Speaker 1: When you're searching for that next big podcast, why not
stop in at Arrow dot net A r r oe
dot net. Not just one podcast, it's twenty different platforms,
one of them being that Voice. I've spent the past
ten to eleven years sharing conversations with those featured on
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Arro dot net A r r oe dot net. Enjoy
your exploration. What an amazing book. First and foremost, let
me thank you from the deepest part of my heart
and soul. Thank you for doing what you do with
er and helping people locate their path, or maybe I
should put relocate their path because when you saw them,
that's a broken road. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me, and I appreciate that.
I'm very lucky to do what I do.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's interesting. I mean I've heard us soldiers say, well,
it's just part of my job. But you said I'm
very lucky. That inspires me.
Speaker 2: Doctor, Well, I hope to inspire you mostly, I hope
to inspire you to stay alive via the book.
Speaker 1: Well, it's such a great book because ninety nine Ways
to Die. I mean, there's not a person on this
planet that's not going to go oh really well, let
me see I hope.
Speaker 3: So, I mean that's the whole point.
Speaker 2: If enough people read this book, lives will definitely be
saved because there are things in here that I can
guarantee you everyone will learn something, even if you're medical.
But it is written for the general public.
Speaker 1: Well, the one thing that mister Bill did not talk
about when he was cruising through the Carolinas was the
measles outbreakout here. And did you think that there would
be in measles outbreaking this day and age.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's very tragic because no child should die
of measles. But it's not just death that we're worried
about here, right. Measles can cause you know, very long
term issues and deficits and other things than just death.
Although you know, a child dying of this disease is
tragic and completely unnecessary. A lot of it comes from
the fact that there's a lot of misinformation out there
right now, and that misinformation and is difficult to combat
because it's also something that's usually very clickable and sexy
and exciting and new. You know, drink kangaroo pea and
it'll fear your cancer. You know, people are like, oh,
I've never heard that before. Let me click on this. Well,
every time we click on it, we're perpetuating the lies,
and it's overcoming the science and what we've invested in for,
you know, over you know, centuries at this point, becoming
humans that have evolved past the point of you know,
correlation to causation. We no longer are like, you know,
I ate the berries from the bush and I threw
up and it caused me to throw up.
Speaker 3: So I don't eat those berries anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's how we used to learn, right, But
now we know that correlations are not always true. We
know that ice cream doesn't cause shark attacks, even though
both of them increase in the summer, right, And so
we don't use correlation anymore. We use causation and we
use science. But that science is something that's very complicated.
There's a lot of numbers and statistics involved, and it's
something that you know, we don't explain to the public
very well. And because that they get their information wherever
it's the most entertaining and wherever it's the easiest, which
is often online these days. But I try to do
my best to combat that, whether it's my work in
television and film, or now with this book, because these
are ninety nine things that you don't have to die from,
including measles. That is a vaccine preventable disease, and a
vaccine that has been proven very safe all across the world,
not just in the United States, so you can look
elsewhere for that information.
Speaker 1: So now would I get in trouble if I hung
a sign outside doctor Google and doctor chat GP's office
scene we're closed for the day, because my god, that's
where everybody tends to go, and actually they need your
book is what they need.
Speaker 2: Well, it's getting worse and worse right because chat shept
is specifically will give you the answers you're looking for
because it learns your information and what you want. And
it's just like social media, right, it creates rabbit holes.
It wants to keep you engaged, and so in order
to do that, it feeds into and you can call
it out on medical things sometimes and it'll be like, oh, Okay,
you're right, that's not the truth.
Speaker 3: But also you need to have.
Speaker 2: Background in order to understand the information that you're getting,
and that background isn't something that everyone wants to earn
with a medical degree. And that's why it's important to
have a primary care doctor or somebody in medicine that's
credential to trust, because these days, you can google is
coffee good for you? And you can google is coffee
bad for you? And you're going to get the answer
yes for both. And that's the way that internet and
information online is set up. So you need the information
to be filtered by somebody that has your best interest
at heart, and also somebody that's going to be responsible
and culpable for that information. If an influencer with a
million followers lies to you, they're not going to get
in trouble. If a doctor lies to you, they could
lose their license. So you need to have somebody who
is going to be responsible for the medical information that
they're telling you.
Speaker 1: The book we're talking about is ninety nine Ways to Die.
How much of this is associated with men on a
Sunday afternoon who thought they could take care of the
leaves on the roof.
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of it, But I didn't write
about the obvious things. I didn't write eat healthy, don't smoke,
don't drink. I mean that stuff, you know, right. I
wrote about the things that you probably didn't think about,
like the fact that strapped throat can kill you, and
drinking too much water can kill you, and that giving
honey to a baby that's under the age of one
can cause botulism. And you know that over the counter
medications not only can they expire in punishing ways, but
a lot of the things that we see overdoses of
are over the counter medications. Those are the sometimes the
deadliest things, like tail and all is the number one
cause of acute liver failure in the United States. And
so these are all things that you probably run into
in your everyday life. But you know, maybe you've stayed
inside the lines just enough to never have an issue
with it. But I want to give you the background
so you can make better decisions. And whatever decisions write
for you.
Speaker 1: You know, guilty, guilty, guilty, I am, I am, especially
when it comes to water. I had a cardiologist tell
me you better stop it, mister, start chewing on ice.
And then when you just did the thing about the
tile and all mine was with advil and and a
leave and he said, you better get off this stuff, dude,
because you're doing damage. And he proved to me the
damage was there, and now when I sit in pain,
I'm sitting in pain. It's the real deal. There's nothing
hiding this stuff, man, because I'm trying to protect my liver.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, ad Phil and Tylan all can be
tough on the kidneys, so I always talk to your
doctor about that one. And it can also cost some
gi stuff. And there's also topical stuff. Will tear in
is topical, which is kind of cool because it doesn't
absorb into the body the same way, but can help
with joint pain. So there's all these little tips and
tricks that medical professionals have, but maybe we don't have
the time to give you. It's hard for me to
do a lot of preventative teaching in the emergency department
during CPR is not a great time to learn. So
that's what the book's for is I really wanted to
help people prevent these diseases, and even though it's bad
for business, stay out of the emergency department.
Speaker 1: You sound like a program director I once had who
said that if you don't like change, there's the door,
because I mean, you identify, you know, the typical day.
There is no such thing as a typical day in
er if you think there is, there's the door.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely not a typical job.
Speaker 2: You know, I in one room, I'm looking at the
bottom of the foot, and then in the next room,
I'm trying to save somebody with a heart attack, and
then somebody is bleeding out, and then you know, somebody
has a strep throat.
Speaker 3: So it goes back and forth.
Speaker 2: And it's definitely a job that takes all comers, which
is something that I love. It doesn't matter who you are,
or where you're from, or anything about you, you always
receive the same care. And I think that that's something
that I'm really privileged to be able to do for people.
But you know, it's also a tough job, which is
why there is some dark humor in this book. And
I think that that's how we deal with compartmentalizing the
stress in the emergency department and dealing with things that
most people you know, don't have to and maybe shouldn't
have to see every day.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with doctor Ashley Alker
coming up next. Tell I mean the book ninety nine
Ways to Die. We are back with doctor Ashley Alker,
ninety nine Ways to Die. You've said strep throat twice,
which means that gave me permission to bring this up.
So it was July twenty first, two thousand and nine.
I went to the doctor because I assumed I had
strapped throat. Doctor, I was having a heart attack. That's
where my pain was. It wasn't in the chest, it
was in my neck.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, we do see a typical symptoms with some
heart attacks. Usually it's in like certain subgroups, like people
with diabetes. Women sometimes have abnormal heart attack symptoms. So,
but it can be kind of different for different people.
The most important thing to know is, and I say
this in the book over and over again, never ignore
chest pain. If your foot hurts for three months, I
go see your primary care I don't you know, it's
as long as it's not like a balloon or infector
or something. If you're just having foot pain, it's it's
probably not going to kill you if there's no other symptoms,
you know, But if you're having chest pain, that's just
never something to ignore. Never ignore stroke symptoms. Never ignore
chest pain. Those are things that can kill you that day.
Go see the emergency department, see a doctor.
Speaker 1: What is it with our generation where we hear about
these tropical parasites, but yet we still take the damn cruise.
I don't understand that at all.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can.
Speaker 2: These are things that are very treatable and preventable. You know,
a lot of the you know, diseases that we're talking
about here, even malaria is very preventable, and soon hopefully
they'll have a vaccine to prevent it as well.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: The reason that you know, we have issues with traveling
is sometimes that people aren't educated on this stuff, so
that you know, they go in the hot springs and
they put their head underwater and they get a braining
eating a meba, which you can also get in the
United States. But you know, you you go to you know,
somewhere in sub Saharan Africa, and you are not on
prophylactics for malaria.
Speaker 3: So you know, these are important things to know.
Speaker 2: Like sometimes, you know, I talk about parasites in the
book a lot in certain chapters, and pigs are very
responsible for a lot of parasites in humans, and so
eating pig in another country, depending on what country you're in,
like you should at least evaluate the risks and benefits
of that. So you know, these are things that are
avoidable causes of deaths. You don't want to have, you know,
parasites in your brain, which can happen from eating pig,
especially if it's somewhere where pork is not being processed correctly.
Speaker 3: So you know, important things to know, you know.
Speaker 2: And then there's a lot of fallacies out there that
have been created and perpetuated by television, like sucking venom
out of a snake bite, those types of things, like
we don't need to do those.
Speaker 3: It's not going to help.
Speaker 1: Ninety nine Ways to Die. Now, there's one thing that
I sat with a Kataba medicine man and he told me,
you American doctors, you practice medicine. And I'm going, Okay,
I'm going to take this to the doctors and see
what they see. Because when you've got a book like this,
ninety nine Ways to Die, this is not practicing medicine. Doctor.
You are physically involved, and you are informing us that
this is medicine for us to learn new things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean it's medicine to keep you out
of the hospital and to keep you from getting diseases
that you don't have to get. I mean, life isn't
just about longevity, right, it's about quality of the days
that you have. So there's diseases in here that you
know can cause significant like morbidity and other things than
just death that you probably you know, don't want.
Speaker 3: And beyond that, I didn't write.
Speaker 2: A book about the things that you know, you know,
to eat healthy and to not drink or smoke, and
to exercise into sleep, and for whatever reason, those books
continue to be sold to people because they think it's
new information. But you know, all those things they just stink.
And so to be healthy and to do those things,
and to eat your you know, leafy grains and vegetables,
and to never drink alcohol, and to exercise at least
five times a week, if not every day. You know,
their lifestyle changes, and they take time and commitment to
do these things, and often they're expensive. So you know,
those aren't the things that I wrote about. I didn't
write about the obvious things. I wrote about leprosy and
anthrax and botulism and parasites and you know, heart diseases
like commotionho that you know, when you see an athlete
drop at a football game and die, what's happening there? Like,
those are the things that I want to teach you about.
It's it's the science behind the diseases that you can avoid.
Speaker 1: Well, you even put focus on the simple walk, that
there could be something that happens on that walk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's dangers everywhere, but the point is
not to be afraid of them, but rather to be
informed and just to make the smart decisions. Right, Like
most people think they have a carbon monoxide detector in
their house in the United States, there's no general rule
about this, and a lot of the homes don't have
carbon monoxide detectors, rather only have smoke detectors. Something like
forty plus percent of homes in the United States still
don't have carbon monoxide detectors in them. So, you know,
these are things that we just don't know about and
we just kind of go about our daily lives. And
you can buy a twenty dollars carbon monoxide detector and
plug it in and you know, save your whole family
that way.
Speaker 1: See, And the only time I hear from that from
that detector is every six months when the battery's going dead. Booboo.
Speaker 3: Hey, that's good. That's the best news.
Speaker 2: You don't want to hear from it otherwise, you know,
because carbon monoxide is odorless, it's colorless. You don't know
until it's too late, you know, where most people can
tell when their house is on fire. So why the
two aren't built in together. I mean, doesn't make any
sense to me, but that's you know, that's the.
Speaker 3: Way it is. So we got to figure out ways
around it.
Speaker 1: How many people do you meet in the er that
think that, oh I was doing everything right, I was
taking all the supplements I was supposed to. Well, they
didn't mix right in your human body. Do you'd run
into that.
Speaker 3: Oh, of course. I mean.
Speaker 2: The problem with a lot of over the counter medications
and supplements is that, you know, they say natural on them,
so people take that to mean that they can't be
an issue. Most of not most, but some of the drugs.
A lot of the drugs that we use are basically
synthetics from natural forms. For instance, dejoxin is made from
a flower, which is a heart medication.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So these things are quote unquote natural, and all that
means in the United States at least, is that they're
unregulated because the FDA doesn't regulate supplements, so you have
no idea how much of the medication you're getting it
says five milligrams, It could be two, it could be ten.
So you know, that's the problem with those medications, and
then the fact that people often don't think of them
as medicine, so they interact. Saint John's war is a
really bad one that interacts with a ton of different medications. Yeah,
and so people take it and they're like, oh, this
is fine, it's natural, but it has a lot of
interactions with other medications and even with foods. So if
you're going to do that, at least talk to your
doctor about it so they can try and help you
at least regulate what you're on and make sure there
aren't any interactions, even if the medication itself isn't regulated.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. That explains why every time I go
in there, your first ten minutes is talking about what
you're taking for supplements. He needs to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Unfortunately, we don't do a good job about communicating
this type of stuff to people. And that's what I
try and do when I, you know, work in television,
and that's what I'm trying to do with this book,
is trying to get and people the information in a
way that's like interesting but also super understandable. We don't
need to use big medical words. We can use you know,
the normal English language to describe a lot of this stuff.
And that's what the book does.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: Be honest, now, who's in that emergency room when it
comes to TikTok challenges? Is that the adult is saying,
I'm going to be cool, I'm going to be young again.
Speaker 3: You know what it is.
Speaker 2: It's not really the challenges, it's the influencers. So people,
a lot of kids will buy supplements. I mean, people
will buy GLP ones now, people will buy these things offline,
and I mean it's just a terrible idea. It's unregulated,
we have no idea what you're getting. Sometimes it's you know,
nothing and so it's not harmful, but it's a waste
of money. And then other times it is, you know,
these mets can kill you if they're taken improperly. So
it's it's a problem because misinformation and medical health influencers
have basically become one of the biggest threats to public health.
And that's in vaccine misinformation, that's in you know, selling supplements,
and that's just in selling ideas because these days they
make money if you just watch or click or follow.
So you have to understand that you're the commodity these days,
and so just by watching something, you're perpetuating the misinformation.
Speaker 1: All right, So let me ask you this question, because
my entire life, we always did the humidifier, and then
you would put some vics in there, you know, to
kind of clear up the sinuses in the air, and
you're going, oh, mom, you're the greatest camper on the planet.
And then we learn that you can't even put nitall
inside something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you're you're aerosolizing like medications that you
probably don't want to aerosolize at that point. Humidifiers are hard,
right because like, obviously you want to keep them clean
and free of mold, which is another chapter in the books.
People are always curious about molds. But also you know,
there are things you can't get from it, which is great,
Like you can't get brain eating amibas, which you can
get from nettipots, you can't get from humidifier. So that's
that's wonderful. But yeah, you just got to be careful
what you do with over the counter medications because you know,
mixing things and putting them in like you know, weird
places like humidifiers like you just you don't know what's
going to happen with that stuff. I didn't hear about
those exact cases, but you know, the point being is
that you have to kind of use the information that's
given to you. And that information, you know, most of
the time is I think in the past something that hasn't.
We haven't taken the time in the medical community to
make it engaging and captivating, and the influencers have because
that's their whole job.
Speaker 3: And so that's what we're up against.
Speaker 2: And so the hope is is that you know, learning
about scorpions and pufferfish and tetroto tooxin and you know,
cocaine and LSD, that these things might interest you enough
that you'll learn something that could save your life.
Speaker 3: And this is the science.
Speaker 2: I did my best to make it, you know, as
up to date and science based as possible, and so
it's the best current information that we have.
Speaker 1: I got to tell you something, inside my heart, You're
going to think I'm a freak. I'm gonna I'm dying
for the day literally for when someone says I got
into medicine because doctor Ashley spoke the truth in ninety
nine Ways to Die, that they find inspiration and they
find truth and transparency. I just I just really think
that this is the book of our times.
Speaker 3: I hope. So I really appreciate that.
Speaker 2: I mean, getting the book out there into people is
you know, obviously a labor of love. But I hope
that people find it interesting and find it, you know, funny.
I hope it makes you laugh. But the biggest thing
is I hope you learn something, and I know you
will if you read the if you read even the
chapter of the book, I promise you'll learn something new.
I'm not giving you information you already have. Even medical
people who have, you know, fellow doctors who have read
the book, was like, oh, I forgot. You know, we
learn about a lot of this stuff in medical school,
but you don't see some of it very frequently. But
the stuff that's infrequent that's in the book is very deadly,
so you know, let's avoid it.
Speaker 1: Wow. Please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 3: Hey, thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 3: Okay, doctor, thank you