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Hi, I'm Bethany Vanzella, host of the Tech News. Ten minutes of news and fun for young people. We give you the lowdown on what's up in the world and sometimes we talk to special guests. One particular guest on our next episode is very special. Mary Poppins, herself, host of Juli's Library, the legendary Julie Andrews.

Listen to the 10:00 news and the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast with new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Inukshuk, and there's Jerry out there coated in powder. And this is the stuff you should know, the aspirin edition once you pick this one. I've been reading a giant book on aspirin and.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Biography, you know, behind the scenes backstage, cool aspirin, all the ups and downs like a behind the music basically. Yeah.

I don't remember why I picked this. I just don't remember.

But I did and I'm going to stand by it.

Remember when aspirin OD'd on itself.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's everything else. That's some nasty stuff to Odilon too, it turns out.

I would think so. I mean, not only the result but just the taste. I don't like the taste either.

But haven't you said that you're like a goodis headache powder dude. Yeah. Goodies are B.S..

I will. You know, that's a lot of aspirin. It's like. You know, if you will, and we'll get to this, but if you have like a heart issue, they recommend you take something like 85 five milligrams and an agoutis and a, B, C is like 850.

Holy cow. Is it really? Yeah. Plus caffeine. It's a it's a big dose of aspirin plus acetaminophen too.

It's it's powdered Excedrin. It's what is the same same formula.

Well they're both different but yeah. One of them is I can't remember which one. I think Goody's is powdered Excedrin. Yeah. I think Bekesi does not have the acetaminophen and just has caffeine and maybe more caffeine.

Wow. It's like the jolt cold of headache powders.

But point is, I don't take that a lot anymore in it. I don't mind the taste. I know it grosses a lot of people out, but I don't love it and I don't just like let it sit on my tongue and dissolve forever. Right. Like a wash it down very quickly. Right. But I'm not like I got to it's just very bitter.

You have no problem with the drain. You're OK. Funny guy. So we are talking aspirin today and it is kind of tough, I've realized, to overstate the importance of aspirin as far as like the world's medicine cabinet goes, like there is no other drug that has been sold more than aspirin in the history of humanity. Did you know that?

Sure. OK, I mean, you know, it's it's the go to or was for many, many, many, many years until other INSEAD started making the scene for decades and decades, asprin was sort of the go to for a lot of stuff.

That's true. All right. Let me see if I can impress you with this. One of the great things about aspirin is it synthesized from nature that it's actually a perfected version of something that you would find in a number of plants, salicylic acid. But specifically it was Willow that yielded up her secrets for mankind, humankind to use as a medicine to make things better.

Yeah, I mean, that's that's a lot of medicines. And that's you know, Emily is getting really into herbalism here in the last few years. And that's kind of one of her beefs, is that the medical and pharma industries have synthesized things and gotten rid of a lot of the great parts of the plant. Sure, she feels like of great use to human beings to make the synthetic versions. OK, fair enough. In this case, though, with aspirin, I would argue that it is the improved version of nature's version.

Oh, yeah, I think so, and we'll talk about why, but like I said, it was the WILLO plant that people realized pretty far back, Chuck, I believe it was at least as is as late as the Sumerians, who I think they were clay tablets, found that basically said, are your joints achy? Try a little will lift. It'll fix you right up. Yeah, it was you know, they I don't think they had the name for it at the time, but it was a Silene.

Right. The ingredient and you could boil it down to a T like you said you could dry, dried out and powder that bark up and pound it down and work it through a sieve and get, you know, I guess an early version of goodies. And you would I mean, everything from the Egyptians. There's the Ebers Papyrus, which is a kind of a fun little cookbook, textbook medical journal kind of thing. Right. That has recipes for myrtle and willow leaf, tea for joint pain.

Great chili recipe in there.

Two great chili.

They too bad they didn't know about Fritos back then, but and by the way, speaking of Fritos. Yeah. You know, there's actually a chapter in our book about frittatas on dogs. There is.

I know my mom is in it.

I think that we don't talk enough about the fun chapters of our book. There's a lot of like kind of heady stuff. But there's also a chapter about frittatas, which if you don't have a dog, it is it is the smell of corn chips that a dog's paws can emit. Yeah, that was kind of one of the more fun chapters.

I think it was a good chapter for sure, because we talked not just about that, but about not just about how humans perceive the smell of dogs paws, but how dogs perceive the world with smell. Yeah, different bacteria can make different smells. And it's pretty. It was a good one. I like that one, although I like our whole book, to be honest.

I finally got it two days ago. Who Ray would you think? Oh, well, first of all, I was very happy about how many they sent. Yeah. I thought they were going to send me a couple of books. They sent me a big ol box of books like you twenty five.

And it was just really great to hold in my hand. And it's, it's awesome. It looks great. It's the size we wanted. It looks, it looks like a real book. It is. It's a book which is weird to see a real book. I know. Did they put your name on the box. No, your name was on my box, is that right? They put my name on my box, too. They just said, what do you mean?

It just said the book title then by Josh Clark. Yeah, yeah. That's what it said. I think they just didn't print the whole thing. Oh, OK. Well, I like my idea that they were going to personalize each of our boxes.

Wow. Nice touch. This just sounds like lazy box printing, but I got you to protect me. OK, well, yeah, I wasn't like trying to rub it in. I was thinking that they would have personalized your box, too. But you're like, I'm going to save that box, whatever. Yeah. Actually, can you send me your box? Sure. OK, I'll send you the box with a big blow to put in it.

There's like a hole where it used to see just for swoony where you can preorder that book stuff. You should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. But back to asprin. This book was I don't even know where I was talking about. Oh, people like Pliny the Elder and Epocrates had written about aspirin or it wasn't aspirin yet. But Sellar Silene, as you know, basically early on, it was all about reducing fever and reducing joint like arthritis, joint pain, inflammation.

And it's still really good for that. To aspirin, it turns out, is a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug in NZ. And it it's like people realized that it was useful, like you said, for for joint inflammation, for fever reduction, which makes it anti pirtek, which I think is a great word. And we knew about this for centuries. And apparently Europe introduced to China for once rather than vice versa. But then it just kind of fell away.

It fell to the wayside, kind of out of human knowledge, although like it was still there. Just nobody was thinking about Willo any longer until malaria became a big thing. When the age of discovery began and Europeans started to colonize other parts of the world, including South America, malaria became a bit of a problem. And one of the remedies for malaria we figured out was since Shona, since Shona Wright always said Chinchorro. But I think it is an Chona.

I always say Chinchorro too, but I'm looking right at it and I don't see that first H unless it's a weird pronunciation thing.

I think I probably just been saying it wrong.

OK, well let's say Cinchona then. Well, pronounce it correctly for once in our lives and that's a different kind of tree whose bark works really well to treat malaria and not just treat malaria, but also reduce fevers as well. But the problem is getting it from South America can be very, very expensive. Certainly was in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. So it caused this one guy, European doctor, I believe, or at least a researcher named Reverend Edward Stone, to look for an alternative for it.

And he came upon Willo. He rediscovered Willo again for the treatment of fevers and inflammation.

And by the way, I think we mispronounced it. Is it ChangeOne? I just know it's neither. That's so us. That is looked at real quick. It says it's Sundowner.

OK, I like that one. Like it almost sounds like it almost sounds like Quimby's saying chowder. So weird. So Santillana.

Yeah. Edwardstown goes looking for an alternative and he starts looking at the willow bark and its properties and does a pretty decent study for back then. Yeah. In 1763 and found that for our administration of willow bark powder would reduce fever pretty consistently. And like I said, it was a good study for back then there were some other Europeans who were also extracting the active ingredient from Willow, and it was kind of happening all around the same time. I think a guy named LaRue did the best job of it in the early eighteen hundred eighteen twenty nine.

And what they got was the substance saline. Right. So that's basically the they isolated the active ingredient in willow bark, and that is willow bark thylacine or salicylic acid, which probably sounds familiar if you've ever used some sort of skincare treatment, say, to combat acne because it actually goes in and dissolves the stuff in your pores. So it comes in handy like that when they when they isolated it, they they they found out that, oh, actually, this pops up elsewhere in nature.

It's actually a kind of hormone that plants use for their own immune response. And you can find it in everything from Willow or Myrdal or Medo Sweet to Jasmine Clover. It pops up everywhere. It's a pretty common plant hormone and it was isolated finally in the early 19th century.

Yeah. And there were a couple of other kind of important side roads on the way to aspirin. That happened one in 1853 when a French chemist named Gerhardt, he invented aspirin by accident, but he wasn't very refined in how he did it. It was not a very good quality. It was pretty impure, not very effective. So it was not paid very much attention to. But we have to mention him. And then in the late 50s and 60s, some German chemists figured out how to produce it synthetically.

They learned the chemical structure of salicylate, which is just kind of crazy to think that they could do stuff like that back then, that they were that advanced and learning chemical structures of something like that. I was impressed by that. But for sure. Yeah. And they figured out how to produce it synthetically, made it very much available, very inexpensive. And that was a big one. All of a sudden. It was a very popular fever reducer and pain reliever, despite its side effects, which are mainly stomach problems and tinnitus.

Yes, but the thing is, is with that, with especially tinnitus and nausea, like it can be really bad if you take too much. It's temporary, but it can be a real problem. And over time, they also found out that it can produce long term chronic effects because it's so hard on your stomach because, again, you're using the same substance that you used to clean out the port, dissolve the stuff in your in your pores that has a big effect on your stomach.

And in fact, we would find later on that it erodes your gastric mucosa, your stomach lining, and that can produce all sorts of problems on its own. In the short term, it makes you want to just throw up and die if you take too much aspirin. And that's what we figured out with salicylic acid. And that was the point of aspirin, was to figure out how to create how to take this really useful, important drug that had been known for millennia by this time and make it so it was it didn't have any of these unpleasant side effects.

And that's where aspirin came from.

Yeah. So maybe we can take a break and come back and talk about a very sort of legendary company out of Germany called Bayer right after this.

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Hi, I'm Bethany Vanzella, host of the Tech News, Ten minutes of news and fun for young people. We give you the lowdown on what's up in the world. And sometimes we talk to special guests. One particular guest on our next episode is very special. Mary Poppins, herself, host of Juli's Library, the legendary Julie Andrews.

Listen to the 10:00 news and the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast with new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

All right, if you heard me say Beier and you're thinking, dude, it's Bayer aspirin, what are you, German? No, I'm not German, but that's how you pronounce it over there. It's buya we pronounce Abair over here. They were originally a dye making company, but like so many other companies involved in chemistry, they could pivot very easily. And you start discovering things when you're working in chemistry that might make you more money. And that was sort of the case with Bayer.

And they set up a pharmaceutical wing and said, hey, you know, we're discovering these other things and you make a ton of money in pharmaceuticals. And this is just sort of the beginning of that. They had no idea what they were onto to. Right. But they they started a pharmaceutical wing and said, one of our first things we want to try and do is to create a version of salicylate that doesn't have all these nasty side effects.

Yeah.

And there's a there's a long standing story in the chemistry community that a guy named Felix Hoffman, a German chemist who worked for Bayer, was trying to figure out a way to make salicylic acid more easy on his father's stomach. His father had rheumatism, which is a chronic inflammation of the joints, and he had to take salicylic acid a lot. So Felix Hoffman was trying to figure out how to help his dad out when he stumbled upon the recipe that or what would become the recipe for aspirin.

That's right.

So all of this led to one of the most popular drugs in the history of the world. There is some debate like with everything like this, it seems like sometimes it's hard to tell who exactly is given credit because history is written by the victors. And in this case, well, there's there's three men. There's a fourth you named Karl Duesberg, who is included as being a big person in the development because he was a marketer and his marketing skills were a big, big reason why aspirin was so successful.

But a lot of people point to Felix Hoffman as the quote unquote, inventor of aspirin, because on August 10, 1897, in his notebook entry, he described adding acetic anhydride and hydride to salicylate and created aspirin.

I'm going to say it if you want to say it. It's called aspirin. A Seattle man, a Seattle salicylic acid. Yeah, it's kind of fun to say it has like a serial killer sialic acid. It's the acid that you love.

But Jack calls it aspirin because it's easier and he can call it that legally because aspirin is now a proprietary eponyms. We'll see.

Put a pin in that. Wow. That was something shall we leave that in? Sure. All right. I think that's our gift to the listeners. That's the end of the year. Zaniness right there. That means our brains are entering the December Bush phase. Yeah.

Boy, is it. I'm looking forward to that break. I know you can't wait. Yeah. Everyone, I think we said this before. We take a few weeks off at the end of the year. And it's just to not have to research stuff for three weeks is really nice. That's all you get. You guys don't notice because we make sure we record extra episodes in advance, but we actually do. We bulk up the kitty, as we say.

That's right. So just just real quick to put a button in this. Felix Hoffman is said to be the guy who created this, a guy named Arthur IKing. Gruen said later on he actually wrote a letter to Bayer from a concentration camp during the Nazi the Third Reich, because he was Jewish. And he said, I was the one who came up with this, but my my records were expunged by the Nazis. Other people like I'm not sure if that's true or not.

And a guy named Heinrich Dresser, he said it doesn't matter if it's true because I rediscovered this stuff. I told both of these guys not to mess with this. They did. Anyway, I took their research, published. It didn't give them credit. And now I am the one officially who is listed as the inventor of aspirin, even though it was really Felix Hoffmann and possibly Arthur IKing Gruen who did.

Yeah, and I guess you could do that. If there isn't any patents being filed, you could literally just sort of publish something and steal someone's work. Yeah.

Which is, I don't know, it's kind of weird to think about, but I guess the law was the law, but they did file patents. And I mean, Bayer realized pretty quickly, this is at the same time they were coming out with heroin, too. So Baer had two really big hits like right, right. With from what I read within a couple of weeks of each other. And Felix Hoffman was central to both of them. But with aspirin, they were like, this is kind of a big deal.

Everybody loves salicylic acid and the effects that it has, but they hate the side effects and we just got rid of them. So they patented it and they came up with the name Aspirin. So the A is a nod to the acetic anhydride, the acetyl part. The SPER is a reference to the botanical name Suspiria Almería, which is the name for Meadow's sweet, another source of salicylic acid, right?

Yeah. So that would be Esperia. And then they added the I in at the end because that was just sort of one of the naming conventions for medicines, just like we have Caixin like cocaine and Silin for antibiotics, they would add an iron. So Esperia became aspirin.

So if you picked up the box and you're like Asper, what is this? You get to the end and see the in and be like, oh, it's a medicine.

That's right. So Germany patent's this in nineteen hundred in the United States after patenting it in Germany and everywhere they could, they would try and get a patent. And it's been sort of an interesting story since then because after World War One and this is that even though this kind of stuff happened, but Germany had to surrender their patents to countries that have defeated them and one of them was aspirin, so they couldn't prevent competitors all over the world from making their own version.

They did retain the trademark in a few different countries. But that is, like you said earlier, that is why you won't see aspirin or you don't have to list lisped, list it with a capital A.. Because it is it's just one of those what do you call it, proprietary eponyms. Yes, I love those. Yeah, those are great. Yeah. You don't have to lisp. You don't have to say aspirin. Aspirin.

Correct. But some historians actually make the case, Chuck, that World War Two happened because Germany was treated so harshly after World War One, that it led to such draconian, basically revenge on Germany and the German people that allowed a guy like Hitler to rise. Is this populist and gain control?

Yeah. So, yeah, I didn't know about the patents either, but that kind of jibes and dovetails with that whole view.

Yeah. It's like give us all your art in patents. Right. What else you can ask for land, sure, I guess, but that's for sure. And they did do that. Remember the the the Nazi gold episode? We did. Yeah. So there's another side story to all this that came out of World War One as well, in that there was an embargo on phenol by England. England said, hey, we make a lot of phenol over here and it's an active ingredient in a lot of stuff, including aspirin, but not just aspirin, explosives, too, which is one big reason why we want to keep a lid on this thing and we're going to make sure that Germany doesn't get any.

And there wasn't anything official in the United States banning anyone from selling the phenol to Germany. But it was definitely looked like as you were aiding people who were, at the very least, the enemy of our enemy, if not our enemy yet, because we had known World War One yet. But that didn't stop Thomas Edison from selling phenol to the Germans during World War One, did it?

No, he was Germany was looking at it, losing one of their most profitable drugs and said, all right, we're going to send a spy over there to secretly buy phenol from Thomas Edison because he's the guy who loves to blow stuff up. He's lousy with it. And I think that was just exposed when one of the conspirators accidentally left his briefcase on the train. Right.

And it was a real black eye on not only Bayer, but Edison as well.

Yeah. And I mean, like, a lot of people are like, oh, well, you know, they were they were trying to keep the Germans from having aspirin during World War One. Again, you could use phenol to create TNT and other explosives. So that seems to be the reason why, which makes Thomas Edison. He actually created the phenol himself and then selling it to the Germans all the more shady, you know? Yeah, totally.

So it was definitely a blemish on on Edison for sure. And he eventually stopped selling it to them and then donated the rest to the US Army, I believe.

Right. So Bayer is selling a lot of aspirin as a powder at first, kind of like, you know, what we were talking about earlier, but they figured out the people. And this is kind of how a lot of medicaments were powder's at this point. And I think aspirin from Bayer was one of the first ones to be made into a tablet. And they said, hey, if we can compress the stuff. Yeah. Into a little tube people, it won't make people like Rich with disgust from how bitter it is.

You can just pop it in your mouth, wash it down with some. With some liquor. Sure. Or absinthe or something. Some schnapps piece schnapps.

And then people will take it more readily or at least not want to not take it. And it really, really worked. And that really popularized the use of tablets kind of from that point on. Yeah.

Not just with aspirin but with all medicines introduced the public to it. And Bayer was actually with their aspirin. They were also I think we talked about this in the Tylenol poisoning episodes, that they were the ones who introduced the cotton ball to pill bottles, and they did it to keep the aspirin from breaking because they were worried that somebody would take a broken tablet and it would be too little of a dose or they would take a bunch of broken tablets and it'd be too much of a dose.

So they put the cotton in there to keep them from breaking. And with the advent of gel caps and coated capsules and all that stuff, there's never been a need for the cotton ball any longer. But we've all gotten so used to it, we would we would be suspicious of opening a bottle of pills without it, even though it's totally unnecessary. Now, I love that little cotton ball. That's a great, great, great. It's at least one of the better cotton ball facts out there.

Well, I like anything that can be repurposed like a twistex on a loaf of bread that ties that up. Oh, sure. Or, you know, you've got to use that cotton ball. You get a great like, you know, you don't stick it back in your pill bottle, do you? Or do you?

Yes. Oh, OK. I actually go to the trouble of taking it out and put it out and then putting it back in like a total schmuck.

Oh that's right. I try to use those things. What I do is I just wrap a toothpick with this cotton and I use that as an ear swab.

That's not bad. Not bad at all. Yeah. The toothpick that came with what?

What comes with the toothpick, I guess from the from the pig in a blanket or something when you went and use the bathroom for free at a Shoney's but refused to eat there.

I still have all these things left over from being a kid from the lower middle class. You know, like it feels weird to throw away a twistex or era or those rubber bands that come around asparagus. Yeah.

Yeah. Who throws that stuff away? Nobody. You've got to use that stuff. No sensible human being I don't know about. Using the cotton from a pill bottle is a Q tip with a toothpick. It's actually very dangerous. Chuck Berry I like. The spirit behind it, you know what I mean? Yeah, you should not do that because the cute toothpick is way too savvy to be putting into your ear. Yeah, for sure. And you shouldn't be using those your swabs anyway, right?

From what I understand. Oh, and one more fact. When we're cotton based fact, remember, cutups were originally called baby geese.

That's right. Yeah. A little baby case. What was that from the earwax episode maybe. Or candling maybe.

Maybe. I can't remember. Don't do it. Don't ear candle everyone. Now, Emily's got that shirt now. Friends don't let friends ear candle. Right.

Teenage ear candling don't do it. So Bayor is selling a ton of aspirin.

They've always sold a ton of aspirin. I think the most recent stat that Ed was able to dig up was from about nine years ago in 2011, where worldwide there was about 40000 tons of aspirin produced. And in the U.S., Americans were taking 10 billion aspirin tablets a year. It billion. That's a lot of aspirin. In 1950, it was the world's most purchased drug, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. I also read that in Argentina, in part because they have a change shortage, like a legit one going on there.

One of the things you might get is change at the grocery store, gas station or whatever is a couple of tabs of aspirin. Oh, nice. Sure. If you make sense. Why not? Sure. But apparently they love their aspirin, they're for sure.

So aspirin is one of those drugs where for many, many, many decades they had no idea how it worked. It was prescribed a lot. It eventually made its way to over the counter in the 1920s. It was one of these things where they knew it worked because they they did tons and tons of studies where, like, this stuff is really effective and the side effects aren't terrible. As long as you're not using a ton of it, it's pretty safe, but it's really complex when you try and figure out how exactly chemically any drug works in the human body because of what happens when it gets in your body.

It's just it's it's really hard even still to pinpoint the exact path something takes when it's a lot easier to say, well, hey, who cares? We've got a thousand studies that show it works. Who cares what chemical processes at work.

Yeah, we just know that it does work. And in this way. And we also know from all these studies that it has this side effect and it might affect this group more in this way than other groups. Apparently, aspirin has the largest chemical database of any compound anywhere. I don't know if that's true or not. I read it in a Croatian brand profile of aspirin, but it's a great knock your socks off kind of fact, if you ask me.

Yeah, but they they eventually did learn, didn't they?

They definitely did learn that it does work. And exactly how I guess.

Yeah. That is kind of one of those rare examples of how we did figure it out isn't it.

I think so in the late 60s and early 70s. And they were using building off the work of Harry Collier, John Wayne and Priscilla Piper. They figured out that the there was a substance in the body. It's weird. They kind of figure it out in a roundabout way because they figured out what the substance was. Yeah, that actually causes inflammation in the body, which is the release of prostaglandin. And they figured out that insets actually stop this from happening.

And aspirin isn't instead, like we said. And so in a roundabout way, they ended up figuring out how it worked. Yeah.

And so prostaglandins are like a whole class of hormones that are produced at the site of like an injury or an illness to help your immune response, like inflammation, pain, all sorts of stuff that basically says like this needs to be taken care of. And the we need to get some some immune response here as fast as possible. And so aspirin blocks prostaglandins from being released by enzymes called cyclo oxygenates, which kind of kick off the production of prostate gland.

And and they figure this out. So this is how it works. This is how the anti inflammatory process works. And it's kind of a it was a big enough deal that John Vaine received the Nobel Prize for it in 1982 for medicine.

Yeah. And they also figure it out. And this is kind of key with aspirin. Not only does it does that enzyme inhibit that release, but it kind of can do it permanently, which is what separates aspirin from. What was one, the other one, the big famous one, Advil, Advil? Yes, I'm blanking because I never take any of that stuff, really.

I'm an Advil guy. I try not to take it because I don't want my kidneys to blow up inside of my body. But, like, when will you take it? Like headaches? Basically, it's a headache. If my headache is bad enough, I will I will take a Nevilles. Pretty rare that I actually do. But yeah, I mean, that's that's that's my go to because the other stuff doesn't work like Tylenol doesn't work. I mean it doesn't do anything for me.

It's weird you get headaches like regular. No, it's pretty, pretty infrequent. I have to say I have been like the last couple of weeks but yeah I probably have more ever the last couple of weeks than I have in the last couple of years.

And the run up to the election. That's pretty funny. Yeah.

I don't ever get headaches. I mean the rare hangover headache, but I don't get just like regular headaches for no reason.

Yeah, no I normally don't either. So what do you take. You take away wait. We established this PC, right.

Yeah. And that's again just for hangover cures. I hate that that's the only time I use that stuff. But because I don't want to come across as a drunk, but it's the rare, the rare hangover remedy.

Gotcha. OK, yeah. I think that's what most people use that stuff for too. Yeah. It's the caffeine and it really gives you a little boost. Sure.

But you know, all you got to do when you get into when you're approaching 50 is learn when to stop drinking. Right. But the problem is as you're approaching 50, it takes like one drink to get a hangover.

Oh, no. Really? Sure. No, that doesn't happen to you. No, I'm good. OK, so there is one other thing that happened to when when people were studying aspirin. Like like this is the point. So many people are taking aspirin that an average doctor conduct like a basically a straw poll or some sort of study on his patients or her patients to investigate the effects of aspirin. That's exactly what happened with one doctor and I believe the 50s named Lawrence Craven, who basically said, I've noticed that there's some sort of weird connection between more blood loss and tonsillectomies that I'm performing on my patients.

It seems like the people who take aspirin regularly bleed more. And he figured out that aspirin is a blood thinner from this.

Yes. And I guess let's take a break now.

It's going to say save something for a surprise, but that was the surprise. But we'll talk more about that right after this. You already know that the challenge is the most heart pounding competition show on television, but do you ever wonder how challenge competitors are selected or which challenges were too dangerous for TV? Well, you can learn all that and so much more on MTV's Official Challenge podcast hosted by your girl Tourie and me. Ainissa, we're giving you the inside scoop on the brand new season of the challenge.

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So listen to Record Store Society on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we spoiled the big surprise, which we just foiled the big surprise, which is the value of aspirin more and more over the years has been especially once other insects came on the scene and took a lot of the market share has been less fever reducer, less pain reliever and more anticoagulant and more, hey, this can really help you out if you have a potential heart condition.

Yeah, because they've figured out there's another prostaglandin thrown boxing Itou that forms platelets in the blood. Like if you have a cut or something like that in your blood, eventually clots. You can thank throm boxing A2 for forming that. The the platelets are joining the platelets together and aspirin specifically keeps that from happening. And like you said, the other end said, don't do that, it's just aspirin. And from that discovery, aspirin was saved from probably obscurity.

Yeah, there is a point in the I think the 70s, 80s, 90s, maybe even where aspirin didn't even make the list of top 10 over-the-counter pain relievers. It had fallen so far out of favor.

Yeah, it was like that's your parents pain reliever, right? Is not cool. It was not hip. Aspirin was going the way of the dodo. And then they discovered this anticoagulant sort of I mean, not a side effect. I guess it just became a cross use or something. And then it became the main use. And there are a few different reasons why you might take something like it's usually like a baby aspirin. It sort of depends, but it's always very low dose.

But primary prevention, if you've if you've never had a stroke, you've never had a heart attack, but you may be at risk for something like that. Your doctor might say you want to get on a daily baby aspirin, not always, because the benefits are somewhat uncertain. And there, you know, there are other risks. Like, again, it thins the blood. So if you if you get cut or something, you're going to bleed a lot more.

And they don't exactly know why. But it effects it helps prevent heart attacks, better for men strokes, better for women. It's so weird. It is very weird. But that all falls under the banner of preventative aspirin taking.

Yeah. And because it can cause bleeding and it can also cause potentially gastrointestinal bleeding from chest and with your stomach so bad, even a low dose, but a chronic low dose that they say unless you have a high risk, you probably don't want to start that regimen every day. So basically don't start taking aspirin without talking to your doctor first. Like, that's definitely one of those caveats that you want to you want to say to.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Secondary prevention is the next one. If you have actually had a vascular event, if you've had a stroke or a heart attack, then you will probably almost assuredly be prescribed to take that daily low dose aspirin because it is statistically significant that they found there are large, large reductions in subsequent heart attacks and strokes, if you've already had one and then you start that low dose and that nuts.

Yeah, it's amazing. Like there was a study in 1994 that estimated, I think it was a British study that was published in the British Medical Journal that aspirin probably saves one hundred thousand lives a year and gets back in the mid 90s, at least just from that secondary prevention. It's amazing. And then there's acute vascular events, e.g., you're having a heart attack or a stroke right now. They say go take an aspirin, at least one aspirin, maybe two, and it will actually possibly save your life.

Yeah, I mean, they've done study after study and it has significant increase in survival rates.

So check there's some other weird stuff that they're like. We don't really know how this works. It's just typical aspirin stuff. We just know that it works that are starting to become like a pretty substantial body of medical literature about other benefits that aspirin provides, not the least of which is it seems to prevent some forms of cancer. Yeah, cancer is a big one.

It might slow or even prevent dementia onset. They've shown there's there is some evidence that it reduces mortality for women that are high risk for preeclampsia, which is sort of a high blood pressure thing that happens to pregnant women. Yeah. So, yeah, they're just now and like you said, there's been more studies about aspirin, like any other medicine, and they haven't stopped because they're still discovering things like this. Yeah. So with specific kinds of cancer, it seems like colorectal cancer is the one that that people benefit from the most, at least as far as we know right now.

There's one study that found a. Thirty eight percent decrease, this is a 14000 person population study. Yeah, population sample, 38 percent reduction in the chances of getting colorectal cancer if you took a daily aspirin regimen to mazing.

It's not all great, though. Like we said, the regular side effects like the bleeding and the stomach issues and potentially stomach bleeding. They've also found that it suppresses immune response and they don't fully get that. But they do think that I think it's the low dose aspirin over. I think the low dose aspirin is not hindering the immune response. It's really just the higher doses.

But they figured out, well, actually, we can use this like graft operations or organ transplants so you can give somebody aspirin and it will keep help keep the body from rejecting it. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Historically, they have sort of look back now and said, I think all this heavy aspirin use might have hurt us in the past with things like the 1918 flu pandemic. The mortality rate could have increased because they were just like shoveling aspirin down those throats.

Yeah, what else? There's a couple of other things. Again, there's that GI bleeding. They found that if you already have a blood clotting disorder, you probably don't want to take aspirin. And I read somewhere that Rasputin actually gained favor from the Romanoff's from saving one of the Romanoff kids lives who had hemophilia by saying like they needed to stop using any kind of modern medicine, which included aspirin, which probably saved the kid's life because it kept it from being kept the blood from thinning of a kid that already had hemophilia.

And they thought Rasputin was a magical healer for that.

And then another thing we should mention, in the 80s and 90s, they discovered that giving aspirin to kids really increase their chances of something called race syndrome or real syndrome r e y, which causes brain swelling. Brain damage very often leads to death. And there were this was a big discovery and a lot of guidelines went in place where they all of a sudden, like kids using aspirin, went down by 90 percent, which at the time was along with the increase of other insets, really, really put a hurting on aspirin market share.

Yeah, no, they found that if you cut the use of aspirin, the rates of raised syndrome and kids went down 90 percent, so. Right. Yeah, yeah. So they were like, stop using get stop giving your kids aspirin. So it went down by 100 percent basically. And it was already like you're seeing I mean the other instead they cut into their market share and that one almost killed aspirin. It was just that the heart protectiveness that brought it back.

Yeah. Another thing that almost killed aspirin and Bayer was after World War One, they were bought out by IG Farben. And if you know anything about IG Farben, that company, they manufactured Zyklon B, very scary stuff. But Bayer survived all that. The dissolution of IG Farben eventually happened and they were able to kind of just say, hey, that wasn't us. We weren't doing that. We're really good old fashioned aspirin and heroin people.

Right, exactly. So over the years, they've figured out like, OK, there's still problems with aspirin that we could stand to to still keep going. Like the whole GI bleeding thing seems to be a problem. So they've come up with different formulations. And Ed, who helps us with this one, turned up that there was at least one mentioned that they tried a chocolate coating of aspirin, which sounds delicious, do. But he couldn't find any other place that had that.

No, but they did make the just easier to swallow and less bitter coated versions.

They did. And let's not forget Bufferin. Remember Bufferin, what was Bufferin?

Even Bufferin was an aspirin with a antacid attached to it.

Oh, that's that was it. Kept your stomach from getting upset. And apparently Bayer also came up with a version that had a coating so strong it survives your stomach and and it dissolves in the gut where it's needed, where it's absorbed. You poop it. It's totally useless. It's called bare useless aspirin. It's called Corne. Right. So they killed it.

Did you got anything else? I got nothing else. OK, well, since Chuck said he's got nothing else and I said I got nothing else, we're just both presuming that Jerry's got nothing else. It's time for listener mail. This is from Alex Ramos' about the Bay of Pigs movie, and by the way, we should issue a quick correction. I had one, too, but I know that you very much misspoke when you said Roberto Clemente was dishonorably discharged.

Oh, thank you. Yes, that was just a math error. We knew that it was honorable and I didn't catch it at the time either. So thanks for those for yinz Pittsburgh Iain's who wrote in. Yes. And then there was one I did. Oh I think. Oh yeah. Rabbits aren't rodents. I got them, you know. But rodents are rabbits. Right.

Well, all right. Greetings from State College, Pennsylvania. I love your show. Guy started listening in a couple of years ago to ease the pain, the monotony of scraping off old wallpaper in the house. My wife and I just bought and have been a devoted listener ever since listening to Bay of Pigs. Right now, I haven't finished yet, so I may be jumping the gun. You're not. But you were musing about making a movie one day about the Bay of Pigs operation.

I want to let you know that there sort of is there's a Kohlman Francis movie called Red Zone Cuba that is partially about the Bay of Pigs operation and also for some reason about a tungsten mine with hidden treasure. It's a real snooze fest plotting and confusing, which is why it was picked up by Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in the day. It's a film for derision. I actually watched it then.

If that's the case. I don't remember it, though. I don't remember that one either.

I say in their commentaries, great makes it watchable. I love the show. Keep it up. Also in the off chance you read this on the air with money plugging my artwork.

Of course Alex will plug your artwork. Mm hmm.

I'm a self-taught painter, mostly painting realistic, still like pieces in acrylic. And my work can be found at Alex Ramos studio. Dotcom, that is our M.O.s.

Very nice. Nice plug, Chuck. That was beautiful. It's good stuff a lot. But we love we love artists and people are out there trying to to scrape by here in this weird time. Yeah. And I'm not seeing it right now. When I just clicked it though. Oh, I think I clicked on the wrong thing.

OK, so everybody just fall for a phishing scam. I don't think so. I think I just went to Ramos studio and it's Alex that Ramos studio programmers. Yeah, we're going with Ramos, although they're either famous or famous, is maybe Alex from now on.

Well, if you want to send us a confusing email or at least confusing with a confusing URL, we love those because Chuck loves to try them on air and then hilarity ensues. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to Stuff podcast that I heart. Radio dotcom. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?

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