Ask Dr. Schund (C)1990 Alan M. Schwartz Dr. Schund, why do people bite their nails? The consumption of self as food, autophagy, is an all but ubiquitous phenomenon avidly and compulsively practiced by most children and many adults. The bitten fingernail says a lot about its owner, both in volume and in substance. All categories of individuals who engage in this exotic practice may be lumped into a single cohort -- Human beings who are bound and compressed into a screaming white hot nodule of distress find extraordinary comfort and a path to survival in the nibbling of their nails. So intense is the release afforded by the eating of fingernails that practitioners of the art will pursue those cuticular tidbits to the point of drawing blood and beyond, to the risk of infection and even self-mutilation. Strangely potent erotic promises are embodied within a woman's sensuously long nails, lightly drawn across your skin, pausing with delicate pressure upon your lower lip. Many societies across the planet and through the ages have revered and even worshipped the extraordinarily long fingernail. America is currently seized within a fetish of artificiality and anatomic distortion. The bustle, the girdle and the padded bra have given way to cosmetic surgery and the implant. Prominent among the appliances for the tantalizing reconfiguration of the human body is the artificial nail, to the tune of more than $70 million dollars each year. Why is that? Rather than condemn the devourer of fingernails as a sick puppy engaged in compulsive neurotic behavior, let us view him for what he truly is, an expert practitioner of self-medication and a voluptuary. The freedoms of America embodied within the Bill of Rights are being eroded. The rights of privacy, religious practice, self-defense, artistic and literary expression... are being progressively expunged by a Supreme Court intoxicated with the power to define propriety and a constabulary that will not be held in thralldom to the small print. Your moral rectitude will be splattered across the newspapers as word of your fleshly excesses is seized upon by those who would with yellow journalism and shrill cries grind your bones to make their bread. Your fingernails are overhanging the precipice of government regulation and confiscation as drug substances. Herbal practitioners in the Far East have for millennia known of the potencies inherent in natural substances. Their pharmacopoeia has been derided and scoffed at by Western physicians and pharmacologists who have unashamedly raided those very pages for their own chemical drugs. The foxglove begat digitalis for congestive heart failure. Rauwolfia tea became reserpine, the first tranquilizer and an effective antihypertensive agent. Cinchona bark is 8% by weight quinine, and why a tree needs protection from malaria remains an unanswered question. The Oriental formularies encoded the awesome black magic of fingernails, punctiliously doled out to the very wealthy and the ultimately powerful members of their own societies. The rhinoceros is an extremely stupid, nearsighted and ugly herbivore. It marks its territory through a unique anatomical adaptation allowing it to urinate in a broad horizontal fan, straight back. This detestable evolutionary dead end has been avidly sought for its extraordinarily valued horn, worth more than twenty five thousand dollars the kilo on the international black market. That wart-like excrescence topping its snout is not a horn at all, not a bony protrusion growing from its skull, but a keratinaceous projection growing from its skin. The breathtakingly potent and officially discredited ultimate aphrodisiac, rhinoceros horn, is biochemically indistinguishable from the human fingernail. The autophagic nail biter engages in an impassioned habit, entrapped as he is within a whirlpool of biochemical fantasy and sustained pleasure. The tender membranes beneath the tongue are bathed with permeable substances leached from the masticated keratin of the fingernail, offering immediate entry into the bloodstream and an express trip to the innermost structures of the brain where the id dwells, waiting and lusting. When your mother examined your nails, we know what she, unconsciously in her heart of hearts, was seeking. When your finger inches toward your incisors, your tongue darting and touching that blade of keratin growing from its tip, we know what thoughts and solace await. Take your finger out of your mouth.