Imagine hosting a radio show where a caller discusses how a Prince Albert piercing spurred an infection. The caller then says that, in order to save his life, doctors must remove his male genitalia and dig out his pelvis to keep the infection from spreading.

It’s all in a night’s work for Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of “Loveline,” who will lead a discussion at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow in the University Union Ballroom, provided by UNIQUE Programs.

Good times.

By day, Dr. Drew is the program medical director of chemical dependency at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena and is an active staff member at Huntington Memorial Hospital, also in Pasadena.

“I can’t tell you how many people come in with serious medical illnesses and the reaction is always the same, ‘What? This has never happened to me before.'” Dr. Drew said in a telephone interview before a recent airing of “Loveline.” “In this culture, it is bizarre. People don’t have any sense. They’re so not used to seeing illness that they are shocked when illness occurs.”

The Las Encinas Hospital facility runs a 22-bed inpatient, 20-bed residential and 30-person outpatient program, including an intensive day program and evening program. He said the center takes in very ill, polydiagnosed patients and described his average patient as someone who has become addicted to the medical system through various opiates.

“We’re known to be able to take care of the sickest patients,” Dr. Drew said.

These patients can have any combination of bipolar disorder, addiction, amphetamine psychosis, personality disorder, chronic Hepatitis C, heart disease and anything else imaginable. Working with them during the day, and practicing medicine where patients address him as Dr. Pinsky, prepares Dr. Drew for the the night job.

He scoffs at people who criticize his radio show questioning and quick diagnosis, which can be based on anything from the tenor of someone’s voice to the reluctance to disclose specific details to the affects of abuse.

“You’ve got to know that what I do all day is work in a psychiatric hospital and take care of very sick drug addicts who lie to me in every word they utter, and, as a result, I have to rely on my instincts to figure out what’s going on with them,” Dr. Drew said. “I’ve learned to read the emotional reactions that I have of patients more accurately than what they tell me.

“When a caller or a patient makes me feel a certain way, I’m never wrong. I’m just never wrong. That’s in my clinical work and that’s on the radio.”

The 48-year-old from Pasadena describes himself as a co-dependent person and he said that when he was younger, and without a radio show, people often came to him for advice. He said he had to learn how to maintain good boundaries and how to prevent people from getting under his skin. Otherwise, he said, he wouldn’t be doing a good service to his patients and family.

“I’ve had to learn through years and years of work how to take that pathology and turn it into a skill, and use it to their advantage,” Dr. Drew said. “So, I have a natural tendency to be overly affected by other people’s emotions. I’m tuned into them very deeply and I think some people take advantage of that. I think that that was really what it was in college. They just kind of knew that they could project their feelings into me and make them feel better.”

It’s taken more than 20 years to refine his radio advice craft. Dr. Drew hosted a radio show while he was in his fourth year of medical school at the University of Southern California.

“There definitely wasn’t even a thought in my mind that I’d be doing radio, ever at that stage of my life,” Dr. Drew said. “It was just all of the things that were interesting to me. I was sort of talked into coming on to this program. There were these amazing things, and this was a period of history that really, my instinct at the time, was that it really called for somebody to just sit down and answer questions.”

The show progressed over the years and expanded from a Sunday night show to five-days-a-week. It went national in 1996, with co-host Adam Carolla at his side.

Expansion of the show came at a critical time. He described the time before the show went national as the most unhappiest of his life. Before, he would wake up at 5 a.m., work in the hospital until 8:30 a.m, sit in an office until 3 p.m. and then work in a psychiatric hospital until 10 p.m, seven days a week.

Refocusing on his radio show forced him to reduce his day schedule, which in turn, made him happier.

“I really just started letting go of things and trusting partners,” Dr. Drew said. “About 1996 or 1997, I remember telling someone, ‘Well, God, I’ve had all of these opportunities. I’ve had all of these great experiences in media. Maybe I should really focus on that. That’s what I’m meant to do, to use media to do good.’

“And I’ve spent the next 10 years up to the present developing partnerships and teammates and people so I could move in and out of my schedule, almost, at will. I’m at the point now, right where I want to be where every day is different than next day, and I’ve never been happier with my work.”

While the focus was improved, the questions began to change. When he started, in the ’80s, callers wanted advice and knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases. The ’90s and 2000s ushered in a focus on interpersonal health, surviving abusive family situations and coming to terms with the emotional, human aspects of sexuality. And since Carolla left to host his own morning radio show, and with the younger Theodore Ramon Stryker co-hosting, Dr. Drew said there has been a broader range of calls.

“It feels a little more upbeat,” Dr. Drew said. “It’s a little more youthful, it feels. It’s not just two old guys talking about stuff that interests us. What I like is that it’s more focused on the caller and less focused on the comedy, which we lost some of that, which is unfortunate, but we’ve really returned to the roots of Loveline, the caller.”

Even if Stryker, an occasional guest co-host in the past, has developed a germ phobia and fear of getting throat gonorrhea from giving oral sex.

“Stryker has sort of learned some,” Dr. Drew said. “It’s very interesting. It’s so funny. He’s freaking out. Oh my God is he freaking out about everything.”

Dr. Drew encourages anyone who shows up tomorrow to be prepared to ask questions.

“I really focus now a lot more on substances and hooking up,” Dr. Drew said about what he discusses at college campuses. “Frankly, I want to go wherever the room wants to go. I think whatever they want to talk about, I want to talk about.”

A crowd of around 600 came to listen to a 90-minute speech the last time Dr. Drew visited campus in the fall of 2001. He addressed topics ranging from female orgasms to the effects of marijuana on the brain.

“I’m still talking about the same stuff,” Dr. Drew said. “Male, female issues and how we can sort of understand each other and how to build empathy and what relationships are supposed to be about. So, the big common thread is: women clueless about men. They seem to have no source of information that they can use to make sense of what motivates men, because their motivational systems are quite different, for the most part.

“And by the same token, for men too, the diversity of responses among women is sort of confusing to them, and nobody sort of lays it out for them so that they can understand how different each woman is, how different women are from males and if they treat a woman how they want to be treated, like a 19-year-old male, it doesn’t tend to work so well.”

“Loveline” airs from 10 p.m. to midnight from Sunday to Thursday on KZZO 100.5 FM.

Nate Miller can be reached at [email protected].