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? 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.

You know dopamine, that stuff in your brain that encourages you to drink and smoke and shop until you—and your credit score—drop.

"The medications in those commercials are for dopamine agonist drugs, which are drugs that go to your brain and stimulate dopamine receptors," says Driver-Dunckley, assistant professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. "It just so happens that dopamine receptors are in the part of your brain that controls movement—which is why the drugs are made to help with RLS and Parkinson's disease. But they're also found in the part of the brain that has to do with your reward/pleasure system."

Unfortunately, researchers haven't been able to make a drug that's specific enough to affect just the dopamine receptors that have to do with movement. "Getting a drug to work in one part of the brain and not another is very hard," she says. As a result, a small number of people—about 1 percent, studies show—who use dopamine agonist drugs may suddenly be overwhelmed with urges to gamble or have sex.

Or comb their hair.

"It's predominantly been gambling and sex that are reported," she says. "But we've also heard from patients about everything from impulsive shopping to eating to hair combing to gardening to playing solitaire on the computer for hours."

In a 2008 study of 300 patients taking dopamine agonist drugs for either Parkinson's or RLS, one person EVEN reported an urge for "wanton traveling." 

Yes, that's correct. Their restless leg medication actually gave them restless legs.

But dopaminergic side effects aren't all fun and (crap) games, if they're happening to you.
Driver-Dunckley says she's talked to people who've suddenly developed huge Internet porn habits or squandered their entire retirement savings at casinos. A 74-year-old Parkinson's patient developed "zoophilia as a possible complication of dopaminergic therapy," according to a 2002 study in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy. Apparently, shortly after having his meds increased, the poor guy tried to have sex with the family dog.  A few times.

"It's horrible and scary when something like that happens," says Driver-Dunckley. "But I prescribe these drugs to lots of people every day. "

In almost every case side effects are a result of improper dosage, she explains. "Most of the patients who experienced these problems were taking higher dosages of the drug than were prescribed."

Changing the dose ends the desire, she says.

As for those of you who might be wondering if an RLS prescription might be just the ticket to improve your luck at cards or love or both, forget about it.

"Most of the time, these people didn't get lucky," says Driver-Dunckley. "It didn't make them a good gambler, just one who was unable to control their gambling urge."

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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.

Leyner has his own unique theories on everything and I am sure this is no exception.

Mark Leyner: I have never been inordinately intrigued or amused by farting.  Of all the bodily effluvia and excretions, I'd probably rank intestinal gas pretty low on my list of favorites. I much prefer tears, spit, pus, ejaculate, rheum, colostrum, etc.

That said, this ban on "intentional flatulence" at the Camden-Rockport Middle School has all sorts of ramifications that do fascinate me. For instance, how does anyone prove "intentionality" when it comes to farting? Will the school district hire forensic gastroenterologists to analyze air samples or study surreptitiously obtained audio recordings of the boys' flatulence to try and determine whether it was deliberate or accidental?  Obviously, there are various illnesses and food allergies that can cause flatulence. 

On the other hand, what if a person willfully, premeditatedly, and with malice aforethought, renders himself potently flatulent?  What if a middle-school student loads up, before school, on a breakfast of beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and sauerkraut? Can he then claim that the farting was something that couldn't be helped, that it was "an accident."

But there's an even more profound philosophical and legal question to ponder. And that is: should farting constitute a mode of constitutionally protected free speech? If not, what necessarily privileges one orifice (the mouth) above another (the anus)?

Is there some overarching moral imperative that justifies society's anathematization of the fart?  By what usurpation of basic liberty can the state proscribe the natural expressiveness of the sphincter and the anus? In other words, can a fart be "art"? 

In the end, the Camden-Rockport Middle School Fart Ban may very well be a First Amendment issue. I think that this could result in a landmark Supreme Court case. This could be the Roe v. Wade of flatus.
    
But I urge all Americans to bear one thing in mind:  justice may be blind, but it's not anosmic. 

Dr. Billy Goldberg: I don't know what I can add to that. Maybe we can just end with this list of fascinating fart facts:

• On average, a fart is composed of about 59 percent nitrogen, 21 percent hydrogen, 9 percent carbon dioxide, 7 percent methane and 4 percent oxygen. Less than 1 percent of their makeup is what makes farts stink.
• The temperature of a fart at time of creation is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Farts have been clocked at a speed of 10 feet per second.
• A person produces about half a liter of farts a day.
• Women fart as much as men.
• The gas that makes your farts stink is hydrogen sulfide. The more sulfur rich your diet, the more your farts will stink. Some foods that cause really smelly farts include: beans, cabbage, cheese, soda and eggs.
• Most people pass gas about 14 times a day.

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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?

"It's analogous to a couple of things," says Dr.  Daniel Aires, director of the division of dermatology at the University of Kansas Hospital. "One of them would be a splinter. When someone gets a splinter in the skin, the skin grows around it. Another thing that's similar is an earring or piece of large tribal jewelry, like you see people wearing now. The skin is very happy to grow around things – that's a natural process."

According to Sheriff Whipple, no one knows for sure how long Babcock had been sitting on the toilet before her skin became adhered to it, but he offered a rough guess.

"Our guess is probably three or four weeks," he told msnbc.com. "She couldn't even tell us how long she'd been actually seated. She really didn't have any idea or concept of things like that. She was in terribly bad shape."

Whipple said the woman, who he described as "very small, very petite," appeared to have developed "bed sores" from sitting on the toilet seat for a prolonged amount of time and thought that her skin had become attached and grown around the seat as it tried to heal.

"Skin can heal and become accustomed to these situations very quickly," said Aires, the dermatologist. "I've seen a case where someone became fused to a piece of white gauze bandage. The bandaged skin was injured and the skin grew into the gauze.  And that took only about a week and a half."

UPDATE: Woman stuck to toilet remains hospitalized

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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.

According to study conducted by a microbiologist named of Anne LaGrange Loving, 70 percent of the lemon wedges she tested (from 21 different restaurants) were contaminated with bacteria, including high counts of fecal bacteria.  Ah, a nice twist of E. coli! (WATCH THE VIDEO)

"I don't need a schmear of feces with my food!" Loving said, musing upon the results of her research. We think that ranks as one of the great scientific quotes of all time! In fact, not since Archimedes – upon discovering a method for measuring the density of an object by dividing its weight by the volume of water it displaces  –  rose from his tub, rushed out naked into the streets of Rome, and exclaimed, "Eureka!  I have found it!" has there been a better scientific quote.

Now, can E. coli (Escherichia coli) kill you? If you're very young or very old, or you have a compromised immune system, it sure can. In addition to severe cramps and bloody diarrhea, an E. coli infection can have some pretty serious complications, including kidney failure. There's a relatively easy fix for the lemon wedge problem. STOP asking for chunks of fruit in your drinks. 

Could schmears of feces on the fruit in our drinks have anything to do with the eye-opening fact that the United States ranks 42nd in the world in life expectancy? Well, maybe, among other things …If you follow the news on a daily basis, you're probably wondering how an American manages to reach the ripe ol' average age of 77.9. If it's not the E. coli on your lemon wedge, how about the bad heparin? Last week, Baxter International recalled its blood thinner (which is used to prevent clotting during dialysis and after some surgeries) after some 448 adverse reactions and 21 deaths. The FDA is investigating two Chinese wholesalers who may have supplied bootleg "crude heparin" to the Chinese plant that sells supplies to Baxter. 

Apparently there are unregulated family workshops that scrape mucous membrane from pig intestines and cook it to produce "crude heparin."

And if it's not the bad heparin, how about that tainted hamburger meat?  A California meat company, Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., just recalled over 50 million pounds of meat after it was discovered that they were allowing "downer cows" to be butchered. Downer cows (cows that can't walk) are banned from the human food supply because they pose an increased risk of diseases, including mad cow disease. Putting aside, for a moment, the outrageous moral indecency of ramming fork-lifts into sick animals (the Humane Society released an undercover video made in the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse) --  how about the fact that more than a third of the meat had been used in federal nutrition programs, including school lunches! Then, of course, there's always the possibility that you could be seated next to someone with drug-resistant tuberculosis on your airline flight. And if you survive the flight, maybe the ricin in your motel room will kill you. 

And if that doesn't do you in, perhaps your own snoring will. A new study shows that loud snorers have a 34 percent increased risk of having a heart attack and a 67 percent greater chance of suffering a stroke! (Keep in mind that loud snoring is more common in people who are overweight.)

Now, that's living – and dying – the American way. We are literally wallowing in the fat and pathogenic filth of rampant commercialism. And we're paying the price – with, if not our very lives, then surely our life expectancies.

Well, there was one bright spot in the news. Gorton's Inc. recalled 1,000 cases of frozen fish after a woman found "pills" in her daughter's Crispy Battered Fish Fillets.

What the heck are they putting in our frozen fish fillets now? Hopefully, it's Ativan – so we can stop worrying about those lemon wedges.

 

 

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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.

You can be born with a teratoma, but most often, these masses aren't detected until a woman's reproductive years – often during pregnancy, since that's when a woman would undergo an ultrasound, which could pick up a teratoma. Of the roughly 22,000 new cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed each year in the United States, about 15 to 25 percent are teratomas.

Among the photographs we found online was a particularly mesmerizing image of a red blob with a perfect, gleaming white molar protruding from its surface. But the funniest picture was that of a teratoma that someone had knitted. It was reddish and about the size and shape of a large cantaloupe, with yarn hair, teeth, hands and an eyeball – all on strings so that they could be pulled out or stuffed back inside.

Wow, I thought, as I wondered how much a monster tumor could weigh. Maybe I was actually five pounds skinnier!

I have to mention, too, that while I was alternately horrified and awestruck, the main feeling I experienced that night was relief, since I found out that while bizarre, ovarian teratomas are usually benign. From the very first "hmmmmm" that Dr. Garner had uttered upon feeling the 6-centimeter solid mass during a routine examination, I had been terrified of ovarian cancer. In fact, when I called my husband after leaving the office, I had burst into tears and wailed, "He found a lump!" and almost T-boned another car in my hysteria.

Of course, as Dr. Garner often repeated, there was no way to know for sure what the lump was until he was holding it in his hands. And regardless of whether or not they are cancerous, teratomas can cause ovaries to twist (not a good thing since that limits the blood supply) and they can rupture. So I scheduled surgery to remove the mass for as soon as possible and hoped and prayed Dr. Garner's diagnosis was right. It was, and the mass was non-cancerous.

As far as teratomas go, mine looked pretty tame, according to Dr. Garner. "Like a big hairball soaked in pus," he said matter-of-factly, as I gagged in his office. However, from a microscopic standpoint, my teratoma contained all sorts of things in addition to hair and the "yellowish, pasty, sebaceous material" that the pathology report referenced. There was also skin, sweat glands, lung tissue and cartilage, for example.

The one unfortunate thing – my teratoma's removal did not result in a sudden drastic weight loss, as hoped. Maybe if it had just had some teeth…

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