You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
I AM six forty on demand anytime the iHeartRadio app. Chief Medical Officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center, Long Beach joins US Now Medical News with doctor Keeney. So you are avoiding the United States right now, and I think that makes perfect sense, especially because we've decided to give measles a try.
Yeah. Yeah, so measles outbreak is still going on. I mean, I know we've talked about it before, but I think it's just this ongoing event at this point and probably will be for the next year, to be honest, because our vaccination rates, especially in Texas, have dropped so low that we can expect, you know, outbreaks at this point.
Why why are we all of a sudden vaccine skeptical. I have a little bit of understanding when it comes to COVID because it was new. It's the mRNA vaccine, a different delivery, and I understand that there's some skepticism to new things, and I know that we'd like to challenge authority all that kind of stuff. But when it comes to the MMR, the measles up for bella vaccine for Pete's sake, that's been around forever. Why are we are we hesitant about something that is shown It's fine.
Yeah, I mean it's it's a combination of things. There are people who are vaccine hesitant because overall because of vaccines, You're right, that's I think that might be the minority at this point. So a lot of people that are just government hesitant, and they don't want to be told what to do, and they don't want to obey the government, and so even if the government's right, they're going to say,
you can't tell me what to do. So, I mean that's there's a big group of people I run into, at least at this point that are more like I want. I'm for individual rights, individuality, individual choice, and I choose not to get my kids vaccinated. And when you look at these cases, the people that are getting measles aren't the ones making the choice. It's their parents. They're making the choice. And seventy eight percent of the cases or kids who didn't get to choose.
Yeah, doesn't it seem strange to you that that we would choose self arm in order to take a stand for individual choice. For instance, I believe in individual choice, too. In many cases, there is at no point do I say I'm going to tear out my fingernails just because the government doesn't want me to. Why do we say, let's make sure our kids get these diseases that have been otherwise eradicated for individual choice? Isn't this? I mean, this feels like it's a real cognitive dissonance going on
within one's own mind. There has to be a psychological component to this.
There is, and I think, you know, overall, just people are trying to deal with it. I know, and honestly, as you talk to each individual person as you do when you're a doctor, they you know, they really are trying to do the best. They're trying to make the best of their understanding of the world, and they're coming to this conclusion you're wishing there was a way. You know, how do I not sound like I'm sold out to pharmaceutical companies because I don't get a dime if you
get vaccinated or not. You know, how do I sound like you know that I can be a legitimate source when you know, because I know when I started this in med school, there was we had Jenny McCarthy, who you know, went from being a we'll call her a reality star show to you know, on the view, to all of a sudden an authority on you know, vaccines and autism, and I realized, Wow, I don't have that level, you know, sitting at a patient's bedside, I don't have
that level of influence. I really can't combat that. So, I mean, there's just people who choose they're they're easily kind of taken in by you know, almost call them medical myths, and they kind of if it aligns with their with their own thinking already, and we tend to believe things that align with our own thinking. And I think that's what's happening. Is you suspect the government, you find out that there's something about vaccines that they're not
telling you, and then it aligns with your thinking. You say, no way, I'm not doing it.
Where is the Where did this go wrong? I love what you said, Doctor Jim Kinney, the chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, as our medical News at, doctor Kinney continues, I love what you said about as you talk to individuals, you learned that they really are trying to do the best for themselves at some point. Their parents must not have taught them that the best thing they can do for themselves
is listen to doctors. So is this a condition of Centerfolds having more influence than the doctor that we suddenly the girl who's in the magazine under my mattress, I believe her more than I believe the guy wearing the lab coat. And ten years of schooling and twenty years of experience, at some point we decided that the credibility of those doctors was not in our best interest. So how do we reconcile. I'm going to do what's best for myself, but I'm also going to ignore.
The experts right now, You're absolutely right, but the you know, and I'm going to take I'm going to take responsibility for that. You know, doctors have kind of made their beds. Right. It used to be people that you could sit and talk to and have a relationship with and you really trusted and understood. And now it's these fifteen minutes appointment where you maybe get five minutes max of FaceTime, And how do you build a relationship? How do you build
trust in that much time? You know, the American health systems somewhat broken, and doctors are not establishing that relationship or trust. And now that's that's really unfair to put across every doctor because I mean, my doctor sits there and talks to me, and I know he does that not just with me, but with his other patients. So there's people out there that actually do that. But overall, as a specialty, we are you know, we have not
engendered the trust that we really need to. And you know, and now that we drop so in the past, if if you only had little pockets, right, and you have what we everybody knows now is herd immunity, right, it's that if if you don't find it in the herd, then the people that are that are sensitive to it won't be impacted. And that's what we've been seeing for years. Well, now we've dropped below that herd immunity and now those
small pockets are no longer protected. They are going to be and really this if you have you know, this is what I'm concerned about, is people are worried about measles and they're coming to be concerned that they're going to get it. If you've been vaccinated, if you were born before nineteen fifty seven, you had measles you know you are You're fine. You know you're not probably not going to get If you really want to know, you can get a measles tighter that will prove whether you're
immune or not. This is really going to be a disease of the unvaccinated. So if you're unvaccinated, you have concerns and if you're not. If you are vaccinated, you're going to be fine, all right.
Doctor Jim Kiney, our chief medical officer, will continue more medical news with doctor Keeney, including something he said here just a moment ago about the health system and spending more time with patients. I want to know whose fault that is that we're not doing it. I love that he took accountability, but we'll find out. Is it all on him? Doctor Jim? I don't think you are the problem that And why is it that working mornings is hazardous? Hazardous?
That is nice? Okay? If I AM six forty were live everywhere on the iHeartRadio.
App, you're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
Chris Meryl KFI AM six forty more stimulating talk and on demand anytime in the iHeartRadio App. Joining me is doctor Jim Kenny, chief medical officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Health Medical Center in Long Beach. It's Medical News with doctor Keeney and Doctor Keeney. You were talking in our last segment here about the health system and that it's really changed. You used to be able to sit down and have a conversation with doctors, and now doctors
you've got fifteen minutes appointment fifteen minute appointments. You get about five minutes FaceTime with the doctors. Is this because we have a shortage of providers or is this a is this a health insurance thing? Is this about quotas and tracking results? What's what's the cause the root cause of that.
Yeah, that's it's a great question. But the problem is there's no sound bite answer to this one. It is. It's a it's a breakdown across the board, right that we do have a significant shortage of physicians. So I mean you refer to somebody even in my area where you know we have plenty, we have a lot of physicians, but we're still a shortage of neurosurgeons and often neurology where it may take three months to get into CE one. You know, there's there's shortages of all types of specialties.
So you know, there's definitely the shortage issue, and so doctors are trying to get in as many patients as they can. You're in a generation where doctors sell, you know, it's one of the few areas where balleories have gone down as medicine. That's why you see kind of this brain drain of you know, it used to be the smart kids went to medical school. Now it seems like
the smart kids going to finance or computer science or AI. Right, So the incomes have gone down rather than going up over the years, and I think Dodgors have tried to mitigate that by working harder and seeing more patients. It plays into it in a lot of ways. I can maybe equalize out my income. I can also serve the population who's saying, look, we don't have enough doctors and
I need to see more people. So, you know, and then we have all the managed care is you know, in term for an HMO for example, is managed care and you get a per member, per month fee. Right. So the geary is if I keep all my patients healthy, then they get to just keep that money. They don't have to spend a lot of money in medical fees,
and so you're kind of at risk. But so what people do is they take on quite a few patients because you know, if you're going to get ten dollars per member per month and you need to make you know, you know, twenty thousand dollars a month, then you're going to take on two thousand patients and at the end of the month, you know, you may have had to see a good portion of those, maybe ten percent of those, or maybe they don't have to see any of them.
But really people are getting you know, we have more interventions in healthcare now, there's more things to check, there's more things we can treat, and so it's really the visits are going up, and the population is aging. You know that people over sixty five see the doctor five times as much as someone under sixty five, so suddenly we need more visits as well. Just so many factors
that we've pent a lost control. Doctors are now kind of hourly employees for the most part, and it's hard to really, you know, control your workflow in a lot of settings. Some settings you can, and they're choosing to work the extra hours of other settings. It's just hard to control it.
I could I literally talk to this topic for two or three hours, but nobody would want to listen to it. So, uh, doctor Kinnie, let me move on real quick. I want to get to this. Working mornings sucks. I've done it before. They asked what I do it for, Bill, I said no. They said we will give you doctor pay for it. I said, that's great, I'll do it. Then they told me doctor pay was ten dollars, which I thought was crap. Right, I didn't realize until talking to you that I am
getting doctor pay. So what's the I've got a sleep tracker on my on my Apple Watch, and it tells me I'm not getting enough sleep, especially this week, right right is there? I mean I thought I find that very useful because I'm somebody that subscribes to the whole I got to get eight hours and I try to go to bed with the with the the sun down and get up when the sun comes up and not set an alarm clock. Am I doing stuff wrong?
Yeah? I mean so a lot packed in there. Right. Sleep trackers, they are asked to me sleep based on things like your pulse and your pulse oxygen level and movement. That's not what sleep labs do, and they never have. Sleep labs are approximating sleep by catching electrodes to your head and looking at actual brain waves. So your sleep tracker is telling you you're in rem sleep, but it actually has no idea because it's not packing your brain waves.
And even when we talk about rem sleep and deep sleep, what estimating with the brain waves is the neurochemical process in the brain that we can't measure. So your three spaces moved from measuring the correct thing when you're just using a tracker. So there is ah, there's a condition now where people get so anxious over the fact that their sleep tracker is telling them they're not getting enough
sleep that they actually have anxiety over it. They go to a sleep study and they realize, no, you're actually getting all the sleep you need, and they're just they don't accept it because they really are bought into these trackers. So they're interesting. They're good because what you can do is modify certain things, right like you know, eat a late meal and go to bed and see what that does to your sleep tracker. That that kind of change, you can tell you, well, I am getting better sleep
or less, you know, not as good sleep. You can try, you know, drink having a nightcap before you go to bed. People think it helps them sleep, it actually hurts their sleep for the most part. Same thing with like marijuana gummies. People swear by those to sleep, but they disrupt your rem sleep and your deep sleep cycles. So you know, that's kind of what's going on with those sleep trackers.
They're they're fun, but they also they have their downside as well, and there's even people then going to the doctor and getting mends that they don't need to help them with a sleep problem that they don't have. So you know, I think there is some danger there. But if you have a sleep problem and you want to see a sleep specialist, they can do a sleep study and a sleep lab connected to the electra and then you'll really know the right answer.
Which is why I offset my nightcap with the gummy because I figured that I just mix them and everything works out. Doctor Jim Keiney, chief medical Officer for Dignity Saint Mary Medical Center, Long Beach. It's Meta News with doctor Kenney. Thank you so much for Carbon Daniel for us. Thanks bell appreciate it. Take a check on News KFI AM six forty. Chris Merril Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand Chris Merril KFI AM six forty more stimulating talk and on demand anytime in the iHeartRadio app. If you are on the socials, there's a chance, while you may not navigate the socials as well as your your teenager or young adult, you are better at not falling for shenanigans, which is
what we're seeing. We're seeing a bunch of the kids these days that somehow are more savvy online than any prior generation and also equally dumber than any prior generation. This I pulled audio here, this from NBC in Washington that was talking about the phishing scams that the kids these days are falling for.
The numbers are alarming, more than one hundred and one million dollars lost in online scams in twenty twenty one by people under twenty years old. The study was done by Social Catfish, a company dedicated to preventing online scams through reverse search technology.
Essially are a people's search company.
We help people verify people online and so you know, our focus is online safety.
The uptick might be because fifty four percent of the households called don't monitor their kids' activities online.
Oh yeah, nobody likes spying on their kids. It is harder to be a parent now than it ever has in the past. It's harder to be a kid than it's ever been in the past. It's harder to be a parent. You hear stories from us fogies that we'll talk about how our parents would say, go outside and don't come back until it's dark, or don't come back
until the street lights come on. And there were times that we would I recall playing basketball with friends, and I'm not talking about street games with anybody that was good at basketball, but it was just a group of guys somewhere between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and we'd be out there playing basketball until we literally couldn't see the basket any longer, and then everybody walked home and we'll see again tomorrow. That's what we did, right.
Parents didn't have to spy on us now. Occasionally to have one of the kids, parents would drive by and just wave and go, hey, I'm just headed home. Just wanted to say hi. And you know, now, looking back at it as a parent, I can look back and go, Okay, they were just checking to make sure the kid was there and then everything's safe. Cool, it's great. But now you have to put keyloggers on your kid's computer. You have to put spywear on your own kid's computer to
make sure that they're not falling victim. And the kids don't like it because they say, you're watching everything I'm doing. Of course, teenagers do that because they want their independence. Yeah, I'm watching what you're doing, because there's always some pervo out there asking for you to send nude pictures. Truth old days, there were still perbos, but you could identify them because they had really noisy vans with no windows. Nowadays, you can't see them.
When they're randomly contacted by somebody, whether it be through social media, through email, or their phones. They don't have their spider sense up like you or I where we grew up in like that, don't talk to strangers.
Generation leaving over confident tech savvy teens to be exposed to four common scams.
Ooo, what would they be?
The first is sex stortion. The FBI published this warning on sextortion plots against teenage boys. Often scammers will pose as a female, send new photos and asked for the same in.
Return was thank Goodness TV out of the sound effects it's received.
The victim is told if he does not send money, a photo will be sent to all of his friends and family and posted online.
It's sad because last year there was a story of a Florida teen that actually committed suicidally. Oh and what he realizes with most sex soortion cases, though they're empty threats.
Before chatting with a stranger online, perform a reverse image search to confirm the person is who they say they are, and if you received a threat, contact local law enforcement to report it.
Now here's where the team is going to be better than you are at doing the reverse image search. Swear to god, it would take me ten minutes to figure out how to do that. I could figure it out, but I don't have the reverse image search website handy on my computer. It would take me a hot minute.
Another scam is student loan forgiveness. Most of the time, the victim will get emails or texts asking for personal information like their social Security number and payment information. To avoid this, the Department of Education's official financial site studenta dot gov should be the only site you give personal information to.
Although that site may go down here very shortly because of.
Cuts, and there is no application fee to apply up. Next, Yeah, talent scout scam users on Instagram and tics.
All right, we got it, talent scouts blah blah blah.
What else to avoid? Just never click on any links, even if the link was sent from a friend.
There you go. Don't click on links. You don't have any talent. Nobody wants to see you naked. And what was the other one? It was the other one we just said. So why do people fall for it? Because when you're a teenager, you're dumb. When you're a young adult, you're dumb. You've got more hormones than brains, and you've got what the kids call fomo. Now for many of you, you know what fomo means. But every time I say the phrase fomo, my wife has to ask what does
that mean? And I just say, you just wouldn't understand. You're getting up there, and that's when I get to go sleep on the couch. But fomo is fear of missing out. So we have so many young people that have a fear of missing out that they're willing to send nuties of themselves to randos. They're willing to click on links that say we'll pay off your student loan town because I mean, what if there's a chance that it's real, And they'll click on all kinds of different
links because I don't want to miss out on something. Oh, this talent agent spotted my Instagram and says I'm hot and could be a model. I better click on the link and give them my photos and send them money to represent me, because I mean, what if they are real? Well, jincidentally is not new. This happened when I was in college. The Internet was still very young as far as it's ubiquity. And when I was in college, we used to get
those chain letter emails. Forward this to six people, you know, because Bill Gates is giving every one a thousand dollars that's on this chain. We got those constantly, constantly, and we always forwarded them because I mean, we're ninety nine point nine percent sure this is garbage, but just in case, maybe Bill Gates is trying to figure out who he can give money to. Okay, and we forward it same
thing fear of missing out. Fomo, there it is, k if I am six forty, We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
Kay if I am six forty more stimulating talk Chris Merrill. If you are looking for good news about the economy, it is this. A fetanyl use may be dropping. We know this because the Border Patrol is now finding more poultry related products than they are fetanyl. Egg interceptions are up thirty six percent nationwide in the year starting in October compared to the previous year. A hotspot for egg
smuggling is Texas. Cazars and Texas have gone up fifty four percent, according to the Customs of Border Protection in San Diego, They've more than doubled. According to the CBP, it's the price difference. So a lot, they say a price is like a third of what it is in the US if you are over the borders. So agents have foiled. Ninety would be egg smugglers trying to ferry the breakfast staples across the border in El Paso. And they say it's all because you can get eggs a
lot cheaper in Mexico. So forget fentanyl. The new cartel chickens and they're coming. Egg prices are dropping. They're still way up, but they are slowly coming down. We like to hear that wholesale egg prices drifting lower. Bird flu issues may be easing. Even as President Trump claiming victory, his administration is acknowledging that the upcoming Easter holiday could
cause prices to jump again. This from Axios the highly pathogenic avian influenza leading to tens of millions of chickens being culled, which means and that to trigger shortages and price spikes. I still have yet to see any reports on what they do with the with the chickens after they call them. Is there just like a mass chicken grave somewhere that we're unaware of because you can't use the chickens for things like nuggets, right, They've got bird flu,
so you can't do that. So there's just I guess mass chicken graves out there somewhere. Many stores limiting how many eggs shoppers can buy. Some restaurants have added temporary egg search charges as well. They say egg prices should potentially start coming down. They dropped by a dollar twenty a dozen wholesale cord to the US Department of Agriculture, down to six eighty five a dozen Department, noting that flew out breaks slowed over the last couple of weeks.
They've been localized have been able to try to get ahead of those. Price of Midwest Larget large eggs was five twenty three a dozen. It's down thirty nine percent from its peak a couple of weeks earlier. The price that consumers are actually paying is still up. However, from January to February, wholesale prices are dropping, retail prices are rising. So if we were to ask you, our egg price is getting cheaper as far as you know, no, And if you read the article, or if you're a whole saler,
you might say, yeah, they're starting to come down. But if it's you buying things at the store, you head on into Ralphs and you look for eggs, they're not going to be any cheaper, which is leading some people to believe that there may be something larger at play. Indeed, is there a conspiracy of foot from Fox Business. It sounds like the Department of Justice is looking into that very claim.
You know, farmers have been dealing with this bird flu since twenty twenty two, but recently prices have gotten out of control.
Take a look back.
In December, a dozen eggs, it's going to cost you around four dollars. Now it's closer to seven dollars. And in February, a dozen eggs cost around eight dollars.
That's wholesale.
This is why the Justice Department is opening an investigation. They're looking into if major producers are violating antitrust laws by sharing information about supply and pricing, conspiring to keep prices higher. But the American Egg Board says, this is a story of supply and demand. Farmers have been battling bird flu and losing.
Okay, all right, good. We have not ever seen anything like this play out before. We've never had an American company take advantage of a news story or a prevailing sentiment. We've never had any oil companies, for instance, that have continued to tell us that this is a simple supplying demand issue while they rake in record profits. We've never seen that happen in any other aspect, especially during the pandemic and then the subsequent supply chain shortage that happened afterward.
Companies don't use news in order to boost their bottom line, to hose you in order to line their own pockets. It doesn't happen. So when you hear this nonsense that says that these major egg producers are somehow gouging you, that's just a total lie. Believe their story. Instead that says it's a simple supply and demand issue. For instance, as I pointed out, wholesale prices are down a dollar twenty even though you're paying more. The difference, of course
goes into the pockets of the egg producers. But that's pure coincidence and in no way, shape or form indicative of some sort of an underlying conspiracy that they're working against you in order to make a ton of money and profit off the news, all at your expense. That doesn't happen. It's simply supply and demand. And while demand remains the same and supply is up, and you would think prices would come down, and they're not. That's it's just a lot of market factors that you wouldn't understand.
It's very it's very complicated. You wouldn't understand. It's just let me simplify supply and demand and all the other stuff with record profits and that that's just you wouldn't understand it. It's too complicated.
Since January of twenty twenty five the start of this year, we've lost more than thirty million birds and counting. Last week was actually the first week we went afoot week without a new farm having an outbreak of the Avian flu. So those this impact has been devastating on our industry. It's been devastating on our farmers. And like I said, our farmers are in the fight of their lives.
Yeah, absolutely, especially the largest commercial farms. The small farmers are losing money. They're in the fight of their lives. The very large farms that are raking in record profit that must be an even bigger fight. That's just massive, you know.
But the other people that are losing are the businesses and the consumers. We're here at rocos where every egg dish is now a dollar fifty more expensive because of the cost of eggs.
Yeah. I just saw an ad out for I don't know, Dunnies or billage In or somebody. They've got some six or seven dollars deal and that included the big omelet too, and I thought, how are they doing that. They're not making any money on that. In fact, I was seeing that waffle house is always the butt of a lot of jokes, not a lot of waffle houses nearby. See waffle house is getting hit hard. However, if you are loving breakfast I Hop, I Hop is getting hammered by
the egg prices. I Hop prices have increased by eighty two percent over the last five years. Texas Roadhouse up forty six percent, TGI Friday's up forty five percent. And this is all in large part because of the rising food costs, but especially when it comes to places like I Hop, it's eggs, comes out eggs. It's all eggs. It's anay issue. Who else is pulling back? Forget it? If you're like me, you stopped eating eggs a while ago because you said, I'm not going to pay those
ridiculous prices for eggs. You'll just wait for the bird flu to be done, and in the meantime you'll find something else to eat for breakfast. Take a check on news KFI AM six forty Chris Merril live everywhere in the iHeartRadio KFI AM six on demand