By Diane Mapes

You’re lying in bed, just starting to wake up, when you realize you can’t move. Your chest is heavy — like somebody’s sitting on it — and you’re overwhelmed with a feeling of dread.

Suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you see something move. It’s a spider. No, two spiders. No three, four, a dozen or more. They’re big as walnuts and slowly crawling up the bed posts of your bed and onto the blankets, scuttling ever closer towards your paralyzed body.

Sound like a cross between “Fear Factor” and “The Twilight Zone?” It’s not. It’s the sort of thing people with sleep paralysis have experienced for centuries. Back in the day, the vivid hallucinations that sometimes occur with this disorder were often attributed to supernatural forces.

According to Dr. Carol Ash, medical director of the Sleep for Life Center in Hillsboro, New Jersey, there is a powerful force at work, but it’s not otherworldly. It’s called sleep.

Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

Dr. Billy Goldberg: I was working overnight in the ER last week and I saw a simple case that left me rattled and worried. This wasn’t some gruesome trauma or a heart-wrenching medical story.

It was simply the case of a 10-year-old girl whose parents brought her in for what turned out to be her first menstrual period. What disturbed me was when the pediatrics resident mentioned that they consider the normal range of menarche, the onset of menstruation, to be anywhere from 8 to 14 years. 8-years-old!

I have mentioned in this blog that I have two young children at home – a 2-year-old boy and a 3-month-old girl. Eight just doesn’t seem that far away. This sent me on a quest to investigate what happened to the innocence of youth.

It turns out that experts agree that the average age at menarche has dropped by 2.5 to 4 months over the past 25 years – and is now 12.5 years. Eight is still very early but it doesn’t necessarily get doctors scurrying to search for a cause of what is called precocious puberty.

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

Dr. Billy Goldberg: If obsessively eating ice is pagophagia, and eating raw potatoes is geomelophagia – then what would eating 420 oysters in eight minutes be? Victory!

Just ask Patrick "Deep Dish" Bertoletti from Chicago who this past Saturday downed 35 dozen oysters to win The Acme World Oyster Eating Championship belt.

I have to admit that I’ve always been a little fascinated with Major League Eating and was a little disappointed that Deep Dish took down one of my favorite gurgitators, Crazy Legs Conti, who finished third with an impressive tally of 24 dozen. My interest in Pro Eating took a personal twist last Thursday when I celebrated my birthday while hosting my weekly radio show on Sirius’ new satellite channel, Doctor Radio. I was overjoyed when I found out that Crazy Legs was going to be a guest. My joy quickly turned to fear when I found out I was going to compete against Crazy Legs and another gustatory athlete, Arturo Rios Jr., in a birthday cake battle.

By Jane Weaver

There’s no question that humans are smelly creatures — from our stinky feet to our putrid arm pits. There’s not much we can do except scrub with soap and mask our odors with deodorant.

But if the malodorous stench is coming from your mouth, scientists are closing in on the cause. Blame a bug —Solobacterium moorei, to be specific.

Researchers at the State University Of New York at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine have identified a tongue bacteria that they say is associated with severe bad breath, Reuters reported.

Not much is known about the bacteria strain, although the researchers said it originally comes from, gag, human feces.

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

Dr. Billy Goldberg: There is no better impetus for a Body Odd blog than Demi Moore making a public declaration that she uses leeches to keep herself looking fresh and feeling healthy. Now, I can’t agree with Demi’s personal use of leeches (although she does look pretty fantastic), but the truth is, these little creatures are medical marvels.

In a throwback to the days of the medieval barber, today’s doctors use leeches, as well as maggots, with great success. Surgeons, for instance, use these creepy crawlers to remove blood from the site of skin grafts or reattached parts and to relieve congestion in the blood vessels.

The leeches used for medical purposes are a European variety called Hirudo Medicinalis and are raised on special leech farms. The Hirudo leech works some additional magic by secreting a chemical in its saliva that acts as an anti-coagulant to prevent blood clotting.

Oh, by the way, the bite of a leech is painless due to its own anesthetic.

Leeches aren’t the only bugs on the medical scene.

By Diane Mapes

We’ve all grown used to those rapid-fire disclaimers at the end of today’s pharmaceutical commercials, where the announcer breathlessly rattles off all the potential side effects from taking the drug. Everything from death to dry skin to diarrhea.

Well, the commercials for restless leg syndrome (RLS) pills have brought something completely new to the table. Gambling? Increased sexual urges?  What’s that about?

It’s about our old friend dopamine, explains Dr. Erika D. Driver-Dunckley, author of a recent study on gambling and increased sexual desire in patients taking the RLS medications Mirapex and Requip.

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

Dr. Billy Goldberg: The past eight weeks of my life have revolved around gas. On Jan. 22, I welcomed my second child into the world, a beautiful baby girl. It didn’t take long to realize that she was gassy like her daddy. In the wee hours of the morning when she was wailing from overwhelming intestinal distress, I had a revelation. I came to realize that we can mark the different stages of our life by how we handle our flatulence.

My poor little newborn desperately needed to let one rip. This is how we begin our life, unable to get them out.

Then comes adolescence – a stage where we are thrilled to let them out. Oh, the hilarious joy of the public fart! But BEWARE if you are in Camden, Maine. The Camden-Rockport Middle School has issued a ban on intentional flatulence – gas-passing students are threatened with detention.

Next comes puberty and we enter the phase of frantically trying to hold them in. I can just imagine my sweet little girl all grown up on a dinner date, squirming to prevent that embarrassing unintentional release.

Life gradually becomes more and more complicated and we find ourselves increasingly awash in uncontrolled flatulence and odor. We begin to reach for the Beano and even find ourselves considering the purchase of Odor Control Nether Garments. One of the many indignities of the aging process is that loss of muscle tone occurs – even around the anal sphincter. Yes, that is why an older person has a harder time holding ‘em in.

By Diane Mapes

When I was a little kid and spent too long in the bathroom, someone would inevitably pound on the door asking if I’d fallen in. Perhaps they should have warned me that if I sat there too long, I might become stuck to the seat like that poor 35-year-old woman from Kansas.

According to news reports, Pam Babcock developed a phobia about leaving one of the bathrooms of the house she shared with boyfriend, Kory McFarren, so she took up residence in it, her boyfriend of 16 years bringing her meals, clothes, water, etc.

After two years, McFarren finally became concerned about his girlfriend’s behavior (she was conscious but starting to “act groggy”), so he called in authorities. Much to their shock, they discovered that the woman had actually become physically attached to the toilet seat.

“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple told reporters when the story broke. So stuck that they had to pry the seat off the base of the toilet with a crowbar and send it with her to the hospital where it was finally removed.

How could this happen?

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

What do you think presents a more imminent danger to your average American citizen today? An Al-Qaida sleeper cell? A nuclear warhead hurtling toward the U.S. from some mobile launch pad in Tora Bora or Pakistan? A giant asteroid? An invasion of transnational flesh-eating zombies from Canada and Mexico emboldened by NAFTA? How about a lemon wedge in your Diet Coke?

Surprise! It’s the lemon wedge.

By Kara Chalmers

When my gynecologist told me that what he felt on my left ovary was most likely a teratoma, I immediately thought of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Remember the scene where Aunt Voula talks about a lump on her neck that contained teeth and a spinal cord? Well, she was talking about a teratoma, which happens to be Greek for “monster tumor.” In the movie, she actually says “inside the lump was my twin.”

Ew. How gross. But how fascinating! I was almost embarrassed to tell my husband. But it turned out he was as enthralled as I was by the idea of a tumor that was brimming with random body parts. (My husband later begged my surgeon to keep my teratoma after removing it, so that he could study it more closely – in the name of “psychological closure.” The surgeon declined.)

That night, we compulsively surfed the web for photographs, and let me tell you, teeth and spinal cords hardly scratch the surface. Teratomas (a.k.a. dermoid cysts) are made of germ cells that try to begin the process of making new humans, according to my gynecologist, Dr. Kyle L. Garner, who’s based in Sarasota, Fla. While germ cells that become eggs can be fertilized to become babies, germ cells that become teratomas, for reasons that are yet unknown, grow unregulated, he said. That’s why teratomas can have hair, eyeballs, brain matter, lung matter, skin, even bone.