and welcome to "sunday housecall." i'm eric shawn. >> and i'm arthel neville. welcome to all of you. joining us is dr. david samadi, chairman and professor of urology at lennox hill hospital and chief of robotics surgery. >> and dr. marc siegel from langone medical center and author of "the secret code." >> let's start here. something we warned about just last week and now that word that new york giant defensive end jason pierre-paul was forced to undergo an amputation of his

index finger after sustaining a horrific fireworks injury over the fourth of july weekend. dr. samadi, can he still do his job without the finger? >> all unfortunate. he's a great talent and a great player, and obviously he didn't get the memo. we talked about this last weekend. be careful about these fireworks, and, unfortunately, he had to have the amputation on the right index finger, so he's going to lose about 25% of his grip, and he has to learn the new way of playing this game. this amputation obviously is not a major operation but still a real surgery. there was also some burn that required skin graft, so he'll have six to eight weeks of recovery. no question that it's going to affect his career, and the big message -- by the way, he wasn't alone. the other player from tampa bay buccaneer c.j. wilson lost two fingers as a result of this, so this is a time of year you always want to be careful and my advice as a surgeon, i have

avoided a lot of these games -- i used to play soccer or volleyball. used to go for defense and i stay away so you've got to be careful. he hasn't signed the contract. we'll see what's going to happen with the giants. it's not a good situation, but we certainly wish him a fast recovery. that's for sure. >> yes, yes. >> marc, we talked about the dangers of fireworks and practically the young man in maine was killed. put a firework on his head, police say, and it exploded. people have to be aware and don't think how dangerous fireworks can be and can still be out there a week later. >> absolutely. the consumer product safety commission says over 10,000 injuries from fireworks every single year and over 30% of them, eric, are hand or finger injuries, so, you know, you think oh, i'm holding a sparkler but that thing can explode. firecrackers, sparklers, bottle rockets, the biggest problem of them all. in terms of this finger, and david's point about privacy is a big deal, i hate the idea that

this got out there but in terms of a finger i want to say one thing. dr. russell warren, the new york giants physician is fantastic, one of the top orthopedists in the country, head of hhs, top surgeon for over ten years and i have a feeling from news reports that he wasn't involved in this. that's terrible. he could triage it and can you save the finger? sometimes you can reimplant the news, eric. if it's an explosion injury when the bones are broken apart then there's going to be a big problem. we don't know exactly what happened but i want people out there to know amputation is not the first thing you think about. you think about can i save the finger? david, more of a surgeon, more of an expert, i want to ask you what you think about that. can you try to save a finger, even reimplant it sometimes? >> that's a very good question and i'm glad you brought dr. russell warren, a friend of mine, and certainly one of the best orthopedic surgeons out there. you obviously try to catch it and look at the vass cla tour

and look at whether you can salvage it. sometimes the scope of injury is so bad that better to remove it and prevent any kinds of infections and injuries in the future and the whole concept, you know, you and i were talking about this privacy and some of the data that got out there about the hipaa violations that could become an issue. >> basically what dr. mad issy is talking about, because we're out of time about i want to address it, a sports anchor tweeted jason's medical records, put it out there online for everybody to see, and apparently he is not liable in any way for putting this private information out there. yes or no? >> yes or no. >> i'm going to tease that. >> i think it's a big problem. >> is he liable? that sports anchor? >> i'm not an attorney. everybody from the hospital, we as doctors are responsible to protect the patient's privacy. in the world of electronic medical record and all the

social media >> exactly. >> it has to say. >> we don't know the case but hipaa is sacrosanct, a contract between us and the patient, we're not supposed to release their information. >> big message to a lot of doctors to be really careful out there. you know where the biggest problem with doctors and residents and fellows are, in the elevator, when you have people coming from outside and you don't pay attention so be careful. >> something else i want to tell parents, hipaa laws, sometimes if you have an adult or over 18-year-old child at college, you're not allowed sometimes to have access to the medical records, so it's very important to be on top of that because although the hipaa laws are very good and private, they can potentially cause some issues. >> you just told me we had more time than we realized but i wanted to tease that dr. samadi wrote an article on this very subject on newyorkdailynews.com and i'm sure he'll post it on his facebook page. >> we spoke a lot with marc about this. the doctor's responsibility to protect the patients unless he has given permission, and he's

right. we don't know all the details, but this is a very serious issue. >> marc, what about parents in that issue with their -- with their children? >> when it comes to children, we try to deal directly with the patient. we bring the parents in if we have, to but even if we're dealing with a minor we try to deal directly with the patient. again, we don't want information getting around. i want to, by the way, get back to the injury for one more second before we move on which is david mentioned the point about loss of function, and he's a lineman, so he's not catching a pass. he's not throwing a pass, but he still has to move other linemen out of the way to get to the running back. for people following the story, we don't know what damage was done to the thumb. the thumb and middle finger, key things. fractured that right thumb, fractured that thumb and he lost his index finger all the way down to the knuckle, he may have problems in terms of what he can do on the playing field. i know he's going to try to return. >> if something like that happen, you hear the stories, do you put the finger in ice or

something and call 911? >> that's quite interesting because i remember a case exactly -- i'm glad you brought this up. the first thing you want to do is if you see part of the finger that's there, you want to put it in the ice, cover it in a bag and bring it to a hospital. there have been cases of revascul revascularization. the nerves, sometimes that's difficult and the vessels, it's a very complex operation but in the hands of a good handed surgeon it will work. >> prosthetics are just cosmetic. people are asking that all this week. he may have a finger on there, a mechanical one. he won't be able to play football with. something more or less cosmetic. >> we wish him well. >> david wrote a great column on this topic, as you mentioned. >> all right. thank you. coming up, we have really a shocking report. have you heard about this? the number of heroin-related deaths in our country have nearly quadrupled over the last decade. coming up, we'll take a look at

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suburbs. what gives? >> eric, the reason that that number has quadrupled is because, first of all, it's getting cheaper. secondly, there's more and more prescription drug users out there who get painkillers after an operation or even not after an operation. they get addicted to it and end up on heroin because a doctor won't give them more prescriptions. we're talking about 4 million people in the united states or more who have tried heroin and a quarter of those end up addicted to heroin, and the problem is, by the way, the biggest problem of all, is the opiate receptors in the brain that heroin works on and hair season an artificial substance that works from the opiate plant. morphine is made from it and then it turns into heroin. your breathing is suppressed and your blood pressure goes down and over time you need more and more of it. you can't regulate it. you're not a surgeon. if you take too much, you stop breathing and maybe we can get you back with a medicine to reverse it and maybe we can't. >> this is a huge, huge problem

and the target audience for this are white male. it's a very specific group that are picking up on this. white male between the age of 18 to 25, suburb, income level less than $20,000 and mostly have medicaid. that's the group that's really in trouble with heroin. among women it has doubled. among men it's gone up by 50%, number of deaths are 400% higher in the last decade. the numbers are ridiculous, and we need to watch out for this. partly it's because of our fault. doctors are writing, i hate percocet and tile 1-877-pa6-50013 and i stopped writing for these medication and those are gateways and people get addicted and 0% end up as heroin addicts. it's a lot easier to get heroin today than come to our office and get one of those prescriptions. access is easier. it's cheaper, but it's extremely addictive, and i'm sore worried about the next generation. as doctors you have to be responsible and stop writing these medications for simple

arthritis or back pain or any of those. that's very important. >> let's say you are addicted or you have a loved one. i'm sure someone watching you right now has a loved one that's addicted. how do they kick the habit and get that moing monkey off their back. >> go to a specialist. i agree with david's point and i want to emphasize it. it's about doctors overprescribing painkillers and now i want to give a shout-out to new york state with the istop program. if i want to write a pain killer i need to go online and check the website and lists where people are getting it from. if you're shopping for painkillers i can stop that. >> i can also worry about your prescriptions because it has been a lot of cases of prirpgss being stolen from doctor's offices. before it used to be a tripli cat e and now the prescriptions are out there. you have to protect that and that's very important. and if your family is in habit carry narcan or rolaxon.

narcan reverses, if you see someone in your family, go through training and give it by injections and within two to five minutes replaces those receptors and you wake up and stop from dying and not breathing. >> that's what we have on the crash cart. if an ambulance is called, they have that, and if they think you have had a drug overdose, bam, you'll start breathing again, it's dramatic, but to eric's earlier question and what if you have the problem, how do you get treated? go to an addiction psychiatrist or expert. get involved in cognitive behavioral therapy that we talked about allotted and use something called naltrexone and slowly wean off of it. >> is it successful? >> this is inpatient rehab. this is not something that's that easy to kick and there are programs all around the country. phoenix house where i went and interviewed people. there's many places that take care of this. a lot of times it could be a month, two months, three months of rehab before you could get off of it and lifelong problem

if it's not alcohol. >> one of those clinics in your hometown, how do you get access to those and who pays for it? >> well, hopefully insurance will pay for it. that's a great question, arthel. hopefully insurance will pay for it. they don't always pay for it. someone in your town that's an expert. >> not enough sensors to cover this problem. that's part of this whole segment is to really encourage the government and private sector to have more rehab centers for this particular one, and i don't know if you're aware of it, even police officers, we're told, they can carry some of the narcan or rolaxon. i'm not sure where we are with them. they would care one of them and if they would see somebody about to die from heroin addiction they would give it from the vein or a nasal spray to activate the breathing system. they can save somebody's life. this is what we do in the emergency room. someone that comes in that's a heroin addict. >> before you get to the

emergency room the doctor's advice is great. talk to the hospital, talk to the local folks where you live if you have a loved one. >> and watch your children. >> it's an epidemic, and one of the main reasons it's an epidemic is because it's gotten so cheap. it's a huge black market item so you prescribe percocet or vicodin and the next thing you know the person is taking heroin, and among adolescents, as david was mentioning, mostly among whites. an enormous problem right now. >> unfortunately, in college and universities, this is also penetrating so you've got to watch your children very quickly. >> doctors, thank you very much. >> good information. researchers warning about another addiction. this one has to do with our cell phones, yeah, and soft real health risks of spending all that time staring at the screen.

time now for should i worry our weekly segment about everything that worries us. this one coming to us from a report that twitter has taken down some of its flashing vine ads amid concerns among epilepsy patients. how concerned should we be. i'm sure this affects epilepsy patients but goes beyond that as well. >> we'll talk a little bit about this which there are patients that are photo sensitive and in this particular situation there were flashes coming from the videos making patients have seizures. not only that. i want to talk about this whole ipad addiction. we've gone from computers to tv to now tablets and iphones and the young generation, 8-year-old kids are spending about six to

eight hours -- six to eight hours average on these computer systems and ipads. 11-year-old and older are spending eight to ten hours. our youth basically are busy with all of this. no face to face interaction. you go a family restaurant everybody takes their phones and doing selfies. it's absolutely ridiculous. what has happened is as a result of watching these violent video games we see increasing violence. the school performance have gone down. average number of teenagers after they go to bed they are sending 24 texts. >> do you think kids go to sleep incheck the texts at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. >> kids are waking up early. there's something called web junky. web junky is about chinese kids in boot camp and really rehab center for this internet addiction. this is serious. you guys are smiling. but he'll probably -- it's a

serious issue. what they are doing is taking all the electronics away, like a heroin addict. and basically teach them,000 interact, how to read, how to go back to normal life. >> first we have to i've the problem. the studies are shock. the kaiser family foundation found 8 to 10-year-olds are averaging eight to ten hours a day something to do with tv, iphone, computer. over 10 years old, over 11 hours a day. more than 50 texts a day on average. now, you get the idea when we start off talking about epilepsy that 5% of epileptics get triggered. it's the flashing lights. if you don't have epilepsy it's not helping your brain either. it's bad for development. it's bad for interaction with

each other. it's bad for developing relationships. you get into bad habits. what about reading. anybody remember reading? reading was imagination. it brought you into another world. you sat there and brought you into the world of imagination. >> what do you tell your kids when you see one has the ipad -- by the way, this is not about apple or attack on apple but all the electronics out there. >> i'm struggling with that right now. i won't mention any names of my kids. but what you do is you take them bike riding or you sit and read with them. you have alternative activity that you give your children instead of this. you stick to it. you know what? here's the biggest secret of all. we're lazy. parents are too lazy out there and that's why this is happening. >> i thought you were going to talk about childhood obesity. >> that too. >> it's not just the internet, it's the cell phones. star basketball player said he an injury from he calls it what,

cell phone elbow. i heard of tennis elbow. you think this thing is real? what is it. our doctors will bisect it in a moment. of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. before you and your rheumatologist decide on a biologic, ask if xeljanz is right for you. xeljanz is a small pill, not an injection or infusion, for adults with moderate to severe ra for whom methotrexate did not work well. xeljanz can relieve ra symptoms and help stop further joint damage. xeljanz can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers have happened in patients taking xeljanz. don't start xeljanz if you have any infection, unless ok with your doctor. tears in the stomach or intestines, low blood cell counts and higher liver tests and cholesterol levels have happened. your doctor should perform blood tests before you start and while taking xeljanz, and routinely check certain liver tests. tell your doctor if you have been to a region where fungal

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>> it's real. there's actual physical manifestations of the mistakes we're making with those addiction iphones. your elbow is bent. you're tapping away. end up with a tennis elbow. you know what? it's not something to laugh at. it sounds funny. if you've got it you know how painful it is. you have to go through physical therapy. it's a big, big deal. >> is it like work on your computer. >> from repetitive moves. same thing with your tennis move that's what we're doing with our cell phones. when you hold the cell phone the whole time you're getting tendonitis. the tendon connects the muse told the bone. if you have that you stop. put some ice pack on it to calm it down if it's short term. long term warm bath or hot pack. you also can put a brace, sometimes if you really use a lot of wrist when you're texting

wear a brace. >> excellent point. the brace is helpful. >> exercise. not yoga even though we talked about this. hand against each other and practice and stretch and you can also push it the other way. >> what's it called? bye. after both the u.s. and iran threatened to walk away is there a break through in iran's nuclear talks? word from vienna is that after a decade of diplomacy a deal may finally be coming to fruition. the pentagon announces its cutting 40,000 troops from the army. with growing threats around the globe critics say this is not the time for a military retreat. we'll talk to a senator whose state is bracing for those cuts. she wrote one of america's most beloved books "to kill a mockingbird." 55 years later that novel became a worldwide sensation and we're waiting for the second book scheduled to be