Discovering a Normal Part of your Body

A young woman at the Georgian Hotel felt a cold coming on, so she inspected her throat and discovered a dozen bumps on the far end of her tongue. I reassured her, but she wanted a doctor to see them.

I love housecalls where I know the diagnosis as soon as I hang up the phone. This qualified because the guest had discovered a normal part of her body. When you examine your tongue in the mirror, it seems smooth. People rarely stick it out far enough to reveal a clump of wart-like taste buds deep inside.

I also love telling a fearful patient that he or she has nothing to worry about, so this was a satisfying encounter for both of us.

It may save you some anxiety to memorize the following normal parts of your body.

- Put a finger inside your mouth and feel the gums behind your lower teeth. Moving just to the left and right reveals two hard lumps which may not be the same size. These are part of your mandible, the jawbone.

- With thumb and forefinger, pinch your neck just below the jaw to feel two lumps that mark either end of the hyoid bone that circles the front of your windpipe. You can wiggle them from side to side.

- Run your finger down the middle of your breastbone to an inch beyond the lower end, then push. You’ll feel a hard mass. That’s another bone, the xyphoid process. One guest was certain had a stomach tumor.

- Feel your major lymph node areas (neck, armpit, groin), and remember what you find. Part of the immune system, lymph nodes swell in response to an infection then shrink after it passes - except sometimes a node or two won’t shrink but remains forever as a pea-sized, moveable granule beneath the skin.

What Antibiotics Do To Your Body

When I started out in the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies sold pills labeled “placebo.” They don’t do that today, so a doctor who wants to prescribe one uses a real drug.

Today’s most popular placebos have names like amoxicillin and Z-pak (azithromycin). These help many conditions but not the respiratory infections for which most are prescribed.

Swallowing any antibiotic kills trillions of germs inside your body. If it’s a placebo, those germs are not causing your problem. Other germs immediately move in. Of course, those are germs that can grow in the presence of that antibiotic. If, in the future, they decide to make trouble, another course of that antibiotic might not discourage them. Do you want that?

Experts have been denouncing placebo antibiotics for decades, but their arguments are feeble. They warn about side-effects and allergies, but these are rare. Most antibiotics, useful or not, are safe over the short term.  
  
The long-term consequences are catastrophic. Soaking the environment with unnecessary antibiotics is giving rise to extraordinarily resistant bacteria. Even today about 40,000 Americans die of infections no antibiotic can treat, and this increases every year.

But who cares? It’s a fact that people with a short-term problem don’t take the long view. That might include your doctor.

Another Free Service

Her child’s nose was bleeding, explained the mother. Could I come?

I was tempted. Once in the hotel room, I would ask questions. I would take out my otoscope and peer up the child’s nose. In the end I would reassure the mother and tell her to pinch the nose and wait. The bleeding would probably stop. Persistent nosebleeds are rare and require expert attention. Then I would collect my fee and leave. 

Over the phone, the mother revealed that the child was in good health and suffering a cold.  Respiratory infections occasionally produce a nosebleed. I reassured the mother and told her to pinch the nose and wait. When I phoned later, the bleeding had stopped.