Going Under: Anesthesia Answered with Dr. Brian Schmutzler
Going Under: Anesthesia Answered is a podcast with renowned physician and anesthesiologist Dr. Brian Schmutzler. Together with Award-Winning Co-Host and television journalist, Vahid Sadrzadeh, the podcast aims to answer not only your most pressing anesthesia questions but to provide the most up-to-date medical data available.
This weekly medical podcast will release a new episode every Thursday at 5 am. Thanks in advance for being a listener.
Don't forget to send your questions to Dr. Brian Schmutzler on social media and his website at www.drbrianschmutzler.com.
Going Under: Anesthesia Answered with Dr. Brian Schmutzler
Breast Cancer: The Risks & Preventative Measures Available
Cutting through confusion about breast cancer! Dr. Brian Schmutzler and Vahid Sadrzadeh unpack why “breast cancer” isn’t a single diagnosis, how tumor subtypes drive treatment choices, and where screening makes the biggest difference.
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This is going under Anesthesia Answered with Dr. Brian Schmutzler. I am Vahid Saderzade and we are brought to you by the Butterfly Network. We are.
SPEAKER_01:Alright, I'm gonna let you in on something that's completely changed the way I practice. I've been using Butterfly Probes for years. It's a portable ultrasound that plugs right into my compatible smartphone or tablet, so I can start scanning at the bedside in seconds. If you've used the older versions or even if you're new to handheld ultrasound, let me tell you why this new IQ3 is a game changer and really impressive. First off, having an ultrasound that literally fits in my pocket means I can move faster, whether it's vascular access, procedural guidance, or just getting real-time insights from my patients. And the tech inside this tiny device is pretty incredible. Biplane imaging lets me see short and long access simultaneously, which is great for pro procedural procedural, procedural guidance. And honestly, a great tool for learners. The new needle out of plane preset even shifts the scan plane digitally so I can see the needle tip sooner, which makes a real difference when precision matters. And especially when I'm trying to put an IV in, honestly. Out of plane. Game changer. Game changer. And the image quality, honestly, the IQ3 holds up against some of the high-end cart systems I've used. That's impressive for something this portable. So if you're looking for a device that supports your practice, I can't recommend the Butterfly IQ three enough. And right now they're running a special offer. You can get$750 off the latest IQ three. Check it out at ButterflyNetwork.com.
SPEAKER_00:Appreciate Butterfly being our sponsor for a second consecutive year. Yeah. And we've got some some content coming out. We do. And hopefully we'll have somebody from Butterfly on later shows as well. You are wearing your Colts blue today, I see that. I am. I am. The the hobbling Colts, we call them. The hobbling colts. Five and one is not too hobbling. Isn't that the best record in the league right now? Uh tied. Tied for the best. With uh several others. I don't know if anybody's five and one.
SPEAKER_01:There are several. Let me see what the old ESPN says. I think there are several that are five and one. I think there's a bunch that are four and one. I don't know. Let me look here. NFL standings. So uh at five and one, uh four and one is Buffalo, four and one is Pittsburgh, five and one is Indy, four and two, three and one, five and one is Tampa Bay. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Tied with Tampa Bay. I I'm just okay. I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy here and pop a hole in your balloon. I just pretender or contender. We're gonna talk about medicine, I promise, in this podcast. So they're gonna win their division.
SPEAKER_01:I think pretty obviously. Although Jacksonville Jacksonville is right on their heels. Yeah, yeah. So I think they win their division. I think they probably win one playoff game. Houston's terrible Titans fired the coach. Correct. So it's it's us and and Jacksonville. In Jacksonville, yeah. And I think Jacksonville's overrated. Although we haven't played anybody aside from the Rams that are that good either. So and he lost to the Rams. Even though you should have won that game. Correct. Because I don't even remember who the player was, but he dropped the ball at the half-yard line. And then he had an a holding penalty. Holding penalty a couple plays later.
SPEAKER_00:Nobody knows his name because he hasn't been hurt or seen since.
SPEAKER_01:I'm surprised if he's still on the team. But this does relate to medicine because uh the Colts had two players who got injured before the game on uh on Sunday.
SPEAKER_00:Anthony Richardson was one of them.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, correct. Um, using a band. He whacked himself in the eye and got an orbital fracture. The bone around the eye broke it. So that's how hard do you have to hit yourself to get an orbital fracture? How um how do I put this nicely? We don't want to alienate anyone, but how uh not smart, let's just put it that way, do you have to be to whack yourself in the eye with a band like that? That takes some serious talent. You've got you've got like seven physical therapists and trainers standing around you. Just let them do it. Just let them do it. Yeah. I mean, Anthony Richardson experiment. He's been a disappointment from day one. It's probably over. It's probably over. Guess who that backup quarterback is? Riley Leonard. Notre Dame's only Riley Leonard. And then the other guy who got injured was a cornerback. I think he was a backup who was just doing some like shadow defense and in pre-op uh pre-game pre-op. Shadow boxing and pre-op. Well, I mean in pre-op in pre-game warmups, no pads on or anything. And one of the ball boys ran out and ran into him and gave him a concussion before the game even started. So come on, Colts. And then you've got the week before Mark Sanchez goes out and attacks some guy in Indy. In Indy, yeah. And that's what I'm saying. This is all an Indianapolis thing.
SPEAKER_00:So Daniel Jones is injury prone.
SPEAKER_01:Not as bad as Anthony Richardson.
SPEAKER_00:No, that's true. I had predicted before the season started. He won't make it 16. No, but the Colts would turn to Riley. To Riley at some point in the first quarter of the season, first half of the season. And I'm still on track for that. Do you think he's ready? No.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yeah. It's a different game. Yeah. I don't think he processes it fast enough. I watch him a little bit in preseason, I don't think he processes it fast. It's a different game. It's a different game. And the NFL does relate to what we're going to talk about because every October they they recognize breast cancer awareness and wear their pink socks and jerseys and gloves and all that kind of stuff. So we're today we're talking about breast cancer awareness month.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, correct. And an important topic not only for women, but for men as well. Men get breast cancer too. That's right. Um does it and I I'm gonna I'm gonna ask the stupid question, but breast cancer, cancers in general, are they all correlated to each other? Or is it a different kind of lack of a better word, genome, or is it a is it a different strain? Is that why you see breast cancer more often?
SPEAKER_01:So um not all cancers are the same. All cancers are the result of a mutation, a genetic mutation, right? That causes that's what cancer is, it causes the cells to grow faster or out of control than they would normally, right? Every cell in your body, for the most part, with except for your neurons, regenerate and create more cells. Basically, every cell in your body does that. So if the genetic mutation happens and those cells grow out of control, it becomes cancer. Um, breast cancer is not necessarily related to any other cancers. There may be some connection, although it's not fully elucidated what that connection is between breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men that probably somehow relate. Um, but otherwise, no. Uh, you know, other cancers aren't necessarily correlated with breast cancer. Um, but breast cancer is the most common cancer for women in the United States. I'm just pulling up all the statistics here. I am not I'm not a cancer expert. I am an anesthesiologist, but I do know some stuff about cancer. So um, so uh breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women in most countries, 157 out of the 185 countries. Approximately one half to one percent of breast cancers occur in men, so not not totally uncommon in men. Um breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the United States. In 2025, it's estimated there will be 317,000 new cases, um, and 42,000 women will die.
SPEAKER_00:Boy, that's a big number.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, huge, huge. So a chance of dying from breast cancer is about one in 43 over a lifetime.
SPEAKER_00:So there there are places to go everywhere you live, obviously. And if you're, you know, hopefully, I mean, if you're you know, we do have an international crowd, so I'm not sure as to the testing there. But you know, most places you go will have in the United States a breast cancer clinic, yeah. Breast clan breast cancer clinic that will have um a mammogram type of and this is you know, right, like the the medical brochures, right, and the marketing says, oh, when you're in your forties or your fifties. Shh it's earlier though, right? I mean, like this should be an earlier test.
SPEAKER_01:So just like colon cancer, breast cancer in women is occurring early and earlier, and we'll talk later about why we think that might be, but yes, it's it's occurring early and earlier, and we find this um we find this uh basically um over time with with all the cancers. They seem to be and and yeah, don't really know why, but really what they what the um USPSTF, I think is what it's called, or what the what the organizations that recommend things say have they continue to to decrease the age of screening for almost all cancers, but breast cancer. So I think right now they're saying th 40 you should get a mammogram annual mammograms. But I mean I th I I mean I think you know if you have any family history, and almost everybody does, you probably should start earlier, 30, 35.
SPEAKER_00:So uh and what what is the I mean mammogram is able to detect some breast cancers.
SPEAKER_01:Not all. Not all. Not all, yeah. I mean there are some that it misses. So but here's the thing. So if you catch a breast cancer early, there are a whole lot of things that you can do to prevent it from becoming deadly, right? Becoming fatal. Um you know, if you catch it early enough, it's as simple as just taking out that one tumor. Um if it's maybe a little bit later than that, then there's you know, you can do mastectomy plus lymph nodes, because it goes to the lymph nodes in the armpit. So you take that out, chemo radiation, depending on what what the genome or what the what the type of cancer it is. So I mean that just just like any cancer, the earlier you catch it the better. Um now the reason they tell you not to get mammograms at say 25 is because there's a lot of false positives. So you don't want to go in, get a mammogram, expose yourself to the radiation, and then have something show up that's most likely just fibrous tissue, but then you know, all of a sudden, you know, you're going down this whole path of getting a biopsy and all these kinds of things when it's probably nothing at a younger age. So again, right now they're recommending 40. I think that I think that almost all women have some family history or risk factor, probably not all, but almost all. So you could probably push that down to 35 or 30.
SPEAKER_00:I just wonder, you know, I mean, with with breast cancer um so rampant in this country. Oh yeah. All cancers, but breast cancer in particular, yeah. You know, is it like this overseas? Like are they seeing these numbers overseas?
SPEAKER_01:Less common overseas, more common here. Um, so you know, there's there's a few potential reasons for that. We test more than a lot of other countries, right? So you're finding more, and I think more women then if you're finding more, catch it and then don't die from it, or you know, there's a potential that you die with breast cancer, just like we talk about prostate cancer, right? More men die with prostate cancer than from prostate cancer. So, you know, I think there are probably women in other countries who die with breast cancer because there a lot of other countries have um, you know, their average age of death is 10 or 15 years younger than the United States. You may have a breast cancer, but if you're dying at 50, you're not likely that that breast cancer is going to be metastasized and be the cause of your death. So that's probably one thing. But certainly there are behavioral, environmental, and other risk factors that are more common in the United States, right? So in the United States, we smoke more than most other countries. The number one, and I've said it a bunch of times on this podcast, the number one modifiable risk factor for almost every chronic and acute disease is smoking. So if you don't smoke, your risk of particularly breast cancer goes way down, your risk of lung cancer, obviously, goes down, your risk of uh bladder cancer goes down, your risk of prostate cancer goes down, your risk of skin cancer goes down, your risk of kidney cancer goes down. Almost every cancer is reduced by not smoking or quitting smoking, even. I mean, it doesn't put you back to a non-smoker level, but quitting smoking reduces your risk. So, number one modifiable risk factor. If there's anything you hear from this podcast, don't smoke. Okay? Fair enough. So drinking is another thing, and this is more probably in the last 20, 25 years that the studies have shown this. Drinking more than moderate alcohol, and some would even say some of the newer studies would even say moderate amounts of alcohol. So one or two drinks per week would increase your risk of getting cancer, and particularly breast cancer. One to two drinks. One to two drinks a week probably has some increase in risk, although small. And and what about in men?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, like you hate. Same thing in men. Same thing in men, yep. Yep. And is it genetic in men too, or is it more or hereditary, or is it more it's hereditary in men as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So so men who get breast cancer um often have either a mother or father who had it or a grandmother who had it. It's passed oftentimes through through the mom or the grandmother, um, but sometimes through the through the father. Cancer is just such an interesting topic, right? I mean, because it's but it's not one thing, right? Cancer is not one thing. Cancer we broadly define as any proliferation or overgrowth of cells abnormally, but every type of cancer is significantly different. And even cancers, even types of breast cancer, and uh again, this is getting way out of my expertise, so I'm not gonna go through all the five or six different types of breast cancer, but even the different types of breast cancer are significantly different cancers from each other. How so? Uh so there there are ones that are more invasive, there are ones that are less invasive, there are ones that are sensitive to certain chemicals and certain chemotherapeutics that aren't to others. So it's when you say something like I have breast cancer, that doesn't give really a description. It's do I have uh ducocarcinoma in site two, do I have an adenocarcinoma? Do I have there's like a bunch of different kinds? Same with um, same with, let's say, prostate cancer, several different kinds of prostate cancer. Um colon cancer. There's several different types of colon cancer. So it's not just one. It's not just I have breast cancer and everybody has the same breast cancer.
SPEAKER_00:So when you're I mean, you've obviously been in the operating room for a lot of different procedures over the course of your career. Correct. Um can you talk a little bit about the procedure for either taking out a tumor or even a mastectomy?
SPEAKER_01:So there's there's a there's sort of a continuum of what they do for breast cancer. So probably the most benign, I say benign, not meaning benign, you know, not cancerous, but sort of the easiest procedure they do is just a breast biopsy or a a partial mastectomy is the other thing they call it. So oftentimes all that includes is making an incision in the breast, finding where that particular tumor is and taking it out. That's probably the most benign. We can do that with a numbing block and sedation. Not a not a huge deal. Um, and oftentimes, if it's one of these early stage cancers, they take that particular tumor out and the woman never has to do anything else. Okay, that's why that's why it's relieved detection. Right. It hasn't spread anywhere. Well, if you can pull out the whole thing, a lot of times there's no other issue. Is that the most common that you're seeing? Yeah, no, I mean for early detection. Yeah, probably not. So so a lot of that happens in a pure surgery center, which I don't really work at anymore. What we more see are things like either simple mastectomies or total mastectomies, right? So um, and and I'm What is simple mastectomy? So the simple mastectomy is just really taking the breast tissue, the doing the total, I think it's called the total mastectomy, um, is where they take breast tissue, they take some muscle, and then they also take the the lymph nodes. So that's a big procedure, right? That's probably for higher level cancer, either either cancer that is spread more or cancer that has a higher risk of spreading.
SPEAKER_00:And you see women, men who preemptively choose to do that, even if it hasn't spread because of the genetic marker, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So there was a genetic marker discovered, gosh, it's probably been 30, 40 years now, called BRCA. And there's two types, one and two. Um, and I think they both predispose you to both breast and ovarian cancer. So a lot of women who are positive for BRC BRCA1 and or two will have a prophylactic or before you even have any chance of having cancer, mastectomy. Basically, what that means is they just take the breast tissue out and put an implant in or put some sort of other way to build the breast back up and have a hysterectomy so that you can avoid the ovarian cancer. So total hysterectomy where they take not only the the uterus but also the ovaries.
SPEAKER_00:So what is the survival rate of breast cancer? Uh that's a great question. Did you have that in your stats?
SPEAKER_01:Let me let me see. Let me go back through the stats here. Um let's see. So mortality declines are more evident in high income countries. Okay, fine.
SPEAKER_00:Um but because they're so different, I'm imagining, right?
SPEAKER_01:Because the types of cancer A woman has a woman in the US has about 13.1% lifetime risk of developing an invasive breast cancer. So I guess if you say if there's three hundred and so you three hundred and seventeen thousand plus another sixty thousand, call it four hundred thousand, estimated that forty-two thousand women will die, roughly ten percent are are fatal. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, that's why early detection, that's why screening, that's why all of these things are not smoking, not overly drinking, not not drinking heavily, maintaining a good weight and a healthy diet, right?
SPEAKER_01:There are probably certain components in our food, and I don't think anybody's determined definitively which they are. Very likely some of the dyes that go in our foods, very likely some of the pesticides that go in our foods, probably contribute to breast cancer. So healthy weight, healthy diet, exercise, for some reason, and nobody can figure out why. Exercise is preventative for cancer. Even like 30 minutes, five days a week, 150 minutes a week is preventative for a lot of types of cancer. Really? Yep. Yep. Something about that changes your genetics. Exercise changes your genetics, or at least your epigenetics, the way that your genes interact.
SPEAKER_00:Which is kind of interesting to me because the way we are built as human beings. Right? Yep. Isn't it to move? Isn't it correct? Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah. Isn't it to I I don't know. You know, like we're not built to be sedative as is that a word like you know what I mean? Like seduction. What was the word I'm looking for? Sedentary. Sedentary, thank you very much. Yeah, not not sedentary. Sedentary. Right. Sedentary. We're not built to be sedentary individuals. Built to move, yeah. We're built to move. So why does everything change when you do move? Why does everything your health improves, your brain improves, your, you know, the mental, the physical. Why does it all improve when you move your body? If we're meant as human beings to move.
SPEAKER_01:So probably within the last 25 or 30 years, the scientists out there have really focused in on what they call epigenetics, or how your environment changes the way that your genes are expressed. So it's not just, you know, DNA, I have my genes, it creates me, right? There are other things that happen, epigenetics. So epineans around genetics, around the genetics, from environmental, from all kinds of things, stress, you know, internal stuff too, that can change the way genes are expressed. And so exercise probably modifies the epigenetic expression of many of these genes. That's really interesting to me.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I mean, I just think it goes to show, like, we're, you know, we are built as human beings to move. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. And and if you think back to our ancestors when they were hunter-gatherers, right? They were moving all the time. They didn't sit at a desk all day long or or like I sit in an operating room or I sit at a desk or I sit, right? So we actually have to like cut out time in our day to go exercise. That's all they did all day long, right? They're running from tigers and running to shoot a willy mammoth or whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00:I mean I think it just, you know, I'm going down the rabbit hole a little bit with this one, but last night I was watching a video. I love historical videos. I'm kind of a history nerd, but I was I was watching a video that had to do with medieval times in Europe and and even before that, right? Let's go pre-industrial revolution age, right? No light bulbs. Nope. It was expensive to have candlelight in your home. So you just went to bed when it got dark. You went to bed when it got dark. And think about it, it was 12 to 14 hours of darkness. Certain times of the year, yeah. Right? So you have nothing to light your home. I mean, even when it's cloudy out, yeah, or you know, it's raining, you need something to light your home or it's dark. Yeah, they didn't have those things. Yeah. So they slept a lot. So they slept, and then they had something called two sleeps, basically. Okay. Where it was normal in medieval times to have two sleeps. So you'd go to bed like dusk. Yeah. You'd wake up at dawn. Like no, you wake up at like 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Yes, just naturally. That didn't have alarms, like they didn't have any of that stuff. They didn't have iPhone 17s. It was iPhone 17th century, right? So, like they they went to bed, they woke up at like 10, 11 o'clock, midnight naturally, stayed awake, and then went to bed again at like two o'clock or three o'clock. What they do in complete darkness from 10 p.m. to so apparently it was just, you know, maybe they did light a candle and it was like they wrote poetry or they had time to themselves. Like a time. Lots of babies, so I'm sure that there were things that happened there. Correct. You know, time to reflect. Yes. So what else are we gonna do? You know, but it's amazing how the human body, right? I mean, it but you look at the the lifespan, how it's improved over time, right?
SPEAKER_01:That's mostly it you would is that yeah, I want to hear your take on this. Is that medicine? Yeah, it's infection, right? So most people died of a bacterial infection of some sort. At 30. At yeah, 25, 30, 40, whatever age it was. It I mean uh so there's a bunch of books on this that are a hundred years old, but basically clean water, so so sewer systems or some sort of clean water, antibiotics, and antiseptic technique. So cleaning things off, like before you eat them, cleaning your cut off with something cleaning before surgery, those three things are why we have longer lifespans, right? So if you look at at when those things all all came into being, your lifespan increased dramatically. But I mean, what what what killed the majority of people until a hundred years ago was number one accidents and number two infections.
SPEAKER_00:I just go back to uh Oregon Trail, little Jimmy died of dysentery or whatever, right? Snake bite.
SPEAKER_01:Although dysentery, I think, is a virus. But anyway, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Sorry. Getting into the weeds. Yeah, yeah. But essentially the longer lifespan, right? And it all goes back to medicine, detection, yep, can improve lifespan, can improve antibiotics. And now, what lifespan is 778? 78 for males and 82 for females, yeah. Which is a huge number relative to 500 years ago. Triple, triple the age, probably. Triple the age. Yeah, probably.
SPEAKER_01:I have to go down one more rabbit hole before we close this podcast. So one more thing before you get down that rabbit hole. One other thing that reduces breast cancer is breastfeeding. So just just so we're comfortable. Is it really? Yep.
SPEAKER_00:Doing doing is it because of the hormones you generate or what? Not sure. I mean, I know you they don't know exactly. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Um unfortunately, as a male, you don't have that option. Correct. You can do all the other things, but you can't breastfeed it.
SPEAKER_00:Um speaking of medicine, yeah. I I do want to go down this rabbit hole with you for for a couple minutes. All right, let's do it. Because it it's just really it's it's fascinating to me. Okay. And I think our audience would kind of appreciate the rabbit hole. Our average lifespan is 70 to 80. 75 to 85, let's say. So I would like to know. You're middle-aged, by the way. I am. Over middle aged. Over. Yeah, it's it's over. Um when you we've been introduced to things that keep us alive. Okay? Yeah. So this is a relatively new as far as Homo sapiens go. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yep. Blip in time for sure. A blip in time, we've been introduced to medicines that keep us alive. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And prosperous too.
SPEAKER_00:Like not just alive, that we don't just like limp through our medicines that we are introduced to at times have side effects, yep. Have side effects and can be described as okay, you know, we're getting addicted to those medicines, right? Yeah, maybe. Or we're becoming numb to those medicines. Dependent on the medicines, right? Yeah. So there would be a side of the population that says, well, medicine is not necessarily the end-all be-all, right?
SPEAKER_01:There are kind of it, it kind of is if you have a raging bacterial infection. There's not a whole lot else besides an antibiotic that can help you. That can help you, correct. So is it the end-all be-all of everything?
SPEAKER_00:But is it some of these This is where the rabbit hole comes in. Is there some of these medications that are causing some of these cancers that we don't know about? Probably. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But again, if you have a rip-roaring sepsis where you have You have to. You have to take the medicine, otherwise you'll die immediately. And yes, is there a chance that that's going to cause cancer 20 years from now? Yes. But it doesn't matter if it causes cancer 20 years from now if you die tomorrow because of the rip-roaring infection. So yes. And this goes back to the Tylenol thing, right?
SPEAKER_00:But also, but also cancer, I mean, chemo and radiation can also cause cancer.
SPEAKER_01:That's correct. Yep. And you have some experience with that, right? Uh so it this goes back to the Tylenol thing, though. Take the minimum dose that you need to take for the least amount of time and only for an actual issue.
SPEAKER_02:Hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Minimal dose, minimal time. This is this is like this is like first-year medical school stuff. This is what they teach you. Don't give people a whole lot of something that they don't need. Are there doctors out there that are over prescribing? Well, it depends what medication you're talking about. What medic what medication are you asking for? I mean, I don't know specifically, but like opioids, probably in the past they have been. You have experience with that. Exactly. Antibiotics, probably. Yeah, because a lot of people show up, and we've talked about this before too. They show up to your office. Not my office, your office, but like a primary care doctor's office to say not our studio, not our studio, yeah. Hopefully not. We're not giving out antibiotics here. And they say, I have a head cold. Yeah. I want an antibiotic. And you try to say that's probably a viral infection, the antibiotic's not going to help you. And they say, But I want an antibiotic. And if you don't give it to them, they keep asking for an antibiotic. So I think there's a lot of people who, a lot of physicians who prescribe antibiotics because steroid? Yeah, probably steroids. Steroids on an although antibiotic, or is it no steroids are not an antibiotic. But usually, like I mean, if you have a virus, they're an anti-inflammatory. So so viruses and bacteria cause inflammation within your body. That inflammation helps kill those things, but it has the side effects, right? So you rev up your immune system to kill the bacteriovirus, but the side effects of revving up your immune system are that you get inflamm inflammation. So the steroids help with that inflammation. That's why it helps with like inflammation in your lungs from a urinary or urinary, an upper respiratory infection, not a urinary checked infection. Hopefully not in your lungs anyway. Um so so yeah, so we give we give steroids to people sometimes, particularly for lung issues, but also for some other things, because it does reduce inflammation.
SPEAKER_00:Steroids better than opioids for treating uh short short term, yes.
SPEAKER_01:Short term. Yes. So long term steroid use does have a lot of side effects. Short term use, probably not. You know, you give a like uh we call it a medrol dose pack, right? Even though that's a branded name. Um five days worth of high dose steroids. You do that once a year, you're probably Fine. That's probably not gonna cause any long-term effects.
SPEAKER_00:I would like to talk about at some point, not today, not today. Today's podcast, but at some point I'd like to talk about pesticides. Yeah. Because, you know, for a long time, I feel like as a nation, as just people on this planet, we use pesticides. Correct. Yeah. And now we are finding out. And I don't know why now. Yeah, there are probably some side effects.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Why now is the time that we're finding out some things about pesticides that are causing a lot of side effects. So And specifically, specifically genetic side effects. Parkinson's. Yeah, probably true. Cancer. Yep. You know, what again, this is a conversation for another day. I do want to hear what you have to say, but like, you know, my dad, Parkinson's, was exposed to pesticides. Was exposed to pesticides. Owned a farm, yeah. Owned a farm. Yeah. Multiple farms. Yeah. Exposed to pesticides over the years. Yeah. This is what they found in Brazil. Right. You know, with the banana farmers, plantains. Exposed to pesticides for years.
SPEAKER_01:So most chemicals are not without some sort of side effects. So you if you look at the and we'll talk about this in other podcasts. But if you look at the history of pesticides, I'll have to look up all the specifics. But pesticides had effects primarily like DDT primarily on other animals, not humans. And so the environmental lobby said you're killing too many birds and bees and whatever else, you need to change the pesticides. Well, now they changed it to things that damage humans. So, I mean, had you just stuck with DDT, I'm I don't know enough about it, I'll have to look had you just stuck with DDT, I think it would have been less less of these things. Now, you're gonna kill a lot of animals, but you're also not gonna give a bunch of people cancer. So was it worth it? I don't know. And we can do a whole we'll do a whole podcast. Interesting. It might it might be good to talk to. So we have a special guest next week. Yes, we do. I'm very excited about it. It might be good to ask him. He's a farmer, he's a farmer. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Let's talk to him about it. Because I'm I'm really interested about the pesticides and the cause and effect, you know, the correlation of disease and pesticides in human beings. Yep. That's for another time. But this great conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Uh you're not their doctor, but you are I'm a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. Ask your doctor if you have any questions or concerns. Uh and don't smoke. I will say, if you, you know, if you ever ask me, did did Dr. Schmutzler tell you not to smoke, I will 100% say yes. So you can take that one to the bank. Take it to the bank. There you go. In his colt blue.
SPEAKER_00:Colt blue, yes. And watch out for bands in your eyes. We'll watch out for those. And get tested. If you have questions or you feel something. Get your mammograms, do your self testing, self checks. All right. Well, we are brought to you by the Butterfly Network. This has been another episode of Going Under Anesthesia Answered with Dr. Brian Schmutzler. See you next time. I'm Bahid Sadar Sani. We'll see you in the next one.
