Nobody wants to feel this burn

You may have seen hemorrhoid humor on bumper stickers: "If you were any closer to my rear end, you'd be a hemorrhoid."

Or heard a comedian riff on the malady: "I tell you what's gross -- tucking your hemorrhoid in the top of your sock so you won't step on it."

Like most people, Dr. Joseph Thornton, an associate professor at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, laughs at the jokes, even appreciating the down-home wisdom some one-liners provide: "Hemorrhoid patients never play musical chairs."

But he also is the first to say that humor revolving around hemorrhoids is funnier if you don't have the ailment also referred to as piles -- not surprisingly, swollen and inflamed veins in the anus and lower rectum that may result from straining during bowel movements or from the increased pressure on these veins during pregnancy seldom make people double over with laughter.

They may well double over, the good doctor says, but not with laughter.

As we sit in a Starbucks, the 66-year-old colorectal surgeon talks about the challenges of helping people deal with a problem that he says "sometimes can grow as big as a bagel and cause embarrassment."

"It's not just the pain and itching from the swelling that they're concerned with," Thornton said. "Often there's drainage and the hemorrhoids bleed. It's hard to keep their clothes clean. Many people won't even wear white clothes. Some men will even start wearing their wife's panty liners. One patient I had told me he thought his wife didn't notice that he was stealing them from her. And then one morning he walked into the bathroom and there were two boxes of them, one marked 'his' and one marked 'hers.' "

More than 30 years of prescribing potions that run as much as $300 to ease the discomfort of patients -- coupled with performing the surgical removal of hemorrhoids that takes patients weeks to recover from -- convinced Thornton to try to come up with something better.

And now he's sure he has. He smiles as he hands over a bottle of pills labeled, "TushM.D."

Patients who have used it over the last couple of years -- a patent is pending on the all natural product -- swear by it.

Could Thornton, an African-American, one day be recognized across the nation in February as the nation celebrates Black History Month?

Or better yet, could he simply be recognized in American history as the man who turned piles to smiles?

"I think I might be a footnote," the humble physician said. "It's not like I've developed the vaccine for polio or come up with a cure for cancer. Hemorrhoids aren't really life-threatening. People suffer with them for 20 or more years. I haven't found a cure. What I've done is found a way for people to manage them, to live a more comfortable life.

Seventy-five-year-old retiree Roger Pryor thinks the doctor is being too modest. So does Terry Leysath, an airplane pilot who's been flying for Southwest Airlines for 24 years.

"Without those pills, I would have had to have surgery," Pryor said. "They just shrunk them up."

Leysath, a former science major, admits he was initially skeptical that the natural ingredients in TushM.D., would jell so his butt wouldn't swell.

"Within two days, the hemorrhoids went away," he said.

He now takes one a day to make sure they stay away.

The secret of Thornton's proprietary blend, he said, which he worked out with master chemists, is the balance and concentration of natural ingredients that include bromelain from the pineapple plant, psyllium husk powder and witch hazel leaf.

A bottle costs less than $40 and can be found at local compounding pharmacies, including Lam's and Partell, and ordered off the Internet at www.tushmd.com.

"When I get the marketing budget, my product will be all over the nation," Thornton said.

Should that happen, and his product works on others as it has on Pryor and Leysath, Thornton will make history for making the pain of hemorrhoids history.

And the ballad sung Johnny Cash-style by the Larynogospasms -- singing nurses who entertain prospective patients nationwide -- about what happens after hemorroidectomy surgery will die out like piles cut off from a blood supply:

I woke up with a burning ring of fire

And I can't sit down 'cause my butt's on fire

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire, the ring of fire.

Paul Harasim is the medical reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His column appears Mondays. Harasim can be reached at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.