Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Measles and Magnesium
24 Plays1 month ago
Why is measles back? Is magnesium the magic cure for all that ails us? And what's the go with giving CPR?
Julie and Dr. Aidan dive into the latest health news from this week.
If you're interested in hearing us cover a particular topic, get in touch at questions@thismightsting.com.au
Follow us on Instagram and TikTok
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome. My name's Julie McCrossin and here we are at This Might Sting with our news roundup. And remember, we diagnose nonsense and prescribe the truth.
00:00:12
Speaker
And Dr Aidan is with me. And Aidan, measles is back. TikTok has gone magnesium mad. Even my taxi driver wants me to use it. And the extraordinarily strange history of the CPR dummy and some gender issues. So Welcome to you.
Understanding Measles: Contagiousness and Impact
00:00:30
Speaker
start with measles.
00:00:31
Speaker
How could it be back? Look, the how we know, the question is really how the hell have we let this happen again? So we'll start with basically what measles is. It's it's a highly contagious disease.
00:00:46
Speaker
It's one of the most contagious diseases that we're probably likely to be exposed to in our lifetimes. it is It's COVID on steroids when it comes to how contagious it is. You just need to be in the same room as someone and you can get it it spreads in the air incredibly easily. It's quite airborne.
00:01:02
Speaker
And essentially it's a disease which For a lot of people, causes a bit of a coldy flu-like symptom. Some people get this non-painful, non-itchy red rash that sort of starts on the face and spreads to the body.
00:01:17
Speaker
But that can be accompanied by fevers, cough, flu-like symptoms, which which might even start a few days before the rash. The key, though, is that it is really, really, really easy to prevent measles from becoming life-threatening or disabling.
00:01:31
Speaker
And what we know is that measles is unfortunately a life threatening and disabling disease for hundreds of thousands of people around the world who still get it. And used to be for millions of people around the world until we started vaccinating against it.
00:01:45
Speaker
And the reason we vaccinate is not to stop you getting measles. It's to stop you getting disabled or dead from measles. And can I just ask you, are children particularly vulnerable to it? are Particularly at risk? Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:01:59
Speaker
So there is a condition which can occur, which is a specific kind of encephalitis. And encephal means brain and itis means inflammation. So encephalitis means swelling of the brain.
00:02:11
Speaker
And there's a specific kind of encephalitis that kids are but particularly susceptible to getting when they get measles. Now it doesn't happen to all children, but it happens to, let's say one in a thousand, potentially even one in 500 children, which is a lot that that's far too high, you know, a number that, that I personally feel comfortable tolerating and Everyone else in public health feels the same way.
00:02:37
Speaker
Frankly, I'd like zero in a thousand children to get sick. This encephalitis, when you get brain swelling, comes with a host of problems. And whenever you get a serious brain swelling, there's a risk of damaging the nerves that feed into and out of the brain.
00:02:52
Speaker
So you get things like permanent intellectual disability, you get things like deafness, you get things like terrible motor coordination problems. you Essentially, when you think about the fact that the spine comes into the brain and all the nerves to the ears, face, eyes, nose all come into the brain,
00:03:09
Speaker
when that brain swells up, it can squish those nerves. And on a micro cellular level, it can damage structures in the brain. just ask you before we just talk a bit more about why the resurgence is happening I'm sure as we all know I'm 17 or 30 I'm sure I had measles i even feel like I grew up in the 50s and I was a teenager in the 60s born in 54 it used to be very very common and um that was really opposing that as a question just checking my memories but I actually can remember how uncomfortable it was and
00:03:45
Speaker
went into my eyes. You know, and and I'm one of five kids, so whether this is my memory or my memory of my
Significance of MMR Vaccine and Herd Immunity
00:03:52
Speaker
younger sisters, I'm not sure. But I'm right, don't know. It used to be very common and people were very worried about it.
00:03:59
Speaker
Totally. So we now have the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps and rubella or German measles vaccine. And there's two things which have happened. One is that as we've started to vaccinate more people, the number of people getting measles and getting the severe side effects has dropped and it's plummeted.
00:04:17
Speaker
But the second thing is the side effect of vaccines. Because remember, we're not giving vaccines to stop the disease. We're giving vaccines to stop people getting sick from the disease. But the side effect of that is that because essentially we've had such a high level of vaccination in the population, it's reduced the severity of the disease. It's turned the volume down to the point where you don't even get sick enough to start spreading easily.
00:04:40
Speaker
And so it's just wiped measles out from most Western civilizations, which means that people just haven't contracted and spread measles much. We've had a few isolated cases over the past few years in Australia, the UK, America.
00:04:53
Speaker
And it's obviously it's back in Australia. There's lots of reports coming out of the United States. It's one of the problems just in terms of resurgence. Obviously, we're encouraging people to get their children out.
00:05:04
Speaker
vaccinated and I will ask in a minute whether adults can get it vaccination late but is part of the problem here not just the anti-vaccination movement which I hope is ah outliers here in Australia numerically but is it we simply don't remember what it was like I've got a memory I have a mother, my late mother, but I heard about her rheumatic heart fever. She had tuberculosis after the Second World War and lost part of a lung. We've all got marks on our arm where we got this special vaccination if your parent had TB. So I can remember mumps, I can remember measles.
00:05:41
Speaker
As us baby boomers die out, there's a loss of living memory. Totally. Same with polio, same with most things. When you don't remember how bad things are,
00:05:52
Speaker
you tend not to perceive them as as high risk. And that's, you know, there's an evolutionary benefit to that. It's that we're not constantly traumatized by bad things that have happened to other people or that we can't necessarily remember.
00:06:04
Speaker
But also it's part of what makes us stupid as humans is that we don't take things seriously when they haven't happened to us. It's an unfortunate part of the human brain. When something hasn't happened to us, we don't tend to take it nearly as seriously.
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, society has forgotten what it's like to have polio, to have measles, to have mumps, to have rubella, to have all these serious diseases. We've already forgotten how serious it was to die from COVID.
00:06:32
Speaker
Well, hope that's not true, but could I just say about polio, as a young woman, I knew people using wheelchairs because of polio. I know people now who've got late effects from polio that perhaps not all people are aware of, but if you've had it when you're young, some people have got limps now or even using wheelchairs now because of childhood polio.
00:06:53
Speaker
um But I guess what you and I have got in common is this passionate commitment to evidence-based healthcare. And so that part of the population who's focused on evidence, and it's why we're doing this thing, this might sting, because we're wanting to promote evidence, we do dutifully get our children vaccinated, our grandchildren vaccinated.
00:07:14
Speaker
But is that failure to vaccinate the driving force of this but it's that's bringing it back? Is that the primary cause?
Social Responsibility of Vaccination
00:07:23
Speaker
Realistically, yes, that's the issue. And, you know, there's, there's two issues.
00:07:28
Speaker
Issue one is i vaccinate my children because I don't want them to get sick. And issue two is i vaccinate my children because I don't want them to pass on the disease to other people.
00:07:40
Speaker
It's very difficult to ask someone to expose themselves to risk in order to protect other people. But it's part of the social contract. It's part of what we do to say, hey, I'm happy to take something which is really low risk and which will save other people's lives.
00:07:55
Speaker
But the second thing is, i get why that might be difficult for some people, but we're not asking you to vaccinate to protect other people. We're asking you to vaccinate to protect your loved ones from dying, from permanent disability.
00:08:09
Speaker
The side benefit is that by vaccinating, we increase herd immunity and that stops the spread of disease. And that's the key, that herd immunity. So just explain that herd immunity and why it's so crucial.
00:08:23
Speaker
By vaccinating a critical mass of the population, we turn down the ability of the virus to sort of replicate within the body nearly as virulently or to such an extreme level. And so we stop it being able to spread nearly as effectively. And so if enough people are vaccinated, it means that the virus doesn't have an in and maybe it it infects one or two people.
00:08:46
Speaker
but it's hard to infect more than one or two people. And eventually those people will come into contact with other people who are vaccinated. And so it just can't spread nearly as much. And there are some great diagrams online of how that works mathematically.
00:08:59
Speaker
but Just before we leave measles, I've just literally a few days ago attended the third birthday of my grandson, my youngest child. And why I mentioned is at a third birthday, there's a pack of kids ranging in age from babies to about six because of the way families work.
00:09:16
Speaker
So I've just been in this swirl of children and swirl of parents who've only met in recent times because their children are going to similar childcare environments or swimming lesson environments or but play activity environment so they don't really know each other except for their kids and reckon that mob of people those adults wouldn't care about not spreading measles to their child's friends as almost as much as their own child.
00:09:45
Speaker
So I just share that little bit of optimism, even though I understand when you're a doctor, unfortunately, you you see that the people who are getting into trouble because that hasn't happened. But I do, I think we are a society in Australia that still has a strong sort of social care for each other.
00:10:03
Speaker
Totally. there are The hotspots of anti-vaccine sentiment that we're seeing are often unfortunately associated with significant belief in alternative and complementary therapies at the expense of proper healthcare. care There are no
Dispelling Myths: Vaccines vs. Alternative Therapies
00:10:19
Speaker
alternative means of protecting against serious diseases like measles other than vaccination.
00:10:25
Speaker
That is the treatment. There are no oils, there's no healing, there's no special thing that you can do to boost the immune system. And I hate that word boost the immune system, because if your immune system is boosted, you get autoimmune disease, the body attacks itself, you don't want a boosted immune system.
00:10:39
Speaker
That's a bad thing. You want an appropriately regulated immune system. So don't boost your immune system, but do boost this might sting our podcast by giving us feedback and by sharing it and all the rest of it.
00:10:53
Speaker
Look, let's go to our next news item for this episode. And it's a condition I've never heard of I don't even, Tay Sachs, I might even be not pronouncing it correctly. Help me.
00:11:03
Speaker
No,
Tay-Sachs Disease: Screening Importance
00:11:04
Speaker
you're spot on. It's called Tay-Sachs disease. It's a liposomal storage disease, which is medical speak. Lipo means fat and soma means the body of the cell. So liposomal means fat inside the body of the cell.
00:11:18
Speaker
And storage disease is basically how the body takes things which it needs to store and then it pops it inside the cell. So in this case, and this is coming from a listener question asking about Tay-Sachs.
00:11:31
Speaker
I've asked, how do I get screened for text if I didn't get it in school? but Great question. So and then the screening it is a rare disease. It's particularly prevalent in specific ethnic and cultural minority groups. So in Australia, the group that has the highest rate is Ashkenazi Jewish patients or members of the community. They're not patients, they're not sick.
00:11:53
Speaker
And what happens is you essentially have two people who carry mutations of the hexagene. And the hexagene is a gene that tells your body how to break down fat and not stick it inside the support structure cells that sort of line up against nerves. If you can imagine the way I like to think of it is nerves, ah they're kind of like a rollercoaster and you've got all those support struts.
00:12:17
Speaker
which are structures inside your brain which keep the nerves up. And there are different names for them. We often call them glial cells. And what happens in Tay-Sachs is you get massive deposits of fat in the wrong way inside your support structures and your nervous cells.
00:12:36
Speaker
And that ultimately destroys those cells ability to communicate properly. And what that means is the electrical chain doesn't happen. You don't get the rollercoaster ride of signals being carried along the nerves. And ultimately that leads to things like movement disabilities, intellectual disability, seizures, and the brain essentially becomes more and more and more dysfunctional and death tends to occur. So Tay-Sachs tends to be fatal and it's an incredibly sad and unpleasant way for a child to die. And it tends to be fatal in the first few years of life.
00:13:08
Speaker
So there's a really strong rationale for screening for it because there's no real treatment. There are supporting cares, but there's no cure once a child has it. You can't undo that sort of genetic thing. And so what we do is we screen people for carrying the defective hexagene.
00:13:28
Speaker
So if two partners who are able to procreate or have a child both have the hexagene in a defective sort of version, we'll advise them not to have a biological child together.
00:13:41
Speaker
I see. So the screening, it has a number of purposes, if I could put it that way. Could I just ask you, you used the term Ashkenazi Jews, and sta it there are two major groupings of Jewish people. but do you is it so far you You tell me the names, and just quick explanation for our non-Jewish audience.
00:14:01
Speaker
So there are Ashkenazi Jews who tend to be Jews of a European descent. So for the past sort of six to 800 years have been living in a diaspora community in Eastern Europe and Europe.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then there are Sephardi Jewish people who are Jewish people of a Middle Eastern and Arabic descent. and who have been living in the Middle East, North Africa, and some parts of Central South America ah for the last sort of six to eight hundred years, some of whom have been in Israel or in countries proximate to that territory.
00:14:34
Speaker
And I think there have been some Ashkenazi or European Jews have also been in the in what we now call Israel. Totally. And it's basically just describing ah basic basically the sort of ethnocultural traits of that community and it tends to be associated with different genetic risk factors.
00:14:51
Speaker
So our listener has said, how do I get screened for Tay-Sachs if I didn't get it at school? it's My hypothesis is that our listener may have gone to a Jewish school where this is particularly screened for. is it How does the Jewish community manage this?
00:15:04
Speaker
So it's been actually a really interesting thing that's happened in Australia, which is because most other communities aren't at significant risk of this, the community themselves organizes screening and organizes screening at schools normally around the age of 14. And there are genetic counselors come in and screen people. it's a very easy screening test. You just use some saliva.
00:15:22
Speaker
And what's quite cool is that they don't tell people the result. Instead, what they do to destigmatize things is that when two people want to consider having a biological child together, they both call up the genetic registry where they got tested and say, hey, we're considering having a child. And the registry will tell them what the odds are of having a child who is affected by Tay-Sachs.
00:15:47
Speaker
So you don't know which partner is necessarily a carrier or if both partners are carriers, that's where the risk is. So both partners need to be a carrier of the gene. And can you be screened for Tay-Sachs at any age?
00:15:59
Speaker
Yep, absolutely. Because I'm thinking of all those Jewish people who don't go to Jewish schools, but it's obviously well known within the community and so you'd follow up. So what's the answer to our question? How do I get screened for Tay-Sachs if I didn't get it in school?
00:16:13
Speaker
What you can do is first port of call is to discuss it with your GP and they'll be able to direct you. But also if you just look up Tay-Sachs Screening Australia, ah you'll see that each state has a service provider who's able to do that screening.
00:16:27
Speaker
And can you get it just from your private doctor or you just go to this particular service? Generally, it's facilitated through that specific service. You don't actually need to referral from a doctor. okay, maybe over time we could look at other conditions that affect just particular parts of the population. That's amazing.
00:16:43
Speaker
yeah Look, you're listening to This Might Sting and we're doing some newsy items and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, also known as CPR, is back in the news in the most unusual way. It's connected to
Challenges in CPR for Women and Inclusivity Efforts
00:16:57
Speaker
gender.
00:16:57
Speaker
I think Bond University have done some research indicating a reluctance to give CPR to women. Can you tell us a bit more about it and why this is actually a terribly important issue for women?
00:17:13
Speaker
It's close to my heart. As a resuscitation researcher, I care passionately about CPR. We know that CPR saves lives. so And the way it saves lives is that it keeps blood circulating around the body long enough to get an AED connected to someone to shock their heart back to life.
00:17:30
Speaker
An AED? An automatic external defibrillator. And so those portable public use, easy to use, anyone can use them. You just open the box and it'll tell you what to do. You don't need any prior training, although if you can get some, it's great.
00:17:45
Speaker
Anyone can use an AD and anyone can do CPR. You don't have to be formally trained, although it's great if you get some training. Essentially what you're doing is you're pressing hard and fast in the middle of the chest. You're compressing the chest about one third of the depth, and that's to draw air into the lungs and then pump blood around the body.
00:18:04
Speaker
It isn't as good as a heart beating itself, but it's just to sustain enough blood flow so that we can hopefully shock the person's heart back or ambulance officers and paramedics can get there to give life-saving medications to bring the person back.
00:18:17
Speaker
doesn't always work. In fact, most of the time it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. And sometimes you can bring someone back and save their life. And is there a kiss of life element to this?
00:18:28
Speaker
There is. We used to give expired air rescue breaths where, you know, I'll breathe in and then breathe out into someone else. I personally don't do that because that's yucky and I don't know the person. I work in healthcare and I don't want to catch any diseases that they have.
00:18:40
Speaker
Just doing CPR compressions is more than enough. If, you know, a child were worst case scenario to be in front of me and not breathing, I would probably give them rescue breaths where I'd give them small puffs of air, 30 compressions and then two breaths, two small puffs of air, 30 compressions, two small puffs of air.
00:18:59
Speaker
And I'd keep doing that until help arrived or someone could put a defib on. The problem is This sometimes works and sometimes you can really save someone's life, but it's not gonna work if you don't do it.
00:19:12
Speaker
And unfortunately what we know is that women are far less likely to receive bystander CPR, which is CPR from the common person, you and I in the street, if they collapse and their heart stops beating and they stop breathing.
00:19:24
Speaker
So if someone collapses and they're unconscious and they're not breathing, they need CPR. And if you don't give them CPR, they're going to die and they're going to stay dead. And what does the research tell us is the reasons why there's that hesitation to give it to a woman in the street?
00:19:42
Speaker
Unfortunately, what the research is saying is that up to 40% of men think that they might be accused of sexual harassment if they expose or touch a woman's chest in order to give her CPR.
00:19:55
Speaker
Which is concerning because ah for a number of reasons, the most important being that unfortunately means women who collapse in public are not getting CPR nearly as often as men are because there's a social perception and fear, which is such a shame.
00:20:13
Speaker
Can I just say before you tell us your thoughts on the solution, this first of all, I'd like to say, my name's Julie. I'm 70 years old. I look like you can see me if you're on YouTube and on the screen. Do it to me if I fall down in the street. Just go for it, guys. Go for it. I've got the will to live. That was just a small advertisement for older women.
00:20:32
Speaker
But the other thing I want to say is, This is so interesting because I did a little bit of reading about, and I want to say the full word because I hate acronyms, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
00:20:44
Speaker
Cardio to do with the heart, pulmonary to do with the lungs, resuscitation, bringing us back. Why I find this extraordinary is resussi-anni, which is the name sometimes called CPR-anni.
00:20:55
Speaker
was created, as I understand, about 1960. So this is a mannequin doll, effectively, from the tummy up, that is used to train people and still is in Australia. And the face is from a young woman who, oddly enough, was pulled from the River Seine in France in the 19th century,
00:21:14
Speaker
And she just had a ah lovely, serene face, as I understand it. She was chosen. and then a toy maker from Norway who saved his own son's life from drowning by turning him upside down and shaking him and then he vomited.
00:21:30
Speaker
but it left him with this passion to save other lives. And because he ended up combining with others and developing Rassassiani, using the sort of material he'd used for toys. But they chose a woman because their concern was, ah because it was mainly men in the military, mainly men in the police, and mainly men at that stage in like paramedic equivalent work, ambulance work like you're describing, they thought they'd be less likely to put their mouth on a man's mouth. It must have been when you were being encouraged to blow air.
00:22:02
Speaker
And so they chose a woman because they thought it would give more chance of the men agreeing to be trained to do it. And now all these years later, we've got this astonishing gender reversal. It just seems so ironic.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And I guess it it also reflects the change in practice. We used to focus on giving rescue breaths and now we're focusing on chest compressions. And Yeah, it's an interesting change.
00:22:30
Speaker
It is. So did the research or do you yourself have reflections on how we can increase the number of people willing to give CPR to women in a bystander context?
00:22:42
Speaker
There was two sort of suggestions that have come out. One has been to increase public awareness through education. So public ad campaigns that feature females receiving CPR and people praising men who give CPR to women.
00:22:57
Speaker
The other thing has been to create more CPR mannequins with breasts, because at the moment, the vast majority of CPR mannequins are flat chested and androgynous or male. And so a bunch of CPR mannequin manufacturers came out and produced CPR mannequins with breasts.
00:23:13
Speaker
And of course, as you would expect, there was absolute outrage from some, frankly, i'm not going to use any descriptors, but from a section of society who had nothing better to do than to jump on a bandwagon and criticize this as as a woke equality, diversity and inclusivity stunt, which is such an idiotic abysmal shame because this is not about any political agenda. This is about the fact that your mom and sister and auntie are less likely to get rescued by someone in public.
00:23:49
Speaker
And if someone cannot get over themselves for two seconds to consider that actually this is about members of our community, 50% of the population, getting equitable access to life-saving measures, this saves lives of the people we care about.
00:24:06
Speaker
That is just the height of selfishness to me. Look, it's absolutely silly. I've got two quick things before we move on to our next news story. But number one is my mother has ah did have more than one heart attack. And ah so I've been in heart wards in major hospitals in Sydney.
00:24:21
Speaker
And I can tell you when you walk in there, there's roughly equal numbers of men and women. So I just think that, again, you will have a comment there. But certainly my anecdotal observation is that a very significant number of women do have heart attacks. Do you want to comment on that before I tell you my other little thing?
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess two comments. One is we know that actually men are more likely to get heart attacks and heart disease slightly. But the other thing is that I often find that people conflate heart attacks and cardiac arrest and one leads to the other often. So a heart attack is a blockage in the blood vessels around your heart. It causes that chest pain, sweating, dizziness, nausea.
00:25:01
Speaker
Sometimes it's people often think it's that crushing chest pain, but actually what we know is that it's more of a chest discomfort, sweatiness, and feeling nauseated. That's far more likely to be a heart attack, particularly in women.
00:25:12
Speaker
It's not the stereotypical, ah, crushing chest pain that you see in the movies that men get. If that gets big enough and enough of your heart muscle dies, then you go into cardiac arrest where there is no heartbeat, no breathing. The person's unconscious. They're not breathing and they need CPR.
00:25:29
Speaker
And so heart attack is chest pain and a blockage to the blood vessels in your heart. And cardiac arrest is you're dying and dead and you need CPR. Okay, look, thank you. The other just want to say is just going to this question of how do we encourage people to give necessary and essential healthcare care or CPR, regardless of male or female or even ambiguous ah sexual identity because you're focused on saving a human life.
00:25:56
Speaker
I have experience in another area of dealing with this very similar issue. We all know that breast cancer is a very common cancer for women and less so for men. And I recently attended the University of Adelaide to see the training that they do there for radiation therapists. These are the people who actually deliver the radiation.
00:26:14
Speaker
And they have a dummy. They have a whole lot of techniques and some of them are... ah very high tech, but they do actually have a physical dummy where they practice positioning and doing the various immobilization, as it's called, keeping us still so you can have this life-saving or life-prolonging radiation beam hit the right spot.
00:26:34
Speaker
Anyway, the lecturer, Eileen Giles, was showing me ah She said, come and have a look at this. and And in the box, there were a pair of very lifelike breasts on a sort of a soft rubber frame.
00:26:46
Speaker
And what they do is they put these breasts onto the mannequin so the men and the women can practice. ah positioning a woman for breast cancer treatment where you put your arms right back but one of the key reasons she identified was they want to familiarize men with the total permission in a clinical context to touch the breast now I do know that there are some radiation units where they will give a woman the choice if possible to have a setup by women but that isn't always possible in a busy hospital as I understand it
00:27:19
Speaker
But anyway, there's an example where there's already an existing set of breasts that could be added to Rassassiani. Totally. And I just want to add one more thing, which is everyone thinks that breast cancer only happens to women, but it happens to men as well.
00:27:34
Speaker
And so if you're a man and there is a strange lump in your breast, it can happen to you as well. Go see your doctor. Yeah, exactly. And I might give a, I took a photo of Arlene Giles and these breasts in a box.
00:27:49
Speaker
I might give it to our producer, Josh, and we can in some way connect it to our ah notes that we have website links and so on to give information. Julie, why do I worry about the idea of breasts in a box?
00:28:03
Speaker
I'll pop mine in then. But look, let's move on to another story that I really am interested in because evidently there's a huge amount on TikTok about magnesium, and like magnesium mania even is
Magnesium: Health Benefits and Risks
00:28:18
Speaker
occurring. And so and I've seen it in the chemistry, going to the pharmacy and there's so many things you can buy and magnesium is always there.
00:28:26
Speaker
So what is magnesium and is there... any evidence-based merit that it's useful in in promoting our well-being? So magnesium is a metal. It's a common metal that you find in the ground, in vegetables, in meat, and our body really needs it.
00:28:44
Speaker
It's really important. And when you combine a metal and it's something that's not a metal together, chemically, it's called a salt. And so the magnesium that we eat is in a salt base.
00:28:55
Speaker
It is important. you Your body needs magnesium. And if you have a balanced diet, you tend to get enough magnesium. It is very important to have enough magnesium in our diets because it's responsible for everything from heart health, the electrical activity in our heart, our brains, our bone regulation, the synthesis of different chemicals in our body. It's it's a core chemical that our body uses.
00:29:19
Speaker
And if you have enough dietarily and your stomach can absorb enough, then you're right. The question, I guess, is if you've got a balanced diet, will you benefit from more magnesium?
00:29:31
Speaker
And like everything, it depends. There is probably a small benefit to having a small increase in magnesium for most people.
00:29:44
Speaker
because chances are we don't have enough dietary magnesium because we don't have balanced enough diets and we're eating a lot of plain carbohydrates and sugary foods.
00:29:55
Speaker
And we're not eating enough green leafy vegetables that are rich in magnesium. That's probably the case. The thing here is that Whenever we talk about something having benefit, it means that there has to come with risk as well.
00:30:10
Speaker
There's no such thing as a drug or a potion or an intervention which just has benefit and doesn't have risk. Everything in life, if it can make a difference one way, it can also make a difference the other way, which means you can have too much magnesium and you can overdose yourself on magnesium.
00:30:26
Speaker
And what would be the detriment involved? For starters, it can give you diarrhea and constipation. So, you know, the forms that magnesium comes in can give you either a lot of constipation or a lot of diarrhea, depending on what the magnesium is bound to.
00:30:47
Speaker
But if you have far too much magnesium, it can start to cause toxicity and you can literally give yourself metal poisoning from magnesium. So the trick here is, and I'm sure be shocked to hear this, speak to your doctor.
00:31:01
Speaker
Now, If you're thinking, I get a few muscle cramps every now and again, i don't have any heart or health significant issues. I wonder if magnesium is good for me. You could give it a go and buy some magnesium supplements at your local pharmacy, and you could try it out for a month or two and see if it makes a difference.
00:31:20
Speaker
And if after a month or two, you stop and you then notice, huh, actually I was feeling better on it. Maybe go back on it. But if you didn't notice a difference, it's probably not worthwhile spending the extra money on it.
00:31:38
Speaker
Unless you've had a chat with your GP, you've done perhaps some blood tests, or they've identified that you have a specific health condition where you would significantly benefit from magnesium.
00:31:49
Speaker
So there are some patients who have atrial fibrillation, which we mentioned in our last episode, where magnesium is a really important part of their diet and they need high levels because it helps to stabilize the electrical signals in the heart.
00:32:01
Speaker
There are some people who have bone conditions like osteoporosis, where they are very much in need of extra magnesium and they don't have enough dietarily. And so there's a significant benefit to magnesium.
00:32:13
Speaker
It's very popular at the moment for a lot of the gym bros and people who are exercising a lot to take extra magnesium to help with muscle development and also to prevent muscle soreness. There's some evidence that has some benefit, but please take it easy.
00:32:28
Speaker
Everything in moderation. Look, our time's up for this news, but on another occasion, I would like to talk about the role of the pharmacist in both our provision of information about medication, but also marketing, selling so many of these supplements.
00:32:42
Speaker
But let's put that for a ah future episode. Just before I encourage people, or might do it right now, to please send us your questions or any suggestions for
Call to Action: Vaccination and Feedback
00:32:53
Speaker
topics. It was great to get one today and i think there'll be in the in the notes for the show where exactly how you can do that and please share our This Might Sting podcast if you're finding it interesting and great so that more people get to know about it but do you want to give us one health tip either arising from our discussions today or just in general that you'd like to share with our audience?
00:33:17
Speaker
The best thing you can do for back pain is to move chronic lower back pain is one of the number one most disabling conditions in our population.
00:33:28
Speaker
And it's caused by a whole host of things, which basically comes down to muscle spasms pressing on your nerves, because there's essentially ah degeneration in the strength of the spine at its base. And it's caused by a bit of osteoarthritis, a bit of aging, a bit of muscle soreness and people suffer. They suffer big time from lower back pain. And the best thing you can do for lower back pain is to keep moving around, warming up those muscles. They start getting blood into them and rubbing together is the treatment.
00:34:05
Speaker
Don't lie down. Don't lie down. Dr. Aidan, I want you to know that I spent a good hour with two elderly, fellow elderly people this week with my exercise physiologist doing all manner of things.
00:34:18
Speaker
My tip is, When you get a vaccination, it might sting, but it also might save your life. So go for vaccines, because I'm in the generation that does remember so many different things. I'll just quickly say I mentioned t tuberculosis with my late mum, but I grew up with a mum who had a scar. I know some of you can see my hands.
00:34:39
Speaker
ah Honestly, it was about three quarters of an inch, and it went from the top of her shoulder completely across her back like Zorro had gone like that. And it was because mum had one of the first ah half a lung was taken out, a lobectomy. It was called radical surgery back then in about 1946. So when you've grown up with that, you're keen on vaccinations. And that's just an old dag sharing a bit of information. But thank you to you, Dr Aidan, and to our listeners. And we'll see you next time.
00:35:09
Speaker
Thanks, Julie. And for anyone listening, just remember to like and subscribe to This Might Sting. We are diagnosing nonsense and prescribing the truth. Have a great one.
00:35:20
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 healthcare advice.
00:35:35
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.