Dr. Ashley Alker

Water can be deadly in overconsumption, so you never want to give a baby under six months water, and you never, as an adult, want to drink copious amounts of water because it causes something called hyponatremia that can result in brain swelling, seizure, and death.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

First off, it's the easiest approach for me as an emergency medicine physician, because that is my biggest goal every day when I'm at work is to keep people from dying.

And I think that it kind of frames my viewpoint instead of telling people, you know, you need to do these things to be healthier, which most of those things, you know, we already know, eat healthy, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, sleep, these things that we...

kind of seemed to reiterate a lot of times.

I thought I would come at it at a different way with a bunch of interesting subjects and 99 diseases that you don't have to die from if you have the right information in most cases.

It depends on where we're talking demographic-wise.

If you're talking about the United States, then mostly it's heart disease and cancer, which when we say old age, a lot of times we're talking about these chronic diseases kind of building through the years.

the end result, which in some cases is a heart attack or terminal cancer.

Additionally, there are different demographics.

So some people in certain countries will die of certain things more frequently.

For instance, in certain Asian countries, stomach cancer is very prevalent, where in the US, the cancers that are most prevalent often are things like

Breast cancer in women, colon cancer, used to be lung cancer, but that's reducing.

So it depends on where you are and what you do and who you are.

But the most common things in the United States are definitely heart disease and cancer.

Something that I think surprises people that was very deadly was strep throat.

So strep throat is a disease that's extremely common, and we treat it with antibiotics.

And one of the first antibiotics, penicillin, is very effective at treating the disease.

So it seems like it's not a big deal.