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Hundreds of Questions You’d Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D.

THREE RIVERS PRESS • New York

A DF Books NERDs Release Copyright © 2005 by William Goldberg, M.D., and Mark Leyner All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.www.crownpublishing.com Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leyner, Mark. Why do men have nipples? : hundreds of questions you’d only ask a doctor after your third martini / Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg. p. cm. 1. Medicine—Miscellanea. I. Goldberg, Billy. II. Title. R706.L49 2005 610—dc222005004882 e-ISBN 0-307-33704-9 v1.0

DEDICATION This book is dedicated to all those special doctors who inspired us: Dr. Marcus Welby, Dr. Dre, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Cliff Huxtable, Dr. J, Dr. Scholl’s, Dr. Phil, Dr Pepper, Dr. Strangelove, Doc Baker, Dr. Who, Dr. Doolittle, Dr. Johnny Fever, Doc Gooden, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. John Rooney, Dr. Kildare, Dr. Hibbert, Dr. No, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Ruth, Dr.Evil, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Dr. Ben Casey, Doc Holliday, Dr. Doogie Howser, and the fight Dr., Ferdie Pacheco.

DISCLAIMER
What you are about to read is mostly true, as far as we know. But this book in no way should substitute for a visit to your doctor. Remember, doctors are trained professionals. Also, do not attempt to answer these questions yourself unless you are a mother. Mother always knowsbest.

When you’re at a cocktail party, someone inevitably asks you what you do for a living. If you say that you are a doctor, the barrage begins. Soon you’re looking at someone’s mole, consulting someone else on his brother-in-law’s painful flatulence, racking your brain to explain the etiology of your hostess’s episodic vertigo, and that’s just the beginning. You would think that aftertwelve years of rigorous training and sleepless nights, doctors would have all the answers. But no! Not so. The sad fact is that one of the medical establishment’s great shortcomings is its failure to teach what the general public really wants to know about medicine. This book is an attempt to rectify this unfortunate situation. Inside these pages we will begin to answer some of the medical questionsthat real people ask. Pressing questions such as “Why does my pee smell when I eat asparagus?” “Is it true when they say ‘beer before liquor, never sicker; liquor before beer, never fear?’” “Is sperm fattening?” “What causes an ice cream headache?” This is not a self-help book or a medical manual. It’s a glimpse at some of the strange things that people want to know from their doctors, but are tooembarrassed to bring up in the ER or during an office visit. They only seem to find the courage to ask these questions after their third martini. That’s when the party begins.

Billy Goldberg:How did Mark Leyner and I come to know each other and pursue this heroic project,Why Do Men Have Nipples? This is a long dark tale, a quixotic quest. A journey of two friends attempting to accomplish anearly impossible task. We are an unlikely pair. I am a New York City emergency room doctor and Mark is a successful novelist and screenwriter. Not exactly the perfect literary match, but, our paths crossed and the rest is history. . . . It began one frigid, blustery night in a busy New York City emergency room. I had been thinking about doing this book for many years. I had compiled questions andpondered answers but was never able to fully steel myself for such a perilous exploration and actually write any of them down. I had just been hired as a medical adviser on the ABC medical dramaWonderland . This short-lived show was a realistic drama based on the daily lives in a psychiatric emergency room and a prison psychiatric ward. The show added an ER character and I was hired to integrate...