Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Chili Peppers

Episode Date: November 4, 2017

This week on Sawbones, we're examining all the health benefits of the red hot chili peppers. Flea is good for you, believe it or ... wait, it's not those chili peppers? Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. Your worth it. Alright, Tommy is about to books. One, two, one, to the table. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of Miss Guy and Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy.

What a pleasure it is to be the greatest theater in the world, the Keith Albee. We've never really gotten to do a show here. No, it's a thrill. Yeah. It's thrilling. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful building. And, uh, in, also, by extension, the greatest city in the world, Hautees and West Virginia.

Now listen, I say that in lots of cities, but I mean it here. Everywhere else he just says it, because that's what you have to, and then everybody claps for him. And so Justin loves that. I love it. Whenever we go on tour to a different locale,

we try to do something that's like thematically appropriate. Like, we were in DC, we did presidential medicine. And. And then last week, our episode about the history of soda as medicine is because Atlanta is the home to Coke. So, there you go. Coke, Cola. So in Huntington, we wanted to try to pick something

that would really speak to our people and something that would really touch them. Something that's really close to, I think, all of our hearts. And we're gonna talk about chili. I was trying to think, and I love, let us preface. In case you don't know, we both grew up here. We were born in Huntington. I love Huntington.

And I was trying to think, what do I love about Huntington? What's special? And so I say this was complete sincerity. We have a lot of food festivals here, which is great. Like a lot. In a way that when you leave Huntington, you're like, so what is it this weekend for you guys? Like, croissants or what's the food this weekend? And they're like, well, we don't actually

have a food festival this weekend. And you're like, wait, what? It's Saturday and Sunday, you know? Coming up. So what? No food, okay. And when we think about Huntington Food Festivals and medicine, I think it's obvious that like

the hot dog festival is probably out. That's a short episode. Don't. Don't hot. If you care about your human body, probably don't hot dog. I hate to say that because we have, I mean, we have a lot of hot dogs here, y'all.

Like lots of people. I personally have a lot of hot dogs. This is definitely a black, black kind of situation like for sure. But I don't think that there's a medical element to eating hot dogs and rib fest, well, we won't even go there. But chili fest is, it's intriguing because chili,

obviously, is usually made with chili peppers, usually. And chili peppers specifically capsaicin, which is the active ingredient in chili peppers that make some spicy, has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. By the way, it's almost certainly occurred to you now that we do have a theme this evening, and that was unintentional. It just sort of shook out that way.

But now I feel a lot more prepared, sort of from an etiquette perspective. And this feels so wrong because for any of you who have attended Chilly Fest, after you have stood outside in the heat for four or five hours, eating small cups of chili and drinking beer, you probably don't feel great. You're probably not thinking, that was medicine. Oh, medicine now. But the truth is, like I said,

there's more to capsaicin than meets the eye. So capsaicin, all of the chili peppers in the genus cap succumb have cap say, and in them. And that's the, like I said, that's the thing that makes them spicy. And it ranges depending on what kind of pepper you get. And a lot of people are familiar with the scoville units.

How spicy a pepper is ranging from like a bell pepper that has no cap say, and so no scoville units. It's not bell peppers on spicy. To the jalapeno pepper, which I guess is supposedly the pepper that most of us enjoy. It's like the right amount of capsaicin for most people. So I want you to get that out. No, I think they're too spicy. I'm not a spicy fan.

And I also, I was chopping peppers once. Do you remember this? And they got all my hands oiled in. And my hands burned for like a day. It was terrible. It was. I heard a lot about it. It was awful.

I remember it differently. But to all the way to things like the ghost pepper, which is very, very spicy, and I would never touch. But no matter how much cap say, no matter how spicy a pepper is, people have been using any spiciness as a marker of something that is good for you as medicine. It is an irritant to mammals, which probably is so that we

won't eat it. Oops. Jokes on you, peppers. We don't care. We're going to eat you anyway. The way that it works is that it activates certain sensory nerves that we have. There are channels on them that usually are activated by things like heat, or if you get some kind of like abrasion, like a scrape, then you would activate these channels on these sensory nerves, and you would get this

like burning sensation and pain, because you're like touching a stove and it hurts. Well, capsaicin also activates these channels so that's why you get this burning sensation even though you're not actually being harmed by the pepper. Although it can trigger inflammation. So if you're activating these nerves enough your body thinks that you're getting burned or that you have some sort of like road rash would be a good example, like some sort of really bad abrasion. You scraped your, you know, fall off your bike and like really bit it.

You scraped your knees really bad. That kind of burning. You can get inflammation afterwards just from handling peppers or from eating a lot of peppers because you have triggered this inflammatory response. And that's when you get like, nausea and your stomach hurts and your nose runs and you know all this extra fluid and swelling and all that kind of stuff.

Also in case you're not aware, this doesn't go away after the chili or the chili pepper travels through your GI tract. And the sensory nerves around your rectum are very sensitive. So you can get irritation on the way out as well if you eat a lot of chili peppers. Yeah, yeah, I'm a, I'll listen to folks, I'm no scientist, but she is right about this one. No. I can go ahead and verify from a layman's perspective. All that said, it is, it is odd to say that the first humans who ate chili peppers

went, this must be medicine. Yes, that's true. Well, it doesn't feel good, and so few medicines do. And it hurts. That's true. It burns. It hurts it burns so much. It looks like a pill, but they probably didn't have pills back then.

No. No, the first use of peppers as like seasoning for something for food dates back to 7,000 BCE in Mexico, where we found evidence that people were using it to spice up their foods. And a lot of South American cultures were already using it for seasonings. They thought that the burning and pain that would have cut, this was all written down like you would eat these foods and it tastes good, but you'd also get the burning and pain that would have cut this was all written down like you would eat these foods and it tasted good But you'd also get this burning and pain and people started to suspect that like I said Maybe this was doing something for you

Medicinally that's a common theme actually that we see throughout history I think is that Before we understood things the things that we thought were medicine were the things that got a response So like if something was a diuretic a lot lot of people assume like, oh, that's getting the evil out. That they also thought that germs were evil. You just use the, you use the word diuretic. Oh, well, I guess I did.

We're proud of you. That word today, toilet paper, it's finally paying off. Do you remember, do you remember what it means? What? Do you remember what it means? Uh, yes, it. I should say I do. But I only know it in Latin.

And I don't want to bore everyone here. It makes you pee. No, but that was good. I'm very proud of you. Thanks. But people in your- You are being very patronizing right now, but- I-

The people would notice that if you took- if you took, like, if you ate chili peppers, or especially if you applied some sort of paste made out of peppers, topically, somewhere on your skin, that after multiple times, you would start to not feel the burning sensation. And so they begin to theorize that if you keep applying it,

you'll become like desensitized to pain. So those were the initial ideas is why this might be medicine, is that if you keep applying the substance to yourselfensitized to pain. So those were the initial ideas as why this might be medicine, is that if you keep applying the substance to yourself, we could eliminate pain. You could be invincible. I don't know, you could get stabbed or whatever. You'd be fine.

It would toughen you up, or you mean like literally, it would like desensitize your... You would not feel pain anymore. Oh, okay. I mean, they didn't, they weren't, it wasn't like an understanding of the sensory process that was happening.

It was just like you keep applying it to your skin and eventually no pain. Which is interesting because this is actually kind of similar to how it does work in some medical applications today. Which is what you get to. Yeah, but they just observed this. The other ways that it was used medicinally was to induce sweating because these were parts of the world that traditionally were hot, and so sweating was good.

You're getting rid of excess heat, and so you would, if it's like, well, I'm feeling really hot, eat a chili pepper, you'll get hotter, you'll sweat, and you'll get better. And that's true. No, I just something that they did. Oh, in addition, there were some uses

that probably were a little more magically based, which were a new baby's-based, which were new babies' feet were often rubbed with chili peppers. Hey, welcome to Earth. Welcome to Earth. It's really good here. I think you're going to love it. This was thought to be good luck.

I mean, I guess you're also like, you're toughening them up. They knew it. They're in the world. It's not like, we found you in the pumpkin patch. Like, they burned and they wrote on my baby's feet. That's cold, I'm sorry, that's just mean. It would also sometimes be burned at funerals. You would burn like a big pile of chili peppers

and a funeral to like create a really noxious, awful smoke that would ward off evil spirits. And also, I guess everybody at the funeral, because that's really uncomfortable if you've got chili pepper smoke in your face. Yeah, that day is hard now. It's spread because of Christopher Columbus who observed, yeah.

Great. I know. I'm not really paying tribute. I'm just saying he's bred the chili pepper room. So he tried it. And he actually thought it was a lot like something called the long pepper that was native to Southeast Asia that was used for a lot of cuisine already like you could get sometimes in Europe and was not it was rare and it was exciting it was spicy for

other reasons and he thought it was similar so he called it a pepper because it reminded him of this other pepper. I guess when man Christopher Columbus had kind of a habit of doing this, huh? Just kind of calling stuff whatever he sort of felt like it reminded him of. Your name's Darla. You look like my aunt Darla. You're Darla now.

OK, Chris. My name's Bethany, but fine, I guess. No, I showed up here and I decided that your name was Darla, so. Yeah. I thought I was in India, so you're in India, right? Okay, cool, bye. Peppers. Peppers.

No, they're not. They're peppers. But they did, they did as a result spread back to the old world and they were actually a lot easier to grow. And so they kind of overtook the use of a long pepper which you don't find as often in cuisine, because it was just easier to grow. Chili peppers, new girl kinds of different varieties. So it became very popular throughout the world.

And use as medicine became very popular throughout the world as well. Everybody with the same idea, one observing other people using it medicinally, and then two, it burns, it must be good for me. So you can find mention of capsaicin or chili pepper extracts. Usually like cayenne is what they would have called it. I mean, we're talking about the same thing.

All these words are being used interchangeably and a lot of old pharma copias. It's chilies, it's cayenne, it's the spicy stuff. So a lot of capsaicin extracts would be put with alcohol and you'd make these little tinctures of alcohol. And you could use it mainly for topical again application, so if you have some kind of pain, they would use it as what was called a counter irritant.

And the idea of a counter irritant is that, let's say that you got like a really awful wound for some reason, I don't know, you were out doing something dumb and you fell and you hurt yourself. If a really awful wound on your arm and it hurts, a great idea would be to use a counter irritant that will make you hurt yourself. You have a really awful wound on your arm and it hurts. A great idea would be to use a counter irritant that will make you hurt worse.

Because then you don't think about the pain. Wow, things are rough back then, huh? Just from like a medical perspective. Yeah, well, it would distract you and then the other thought was it would draw the bad humors away to this other site and it would draw inflammation. We didn't know what inflammation was, but you know it would draw it away

and so it was often used as a counter-eartime because you put it on your skin and it would burn and you think okay now my my other wound is gonna be much better because my skin burns. Humors aren't real by the way. Some people don't regularly listen or show them I'd be here so soon just kind of throughout the term humors is there's something that the Saunders are still into? Humors are not a thing anymore. So you know, we're very used to talking about humors. They come up a lot.

That doesn't make it more real. Yes, the belief is that there were four humors that you had to keep in balance. And that's why you get so much of medicine. That's like something that makes you puke or makes you poop or makes you pee. There's just to balance out your humors. We're just trying to get rid of one or give you more of one or whatever.

That's probably blood everybody. Obviously that was wrong. We were all wrong. In addition, after you put this on your skin, it would make it red and swollen. And again, so it must be working because now your skin is red and swollen. So there you go. Did something?

I don't know. As it spread throughout the world, it expanded to other ailments. As I said, pain was the biggest application for it, but you also found places where it was used to stimulate digestion in the Caribbean. So it would, it was like, eat a little bit of the spicy stuff or take a little bit of this tincture at the end of a meal and you would digest your food faster. In China, it was used for pain relief, but also again for stomach issues, which is always so weird to me to think about like, oh my stomach's upset, I need some chili. Yeah, that's not the route you want to go down.

In Japan, you can find it even to this day. And you know those foot detoxifying pads. They were seeing those on the internet that you're supposed to apply to your feet at night, and then you take them off the next morning, and they're dirty, and it's a sign that they've detoxified your body. They, yes, it's on you, you have oily feet, and that's it.

They're not really detoxifying your body. Some of them do have capsaicin in them, and have for a long time. That doesn't make them work better, because they're still fake, everybody. Because they don't work. Because they have something in them. It was also a very popular toothache remedy in the UK,

so they would have little drops of cayenne to put on your tooth, if it hurt. And then we don't have a third step for you. We just, you're two thirds, and we're going to put this painful juice on it. But after that, I mean, anybody's guess at that point. We actually don't know what happens after we haven't thought that far through yet. In the US, it was a big, the early herbalists were a big fan of capsaicin.

And Samuel Thompson was one of the leading herbalists in the early days of the United States, and he popularized it for anything that was considered a cold illness. There were certain diseases that we were thought of as cold diseases, so we would try to treat you with things that we thought were warming to fix them, and then warm diseases we would treat you with things that made you cold to treat them. Again, none of that was real, but that was a thought process. So this was thought to be a warming herb. He thought most illnesses, same old Thompson, thought most illnesses were the result of coldness.

So you can see why cayenne would be a very popular choice for him because then it'll warm you up. So he recommended cayenne, steam bass, or anything again that would make you puke or poop. Those were his biggest suggestions. Coyon was his second favorite herb only because his first favorite lobelia is really great at making you throw up. So he usually recommended lobelia first for puke and then second,

use some Coyon because it'll warm you up. And it can treat cold diseases like any kind of upper respiratory infection, flus, pneumonia, any kind of respiratory ailment was thought to be something cold and so cayenne would help with that. And then later it was expanded to use for things like ulcers, skin ulcers, cayenne was commonly used for, and heart disease. As time went on, it was very popular. Well, if you have a bad heart, take some cayenne. Yeah, I mean, I guess it was before, I'm about to blow V8 for a second, sweetheart. So if you want to drink some water, I need you to say hydrate. Okay, go ahead. So like,

do you think the doctors back then ever looked at somebody dead in the eye and say, listen, I appreciate you coming to me. And it means a lot, you're trusted me. I should warn you that, and you know this, medicine hasn't been invented yet, right? So everything we do here is gonna be a lot more challenging, physically and spiritually, and they won't invent medicine for a while, and I don't think you're gonna see it. So just, I'm just gonna go crazy here, okay?

Just gonna take you on a freeform jazz odyssey of different poking and prodding and lying. Just lying to you, because we don't have medicine yet. But check back once medicine gets invented, because you're just gonna go gawk off for it. And it's just gonna, you'll see, it's weird. The weirdest thing, now is that another, no, here's the wild thing. It does stuff.

That's the big day with medicine that they're working on right now. When it's invented, it actually affects things and makes you better. So we're trying. I hate to tell you this, we still get it wrong sometimes. I mean, it works better than why. Okay, it works better than this.

It works better than wishes. It works better than lying. Okay, it works better than this. It works better than wishes. And honey, which is basically all of medicine to this point. It really is. On our show, we talk about medical history a lot. And we always get to the heroic era of medicine, which is my favorite era, because it was basically like, look, we don't understand anything. We don't know how to fix anything.

We don't know why people are sick. Whatever we do is better than nothing. Just throw everything at patients. Do every surgery you can think of. Yeah, cut that off. Yes, open that up. Throw that on them. I don't know, make them drink it.

Shoot them full of that, too. That's my favorite of medicine. Yeah. It was really just like, eventually people went ethics. No. It's not killing people. It's the Hail Mary of Medicine. It's like, listen, eventually people went ethics. No. It's not killing people. It's the Hail Mary of medicine. It's like, listen, we tried stuff for thousands of years.

We have nothing. We're just going to try it all. Hail Mary, where my jaw's at? OK. Let's send it to God. As far back as 1878, Cap Stason was actually the active ingredient. It was actually isolated in a lab and studied

and we actually, and you see this trend in medicine and I probably, I studied medicine, but in other sciences too, where there were smart people who figured out Andre Hodges, who figured out how Capsacin worked on sensory nerves all the way back in the 1800s, which is really cool, and then it was just like lost. He wrote it down and everybody went whatever and moved on and kept saying like, I don't know, it burns your skin. It's really cool. And then we forgot about how it really worked.

And then later in the 1900s, we did more research and then we relearned this thing that we already had known. And that's when we started to see that this concept of decensitization to pain actually is somewhat true. So how does this work? Capsacein induces your nerves to release something called substance P, which is a neurotransmitter that's released

in certain kinds of pain, usually chronic pain. So not like I put my hand on a hot stove pain, pain like arthritis pain, stuff that bothers you every single day for a long time. So this capsaicin will stimulate the release of this substance, just like chronic pain would, until like you burn yourself out, you release so much of it, you deplete your nerves and you don't have any. And so then you have less of this chronic pain. So capsaicin actually really can to some degree, not completely eliminate, but can some degree

help alleviate chronic pains like neuropathic pain, nerve kind of pain that like diabetics, for instance, often get in their feet and hands, arthritis pain. It's not so good for quick pains. Like, you wouldn't want to use it again, because like, you chopped your finger off or something like that. But for these more chronic pains, it actually does do something. If you chop your finger off, there are a few other things

you should do first. I mean, definitely try to eat something spicy, but you are going to want to find the finger first. That's why. Give me alapenio. Quick, alapenio, quick. No. But we did.

We began to understand that, which was really cool. And we began to investigate other things that haven't really yielded as much evidence. Things like, exactly, how does it work on the stomach? What is the effect on the GI system? Is it good? Is it bad? Does it help?

And weight loss. It's been studied for weight loss for a really long time. They also figured out that it lowers the body temperature in dogs. I don't know. There's that fact for you. I always wondered like, who did that study? Who was like, I wonder what it does to a dog. I wish I could have been there when they told the dog.

Hey, good news. Remember when we had you eat like a lot of spicy food? Yeah. It lowers your body temperature. Oh, okay. I mean, you have to imagine like as they set up that study, like, they gave the cap says and whatever, they gave the dogs some chili peppers, and then they watched it eat it, but...

Why should we take its temperature? I don't know. What do you want to do? How much do we let him eat before it does something? Also how spicy were they? Did you have to coax the dog and eat it? Because if it were me, I'd be like, no, I'm good. And also, I do want to mention that's why they call it a chili dog.

Don't clap for that. So, no. In addition to these medicinal uses for capsaicin, because it is, as I mentioned, an irritant and it can make you uncomfortable, it has also been used as a weapon over time. Nice. Now we're getting somewhere. As I mentioned, we have accounts of people burning chili peppers to create these chili pepper smoke, you know, like, weaponized smoke basically that would really irritate your airways

and could even like constrict your airways if you breathe it in. And so it was a really good kind of, I guess that's like a chemical weapon kind of thing. And we also see accounts of that being used among ancient Chinese police as well. So it was known to be an irritant, and then of course pepper spray. Sure. So, you know, it's also weaponized. And it's also fair to say about capsaicin

that it does have, and you'll see this like touted as way more than it is, but it does have some antimicrobial properties. There are things about capsace in the inhibits of the growth of bacteria, which is cool, but don't get carried away. The next time you have a urinary tract infection, please don't go eat chili instead of going to the doctor. I mean, you can, I mean, you can also eat chili. Well, yeah, on your way to the doctor, please.

On your way. Don't eat chili on the way the doctor. That's unsafe driving, okay? Swink through Wendy's afterwards and get you chili. But no, but it actually does help inhibit the growth of bacteria. So that's one theory as to why if you look at how spicy some ancient cultures would make their food, it probably helped in food preservation. So you didn't have refrigeration yet, so you could probably put a ton of chili peppers in there

and the food would stay fresh longer. That's great, but it's not gonna, as far as we know, it doesn't kill bacteria in the human body when you have pneumonia or something like that. You still need to, again, go to the doctor. Like I said, today, we do use capsaicin for pain relief. There are capsaicin creams that are available. And generally, it's for these kinds of chronic pains

that we talked about, things like neuropathic pain or arthritis pain, that kind of thing. And again, I don't want to overstate it. I'm not saying it completely eliminates these pains and eliminates the need for any other kind of medication, but it can help. They're doing research, especially into weight loss. But again, I wouldn't get too excited about it so far.

All of the actually blinded studies properly done haven't really shown a big effect. It's not dangerous if you really like jillies. Go for it. But there haven't been a huge weight loss as a result of eating chilies. And they're also investigating the long pepper that I mentioned before has shown in some studies, some that there are compounds in it that

inhibit the growth of tumor cells. And so then people have thought, well, is that true for chili peppers as well? So like they've done some studies on that, but this is all done in labs. There's no proof that eating chilies reduces your risk of cancer at this point. Again, I'm not trying to discourage you from eating chilies, but I never want to overstate what they can do. And don't use that instead of going to a doctor. All that aside, it is still, herbalists still really value

cayenne as one of their kind of main herbs. I read over and over again that if you can only master the use of one herb in your life, cayenne is the one to master. That I read this one quote, if I were allowed only one emergency herbal medicine, it would be cayenne tincture. Because it's immuno.

Immurgency herbal medicine. It stimulates circulation through the entire body. When the venous structure becomes filled with mucus, It stimulates circulation through the entire body. When the venous structure becomes filled with mucus, the blood thickens and has a harder time circulating and cayenne will move the blood like no other. Now there's problems here. Yeah, let me start with emergency herbal medicine. And on our show we often say say that cure all's cure nothing.

And I think that's an important thing to remember. If you see somebody trying to convince you that anything, any medicine whether it be herbal or what we think of as traditional medicine, that it will fix all of your problems, that's probably not true. And today you will find cayenne or capsaicin or chilies listed as a cure for pain as an appetite suppressant, as an appetite stimulant for circulatory and metabolic stimulation. It's prescribed for upper respiratory infections, dyspepsia, colic, flatchelins, arthritis, rheumatism, low back pain, sore throat, heart disease, and muscle aches. That's a lot, guys.

That's a lot of things, huh? For a spicy powder to do. It seems like a lot of things. It's also advised that if you think you're having a heart attack, you should eat some chilies, and it will stop the heart attack. And if you have a wound that's open and won't stop bleeding, you should dump some cayenne on it. Oh no. Oh no.

And it will stop bleeding. And if that wasn't enough to convince you, you can take a tablespoon of cayenne and a tablespoon of olive oil, you can mix it all together and dump it on your head and your hair will grow back. So. Okay.

Okay. Great. Thanks. I thought for saying you going to say and rub it on a steak. I'm like, okay, great, cool, good ending. Anyway, that folks, thank you so much for having us. Thank you to the fine folks of the Yeager program. Yeah, thank you all. This was really exciting for me. The Yeager program meant so much to me. It was, I can't tell you AGR program it so much to me it was I can't tell you how many ways it changed my life and gave me so many opportunities

So this was really an honor to be back here partisan posiom. Yeah, and thank you to you all for coming that is gonna Do it for us for this week. Thanks to taxpayers for using their song medicines the intro and outro of our program and thank you to you once last time. Yeah, thank you for coming. That's gonna do it for us so until next week my name is Justin McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. And as always don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone, Listener Supported. you