There are worse places to be than Dr. Michael Levitt’s waiting room. Chernobyl, for instance. Or Love Canal. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Levitt’s facilities themselves, you understand. Indeed, as doctor’s offices go, they’re better than most. There are no millennia-old copies of Travel & Leisure on the coffee table (A Weekend in Pangaea!), no sour balls from the mid-1950s in the receptionist’s candy dish, no relentless Muzak repetitions of The Girl From Ipanema. No, the problem with Dr. Levitt’s waiting room is Dr. Levitt’s patients. Michael Levitt is a gastroen-terologist working at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis.
The term gastroenterology, of course, refers to the branch of medicine that treats ailments of the stomach and bowels and comes from the Greek gaster, for belly, and enterology, for someone who really ought to wash his hands before making you a sandwich. For a medical specialty high in heroism and low in glamour, you can’t do much better than gastroenterology, but in Levitt’s practice the stakes have been raised. For the past 15 years, Levitt has been roundly recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the science of flatulence.
Flatulence is the means by which the body rids the colon of unwanted gases, the intestines of unwanted pressure, and crowded theater rows of unwanted strangers. Its familiarity notwithstanding, it has generally ranked near the bottom of most people’s lists of Impressive Things the Body Can Do–just a notch above the ability to flatten Coors cans against our foreheads. Despite the low esteem in which nature’s joy buzzer has been held, however, a handful of researchers have made it the chief object of their study. What, they have asked themselves, can it tell us about the functioning of the body? How, they have challenged one another, can it be alleviated when it becomes excessive? Why, their families have asked them, couldn’t they at least have considered a nice podiatry practice?
Levitt is one of the rare scientists who have been willing to tackle these questions, and after 19 years in the flatus game, he does not regret his choice. An enormous amount of lore has grown up around the phenomenon of flatulence, he says, much of it untrue. Debunking these myths and uncovering the truth is like investigating any poorly understood area of medicine. The answers are all there–if you’re willing to go after them. Levitt came by his interest in eruptive science in a somewhat dramatic way. In 1976 a patient approached him with what Levitt later decorously described in a New England Journal of Medicine paper as a five- year history of passing excessive flatus. The demure phrasing in Levitt’s writing did nothing to capture the problems his patient faced. Since 1971, the prudently unnamed 28-year-old male confessed, he had been passing intestinal gas far more than he ever had before in his life, and certainly more than any of his understandably put-upon friends and family members. For the previous two years, he had been keeping a scrupulous record of his personal greenhouse emissions, and when he revealed these so-called flatugraphic recordings to Levitt, the doctor was taken aback.
