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Those of us who can remember far back enough to being a medical student – and I'll admit, it's getting a bit of a stretch these days – will recall the discomfort non-medical people feel with some of the situations we deal with as a matter of course. My housemates would look at my medical textbooks with a mixture of revulsion and awe. The more modern equivalent for me happens on the train; I open a journal, or a pdf on the laptop, and am about to read an interesting paper only to realise that the ‘normal’ people around me have responded, and are either aghast or morbidly interested. In this month's journal I reckon that there are at least three such articles – papers which would, in the words of my son, ‘gross out’ the ordinary lay public, but which are very important.
The first of these is my editor's choice: a paper by Fairhurst and Cockerill on the management of drooling (see page 26). I'll be honest, I'd not heard of it referred …