A 1997 study reported in the Journal of the American Medicine found that physicians inappropriately prescribe antibiotics for viral infections 70 percent of the time, even though they know that antibiotics are not effective against viral infections.
Doctors wrote twelve million prescriptions in 1992 for antibiotics to treat colds, bronchitis, and other respiratory infections against which these drugs are useless. Researchers concluded that physicians were prescribing antibiotics because they were yielding to what they perceived to be their patients’ expectations.
Question from a reader who has bipolar disorder. He asks if it affects sexual desire:
Question from a reader who has taken marijuana and wants to remove all traces of it from his body:
Anxiety can become progressively disabling at work and in personal relationships. Anxious people have frequent feelings of guilt and worthlessness about not being able to cope successfully with situations that other people have no difficulty with and about being dependent on family and friends, thereby restricting their lives. 
Recent scientific research suggests that anxiety is the result of a biochemical imbalance in the brain’s alarm center—the amygdala—and a psychological imbalance in thinking. The combination of a biochemically overreactive amygdala and fearful, worrisome thinking causes an exaggerated and persistent stress response. As to which comes first, this is a little like the chicken-or-the-egg question. The answer is both, in a circular pattern of causation. This is the mind-body principle: every change in the mind (anxiety) produces a corresponding change in the body (alarm) and vice versa. 
Anxiety can leave you breathless. The symptoms of hyperventilation, which literally means overbreathing, are commonly experienced by people with anxiety and yet frequently go unrecognized by either the doctor or the sufferer. 
Some people need to eat constantly and others can go long stretches between meals effortlessly. To the latter group, I say, don’t start a habit of snacking if you don’t have one already. Snacking makes the digestive system work around the clock, which will make you feel fatigued and slow the whole cleansing/healing process. 
Mood responses in children and adults are profoundly affected by diet and environment. Chemicals in food and environmental pollution have been shown to have a deleterious impact on the brain and neurological functions, leading to everything from attention deficit disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder. It makes sense that foods that contribute to physical illness would contribute to mental and emotional imbalances as well. 
Are you not digesting food well? Let’s take a look at how long some commonly eaten foods take to pass through the stomach: fresh fruit, when consumed alone on an empty stomach, leaves the stomach in about fifteen to twenty minutes. Vegetables take a little over one hour. A serving of pasta, a serving of whole-grain cereal, a filllet of fish, or a breast of chicken spends about three to four hours in the stomach. 
Question sent in from a reader: 