Advocacy For Yourself

Sunday evening. We're here every Sunday evening between seven and a pm Central Time, and we are providing you with unfiltered health and wellness information, strategies to stay healthy, strategies to stay out of the hospital, and hopefully, with a little bit of luck, have a long, healthy and healthy life.

Our website is doctor Joegalotti dot com. D R j O E. G A L A T. I. And when you get to that website, all of our information is there, social media links, there's a tab to get in touch with me, SNA FRAU newsletter which goes out every Saturday every weekend across the country. And of course, if you want to pick up a copy of my book Eating Yourself Sick, which now more than ever makes sense for

you to have, it is available on Amazon. And actually some good news, I am in the process of writing another book, so stay tuned on that in the weeks and months to come. All right, So some talk about but what I want to really focus on for a little while tonight is you the patient, You the family member, being an advocate for yourself. And the reason this is

coming up now. And as I've said many many times, the content for this radio program is not something that is necessarily handed to me and they say you've got to talk about this. It comes from real life experience. In our clinical practice, we take care of people with liver disease. I'm a hepatologist by the way, Liver Specialists of Texas. The website is posted on our doctor Joe Glotti website, So we take care of a lot of sick patients, and I have always always stressed the need

for you to be an advocate for yourself. Now, you cannot advocate for yourself if you don't understand what the issue is. If you are with your family practitioner and they say, look, Frank, you now have diabetes and I am going to put you on this pill, all right, may seem innocent enough. Oh jeeh, I've got diabetes. But a well informed consumer, Well, first of all, say why am I going on this medicine? Number two, what is

the implication of me having diabetes? Am I in a situation where through lifestyle, diet, weight loss, exercise, I can turn this around? Doctor, I know, because you should be a good consumer. You know that diabetes can cause damage to your kidneys, It can cause damage to your blood vessels, It can cause damage to your nerves. I like to say that diabetes takes no prisoner. You want to have the conversation, say, doctor, what is the state of my kidney?

Am I spilling protein in my kidney? Am I having problems with high blood pressure? What is my cholesterol and triglyceride? Am I showing any abnormal EKG findings? Now this would be advocating for yourself. Now. It is a sad state of affairs where doctors are not providing this information up front. Frank, let's sit down and spend ten minutes starting to educate you on diabetes. No, this is not happening. Why do

I know it's not happening. Patients are telling me because they're coming uninformed, and so you the informed customer, to advocate for yourself. You have to ask all these questions because you don't want to strictly go get the prescription that Walgreens take your pills as ordered and business as usual. You want to have that attitude of Okay, maybe I need these medicines for a short while to correct some blood sugar issues. But being able to advocate means you

have to understand you need to be schooled. And if your doctor and his or her nurse and the team is not going to school you, you have to seek out information on your own and advocate for yourself. That is what I am talking about, and you can. You can substitute a new diagnosis of fatty liver, a new diagnosis of high cholesterol, a new diagnosis of migraine, a new diagnosis of really anything, and advocate for yourself now case and point. I received a call yesterday from a

patient's wife. This is a gentleman that has multiple medical problems related to his liver disease. We have been seeing this gentleman for a good number of years and we have i'd like to think, educated both him and his wife on the rules of the road. If you get this problem, call us. If you get this problem, do not let anybody do this. They have very good boundaries. And so his wife called our office on Saturday morning and he had presented with what appears to be a

gastro intestinal bleed. He had rectal bleeding, a fair amount of it, and he is known to have diverticulosis. And he went to the hospital and they looked at him and they said, you know what, go home. So here's a gentleman that is a bit older, he has underlying liver disease, and he's bleeding, and the emergency room is saying go home. And that is a bad move. This

is not somebody you want to send home. This is a person that is potentially going to rebleed and have a catastrophic set of complications which may be life threatening. This is critical. So his wife stood up and said, you are not sending him home. We are going to stay. I want you to call a gastroneurologist that is familiar with him, get evaluated. He may need a colonoscopy, he may need closer observation. And that is exactly what happened. A life saved. And so it is this wife's aggressiveness

in advocating for her husband. She has done her homework, she has listened to me and my team, and I'd like to think that they were going to have a far better outcome. But I can tell you everybody, many times this doesn't happen. Patients will be discharged, things are not done, and it's a bad outcome, including the loss of life, and that is horrible. And so the bottom line here, as we begin to take a break here, advocate for yourself. But to advocate, you have to know

what you're advocating about. And that's why you need to be knowledgeable on this whole health and wellness landscape so that you can advocate. That is the word of the day, advocate. All right, we're going to take a break here. I'm doctor Joe Galotti. You are tuned into your health first, which when we say your health First, we are saying please advocate for yourself. We'll be right back to stay tuned.

Welcome back, everybody to your health First. It's always a great pleasure being here every Sunday evening between seven and eight Central Time, broadcasting from our home radio station seven forty k TRH and across the globe on the iHeartRadio app. Make sure this summer, as you're traveling around you say, hey, it's Sunday night, doctor Galotti. We may be camping in Sedona, but you can still get the program seven o'clock Central Time. And don't forget doctor Joeglotti dot com is our website.

Send me a message. I love, love, love to hear from everybody, and also all of our social media is there. Pick up a copy of my book Eating Yourself Sick and Again. In that book, I talked about how to be an advocate for yourself. It is really really the most important thing we can do, all right, So to follow up on this personal advocacy, which really is very key.

So we talked about this wife yesterday Saturday who called us to get really confirmation that she was right that her husband needed to stay in the emergency room after he came in with a gastro intestinal bleed. Please please, please please. If that isn't grounds to admit somebody, an older gentleman with multiple organ problems, then I don't know what does. So she advocated happy outcome. Second thing is we received a rather circuitous set of phone calls text messages.

It started off with a friend of a patient who knows a doctor who knows me, and then we got involved. So this was a gentleman with advanced livid disease. And when I say advanced livid disease, I am talking about life threatening livid disease. This is not ingrown toenail type material. We're talking If you are not careful, this person probably will not live another thirty to forty five days. There is the risk of going into kidney failure, respiratory failure,

cardiac failure. You're already in liver failure lights out. So now this person is in a let's just say a secondary hospital in San Antonio. Now San Antonio is simply a stone's throw from Houston, Texas, the Texas Medical Center, largest complex in the world, and our liver transplant team practically number one in the country. So within within site is the place that you want your loved one to go. And so originally the the the information came through this

very convoluted set of of of communic case. Get to doctor Galotti. This guy will help you out and his team of course, and so he you know, the problem is trying to get patients from outside facilities into the medical center can take several days. It's the nature of the beast here. And so my recommendation was there are physicians in the San Antonio area that can really take care of this issue at a higher level than where

he was at. We gave names, we gave numbers, we gave websites to to make this happen, because literally it's easier to try to move latterly in the neighborhood rather than pick up and drive across the state. So we gave them all this information and they that the team at this other program was unwilling or incapable of evaluating this patient. And so this patient was stock languishing, dying in this other hospital. So the advocating part was this

gentleman's family was unrelenting. They stayed in touch with us, They were giving us updates hour by hour, giving us the information we need. We had already tried to get the person transferred into Houston Methodist, and again I am at the mercy of availability of beds, though we can certainly work to make the system be a little bit

more efficient. But this family was advocating for their family member and because of their unrelenting pressure in a very very loving way with us, with the doctors at the other hospital. Good news. This person arrived last evening to the place, the location this person needs to be, and I would say there is a much higher probability, much higher percentage that this person is going to do well and get the care they need. This family advocated for

their loved one. And so many times we cannot advocate for ourselves. You're sick, you're you know, you're out of the loop, you're incapable of making all of these high level decisions and communications. But here again, and I could write a book about this. Patients and family members, loved ones, BFFs that have advocated for somebody else, And it is so so so important. And when you talk about a

good outcome, you talk about a lousy outcome. At the center of all this, it is people advocating for themselves. And not taking no for an answer, but again advocating realizing that they understand what livered. You know, end stage liver disease means they understand when the kidneys start going bad, that that's going to have a bad out come. If you are sort of neutral and you say, well, I don't know what the hell's going on, and that's like

why did dad die? Well, I don't know. Nobody told me. No, I would say, yes, nobody told you, but you did not take the effort to learn and editate yourself.

for yourself. Don't just be a cow and take every prescription you're given and not saying what the hell is this? Why do I need to take it now. I am not anti drug. I'm not telling you to drink an oxtail soup to cure your diabetes. Okay, But you have to be a good consumer. And I've been saying this for twenty three years, to make you a better consumer, in other words, to advocate for yourself. All right, And look, I could get as ridiculous as you want here on

the radio tonight. Remember the days when we would go to a department store or how many out there, remember Sears, and you would go and you would say, hey, honey, we need a new refrigerator. And you will go and you will read the labels. You will go to consumer Report and you will talk to the salesperson to say ice maker, no ice maker, front load, whatever the feature is. Capacity, you're being a good consumer. You don't want to buy something and just take it home and have buyers remorse.

And we spend more time researching out the refrigerator we're going to buy than researching out our medical conditions, or our medical maladies, or the medicine we are taking. People come in with zip lock bags full of pills and they don't know what the hell they are. All they know is that this is a blue one, this is a pink capsule, this is a small white tablet. What

is it for? They don't know. And many times they go to multiple doctors, they go to different specialists, and they're get any prescriptions from everybody, and they may go to different pharmacies. Now the pharmacy regulation is far better today where there is cross talking. But if you go to a Sam's Club to get a prescription and then you go to Costco and they may not talk to each other. But many drugs are generic or brand name,

and they're taking two of the same medicines. One is generic and one is brand name, and all they know is that I take one of these at eight o'clock and I take this at eight o'clock or in the morning as well. It is the same damn drug. And you wonder why people don't feel good. So again, advocating for yourself, do your research now and do if you get doctor Joeglotti dot com is our website. So last thing I'll talk about, and this is not so much

a rant. I get very passionate about this, and don't take my passionate tone here, as you know, being angry. I'm not an angry guy. I love what I do. I love to take care of patients. I love to see that they do well. I love to see when patients come and their families come and they are really informed and they're advocating for themselves. So here's another one. So lady comes mid forties. I would say with her husband,

she is a professional. Her husband is a professional, well educated, But that really doesn't that's not the whole story here. And I would say that they or she has a rather serious, potentially life threatening problem with her liver. Okay, And so because of that problem, she self advocated for herself. She saw local experts where she lives. She came to Euston to seek out other expert opinion, but really was not getting the detailed answers that she and her husband

were looking for. The care was not bad, it was not malpractice, but it it was that sort of deeply understood description that they were not getting. It was sort of superficial, Yes you have this and you have to do that well at forty three years old. That doesn't usually settle well with people. They want to know what are the next steps, what can happen? Really, they're advocating for themselves, and so what they do is they pick up and head to the male clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,

which is not a bad idea. The male clinic for this particular liver disease, they are I would say, world renowned. So they go there and they sort of get a direction, but they still are not quite settled, and so they let their fingers do the walking. They get on the internet and my name pops up and they come and see me earlier last week, and we go through our head to toe evaluation. We look at about I think it was three hundred and eighty pages worth of medical records.

Myself and my nurse practitioner. We looked through every single page. We got her into a gown, we examined her, tried to see what extent her liver disease was, and we went from there. And then we sat down, the two of us, and really the first thing I said is, look, you've been to several different centers, you've been to a world famous center at the Mail Clinic. You've come and seen me now. And the question I had for her is how how does she feel about the conversation we're

having so far? And is anything that I am saying or doing or thinking different than what has already taken place over the past four years. This has been a four year journey for this lady. And you know what she said, She said, in all these years, all the specialists, all the expert locations, you are the first person that got me into a gown and examined me. All I did was a physical examination, an old fashioned physical examination. And I said, now, wait, wait, you're telling me this

team that you saw did not examine you. No, they did not. Okay, you went to the male clinic, the world famous male clinic. They never got you into a gown to even feel your abdomen and your liver and your spleen which are enlarged. No, didn't listen to your heart or lungs. No. And she said, and the husband said, for this reason, we are staying with you now here Again, I'm not here to give accolades to myself. That is not the point here. I have been doing this with

or without accolades for thirty five years. It was just the way I was trained, and it was partially the way I was brought up, that we really really take care of patients. But this lady advocated for herself and her husband. They were trapesing all over the place to get answers, and they were right, there was something that was not right with this case. And many others just basically said, this is your diagnosis, this is the therapy,

don't smoke, don't drink, and that was it. And so for tonight, three illustrative cases of people advocating for themselves. And all I would say is that it is so sad when we see cases that get to us late and there are bad outcomes, and families will sit there and say, if we had only known, if I had only done this sooner, if I had only sought out a second opinion sooner, we would not be sitting here, really in a pre morbid situation where literally nothing can

be done. So advocate for yourselves, advocate for each other. If you know, maybe you're not the patient, but you have a relative, a friend, a coworker, somebody within your circle of influence, and you know that they are struggling, and look everybody, at least everybody. A lot of people I talk to, they talk about their medical conditions. That's sort of the water cooler discussion. Ugh went to a gynecologist and I got fibroids, or I have a murmur in my heart, or I have some COPD from smoking

for thirty five years. Whatever it is. People like to talk about that medical problems. And if you pick up and hear that something ain't right, that they're struggling being that bff, you should guide them to advocate for themselves. That is the message. All right, Final segment for this week's Your Health First. I have some miscellaneous items in the news we're going to chat about, and don't forget Eating Yourself Sick. Amazon bestseller available on our website, Doctor

Joegalotti dot com. New book coming out sometime later this year. I don't know what the title will be, but it's going to be a smash. Stay tuned, we'll brite down. Okay. Final segment for this week's Your Health First. Every Sunday we're here between seven and eight. Tell your friends and relatives about us, and of course, go to our website doctor Joeglotti dot com center for a newsletter. All of our social media is there. Pick up a copy of my book, Eating Yourself Sick. It is a guideline. We've

been talking about advocacy for yourself. The book really does that very well, giving you the tools to understand you have to understand what the heck is going on. We don't have an owner's manual for the human body.

But certainly reach out to us and one of our team members will get back with you that I promise. All right. So in the news, how how can we have a program without talking about obesity? So this week the American Diabetes Association Heather Annual meeting, and as you can expect, the buzz about weight loss and the ozepics and the w Goovis of the world were there. But drum roll, there is now a pill. Isn't that what

we have always shot for? A pill? Part of the pill mentality that I talked about in Eating Yourself Sick. But anyway, there is a new drug called Ready for this. It's a tongue twister or fog leapron or fog lepron. Even my New York accent sort of stumbles over it. But anyway, it's an oral medicine that works similar to ozempic, the GLP one agonist type drug, and the amount of weight loss is very similar to ozempic over a nine month period based on the preliminary research, and they are

thinking that sometime later this year it may be FDA approved. Now, at one end, you could say, hey, it's good because we could ditch ditch the shot, right, nobody likes taking injections, and because it is a pill, it is much easier and much cheaper, less expensive to make pills rather than syringes and that whole delivery system just it takes more time, a little more specialized, more labor, and it's more expensive rather than a pill that they could just run off

the assembly line. And I would say, look, that is good considering the millions upon millions of Americans and people around the world that are obese and having trouble with metabolic syndrome, which is the killer. Eighty five percent of chronic disease is related to lifestyle changes or lifestyle choices. This sounds like it's a good idea, but I will still bring up my pet peeve. With all this, we are not teaching people or I should look. Look, I could stand here with a megaphone as big as man

could make. People won't listen. You are going to have to make the decision to advocate for yourself. Advocating for yourself is not necessarily taking a pill. It is taking a pill learning how to eat better. That is, we got here by eating ourselves into a corner, eating ourselves sick. It's a good book. We have to get ourselves out by not eating ourselves sick, by learning how to look at food and realize what is nutritious, being able to look at a a processed food product and say, you

know what. First of all, the ad is a bit of a come on. I don't really care that it has more protein than an egg. I really don't care that it is low fat because they probably added sugar and salt to it to make it taste better. And so that is the first level understanding the consumerism, Understanding different foods and their nutritional content, Understanding the role of dietary fiber. Where do you get fiber from. It's not from just taking a cup of metamucil, It's from getting

beans and nuts and fruits and vegetables. Understanding portion control, Understanding how to prepare food. That is what is going to change the needle. And instead of a country addicted to their pills, we get people addicted to the foods they eat and create a certain ground swell of enthusiasm. So there is a lot of new data, a lot of new technology on the rise. But at the end of the day, doctor Galotti, here my voice, we have to change behavior and become better consumers and understand food

got us into the problem. Food can get us out of this big hole.

the first aid stuff that we take. She happens to be a nurse, but I think she would have done this anyway. So the main thing if you're traveling, if you're traveling for a long weekend, or you're traveling on a two week trip, even if you go into Disneyland, or if you're going overseas somewhere or somewhere more exotic. First of all, make sure you have enough medicine, your own prescription medicine. Plan on flights being delayed, getting detoured, and so don't say, look, we're going to be gone

fourteen days. I'm going to take fourteen days of medicine and then I run out. You probably need at least another week or ten days of backup medicine. Number two, here is a chance to make sure you understand all of the medicines you're taking. What are they? Number three, bring a print out of all of your medications, the name, the dose, and the frequency. You should be able to

do this. Pharmacies will do this for you. Make sure you carry some over the counter medicine, so a little bit of a pseudo metafine, some ibuprofen in case you get a sprain or a headache or something hurts, bring some allergy medicine in case you have some sort of reaction. Make sure you bring some GI products, be it something as simple as toms may milanta, things like that. Maybe a little bit of zantac pepsid over the counter if you get some GI distress, and a little bit of

amodium in case you get some traveler's diarrhea. Talk with your doctors about taking any antibiotics with you in case you get hit with some traveler's diarrhea. Also, make sure you take a thermometer. I cannot tell you how many people travel without a thermometer. That is really important. If you have trouble with high blood pressure or cardiac issues, take your blood pressure cuff with you. That would be important.

The other is the usual band aids, bandages, gauze pads, some antibiotic ointment, things like that in case you get sprains, cuts, at least something to tide you over until you could get to a hospital, urgent care center, or see a doctor in town with out of doubt. If you're traveling into more exotic places, you want to make sure you have appropriate repellent against mosquitoes. And other little things that

you may run into the wild. Here again, I would say, make sure you check in with a travel medicine physician. We did it when we went to Africa last year. It was amazing. They have maps of the world different diseases, be it anything from hepatitis A to various water born problems, ticks, fleas, bugs, all kinds of things. So travel medicine is a good idea, So stay up to date on that. You want to be able to go on vacation and have it stress free and not worry about somebody getting sick. All right,

That is it for this Sunday evening. I hope you have a great rest of the evening, a powerful week. Take a look what you're eating, Take a look at how much you're sleeping. Take a look at the food you're eating. Stay away from junk food and to drive throughs. It's better if you could cook it at home. Put your health first. That's what we're all about.