
                       Don't Get Sick Until You Read This
                                 by Dave Barry

 
 
    It's time for Alarming Medical News Items, the popular  feature  that 
    can strike at any time without warning symptoms.   For  your 
    protection, this column undergoes a rigorous fact-checking   procedure 
    under which, before we will print an item, it must first  be  delivered
    to us by the United States Postal Service.  Don't bother  to thank us: 
    We aren't listening.
 
    Speaking of which, our first alarming item concerns the recently 
    discovered:
 
    EAR PROBLEM FROM HELL
 
    We learned about this thanks to alert reader Diane Eicher,  who  sent 
    in an American Medical Association newsletter containing  an  article 
    about  a North Carolina man who went to his  doctor   complaining of a
    "full sensation" in one ear, accompanied by a hearing loss.  The doctor
    checked it out, and found that the man's ear  canal was blocked by  -- 
    we are not making this up  --  a plug of  hardened Super Glue.
 
    Now  some of you are scratching your heads and wondering,  "How  does a
    person with an IQ higher than pastry get Super Glue in  his  ear  and 
    not know it?"  But you parents out there  are  no  doubt  nodding your
    heads and saying:  "It would not surprise me to learn  that this man
    has a 3-year-old son."
 
    And, of course, you're right.  According to the AMA newsletter, the 
    son "squirted the glue into his father's left ear  while  the  man was
    sleeping."  Fortunately, surgeons were able to unclog  the  man's  ear,
    but as medical consumers we can prevent this  kind  of  near-tragedy 
    by  remembering to take these basic  safety  precautions:
 
    1.Never keep 3-year-old children around the house.
 
    2.If you do, never sleep.
 
    Also:  You older children should remember that Super Glue is  a 
    serious  household  repair substance and not a toy to be  used  in 
    such  pranks  as applying it to the toilet seats  in  the  Faculty 
    Men's Room, taking care to first prepare the surface by wiping  it 
    clean of oil and dirt.
 
    Our next item was brought to our attention by Debbie and   Lindsey 
    Mackey, who alerted us to an article in the  British  medical  journal
    The Lancet  with the following title:
 
    EXPLODING HEAD SYNDROME
 
    Quite  frankly,  we  were disappointed by  this  syndrome.   We 
    naturally  assumed,  from  the title, that it  would  involve  the 
    actual  explosion of a person's head, ideally Barry  Manilow's  in 
    concert.   But it turns out to be just this weenie syndrome  where  you
    wake up in the middle of the night having "a violent sensation  of 
    explosion in the head."  Big deal.  We get that all the  time,  but 
    you don't see us whining to The Lancet.  You see us making  a  mental
    note to drink gin from smaller containers.
 
    But  not  right now.  Right now we want to tell you  about  the 
    exciting new:
 
    ADVANCES IN B.O. MEASUREMENT
 
    We  found out about this through alert readers James McNab  and 
    Shelley  Owens,  who sent us an article from the  Journal  of  the 
    American  Society for Heating, Refrigeration and  Air-Conditioning 
    Engineers written by a man named  --  we are still not making this  up  
    --  P. Ole Fanger.  Mr. Fanger, who hails from  Denmark,  has  done
    much research in the field of measuring exactly how  much  a  given 
    human being tends to stink up a given room, and  he  has  come up with
    a unit of air pollution called the "olf"  ("from  the  Latin olfactus,
    or olfactory sense").  To quote the article:  "One  olf  is the
    emission rate of air pollutants (bioeffluents) from  a  standard person
    (Figure 1)."
 
    We  sincerely wish that we could show you Figure 1, which is  a  truly
    wonderful drawing of a standard person with dozens of little  Smell 
    Arrows shooting out of his body.  Looking at  this  drawing  reminded 
    us  of one of the highlights of our life, which  is  the  time that we
    were with two friends of ours, Randall and George, in  a  bar that was
    empty except for two women at the far end  of  the  room,  and  George,
    after maybe 17 Miller High Lifes,  decided  to  Make a Move, which was
    pretty funny because George, even on  those  occasions  when  he has
    total control over his  dentures,  is  not  exactly Paul Newman, or
    even Mr. Ed.
 
    But  he went lunging over there, and with all the  subtlety  of 
    Hurricane  Gilbert, attempted to strike up a  conversation,  which  the
    two women were clearly not interested in.  So they were quiet,  and
    after a while George got quiet, and we were listening quietly,  so  the 
    whole bar was very quiet when George had  an  unfortunate  bodily
    event.  It's the kind of event that can happen to  anybody,  except 
    maybe  Margaret Thatcher, but it rarely happens  with  the  magnitude 
    that it happened to George.  You talk  about  Hurricane  Gilbert.   Of 
    course,  in  those days  we  did  not  have  modern  measurement 
    techniques, but we're sure that this event  was   completely off the
    scale on the Olf Meter.  We're only sorry that  we  didn't  get  to see
    the two women virtually sprint from  the  bar,  because  we were lying
    flat on the floor laughing so hard that  we  thought we were going to
    suffer a heart attack, which every  American should know the Six
    Warning Signs of.
 
    TODAY'S  MEDICAL TIP: Never undergo any kind of  major  surgery 
    without first making an appointment.
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