This is a follow-up to the tale of woe that is my last trip to the dentist after a diagnosis of an abscessed molar on the bottom left. I kept the following bits under wraps mostly for the past week or so, save to a small number of people, and then I'll wrap things up with the events of today. To save your stomachs and appetites, the rest of the this post is under the cut. If you read the known side effects of the antibiotic clindamycin carefully you will note the following: Chills, confusion, diarrhea with blood in it …

For many years, the development of pharmaceutical drugs has been kind of hit or miss. New and interesting bioactive compounds are discovered and tested in different laboratory animals until someone figures out what a particular compound might be good for. It isn't terribly common that a pharmaceutical company comes up with an idea for an effect and then works backward until they find a compound that will do what they hope to accomplish.

That shows signs of changing.

A company called Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia has announced the development of a new drug which is effective in treating one …

There's really no way to start off an article about this other than to lay it out up front: Soda fountains in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia were found to be contaminated with the same bacteria you find in human feces. Thirty soda machines in the area had samples taken from them for analysis and the soda from them was found to be contaminated with a few strains of e. coli, stenotrophomonas maltophilia, klebsiella pneumoniae, and other coliform microorginisms. Oh, and as if that wasn't enough to make you reconsider getting a drink the next time you go to a …

At first scratch, it would appear that respiratory troubles are fast becoming part and parcel of my winters in the DC metroplex. Two weeks ago I was fighting off a cold, and rather successfully, or so I thought. Last week I developed a persistant dry cough that now has has my cow-orkers wondering if I have tuberculosis, keeps Lyssa awake at night (even if I sleep on the couch), and busily ties knots in the muscles of my neck and stomach. It isn't one of those coughs that clear your lungs and sound disgusting, but at least mean that you …

It seems that my body's biochemistry is ever so slightly messed up due to the large amounts of analgesics and antibiotics I've been taking lately in preparation for the peculiarly mediaeval form of torture referred to today as root canal therapy, which feels like anything but therapy if you're on the recieving end for a couple of hours at the very least. It's been difficult to think clearly for the past couple of days, and I seem to have the short term memory of a goldfish. On top of all of that is a general feeling of malaise - much like …