Tongue Trouble..

I have had a sore tongue for about a week now and it is driving me crazy.

Started with something like a burnt tongue, then became as painful as an ulcer, but now half of my taste buds are numb. Yesterday, I could not even taste salt properly anymore, but luckily that's ok now.

One of my tiny tongue feelers bleed every night so I have resorted to rinsing with Listerine. That seems to alleviate some problems, but since I have only started yesterday, let's see if tomorrow it gets any better.

My wife has also developed the same problem, and she said that some of her officemates have been telling her that they too have had the same symptoms.

Back to Malaysia's most popular antiseptic mouthwash.. A question that has haunted me for many years is whether do we need to rinse after gargling with it? Yes? No? Don't know?

Well, again thanks to the greatest invention of human kind - the internet, I have concluded that you can/should rinse off with water afterwards. Well, some forums say only after 30 mins, and some say you can right away.

It DOESN'T specify on any official Listerine pages (correct me if I'm wrong) the correct answer, though.. Trust me, I'll get it out from them sooner or later..

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner mentioned this interesting fact:

Listerine was invented in the 19th century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in a very distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis", the faux medical term that the Listerine advertising group created in 1921 to describe bad breath. By naming and thus creating a medical condition for which consumers now felt they needed a cure, Listerine created a market for their mouthwash. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered a catastrophe, but Listerine's ad campaign changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. In just seven years, the company's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

Go figure..