Cared Spitless

I've noticed that a lot of prescription medications list dry mouth as a side effect.  Apparently it wasn't my imagination: they now have a prescription drug to handle dry mouth.  A lot of people would be suspicious about this: Big Pharma gives you a drug that gives you dry mouth, but don't worry, they have another drug that fixes that.

To me, the bigger question is: isn't it kind of a coincidence that fixing so many of your problems involves reduced saliva?  I remember George Carlin joking that saliva causes stomach cancer, but apparently it causes everything else as well.  Or maybe it's the part of the brain that handles salivation that causes all our problems.  That makes sense, since it has a pretty simple job, as Pavlov showed.