he caught it after having respiratory symptoms.
And any time you develop pulmonary symptoms, respiratory symptoms, he said in his statement that he thought he had the onset of asthma.
And at 67 years old, it's possible for people to develop asthma, but it's very unlikely.
But the fact that he went from, I suppose, breathing normally to having some significant respiratory difficulty, that means that the tumor has pretty much invaded his airway.
And it's causing him difficulty in just breathing.
We breathe thousands of times a day.
Try not breathing for a few minutes and see how you like it.
Well, I suppose, yeah. I mean, if it's already at the point where he's noticing it, then it's taken over significant portions of his lungs.
And then, of course, you could say, well, just hack out the lung and so on.
But the big danger, of course, is that it's traveled elsewhere.
The body is not a sealed-off system.
Everything goes everywhere.
And the diagnosis, when you first get any kind of cancer diagnosis, the first thing they look for is, Has it gone Roma?
Has it traveled? Right.
It's called metastasis.
And that's how we stage cancers.
We stage various cancers.
Like in the case of an early tumor, you know, you can have a stage one where it has not spread or stage zero, in fact, where it hasn't spread.
You can have stage one, two, three, or four.
And again, I don't know where Rush's tumor is on that spectrum.
I would suspect that if he said it's advanced and he's having respiratory symptoms, I would suspect that it has spread.
You know, we can't really say that it's spread throughout his lungs.
It could just be invading a major bronchus, one of the two main tubes that feeds a lung.
If it is a tumor that's localized to, let's say, the right or the left bronchus, which is the main Think about the thickness or the diameter of a water hose.
The bronchus isn't that big around, but it's pretty big around.
It's where the trachea, the main windpipe, splits into two bronchuses.
Bronchi, they're called, but we call them bronchus.
There's a right and a left one. If he had a tumor that had grown next to one of those and was impinging upon the bronchus, Then it certainly could cause him respiratory symptoms and still be pretty localized.
So it might be pretty treatable.
I will say this. He kind of gave a mixed bag as to what's going on because he said he hopes to be back in the studio this week after some treatment.
Now, lung cancer treatment can be pretty brutal.
And there's surgical options which are largely reserved for a certain type of cancer called non-small cell carcinoma.
And then there are non-surgical options.
Chemotherapy and radiation therapy that are also used in non-small cell carcinoma, but those are reserved for a smaller cell carcinoma or called oat cell carcinoma is how it used to be termed.
And these are pretty aggressive tumors, but they only occur in about 15% of lung cancers from what I understand.
So these small cell carcinomas, the small or oat cell carcinomas, That may be what he's facing.
I mean, if it's an aggressive tumor and it has taken off, I mean, I just don't know how long he's had this.
He said that he had symptoms last month, just a few weeks ago, went and got it checked out, and basically found this tumor that's already causing him symptoms.
So the fact that it's advanced means that it's either been there for a long time and it's slow growing, or that it could have just been there a very short time and it's very aggressive, very fast growing.
Let me give you a story.
Personal story about this.
Back in 2004, I was working in the emergency department at a pretty big hospital, and a woman came in with a headache.
Now, I did a CT scan on her because it sounded very suspicious, and her brain, Steph, I mean, it was awful.
Her brain looked like Swiss cheese.
She had tumors, those oval-shaped tumors of all different sizes scattered throughout her brain.
It was really sad. But she had been to that emergency department, the same emergency department, less than a month before.
In fact, 27 days prior to that, she had come in with a similar headache, had had a CAT scan then, and guess what?
It was completely normal.
So within a four-week period, this woman went from, you know, what was probably early cancer causing her symptoms, but no signs on a CT scan, to completely pockmarked and Just Swiss cheese-looking brain.
She died less than a week later after that.
She was in the hospital. We hospitalized her after seeing her that second time.
But cancers come in all different forms, as you well know, and they come in all different types of aggressive behavior.
So there are slow-growing cancers.
There are fast-growing cancers.
We don't know what kind Rush has.
Now, with regards to how famous he is, how much money he generates, how popular he is, it always strikes me as a little odd.
I mean, I'll go for my annual checkups, and I'm very proactive when it comes to these kinds of things.
You should be. Again, it could be something that started quite rapidly, but there are ways of, especially he's a cigar smoker, or at least he was.
I don't know if he was ever a cigarette smoker.
But you can, of course, get these proactive scans done that hopefully can find something early.
Yeah, there's controversy about that because, you know, the CT scans that are used nowadays to screen for lung cancer, they do administer radiation, but the scanners that we have nowadays, the technology is so great on them that the radiation dose is minimal.
And for my own personal patients, I absolutely recommend, if they are smokers or ex-smokers with a significant history, I absolutely recommend that they get yearly or annual Lung cancer screenings via CT scan.
There's no better test to determine this.
There's some blood tests that look at cancer markers, but those aren't really used to detect cancer as much as to follow its progress.
And those are not very applicable as far as lung cancer goes.
You know, lung cancer is the number one cause of death, cancer-wise, amongst men and women.
When you combine men and women, it attacks a couple hundred thousand Americans a year.
It kills almost two million people around the world every year.
Obviously, in the developing countries, it's a much worse prognosis because of the detection and the treatment that they have.
But nowadays in the U.S., we have pretty good detection measures.
It's just that, once again, as we discussed with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or I'm sorry, with We discussed at some point somebody who failed.
Yeah, I think it was Bernie Sanders.
We were discussing Bernie Sanders, who has access to the best healthcare on the planet.
Now, just to be clear for your audience, I'm not a Bernie Sanders fan.
I am a Rush Limbaugh fan, but I'm not a Bernie Sanders fan.
But the fact that he didn't get screened for heart disease and had a heart attack out there on the campaign trail was really a misstep.
I mean, this guy should have been getting screened every year.
Physicians should be saying, okay, Mr.
Sanders, or Senator Sanders, we've got to get you screened.
And the same thing with Rush.
I'd be very surprised if he had not gotten these screenings annually because they can and they do detect lung tumors before they become problematic.
The problem with these screenings is you can find false positives on them.
And if I may share another story about a patient of mine, this just happened recently.
In November, he contacted me.
He was him and his wife.
He's a 62-year-old non-smoker.
In fact, I've been meaning to do a video about this.
Never smoked in his life.
But he's at the State Fair of Texas, and he and his wife are out there, and they ran across this booth.
And he called me, and he said, Hey, listen, we're seeing this deal out here.
It's a full body.
Actually, it's a torso.
It's a chest and abdomen.
CT screening, it's 99 bucks for the both of us to do it.
Do you recommend it? And I asked them some questions.
I said, look, ask them what type of CT scanner this is.
If it's some fly-by-night operation that's bought a 30-year-old CT scanner and is running, you know, three-mile island levels of radiation through you, I wouldn't do that.
But if it's a relatively new scanner, if it's a 64-slice or what's called a 128-slice scanner, think about megabytes, how everything doubles The more slices you have in a CT scanner, the less radiation you get, the faster the study goes, the more detailed the pictures are.
So he said, okay, hold on, let me ask him.
He's a very Texas accent.
He said, okay, let me ask him.
And he hops off the phone for a second, comes back, he says, it's 128 slice.
I said, well, hey, listen, for 99 bucks, that sounds like a great deal.
I would recommend you do it, you know, if you're interested.
Okay, so they went and got the scan.
Guess what? This guy, never smoker, showed up with a three-centimeter lesion.
That's pretty big. That's about that big.
It's about two inches wide, a three-centimeter lesion in his left lung.
He wasn't having any symptoms.
He wasn't having any weight loss, any shortness of breath.
Okay, but with lesion, I just think of it like a blister or a wound, but what do you mean by that?
A mass. A mass.
Something that should not be there was there.
Now, here's the problem that we run into when it comes to this kind of screening process.
You can get false positives.
And I hopefully didn't just give away what's the end of the story here.
But the bottom line is, it freaked him out.
Needless to say, this is before Thanksgiving.
Freaked me out a little bit, too.
I said, well, look, you got to go see a lung specialist.
We got to get you worked up.
As we say in the medical field, we have to do some more testing and find out what in the heck's going on.
So just as they probably did with Rush Limbaugh, They took my patient.
He saw a pulmonologist after this initial scanning and found this mass, and the pulmonologist did what's called a bronchoscopy on him, where they actually put him out under anesthesia, and they slide a rigid tube down his bronchus, down his airway, and took a piece.
They biopsied a piece of this mass.
It was in a place in his lung, in my patient's lung, where they could get to it.
I'm not sure where this mass was In Rush Limbaugh's lung, if they could get to it via bronchoscopy or not, sometimes they'll have to go externally through the chest and do what's called a CT-guided biopsy.
In any case, in order to diagnose, once you find a mass with a CT screening, you've got to find out what it is.
Is it benign? Is it malignant?
Is it infectious? Is it something that's been there for a long time?
The only way you can do that is with a biopsy.
So my patient underwent a biopsy.
Now here's, you do this famous series of videos, what pisses me off about whatever, and what pisses me off about the American healthcare system, one of the things is the lack of customer service, okay?
So my patient went on December 16th, I believe it was the 16th, it was a Friday, and had this biopsy done.
The results were back on the Monday.
It was December 19th, if I remember correctly.
I could get my dates wrong there, but it was a Friday before Christmas.
Guess what? They didn't let him know until January the 3rd.
They didn't fax me the results until January the 3rd because of some mix-up in the deal.
Now, I called over there a couple of times at his behest.
They didn't have the results.
They faxed them to us on January 3rd.
Now, what pisses me off about that is this guy's Christmas and New Year's would have been a lot better had he had those benign, no worry about it results.
This is just a mass. It's been there for a long time.
It's not cancer. That's what the result was.
The biopsy result showed that it was nothing dangerous.
So huge sigh of relief, huge hassle factor to go through.
But hey, this guy knows now that he's got a three centimeter mass in his, I believe it was his left lung.
And it's something that we're going to watch.
We're going to make sure that it doesn't grow over the next year or so.
But once we get past that, once he's back to normal, I mean, he's 62 years old.
He's got a while, hopefully, before he's a goner.
And I hate to sound trite when I say that, but, you know, my objective in this is to help people live healthier.
And the only way we do it is through screening, through taking advantage of the technology that exists out there already to find disease before it becomes problematic.
In Rush's case, I don't know.
I hope he did. Perhaps he did.
Maybe he got a CT scan a few months ago and it just popped up, this tumor.
One more story, if I may.
A local news personality about six years ago.
Yeah, it was November of 2014.
She was an investigative reporter for the ABC affiliate in Dallas here.
And her name is Janet St.
James, if anybody wants to look her up.
She put all this on the internet, her trials and tribulations about her cancer.
She went and had a mammogram done in November of 2014.
On Good Friday of 2015, less than six months later, she was having a breast exam at her physician's office.
They found a lump. It not only was a lump in her breast, but it had spread to her lymph nodes as well in her armpit.
So right away, they took her.
She had to have a double mastectomy.
She had to have radiation and chemotherapy, and that's what she chronicled on Facebook.
She put a big story out there about how she went through it.
Nowadays, she's cancer-free, but she is one of the lucky ones because she had what was called an interval cancer, which is in-between screening tests.
She had her mammograms religiously every year, but she had an interval cancer pop-up that was quite aggressive.
It was reminiscent of that lady that I saw in 2004, where the cancer spread like crazy over a month period.
So we have to be diligent about checking for cancer, and a big part of that is screening for it.
Well, I think it's also all the more important if you're not living a particularly active or healthy lifestyle to begin with.
So one of the things that, I mean, one of the reasons I do a lot of cardio is if you do a lot of cardio and you lift a lot of weights, if there's a change in your general health, man, you'll notice it pretty quickly.
That's right. And that's one of the things when I was going through the treatment for lymphoma and so on, they said, well, listen, your body is strong and healthy enough that it's really going to help you in this whole process and help you with recovery, which is why I think it wasn't particularly brutal.
For me, but if you look at Rush Limbaugh, for all of his talents as a broadcaster, not the healthiest living guy on the planet.
We talked about the cigar smoking.
He was, of course, addicted to painkillers, which he procured in significant quantities over quite some period of time, and ended up being arrested for all of this, and he had his hearing issues and so on.
And he had back pain.
Maybe that came from something chronic.
I never know with back pain where it's like, okay, well, are people not exercising because of the back pain or do they have a lot of back pain because they're not exercising and sitting in a chair for three hours a day and driving back and forth and just never really moving and turning into one of those...
Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down characters from late-stage Wally movies and so on.
But, you know, particularly if you make the choice to maybe overeat, if you make the choice to not exercise, man, that screening just becomes pretty essential in my humble opinion.
Absolutely. And one of the big risk factors that's often overlooked for many different types of cancer, I'm not sure about lung cancer in this instance, but obesity.
Obesity puts you at risk for certain, I mean, definitely puts you at an increased risk for having cancer.
And, you know, I don't know how much that contributed to Rush's diagnosis.
One more thing I'll mention is that it's possible that lung cancer is not a primary cancer.
In other words, you can have different kinds of cancer, like breast cancer, kidney cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, which is very common in smokers.
You can have that spread to the lungs.
So that might be the case we're talking about here, but I kind of doubt it because Rush did say he had advanced lung cancer.
And when people say lung cancer, when we call it lung cancer, what we're referring to is a primary tumor of the lungs.
It is possible, though, that it's spread from someplace else.
And they would have found that by this point in time.
They've done an extensive workup on him, I'm sure, whole body PET scan to check for various problems, see if anything is lurking elsewhere that might be a cancer.
And I'm certain that since he's not mentioning it, my best guess, I'm not certain, but my best guess is that this was a primary tumor that originated in the lungs.
Go ahead.
Well, one thing about, you know, as you and I talked about last night, as you said, well, he didn't smoke cigarettes.
He smoked cigars, right?
Well, I didn't find any pictures of him smoking cigarettes.
I'm unaware of a cigarette smoking history, but cigars can give you lung cancer.
Absolutely. I mean, one of the big risk factors for lung cancer is the major risk factor, excuse me, the major risk factor for lung cancer is tobacco smoke in any form.
It can be inhaled, not inhaled.
It can be swallowed. It can be secondhand smoke.
And if you don't think that cigar smoke, which let me differentiate cigars and cigarettes.
Cigarettes are a small amount, about a gram of tobacco leaf, encased in a paper container with a filter on it.
Now, the filter filters out some of the particulate matter in smoke, not all of it, but certainly it still causes harm to your lungs.
Well, a cigar is an unfiltered wad of tobacco wrapped in a leaf of tobacco, so it's pure tobacco.
In fact, it's estimated that the bigger cigars, like the ones that Rush tended to smoke, Those big cigars can contain anywhere from five.
Sometimes a big cigar can contain up to five cigarettes or even a whole pack of cigarettes in one cigar that you're putting in your mouth.
And if you don't think that cigar smoke, you know, there are those who say, well, cigar smokers don't inhale, right?
They're all like Bill Clinton. They don't inhale.
Well, if you think that cigar smoke, you're not inhaling it, even though you're not inhaling it, Try being around a cigar smoker, especially with one of those stinky ones, and tell me you're not inhaling that smoke.
Of course you are, especially if you've got it in your mouth there.
You're putting it right there in your mouth.
I like to tell my patients there is no such thing as a safe cigarette or a safe cigar.
Every one of those things that you smoke or the tobacco that you get exposed to, it's just a sorry fact.
I'm sorry for this, folks, because it is such an addictive substance.
And from my understanding, it's a great substance.
It makes you feel wonderful.
I wouldn't know.
I've never smoked a thing in my life.
But the bottom line is that there is no such thing as safe exposure to tobacco being burned.
It's just not. Or being a little pinch between your cheek and your gum there.
There's no such safe amount of that that you can take.
So to all the smokers and dippers out there, I would say, stop!
Well, I mean, looking at...
Looking at someone like Freud, who was smoking like, well, not only was a cocaine addict, but also smoked like 20 cigars a day.
And of course, people said, well, hang on a sec, if you're such a great psychologist, why is it that you cannot cure?
He said, hey, man, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, which kind of became this famous statement.
But he had multiple run-ins with face-disfiguring tumors later on in his life that I would assume would be directly linked to his cigar smoking.
Who knows? Who knows?
He's long dead. We don't have the biopsy results.
I mean, it's highly likely.
It's highly possible.
As far as I'm concerned, Freud was a tumor.
But anyway, that's beside the point.
But yeah, it's highly likely, highly possible.
Now, what's interesting about lung cancer is that you can get lung cancer without ever having smoked.
The Andy Kaufman experience, right?
He was a non-smoker and got a pretty nasty form of lung cancer, if I remember rightly.
Well, if he's not still around.
No, I think that Andy has gone the different way here.
But yeah, think of all the comedy clubs he played in, though, with all that heavy, heavy, heavy smoke, the secondhand smoke exposure that he had for years prior to...
Oh, back in the day. Sorry to interrupt, but back in the day, so younger people won't understand this.
You were taking your life in your hands going to a movie theater because you see those old-timey documentaries and you can see the smoke in the air as the projector light makes its way, like elbowing its way through the carcinogens to the screen.
Airplanes. You can still fly on airplanes where they've welded shut the old...
Ashtrays that you're getting, you know, I mean, an airplane of all places, you know, you've got a tube stick of death inside a tube stick of death, and air circulating around, like everywhere you went, restaurants, you know, like the, oh, it's okay, we've got a non-smoking side of the restaurant, which is kind of like, hey, don't worry, in the pool, we've got a non-peeing side of the pool.
So that's totally fine.
Nothing bad will happen.
But it was really constant.
And of course, for people who grew up with parents who smoked, You know, like a friend of mine, his father died young, relatively young, I think in his late 50s, and was a cigarette smoker.
And I remember when he moved into his place, the walls were white.
White is the background here.
White is my forehead. And then, of course, when he moved out, he was like some dinosaur.
Like the walls were the color of a dinosaur tooth.
And you could, of course, imagine what that did to the inside.
So smoke was like everywhere.
When I was younger, my mother was.
It still is a smoker.
She's still kicking in her 80s, but not a heavy smoker, but, you know, a couple a day, maybe four or five a day.
But yeah, it really was just everywhere when we were growing up.
Yeah, my parents, both my parents smoked.
In fact, my mom died of lung cancer.
I'll get into that here in a second.
But yeah, I can't imagine what I smelled like going to school.
Oh, it must have been awful because they smoked inside the house.
They smoked inside the car and I have asthma.
I was hospitalized several times for pneumonia with asthma history when I was a kid before I was about six years old.
And my parents just never, I guess they never put it together and they were not told.
The research wasn't there.
The science wasn't there. Certainly the education wasn't being put out there.
But the bottom line is that, yeah, lung cancer is a horrible disease.
My mother was diagnosed in August of 2004 with small cell lung cancer.
So she was not a surgical candidate.
It had not spread. But it was in the bottom of her lung.
It was invading her diaphragm.
And she died in December of 2005.
So she lasted a little more than a year.
It was terrible. It was an awful, horrible course of chemotherapy, radiation therapy.
Oh, yeah. I'm sorry to hear that because it's not like a straight line and it's a real decline.
I mean, it is a brutal, debilitating, you know, stripping you of reason and painful and exhausting.
And so, I mean, it's incredibly difficult for the family as well.
And it's really not, you know, please, please, God, just get me a bus instead of, you know, like just cream me somehow rather than this way.
Yeah, it was a bad, bad experience.
She was often sicker than she would have been just, you know, dying.
I hate to say that, but she really suffered a lot.
Finally died on hospice care.
And I want to take this time, if I may, to plug a specific charity that I really believe in.
It's the American Cancer Society.
I sent you a link to share with your audience.
Yeah, I'll put that in the description for the show.
Thank you, about the very good description of lung cancer, the types and the treatments, etc.
But the American Cancer Society really came through for my mother.
She was 76 when she died, and they really were very helpful as far as education.
Now, I'm a physician, you know, so I was there, of course, and trying to take care of her stuff, but they were most helpful as far as arranging things, hospice care, etc.
They really got involved, and I applaud them.
I believe in that charity.
For sure, the American Cancer Society.
So, yeah, if you're a smoker, please, and I ask this of every child that gets brought into the emergency department when I see one, I ask the parents, does anybody smoke in the house?
And of course they all say no, nobody smokes in the house, but they reek of cigarettes.
Really, think about what you're doing.
Think about what's going on.
Think about, I mean, it is really, you're doing everybody around you a disservice by smoking around them.
Just take a few steps outside.
Do your thing. Don't smoke in the car.
Don't expose people to secondhand smoke because you're putting them at risk of this kind of disease, of lung cancer.
It's one thing if you want to put yourself at risk.
Hey, I'm a libertarian.
Go for it. But it's another thing to put other people at risk, especially young children.
So please, please, please, don't do it around the kids, folks.
And you mentioned as well that we can dip into perhaps Christopher Reeve's story another time, which was an odd kind of heartbreak for me because I absolutely adored that man's portrayal of Superman.
I think he was the very best Superman in history.
Henry Cavill is barely competent to sweep up Christopher Reeve's hair trimmings.
And he, of course, had the most wretched accident, horseback riding, after he'd spent a long time being too nervous to be an actor.
Then he came back in a movie with Anthony Hopkins, and then shortly thereafter has a terrible accident, has a terrible break in his vertebrae, and lives.
I think he did a version of Rear Window because he was in a wheelchair anyway.
I didn't know that. Yeah, the wasting away that occurred.
I mean, he was literally one of the most beautiful human beings that creation has ever graced us with.
You know, he made JFK Jr.
look like Jan Taney DeVito in my book.
And just a terrible way.
And then, of course, he died from complications, not, of course, from the actual spinal breakage itself.
And then his wife, of course, succumbed to lung cancer, as you pointed out, just about a year afterwards as well.
Yeah, it was a really sad story.
He did die of complications from his quadriplegia in that he had pneumonia, which is very common amongst folks who can't really breathe on their own.
So he died in, I believe it was August of 2004, I think.
I'm not certain about that.
But then in June 2006, about a year and a half later, his wife died.
From lung cancer. Never smoked.
She was only 44 years old.
But the stress. Sorry to interrupt, but this is always the big question for me, is the stress.
And that's rather the problem with the false positives.
I think of your poor friend or your patient who had the false positive.
It's like, that's a couple of weeks of thinking you might be at death's door.
That's pretty bad for your cortisol flooding and your general immune system and all that.
Exactly. And I'm still pissed off about that.
That radiology center...
I might put their name in the video when I do it because they really ticked me off.
They ticked him off too, of course.
But yeah, I would say that, you know, and if I may get into this whole vaping thing, can we talk about the vaping stuff?
Oh, please, please God help the kids stop vaping.
Well, vaping, absolutely.
I mean, kids don't need to vape, but the government banning flavors of vaping, like, that's going to help.
I mean, that's ridiculous. Yeah, forbidden fruit never, never been a problem for kids.
Yay. Remember when they put all those advisory lyrics on rap albums and just completely eliminated profanity in the rap industry?
That was glorious. Right.
Or the warnings on cigarette boxes, the Surgeon General's warning.
Yeah, people are going to people, right?
They're going to do what they want to do.
So the thing about vaping is, and I'm saying this not as an advocate of tobacco or nicotine use.
I have to come across and say this, that, boom, I absolutely am against that.
Please, have more self-control.
Kick the addiction.
Get rid of the habit. Stay healthy.
Be yourself. Don't be a slave.
You can own something.
Don't let it own you. I'll get off my soapbox there.
But that being said, if I had to choose what my patients did, whether it be vaping versus whether it be cigarettes, Let me tell you, it's hands down, I would rather them vape.
I really would, because if you look at smoke and what smoke is, people think that smoke is this ethereal substance that looks sexy when it's blown across a camera screen.
No, microscopically, what it is is soot.
I mean, it's nothing more than the ashes in your fireplace ground up a million times smaller.
It is particulate matter at the microscopic level.
Let me say this, that if you don't think your lungs were designed to handle particles being in them, then go ahead and crunch up a Dorito chip and Take a big breath before you swallow it and see how you do.
You're going to violently react to that.
You're going to cough that stuff up because the lungs were just not built.
We have defensive inbred mechanisms or not inbred is probably not the right word, but ingrown mechanisms for us to reject things from our lung lining.
The lungs are a very pristine place.
Just watch the cinnamon test on YouTube and you can see people cough.
It looks like cinnamon is coming out of their ears when they try that stuff.
Right, right, right.
So the lungs need to stay as clean as possible because they're constantly secreting mucus, okay, which will drown you if you secrete enough of it.
So they're secreting mucus in this finely tuned balance of regulating air consumption versus protection of those airways.
They're very, very fragile membranes and tissues down there.
So by inhaling a substance that is microscopic particulate matter, Oh man, you are just asking for trouble.
There's a wonderful video, if I can find the link, I'll send it to you, on the smoker's lungs for 18 years, I think it was, versus someone who's never smoked.
The never smoked lungs are nice and pink and white.
These are actual lungs that they're hooking up to a tube or a billow, and they're blowing air into these things.
The smoker's lung is all black and sooty, and it doesn't inflate properly.
Oh my gosh, you want to do that to your lungs, then smoke.
Even cigar smoke folks will do that to you.
So just kick the habit.
Kick the habit, please. But if you're going to have to ingest nicotine, which is a very harmful substance, I personally, even speaking as a physician, I think that vaping is probably the way to go because at least you're going to avoid, hopefully, I think we will avoid the lung damage that's being done to the lungs.
It could be wrong about that, but if we study it out long enough, I think that the current vaping ban that's going on, I think that's motivated by financial concerns in the tobacco industry.
Well, I also did want to mention as well, from what I've read, and again, I'm no doctor, no expert, but from what I've read, if you quit smoking and you start exercising, you can...
Significantly, if not downright massively, reduce your risks over time, assuming you do it relatively young, sort of middle-aged and so on.
There is a significant amount of risk reduction that you can achieve by quitting and substituting smoking with exercise and clean living and good food and fresh air and so on.
Your body is dying but healing in a weird simultaneous fall and rise in life because after 27, we're all just falling apart.
But the body is always trying to repair itself, and whatever you can do to mitigate future damage, you can really help yourself.
Yeah, there's no question that your risk does reduce, especially from lung complications.
COPD, we call it chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is similar to asthma in many respects, but I can't tell you how many COPDers, how many patients with COPD I see in the ER, and they come in and...
They're on death's doorstep, and we give them breathing treatments, we get them perked up a little bit, and then they want to go outside and have a cigarette.
So it's an extremely addictive habit.
I mean, I can't think of anything that's probably more addictive.
It's a higher relapse rate than heroin.
Yeah, okay, maybe heroin, I was going to say.
But yeah, nicotine is just such an extraordinarily addictive substance.
And I remember one British smoker activist who died of lung cancer.
After quitting smoking, he was a smoker for a long time.
Then he became a rabid anti-smoking activist after that.
He had a great quote.
He said that, when I quit smoking, I found out that I feel normal again.
I was having to smoke to feel normal.
After he quit smoking, he felt abnormal for a while.
Then he got back to feeling what it was like to not smoke, which is what the cigarettes were doing for him.
The cigarettes made him feel like I'm not smoking, although he was smoking, if that makes any sense.
No, no, you just get used to it, and then, you know, it's like anything artificial you put in your body tends to displace what your body's normally doing, and that's what withdrawal's all about.
Okay, well, listen, thanks so much for giving us the update, and just a reminder to please people, be proactive with your health, and if you could remind my lovely audience where to find you and your excellent books on the web.
Okay. I've written a couple of books.
The Guide to Buying Health Insurance and Healthcare.
That's the go-to place if you're looking to save money on your health insurance and or healthcare.
You can certainly find that on Amazon, iTunes, and Nook.
I've also written a funny book called Healthcareonomics, A Thousand Crazy Ways that American Health Insurance Industry Controls Americans' Healthcare.
It's a thousand little snippets.
You can read it before bedtime. It's pretty funny and guaranteed to make you chuckle, but also it'll make you think.
And then I have a blog, healthcareonomics.com.
I have a YouTube channel, that's Healthcareonomics.
I'm on Twitter. I'm very active on Twitter.
I'm now on Gab and Parlay as well, and I'm on Healthcareonomics on those.
And lastly, I have an equation, Dr.
W's equation. It's an app that I'm putting the final touches on, the revision of.
I hope to have it out within the next week or so, and it helps people buy their health insurance plans.
It helps them compare health insurance plans and find the one that most suits their financial needs.
It's saving the most money. It's pretty incredible.
Well, and the good news is that that app had nothing to do with the people who designed the Iowa caucus vote counting app.
And so it has a fairly good chance of being very successful.
Thanks a lot for your time today.
Really, really appreciate it. And we'll talk again soon.
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