By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

We hope that those of you who share our insatiable appetite for pungent biomedical fodder heard about a health clinic in Arkansas that was evacuated recently after more than 30 people were sickened. The staffers and some patients were hit with symptoms that included nausea, dizziness and uncontrollable drooling.

A hazmat unit from the National Guard ran precautionary tests, and health officials are looking into whether the outbreak might be connected to an exterminator’s visit.

Uncontrollable drooling?! Surely there’s a disaster film in the making here. Imagine scores of hapless villagers borne away on a tsunami of drool!!

It makes good sense that a hazmat unit was called in because the toxic effects of pesticides – and nerve gasses, for that matter – may include excess salivation with drooling.

But before we tackle the fascinating subject of excessive drooling, which in polite society is more properly known as sialorrhea, how about a quick tutorial about saliva? Drool School.

By Diane Mapes

You might not think President George W. Bush and Amy Winehouse have much in common, but they’ve both succumbed to episodes of syncope, a medical term derived from an ancient Greek word that means “to interrupt.”

In other words, they’ve both fainted.

Bush passed out while eating pretzels and watching TV on his couch back in 2002; Winehouse lost consciousness last Monday after signing autographs for a group of fans outside her home.

According to the experts, fainting isn’t as freakish as you might think. Caused by a decrease in the flow of blood (and oxygen) to the brain, syncope is actually fairly common, says Dr. Blair P. Grubb, professor of cardiovascular medicine and pediatrics at The University of Toledo Medical Center. About 19 percent of all adults will experience at least one episode of it in their life. The tricky part is figuring out why.

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

"For each ailment that doctors cure with medications (as I am told they do occasionally succeed in doing) they produce 10 others in healthy individuals by inoculating them with that pathogenic agent 1000 times more virulent than all the microbes - -the idea that they are ill."
 -- Marcel Proust, “The Guermantes Way”

This quote came to mind after a particularly grueling weekend in the ER. You see, I am just getting over a brief yet vicious bout of nosophobia. Nosophobia refers to a morbid fear of contracting a disease. In my case, I was terrified of about 37 different ailments that might strike me or one of my family members down.

It didn’t help that when I got home from the hospital I had to spend an hour convincing my sister that she didn’t have thyroid disease, liver failure or metastatic cervical cancer. My sister and I both share a genetic predisposition towards worrying that isn’t exactly helped by my practice of medicine.

Surprisingly, most doctors aren’t hypochondriacs. But medical students often go through a phase of thinking they have everything they learn about in school. I can recall sitting in a genetics lecture with a pregnant friend and watching her cringe and rub her belly as we learned about every horrendous ailment that might affect her unborn child. This condition has been called "medical student's disease," "hypochondriasis of medical students" – and best of all, "medical studentitis."