Flu Prevention and Immunizations

Podcast transcript

INTRO
Welcome to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Over the next half hour, Docs in a Pod will educate you about the health and wellness of adults everywhere. Co-hosts Dr. Rajay Seudath and Carmenn Miles will share information to improve your health and well-being. And now here are Carmenn Miles and Dr. Rajay Seudath.

CARMENN MILES
Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today on the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. I'm Carmenn Miles and we're excited to jump into yet another great conversation centered around health and wellness topics that really matter, especially for our seniors. If you're listening in for the first time, just know you can catch episodes of this award winning podcast every Saturday on your favorite listening platform. And in fact, Docs in a Pod is now available on Amazon Music, audible, and iHeartRadio. So, you can find us just about anywhere, including on the radio in several Texas markets. And again, each week we share practical health information that hopefully helps us all, especially again, our seniors live happier, healthier lives. Before we dive into our topic for today, let's welcome our co-host and our guest medical expert. Dr. Rajay Seudath is our resident co-host. Absolutely no stranger to the show. He's a proud Tampa native and board certified and family medicine. He is the lead physician at the University location for Optum. He's passionate about primary care, and we're so honored that he takes time out of his busy schedule to share with us week after week. Dr. Seudath, how the heck are you?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
I'm doing excellent. I'm happy to be back. Thank you for having me on.

CARMENN MILES
We're happy you're back to. Let's introduce our guest for today. Today we have with us nurse practitioner Dovie Stewart. She is a family medicine nurse practitioner from WellMed at Alice. She offers preventive care and management for conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure. She strives to give each patient the level of care she would want for her own loved ones. NP Stewart began her career as a licensed vocational nurse in 1990. She knew early in her career that she wanted to become a family nurse practitioner to better help patients and their families. NP Stewart received her training at Walden University and is certified by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. When she's not caring for her patients, she loves spending time with her family, quilting and relaxing at the lake. Welcome to the show, NP Stewart, how are you?

DOVIE STEWART, NP
Hi.

CARMENN MILES
It's your first time with us, so we're excited about this topic. It's flu season. No matter what we do, we can't shake it and we can't escape it. Many people think of the flu as just a bad cold, but influenza, the medical term for the flu, can be a pretty serious illness for many, especially for our older adults and people with chronic conditions. Tell us, why is the flu such a huge focus for us this time of year?

DOVIE STEWART, NP
This time of the year we have a big focus on your influenza, your flu, when patients get it, especially your patients that are already immunocompromised. Your patients with asthma, COPD, immunocompromised due to the diabetes, elevated blood sugars, heart failure patients, cardiovascular patients, which is a majority of our patients and the majority of everybody. Somebody is going to have one of the many diagnoses that is a high risk for influenza. So, getting your flu vaccine is so important to help prevent hospitalizations and worsening of those chronic conditions that you already have.

CARMENN MILES
All right. Good. Let's take a moment to welcome those who may have just joined us. You're listening to the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. You can catch episodes of this award winning podcast every Saturday on your favorite listening platform, including Amazon Music, iHeart radio, and Audible. We're also available on the radio in several Texas markets. I'm Carmenn Miles alongside co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath and our guest today, NP Dovie Stewart from WellMed at Alice. I want to expand our discussion to vaccinations. But first, there's so many myths out there around vaccination. So, I wanted to start by quickly dispelling those myths. YouÕll touch on what I know you're going to touch on through the next 30 minutes, but let's just let's just go through a few myths. The first myth and the most prevalent I see out there is, a lot of people believe that the flu shot can actually give them the flu. Is this a true or false statement?

DOVIE STEWART, NP
It's more of a false statement. It is what your body is doing. It's building up the antibodies to help prevent you from getting sick when you acquire or you come in contact with the flu virus. So, what the vaccine is doing is you're feeling that fatigue or that tired or maybe a low grade fever because it's your body's immune response system to help better protect you from getting the flu.

CARMENN MILES
Gotcha. Very good.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Oftentimes when people tell me that, they say, oh, I took the flu vaccine. It made me so sick. I got the flu. It gave me the flu. And I said, no, you didn't get the real flu, you got the light version of the flu. That was the practice. Imagine how bad you would have felt if your body didn't get that practice. If you got the real wild type H1n1 flu with no defense, however you felt you were going to feel ten times worse if you didn't get this vaccine. Oftentimes I could help them to wrap their heads around that.

CARMENN MILES
Very good. NP Stuart, what do you say to your patients who say, I never get sick? I don't really need that vaccination.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
I tell my patients, never say never. There's always a first time for everything. Knock on wood, I've never had COVID through all this time, going to nursing homes. I've never, but I've had my vaccinations and I've done the proper things to not get it. Can that keep me from not getting it? Absolutely not. I can always come up and contract the virus at any time, just as they can with the flu. Just because you haven't gotten it yet and you've been one of the lucky ones, that may be that when you do get it, you may get the worst case of the flu that you've ever had because your body just has never had to fight up against it.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Another thing that I sometimes tell patients is you may not have been very symptomatic when you had it. You may have gotten it and your symptoms were mild, and that's great. That's good. I'm glad your body is strong enough to do that, but if you had a mild case of the flu and you gave it to somebody else, someone who was really bad, someone who was pregnant, someone who was getting chemotherapy, someone who has a liver transplant. You're waiting in my waiting room there, and it's just itÕs just a little cough, being vaccinated might make you not even have that cough. It's one thing to think about vaccinations as I'm trying to look out for the other people as well as myself. Sometimes that's one of the ways we can do that. More often than not, what I tell you to my patients who are like, hey, I never get the flu. I never got the flu, I'm always good. I say, hey, well, I want you to go down the street to the Seminole Hard Rock Caf, and I want you to play the slots and play some poker because you've been real lucky. Make sure you play the lottery. In fact, give me some numbers so I can play them from you, because this luck is going well. That's great. But I like a sure bet, and a sure bet is definitely getting vaccinated.

CARMENN MILES
I love that. That's a great way of putting it. Why gamble? We'll go with the sure thing. WeÕre focused around the flu vaccination right now because it's that time of year, but we're talking about vaccinations in general. In regards to the flu vaccine, who should get vaccinated? Is there a specific age range? Tell us a little bit about that.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
All individuals should get the flu vaccine. From infancy to elderly to the 102 or 103 patients, everybody should get the flu vaccine. As Dr. Seudath mentioned, you may get a very light case of it, but what if you gave it over to your mother who's suffering from severe COPD and is on dependent on oxygen? Or what if it's given over to your grandbaby that was premature at birth? So, there are reasons why we do this for the influenza vaccinations, and that's to not only help protect us, but to help protect our loved ones.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Another thing about having it every year, sometimes patients like, do I have to get it? I got it last year. I don't have to keep getting every year. These people are just trying to make money. I don't get it. I don't I don't need it. Sometimes you have to explain to them, when flu goes from person to person, it mutates. There's about eight pieces of DNA and they get all scrambled up together. So, the flu that somebody had two weeks ago can actually be so mutated it can reinfect you. So, what they try to do is they try to engineer the flu vaccine to have the most dangerous versions of the flu, and that could be different from year to year because it has such a high rate of mutation that DNA, those chromosomes get scrambled and chopped up and put back together. So, sometimes if you explain it that way, they can understand the why as opposed to just the what.

CARMENN MILES
Very good. When you say from infancy, are we talking three months, six months, or is there a particular age?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
I think we start at five for that one.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
I want to say, every flu season, children six months through eight years of age need two doses during the year.

CARMENN MILES
Gotcha. When you say it mutates, I've always struggled with that. Can we can we dig a little deeper there and explain it to where someone like myself can understand it?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Sure. When our cells divide, we get half and half of whatever those two cells are. When the virus goes into your body and steals your cells, it steals the machinery of your cells to copy itself. Again, viruses aren't very complex things. They're not like us. They don't have so many different types of organelles and things, so they're just borrowing our machinery to copy themselves, and they're kind of sloppy. So, some viruses, when they do that, they make a lot of mistakes. They make a lot of mutations when they copy themselves. As those pieces of DNA, which is the instructions on how to make a virus, as that gets rearranged or reordered and mistakes happen, they get more mutations. Those mutations might make them attach to your throat. So now you get more coughing and sneezing. Those mutations might make it so they attach more to your intestine, so you get more nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. It might make it so those viruses induce more inflammation so you get more body aches. So, those are the ways that the actual mutations are happening. How it mutates in your body versus how it mutates in another person's body, as it happens hundreds and thousands, millions of times. Like we said, the flu virus of 2023 may be different of the flu virus of 2026.

CARMENN MILES
It makes perfect sense. We need to take just a quick break, but please stay with us as we continue this discussion on vaccination, specifically the flu vaccination. You're listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. We'll be right back.

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CARMENN MILES
We're back on Docs in a Pod. I'm your host, Carmenn Miles with co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath and our guest today, NP Dovie Stewart from WellMed at Alice. Not too far from San Antonio, Texas, right Dovie? How far is Alice from San Antonio?

DOVIE STEWART, NP
About two hours. We're about 45 miles west of Corpus Christi.

CARMENN MILES
Very good. If you just tuned in, we're talking about the flu vaccination. It's that time of year. Dr. Seudath, take it away with and carry on with the conversation, if you will.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Sure. We were just talking about flu vaccinations and flu status the reason why it's important to get it every year and how the flu continues to mutate from person to person. What I wanted to talk about is that actual sickness. Once a person gets infected, they're having all of these symptoms, what do we do about it? How can we alleviate those symptoms? What happens when a person gets hospitalized? We had touched on earlier there are people who are at a higher risk. We talked about diabetics, people with heart failure, people who may be going under chemotherapy, have a transplant or are pregnant. All of those are situations where your immune system has been decreased. So, they're at a higher risk for getting the flu. So, getting your flu shot builds your immunity to it. Some people will say, I got my flu shot, and I still got the flu. Yes, you may have still actually got the flu. I got vaccinated in September, and right after Halloween, I'm positive. What I tell people that is the flu vaccine decreases the severity of your symptoms. So, if I have a person who's sick with the flu, they're flu positive, what we can do is we can give them medicines for their symptoms. Tylenol. We can give them cough suppressant. We can give them a steroid pack if they have COPD to try and help with their mucus, we give them an inhaler to help open up their lungs. We can also give them Tamiflu, which is an antiviral for the flu. So, those are some of the things we can do. The key thing of being vaccinated is and I try to tell patients, yeah, you were miserable on your couch for five days, but you weren't in the hospital intubated for five days. I think that's the trade off that I try. Is there anything that you try to bring to your patients, NP Stewart?

DOVIE STEWART, NP
The same. I try to explain to them that it's not going to be as severe if you've had the vaccination. So just to go back and look and think of how bad you feel now, what it could have been. Did you end up with bacteria? Not having been vaccinated, you can get bacterial pneumonia, where it's even harder to clear out that pneumonia, ear infections or sinus infections. Then worsening of those chronic conditions. People that have COPD, heart failure, congestive heart failure or diabetes, it can worsen those disease processes by getting the flu vaccine. It can make it worse and increase more of the complications from those conditions that you already have.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely. Sometimes we have patients who get admissions for flu and they're coming out and absolutely we notice their functionality is so much less. They're not able to do the things that they were doing. They're not able to care for themselves. A major flu can even cause respiratory failure where they're now intubated and they're in the ICU. Like you said, being intubated can now lead to a respirator associated pneumonia. Now they're getting heavy antibiotics that can cause issues with your lungs.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
It can lead to organ failure.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yes, absolutely. That all may have been avoided just by getting this vaccine. In fact, I had I had a gentleman who went through that and he said, I really didn't believe any of this stuff, but going through it, I feel it. In hindsight 2020, I wish I could have done this previously. I think that's one of the messages that we're bringing to people. We were talking about myths. I had a patient who came to me and he said, I thought the flu vaccine gives you paralysis. It can make you paralyzed. Of course, he was touching on a very, very rare complication from the inflammation from the flu. Sometimes we have to tell patients there is a sliver of a chance that you can get that from the flu vaccine, but the chance of you getting it from that actual flu virus is so much higher. NP Stewart, when you get people who are sick in the clinic, have you gotten people who are saying, oh, I don't want the flu vaccine while I'm sick. IÕm not feeling well. I don't want to get it now. I'll put it off until next week or next week or next week.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
Oh, it's a constant. Just a couple of years ago, my sister actually had a coworker who was completely healthy, no medications, never took medications, and absolutely refused vaccinations. She acquired the flu, then pneumonia that mocked a system failure, and she did pass. My sister's like, she passed away from the flu. This is why it's important to have our flu vaccines. This is why it's very important to get the vaccinations and to help protect ourselves. It's it does happen. It's never happened to me, but it can happen and it will happen. It's just a matter of time.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely. Sometimes you'll get patients or individuals who may say, well, I'm going to boost my immunity. I'm going to take blueberry powder and I'm going to have turmeric in the morning and I'm going to eat my spinach, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to have my honey with ginger. IÕm doing all these things. Why do I need that? My response to them is often, why can't you do both? The flu vaccine is not stopping you from getting that. Have you ever had patients who are who say, well, I don't want to put that chemical in my body.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
Yes. But then they tell me that they were just drinking a monster drink on the way to the clinic, and it's like, but you're putting artificial things that you don't know into your body. You're drinking this, but you donÕt want to get a flu vaccine.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Or, if I get the flu, just give me antibiotics for it. We won't get the vaccine, but you'll get the antiviral and the antibiotics.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
Right. IÕve got the flu, now treat me for it.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Right. tried to reframe the process of getting the vaccine as actually more natural than the antibiotics, more natural than the antiviral because it's using your own immune system. What is more natural than that? It's literally telling your body to defend itself.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
ItÕs doing its job to protect itself from the flu, and they don't they don't get it. I have some do. They want to try to get that free vaccine twice a year. For our more severe respiratory, that may be the best thing for them. You have the extremes and then you have the people that are coming in like, it's flu season, I need to get my flu vaccine. So, there are positive ones and there's those that need that extra education. Every time they come in, I tell them and they're like, I told you last time, I don't take it. I said, I understand that, but I'm going to ask you every time you come in to see if there's that one chance, I'm going to convince you to get your flu vaccine.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
It's really like planting a seed and watering it because I'll tell you, there are sometimes when patients, they make that 180 switch and it's wow, oh, you're going to get your flu vaccine this year. What changed? Oh, my brother got a really bad flu. Or I saw a movie and this person got really sick and I said, you know what, I'm going to get it this year. It's so strange the motivations that make people make healthier changes. Sometimes it has nothing to do with all the things I've been saying for the last five years to this person. But that seed, they know that's important. That seed is there and they say, I'm going to make a healthier change in my life, and that's when the seed blossoms.

DOVIE STEWART, NP
IÕm the same way. You have those patients that say, well, my so-and-so or my friend said not to get it because it's not this. But then there's that one where it says, well, they told me that they needed this, so this is a reason why I'm doing it. Well, I've been telling you that for years of getting your flu vaccines. But I'll tell you, I'm like, let's give it to you. Let's get it today. I've also noticed it's a bit generational because the generation of the 80 year olds of the 90 year olds who had seen polio on their block, they had a friend who may have passed from polio, or a kid who was in an iron lung, those are the staunch people. They get their vaccine every year. It's the folks who have really benefited from the years and decades of vaccines, eradicating disease that are the ones who are questioning it. It's the people who've lived through those difficult times. They're the ones who embrace it. So, I think sometimes we just have to kind of remind people that vaccines have really changed the landscape of how we dealt with medicine for such a long time.

CARMENN MILES
My goodness, what great information. Hopefully we've turned some listeners into believers, and we can save some people from some illnesses that stem from influenza. You heard it here, folks. It's recommended that everyone six months of age and older receive an annual flu vaccination. For adults age 65 and older, vaccination is especially important, because it can reduce the risk of severe illness and hospitalization. Of course, consult your doctor for further guidance on the flu vaccination, or any vaccination for that matter. We're just about out of time. Thank you both so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to share with us today. Thanks everyone for listening in. If you found this episode helpful, consider sharing it with friends, family members, or anyone interested in learning more about health and aging. You're listening to the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Again, you can find us every Saturday on all major podcast platforms and on the radio and several Texas markets. We will catch you right here next week, same time. Until then, stay well.

OUTRO
Executive producer for Docs in a Pod is Dan Calderon. The producer is Cherese Pendleton. Thank you for listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Be sure and listen next week to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed.

DISCLAIMER
This transcript is generated using a podcast editing tool; there may be small differences between this transcript and the recorded audio content.

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