By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

Imagine, for instance, if an accidental bop on the head changed your accent from the grating stridence of Fran Drescher to the dulcet, euphonious tones of, say, Kate Winslet. Or, if you’re a man, a whack to the forehead transformed your speech from something out of Homer Simpson's pie-hole to the adorably urbane voice of Stewie Griffin from “The Family Guy.”

An equally bizarre voice change happened for real to a woman from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Recent newspaper reports and a cable TV show featured CindyLou Romberg, who had a serious brain injury after falling out of a moving car in 1981 and splitting her head from front to back. Once her awful headaches and lingering back pain abated, she resumed a normal life as a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast. Until her back started bothering her again about a year ago.

After visiting a local chiropractor, she soon began speaking gibberish. When Romberg eventually began speaking normally again, she had a German accent, tinged with what some friends thought was French or Russian. This from an American woman who had never studied a foreign language, nor been to any foreign country, except Canada.

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

Attention all campers! You no longer have to bother dipping your bunkmate’s hand in warm water in an attempt to make him pee in the bed. If you want to know how to terrorize that kid who picked on you on the kickball field, all you have to do is get inside his dreams. Get inside his dreams. Through his nose.

German researchers have found that sleepers exposed to an unpleasant smell will have negative dreams. The opposite is also true. When subjects were exposed to the smell of roses, their dreams were predominantly positive. These olfactory observers used rotten eggs in their study, but we are sure that a stinky gym sock, left perched on the pillow of your enemy, would work just as well. While we’re fairly certain that the researchers didn’t plan to have their findings used in this manner, there are always unintended (and sometimes dastardly) consequences of scientific breakthroughs.

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

Is it true that our noses actually grow ever longer as we age?

Wouldn’t this be yet another depressing indignity heaped upon all the other depressing indignities that accompany getting older? There’s good news and bad news.

The good news: No, our noses don’t grow longer. The bad news: Our noses DROOP.

Gravity is the villain here. As the collagen and elastin in our skin break down, our skin loses its strength and suppleness and the pull of gravity wreaks all manner of havoc upon our bodies. It causes the tips of our noses to droop, our eyelids to fall, our ears to elongate and our jowls to form. It causes our boobs and our scrotums to sag.

Gravity even causes those lovely, purplish varicose veins. Normal veins work against the force of gravity. Over time, as the vein walls weaken, the pressure of gravity causes veins, especially in the legs and calves, to enlarge and bulge.

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

In the great drama that is medicine, there are obvious villains: cancer, heart disease, trauma. And there are glorious heroes: vaccines, antibiotics, artificial hearts, etc. It’s easy to wax poetic about such august matters. But we prefer the bit players on the medical stage – the unsung, largely forgettable conditions. Of these, nothing is as gloriously mundane as earwax.

Earwax – or cerumen, as it’s known in the biz – is made up of keratin (the stuff of dead skin) along with fatty secretions, a mix that protects the ear canal from water and infection.

There are two types of cerumen: wet and dry. Wet cerumen, which is light or dark brown and sticky, has a relatively high concentration of lipid and pigment granules. Dry cerumen, which is grey or tan and brittle, tends to have less fat and pigment. The wet wax tends to be most frequent in Caucasians and African Americans, while the dry version is found in the ear canals of Asians and Native Americans. (We’re surprised that no enterprising screenwriter has come up with some nightmare, doomsday scenario in which the world is ultimately Balkanized into two warring camps, The Wet Cerumens and The Dry Cerumens, whose internecine battle results in the destruction of the planet.)

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

What if you could simply swallow a pill and become a buff, shredded, aerobic dynamo all without having to spend one sweaty second in the gym? Wouldn’t an instant fitness drug be great? Maybe not.


A dream for couch potatoes? Watch video

We were both mighty intrigued to learn that scientists had developed not one, but two “Mighty Mouse Drugs” that endow mice with all the benefits of having worked out furiously, without the effort of actual exercise. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that a drug called Aicar increased mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. A second drug with the catchy name “GW1516,” when combined with exercise, boosted the mice’s endurance by a whopping 75 percent!

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

We see a great deal of head trauma in the ER. Survival stories, however, are few and far between.

For every amazing tale of survival you hear about – a man is fine after being accidentally shot in the head with a nail gun or a boy completely recovers after a butter knife is lodged in his skull – most cases of head injury don’t have happy endings.

The recent tragedy of welterweight Oscar Diaz is typical. The 25-year-old boxer is in a coma after collapsing in the ring on July 16. According to news reports, there was no sign that anything was wrong with Diaz until he grabbed his head and cried out just before the 11th round. Doctors think he will survive after surgery for bleeding on the brain, but whether he’ll have a normal life is unclear.

When it comes to head trauma there’s a weird phenomenon we often see in the ER — nothing turns out like you'd expect.

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

No matter how careful we think we are, we’re all prone to doing some pretty stupid things to our bodies. Some of us take responsibility for our own actions. Others blame their defective thongs.

Remember Macrida Patterson? She’s the Los Angeles traffic cop who sued Victoria’s Secret for an eye injury that occurred when a heart-shaped metal fastener in her underwear snapped, popped into her eye and injured her cornea.

The case of the hazardous thong got us talking about the fact that people typically look for some excuse or someone else to blame when they get hurt. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergency room.

Just this past week, Billy was working in the ER and he saw a classic example of a poor decision gone haywire. It was a busy Monday evening and the ER was filled with your usual assortment of injured, infirmed and intoxicated. Alcohol is usually involved in most of the ER’s most brilliantly dumb accidents. In fact, from 1992 through 2000, researchers found that there were about 68.6 emergency department visits related to alcohol, almost 8 percent of the total ER visits during that time period.

We have to assume that some intoxicant was involved in this particular case, but by the time Billy got involved, it was too late for questions. A middle-aged man had apparently needed to urinate and used a nearby plastic bottle. After inserting his penis in the hole, he found himself unable to extricate his now swollen member from the grasp of this plastic vise. It is unclear what attempts he made on his own, but by the time he arrived he was trapped and had been unable to relieve himself. After a hefty dose of morphine, two young residents and a junior attending physician unsuccessfully tried to free him from captivity. By the time Billy arrived, he was screaming in pain.

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 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."

By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

What ever happened to good old-fashioned romance? Oysters and champagne are passé as people reach for more exotic aphrodisiacs. The pursuit of a sex boost had a deadly result for one New York man after he ingested an aphrodisiac made from toad venom. This poor soul ate a product meant for the skin, and unfortunately it contained a chemical that had effects similar to the heart drug digitalis, which can cause irregular heart rate, nausea and vomiting.

What a terrible way to go.

Aphrodisiacs are by no means a new invention. The name comes from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, and throughout history many products have been believed to stimulate sexual desire – from rhino horns to snails to the beetle-derived “Spanish fly.”

Viagra is mistakenly thought of as an aphrodisiac, but rather it’s a treatment for ability (impotence), not desire. Unfortunately modern pharmaceutical companies have yet to find that magic little potion to increase sexual desire. Just this month, a highly touted compound, Bremelanotide, originally known as PT-141, was shelved as an aphrodisiac by its company Palatin Technologies. This nasal spray showed remarkable promise stimulating the desires of both men and women, but it also raised their blood pressure.

Don’t give up hope. The company has another compound, PL-6983, that they’re banking will take its place.