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Kickstart Your Heart
22 Plays5 days ago
This week, Dr. Aidan and Julie get stuck into
- atrial fibrillation and what you need to know
- all the juicy details about HPV and oral sex
- when drinking alcohol overseas is safe
- if your dopamine levels are actually making you depressed
Get in touch with us at questions@thismightsting.com.au
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Transcript
Introduction to 'This Might Sting' Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to This Might Sting, a program about health where we diagnose nonsense and pro prescribe the truth. My name is Julie McCrossan and my partner is Dr Aidan Barron. And look, today we're going to talk about hearts out of rhythm and sex that comes back to bite you and TikTok and neurotransmitters. Look, welcome Aidan. What do you reckon? Neurotransmitters.
00:00:30
Speaker
I'll be looking forward to that a bit later. You'll tell me what TikTok is. Good morning, Julie. I am super keen for today's chat. Super,
Understanding Atrial Fibrillation
00:00:38
Speaker
super keen. Let's start with atrial fibrillation. Do you want to kick us off? We did talk about this in an earlier episode. It's a heart problem, but in essence, what is it and why do we need to know about it?
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Julie. So atrial fibrillation is one of the most common heart problems in Australia that we see. Basically, it's an electrical conduction problem. See, our hearts are muscles that have an electrical circuit to themselves. They're really cool machines.
00:01:05
Speaker
And you've got two parts to your heart. You've got the major part of the heart that does the majority, the lion's share of the pumping, that's your ventricle. And then on top of that, you've got an atria, which is this extra filling chamber.
00:01:17
Speaker
What happens is these atria are supposed to fill the ventricles and just give them a bit of a top up. It's like giving it a bit of a top up to a glass of wine. And when that happens, your heart beats really efficiently. The problem is as people develop with age, disease, a bit of heart failure, or a bit of a problem with the filling of the blood vessels around their heart, often caused by buildup of plaque, all these things can lead to a thing called atrial fibrillation.
00:01:44
Speaker
where essentially the electrical circuits in those little filling chambers the atria don't beat rhythmically instead they go into this fibrillatory rhythm which is essentially if you can imagine instead of squeezing my hand at a regular rhythm boom they're dancing around like a skittish little mouse jumping backwards and forwards and so it's this irregular sort of palpitationy sensation that sometimes people get sometimes people don't but it just means that the heart isn't beating as efficiently as it normally should which if that were the only issue, wouldn't be a huge issue.
00:02:13
Speaker
The problem is our blood tends to clot when it's not flowing properly. And if the blood isn't flowing through the atria regularly, it can get a bit stagnant in the corners and it can form clots.
00:02:27
Speaker
And those clots can then be pushed through our heart up into our blood supply and cause strokes. And that's the big deal that we worry about with atrial fibrillation is stroke. Just what is a stroke and why is that something we never want to have? Just in case someone's watching us listening who doesn't realise.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, look great question. A stroke is essentially where a part of your brain doesn't get enough blood supply, and that can either be from bleed or a clot, a blockage in a blood vessel. So when we talk about strokes in common language, we tend to talk about the clot type strokes, and that's essentially where a clot finds its way to a blood vessel, blocks off the blood supply, and then an area of your brain which you need for thinking and talking and moving doesn't get enough oxygen and it starts to die.
00:03:12
Speaker
And if we get in there quickly enough, we can often reverse that, but oftentimes there's a significant amount of disability that comes with that. And that's why people might be really familiar with the fast test or the face arm speech thing that you'll often see on the side of buses or sometimes in news ads. It's can the person smile properly?
00:03:29
Speaker
Can they lift their arms up equally? And can they speak normally? And if the answer to any of those is no, then it's time to act fast and call triple zero. And atrial fibrillation, you gave, before we go to some of the other risks in addition to stroke, you gave some description of what it feels like.
00:03:48
Speaker
I gather it can vary, but can you just say a little bit more about how on earth would you know if something was happening? This is the tricky thing. So some people just don't know it's happening. And that's the real issue. Some people know instantly the second it happens, they go, oh, I can feel palpitations. My heart's feeling irregular. I can feel my pulse. It's not beating regularly. And that's the real tell is that the pulse isn't regular.
00:04:09
Speaker
You get an irregular pulse. You get a bump, bump, bump, instead of a nice lub, dub, lub, dub, lub, dub. But if you're not feeling your pulse every day, and then most people aren't, I think I'm probably the exception there.
00:04:21
Speaker
Those with health anxiety will will relate strongly. you just Some people just don't know. And that's why as we're getting older, those health checkups every every so often with a GP are so crucial because one of those things that they're looking for is we're looking to pick up someone who's got a new atrial fibrillation.
00:04:37
Speaker
yeah there any other key risk to atrial fibrillation we should mention before we go to treatment ah other than the fear of stroke? Look, we know that when you develop atrial fibrillation, your heart's not beating as efficiently and that it often leads to heart failure down the track.
00:04:55
Speaker
Not always, though. It certainly increases your risk. I suppose one of the things that always amazed me when I first heard about atrial fibrillation is that how important electricity is, the electrical system is to the pump. And in terms of treatment, I'll get you to give us a sense of it, but I actually know someone I'm close to who's got atrial fibrillation and A couple of times they seem to have had a treatment. It almost sounds like they're a computer that gets rebooted. It's like an electrical treatment. Perhaps you could explain that.
Treatments for Atrial Fibrillation
00:05:25
Speaker
Totally. There's a few different ways we treat atrial fibrillation, depending on how early we catch it, whether the person is getting really bad symptoms and feeling really sick or whether they're not noticing and and going about their day-to-day life.
00:05:37
Speaker
But there's sort of three mainstays of treatment. One is to stop it causing strokes, and that's by giving someone blood thinners. And the other two ways we treat it is to either make sure that the atrial fibrillation doesn't get too fast,
00:05:48
Speaker
and that's called rate control and the other one is sometimes we can knock them back into a normal rhythm and that's called rhythm control and there's a few ways to do that and one of them is to completely reboot you as a computer it's sort of a shut down turn back on and there's a few ways to do that one's with chemicals there's a drug which is often featured in tv shows that we push really quickly called adenosine and sometimes it causes this fear of impending doom because it literally pauses your heart for a few seconds And then you restart again. And it's scary at first to watch. It's very safe when it's done.
00:06:20
Speaker
But if someone's really sick, we will literally shock them. We'll defibrillate them. And we do it in a very special controlled way in hospital. We time it perfectly to the right part of the heart wave. And it is literally a reboot.
00:06:32
Speaker
It stops your heart by making a huge jolt of energy go through and turn all the electrical... um because because the heart's fascinating, right? It's electrical wiring and each part of the wire is made up of these little cells and basically it spins them all into our into sort of an off state and then lets them reset themselves naturally.
00:06:51
Speaker
The science is really cool, but it's also really scary if you don't know what's going on to look at it from the outside. Before we move on to it but another topic in our newsy session on health, my friend who's got it it's the anxiety of uncertainty.
00:07:05
Speaker
And my understanding is anxiety... may even be able to set you off again. I'm not sure about that. You correct me if I'm wrong, but it must be hard to live with. There'll be people listening who are living with it, but you just have to do it, do you? it Because it is quite common, as you've said.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, look, it's one of those things. Some people experience a big impact on their day-to-day life from atrial fibrillation. They get tired, fatigued, exhausted. Musicians find that they can't keep beat and tempo anymore because they have an irregular pulse. There's a famous story of a violinist who really struggled after his atrial fibrillation.
00:07:39
Speaker
Some people don't experience any symptoms at all. And I think if someone is given an atrial fibrillation diagnosis, they should take comfort from the fact that they're in good company with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, let alone thousands, tens of thousands in Australia who manage day to day with this disease and who live healthy, happy, normal lives. But it does suck.
00:07:59
Speaker
Every disease sucks in its own way. yeah And is prevention essentially, ah you know, plenty of exercise, eat a healthy diet and manage your weight, you know, all the normal cardiovascular advice?
00:08:13
Speaker
Literally nothing special. Don't smoke, reduce your alcohol intake, exercise, make sure you're eating a balanced diet, go and see your GP for regular testing to avoid the buildup of high cholesterol, which can cause plaque inside the arteries, which can lead to a lack of oxygen to your heart, which can lead to atrial fibrillation.
HPV and Cancer Vaccination
00:08:32
Speaker
And look, we go on to our next item in our This Might Sting lineup of news, and it's the risky business of pleasure. And those who've heard an earlier episode will know that I raised the topic of oral sex and HPV.
00:08:47
Speaker
Do you want to kick off on this one, Hayden?
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah. The first thing is people don't know what HPV is. People don't know that human papillomavirus is a virus out there that exists. There's a lot of different strains of HPV.
00:09:04
Speaker
And the only thing people probably have heard of is Gardasil, which is the HPV vaccine against HPV 16 and 18 that we routinely give to young kids now under the age of 14.
00:09:17
Speaker
And the reason we do that is because... We realized that herpes papillomavirus and particularly strains 16 and 18, and potentially one or two other strains actually we think cause, or at least predispose you in much more significant ways to cervical and anal rectal cancer.
00:09:40
Speaker
And that's been the sort of where the story ends cervical and anal rectal cancer. But Julie, I know that you actually have an experience, which isn't so commonly discussed. That's right. I've had stage four oropharyngeal cancer, which is essentially deep down in the throat, so you can't see it, the tumour through the mouth, tonsils and side of throat.
00:10:02
Speaker
Cancer is basically... cells developing out of control. So this great big or lumpy tumour was deep down in my throat and it was treated in 2013 with 33 sessions of radiation and weekly chemotherapy.
00:10:14
Speaker
But when I was first diagnosed, I was astounded to hear it was caused by HPV. And I'm so thrilled, Ada, that you began with the mention of Gardasil, the Australian developed vaccine that will hopefully eliminate cervical cancer from the world. And they're working very closely to get it out of Australia by making sure, as you said, that children get it ideally before they're sexually active around 12, 13 in schools.
00:10:42
Speaker
And we give it to boys and girls. Why? Because boys don't have a cervix. And it's because ah HPV does cause cervical throat cancer, ah or opharyngeal, but throat cancer, anal, vulval, cervical.
00:10:55
Speaker
There's five of them anyway. And the evidence is now that getting the HPV vaccine significantly reduces the likelihood of getting all those cancers. How did I get it deep in my throat? Oral sex.
00:11:08
Speaker
And this is why... People are very inhibited about talking about it because you don't commonly hear people talk about oral sex. and But the I guess the important fact I'd like to...
00:11:21
Speaker
share and then hear what else you think it's critical for our audience to know is that right now in the United States and in Australia, more men are diagnosed with HPV-related throat cancer than women are diagnosed with HPV-related cervical cancer.
00:11:39
Speaker
I almost feel like I have to say that again. it was More men get throat cancer from HBV than women get cervical cancer. And yet I don't think it's received anything like the same attention.
00:11:53
Speaker
And of course, some women can get it as well, um far fewer women. But this is a huge public health issue. And I think in Australia, we're very good at delivering vaccines. We have a high rate of follow up and a really good system through our schools.
00:12:12
Speaker
And I guess because we invented the vaccine too. It's another reason Ian Fraser and a colleague invented it up in Queensland. It's another reason we're into it. But in many parts of the world, even New Zealand, Britain, the rates of a vaccination of children is far lower and particularly lower for men.
00:12:30
Speaker
So what would you say to men? Oh, can I say one quick thing? It's critical. About 80% of us will have HPV of one sort or another in our lifetime.
00:12:42
Speaker
And for the vast majority, our immune system will chew it up and spit it out. So we can keep having oral sex. Best news I've heard all week, Julie. Exactly. It's so important because it's really common, particularly for people under 50.
00:12:57
Speaker
So, yes, we can keep having oral sex. It's just we have to, or for men, I strongly recommend that you ask your GP, whatever your age, is it too late for me to get the HPV vaccine?
00:13:10
Speaker
Because in some countries they do give it to people who are particular risks, such as gay men have a higher risk. And there is evidence that lesbian women have higher risk because we, of course, also have oral sex with women.
00:13:23
Speaker
So it's worth asking your general practitioner, am I still eligible, ah even if I'm an adult now? But if I could just say the classic symptoms for oropharyngeal cancer, this very common cancer for men and some women, if you get two lumps on the side of your neck or one or two lumps on the side of your neck, you have a persistent earache, you have a hoarse voice, you have a sore throat, but you're not sick, or any changes you can see inside your mouth that last for more than two or three weeks, go to see your general practitioner and ask for referral to an ear, nose and throat doctor.
00:13:59
Speaker
Because remember, the GP may look down your throat, but they can't see the tumour. There's a special test where they put anaesthesia down your nostril and there's a long tube that goes down your nostril and it doesn't hurt at all with a little camera on it.
00:14:16
Speaker
And that allows the doctor to see on a screen that deeper part of your throat, which is where the tumour actually is. So you need an ear, nose and throat doctor, an ENT doctor to to get the a diagnosis or to see the tumour and then get a biopsy done to see if you need treatment.
00:14:34
Speaker
And the good news with oropharyngeal is you have a much higher survival rate than people who get throat cancer from tobacco and excessive alcohol drinking, which are the other two primary causes.
00:14:46
Speaker
I hope I was coherent there, Aidan. Do you think I should add something else? like I've obviously talked a bit about it because I've had it, but it's so important to say oral sex is still okay. Preaching the good word. i Yeah, I think it's the important message is all sex carries risk.
00:15:03
Speaker
but we can significantly reduce those risks, making sure that you're vaccinated. It's not too late. It's almost never too late to get vaccinated against HPV. So discuss it with your GP if you're not vaccinated already, particularly for men out there having sex with men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, it still might have benefits. So go discuss it with your GP.
00:15:24
Speaker
And yeah, if you're getting persistent symptoms in your throat and things aren't going away, time to go see a doctor. And it's important to say too that if, like me, you have had it and you've been treated, ah many men or women have who've had this cancer think, oh, can I have sex with my partner anymore or will i give them this terrible problem?
00:15:44
Speaker
And the message is it's perfectly okay to continue having sex with your partner. They will have been exposed to it forever. ah really long time. but ah What I find is the hardest thing is the taboo around saying the words oral sex because most of the men I've met who've had it and I've met lots of them now, they're just average blokes who had no idea that oral sex could give them exposure to HPV and possibly get this throat cancer. And they're just so embarrassed. Most Australian men do not want to talk about it. And you don't want to delay talking to your doctor because with all cancers, delay means higher risk.
00:16:19
Speaker
Should we turn to another topic, sir? Julie, couldn't say it better myself. Moving on from taboos like oral sex, there's something interesting in the news. I think people love to have their biases confirmed. Is chocolate going to kill me? Is chocolate going to save me?
Dangers of Methanol-laced Alcohol
00:16:35
Speaker
Is alcohol going to kill me? Is alcohol going to save me? And the next story is news story on the ABC about alcohol-related deaths and Australian tourists. um It's not the average alcohol story where one glass a day is the secret to long life. Instead, this is a much sadder, less common story, but it's one that's really hit home for a lot of young Australians.
00:16:56
Speaker
Typically speaking, alcohol and the long-term effects of alcoholism aren't something that we tend to consider. We're young, we're healthy, we're enjoying life. And I think this has really scared and shocked a lot of people.
00:17:08
Speaker
can you tell us more, Julie? This is the incident in Southeast Asia where a group of young people had drinks at a ah club and it turned out that methanol, is that the right substance to talk about?
00:17:21
Speaker
Methanol was in it and ah it caused some to get very ill and some to actually die. And that evidently this is not an uncommon risk, particularly in Southeast Asia or or in other parts of the world where people poorer parts of the world where there's less controls and regulation around alcohol.
00:17:40
Speaker
And I suppose the question, is it a moral panic, or that expression where somehow the media beats something up and people talk a lot about it when it's not a real issue. But there's a thing called smart traveller in Australia that many people will have looked at, run by the federal government. and My understanding is that there is a genuine concern that, you know, that i say I've got two adult children in their 30s and I'd be saying if you're overseas, make sure when you drink something, you open the bottle yourself and you're confident that it's from a reputable source. Because how on earth would you know if something had been laced with methanol?
00:18:17
Speaker
This is the thing you wouldn't. You simply wouldn't. We put additives in methylated spirits in Australia to make it smell and taste awful to the point where it almost induces vomiting. And we do that on purpose that people can't put methyl or methylated spirits inside drinking alcohol.
00:18:34
Speaker
The problem with alcohol and when we talk of chemically speaking, alcohol is anything with an oxygen and hydrogen group on the end of it. So it's a chemical. There's many different kinds of alcohols.
00:18:46
Speaker
The alcohol we drink is ethanol, but there's a lot of different kinds of alcohols out there. There's propylene glycol, there's methanol.
00:18:56
Speaker
And methanol is one of the toxic alcohols, unfortunately, that if you drink it, it is really, really, really dangerous for you. And when people are producing alcohol themselves in backyards, it can be difficult to predict which alcohol you're going to produce. And so if you're producing alcohol, moonshine yourself on the cheap, and you're not careful.
00:19:20
Speaker
you can produce methanol. And our livers are very finicky. They're incredible things. livers The human liver can regenerate. it can It's constantly filtering out toxins every day. You don't need to do a detox. That is your liver's job.
00:19:35
Speaker
But it can't process some alcohols. And so when you drink a significant amount, and that doesn't have to be so much methanol or one of the other toxic alcohols, it poisons your liver.
00:19:47
Speaker
And the problem with liver poisoning is you don't get symptoms at first. You don't feel sick for the first few hours, but your liver slowly starts to die and toxic levels of metabolites, which are byproducts that the liver uses to try and fix things, build up in the body.
00:20:03
Speaker
And you start to get sick and nauseated and you start vomiting and you start getting confused and your brain starts to swell. And by that time, it's already too late. The damage is already done.
00:20:15
Speaker
And it's really hard to come back from that. And so it causes thousands of deaths ah around the world every year, toxic alcohols. And the truth is, if you're overseas, I don't know that I can really say, well if you just drink this or drink that, you're safe.
00:20:30
Speaker
The fear and the panic is real because We don't know. And the problem is this wasn't someone sneaking spiking a drink with methanol. This was actually the manufacturer themselves of a cheap alcohol at the manufacturing plant had methanol in those bottles.
00:20:50
Speaker
So it's a real risk. And I think travellers young people have to be incredibly careful when they're overseas. If it's too good to be true price-wise, it probably is.
00:21:01
Speaker
It's a classic harm minimisation message. Another time, Aidan, because I know you were a paramedic before you became a doctor, I'd really love to talk about what you've witnessed about the dangers of alcohol as someone roaring around in an ambulance when people ring triple o We might save that for a future episode, but I think we've time to talk about health according to TikTok and this issue of advice around dopamine and hacks about dopamine on TikTok.
00:21:30
Speaker
You're going to have to help me. Remember, I'm the 70-year-old you're nearly 30. You've got to help me. What's happening on TikTok and what are these hacks about dopamine?
Dopamine Hacks and TikTok Health Advice
00:21:38
Speaker
Well, Julie, welcome to TikTok this week.
00:21:41
Speaker
Hacking dopamine, dopamine hacks and how to maximise your dopamine and dopamine's a neurotransmitter it's a chemical in your body so is noradrenaline so is serotonin so is oxytocin these are all chemicals that our nerves use to talk to other nerves and other organs We decided in pop culture, probably in the late eighties to early nineties, that dopamine was the, one of the happy chemicals.
00:22:09
Speaker
And we did that because we had to create a narrative around how antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication worked. And it was really easy to explain in a really basic model that serotonin and dopamine you happy chemicals.
00:22:23
Speaker
And then if you don't have enough, you get sad. Not really how it works. in any way, shape or form. But we've decided that dopamine is this happy chemical. It helps you to motivate yourself and do things.
00:22:36
Speaker
And in some ways, that's true. Dopamine is important for thinking and tasks, but a lot of these chemicals are. And so now there's this trend about different activities that you can do to sort of maximize dopamine, like cold plungers and ice bars. And I think we've even got a clip here. Okay. Repleting dopamine is a topic your doctors will not talk to you about. Instead, i'll probably try to put you on antidepressants or dismiss your symptoms.
00:23:00
Speaker
So I'm here to tell you how to do it naturally. Super low levels of dopamine in the brain often manifest as low mood, procrastination issues, lack of motivation, and anhedonia, which is loss of pleasure or feeling numb all the time. Luckily, there are supplements and natural methods that we can use to essentially biohack our brains into increasing our dopamine levels so that we feel more energized, motivated, and energetic.
00:23:22
Speaker
I love biohack. I don't know what it means, but ah you're looking you're shaking your head, gripping your head and looking disturbed. but What worried you about that dopamine biohack we just got from TikTok?
00:23:37
Speaker
The first thing to say is that if you truly had really low levels of dopamine in your brain, you would have Parkinson's disease. Dear. Because that's what Parkinson's disease is. And that is essentially what it is. You're the part of your brain that produces dopamine, the substantia nigra, which literally means the black substance dies off and stops producing enough dopamine. And dopamine is primarily used in the brain for movement in the back part of your brain.
00:24:05
Speaker
And, and so if you really had a truly significantly low level dopamine in your brain, you wouldn't be able to coordinate your movement properly. I think what they're talking about is symptoms related to depression or low mood.
00:24:20
Speaker
And unsurprisingly, the activities that they're suggesting are things like exercise, which we know improve mood. That's not controversial.
00:24:32
Speaker
I think it's incredibly controversial and has almost no backing whatsoever to suggest that eating specific foods and doing cold plunges every morning is going to increase your dopamine. Personally, I can say i would be incredibly upset if you forced me into an ice bath every morning.
00:24:47
Speaker
That would not make me happy that day. But if it's going into ice water or eating particular healthy foods, Does it matter if it's wrong? What's your concern that there's insufficient focus on evidence rather than perhaps a non-trained clinician advocating something in a lively social media context?
00:25:08
Speaker
I think I probably have three problems with it. The first is it's portrayed as the antithesis of medicine, as if doctors are evil and we just want to put everyone on antidepressants and just medicate everyone's problems away.
00:25:23
Speaker
which is so not true. Like we, from day dot, we are trying not to give people medicine. In fact, de-prescribing is a fundamental part of medical practice today. How do we take medication away? Because we know medication has side effects. We don't like putting people on medication.
00:25:42
Speaker
And certainly we don't get any kickbacks from prescribing medication. I don't get paid more to prescribe medication. In fact, GPs, it costs them, it takes more time, longer appointments, a few extra minutes, extra administrative costs, and there's no benefit to prescribing patients medicine for us.
00:26:01
Speaker
The pharmaceutical companies make heaps of money. We don't get any kickbacks. That's the first thing. The second thing is if you're actually concerned that you have persistent low mood and you have anhedonia, which is a sort of lack of ability to enjoy things in your life,
00:26:19
Speaker
doing a whole bunch of cold plunges might not be the way to fix that. And you should probably be seeking professional help. And the third thing is
00:26:30
Speaker
If you want to improve your health by doing things which are good for you, that's fine, but we should be talking about them in realistic terms and we shouldn't be over claiming for things.
00:26:42
Speaker
So we know that additional omega-3 in the diet might lead to improved mood because it might give you a bit more of a sort of nutritional base, which you can use to make things like serotonin and noradrenaline and dopamine.
00:26:56
Speaker
because the omega-3 oils are one of the precursors to those brain chemicals. So there is science to suggest that actually making sure you have adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in your diet has benefit.
00:27:08
Speaker
But it's not a cure for depression. It's not a cure for low mood. If you're doing well and you're trying to do slightly better, that's a really legitimate thing to do. But if you're not doing well, it's time to get proper help. It's not time to do ice baths in the morning.
00:27:26
Speaker
Look, i yeah I guess the whole purpose of this podcast we're doing together, Aidan, is because we are trying to get some evidence-based information out there. but I must have admit the energy of TikTok is seductive, isn't it? And a crazy language like biohack. But look, it's time for us to close up our episode. But is there any key thing you want to take away? when We've talked about sex being risky, but we can still have oral sex. Our heart may be shaky, but there's something that can be done.
00:27:52
Speaker
But what are you taking away? I think social media can be seductive and addictive. And certainly we know that there's a sort of dopamine bias to social media. There there is a dopamine pathway addictiveness to social media. That is a thing.
00:28:09
Speaker
Biohacking can be dangerous as well. Our bodies are actually incredibly efficient. They've evolved to work this way for a reason. So if you're doing things to improve your health, like regular exercise, eating well, that's fantastic.
00:28:23
Speaker
But there's a lot of fake science out there. And so if it's extreme and not in moderation, there's a risk there. And i just be careful. And if you're not sure, look it up actually when i say do your research i don't mean watch a youtube video actually go and speak to a bunch of experts ask experts ask your doctor email a professor at one of the local universities i laugh because people say oh xyz reduces inflammation but they can't name a single cytokine or or an interleukin or explains to me what inflammation is and what this inflammation i'm supposed to be treating is so i think that's probably a key message
00:29:01
Speaker
I think we hear the frustration of a doctor. Our time is up. And I just want to say we would love to hear from you about topics you would like us to discuss. And if you disagree with anything we've said, we'd also like to hear from you about that as well.
00:29:16
Speaker
So send us your questions. So thank you so much for listening. We'll be back with new and exciting topics in our next episode. And always remember, take your medication as prescribed.
00:29:30
Speaker
This Might Sting is hosted by Aidan Barron and Julie McCrossin. Executive produced by Joshua Kirsch. While we always work to give you the best information and tips, nothing in This Might Sting should be construed as personal health care advice.
00:29:45
Speaker
You should always make health decisions in consultation with your general practitioner and specialists. If you'd like to hear us talk about a topic on the show, or if you think we've made a mistake and want to request a correction, please contact us at questions at thismightsting.com.au.