DEAR DR. GOTT: I am a registered nurse and was taking my coffee break with a friend who is an X-ray technician. She was looking at the abdominal X-rays of a female patient. I noticed several little white spots on the lower intestine and asked her what they were. She told me they were calcium tablets that were being passed without being broken down, and that it was quite common.

Since then, I have taken my calcium supplement in liquid form. Perhaps the reader who complained about the Allegra-D tablets passing undigested could benefit from a liquid allergy medication such as Zyrtec, instead. I hope this helps your others readers, as well.

DEAR READER: I have received a few letters with similar claims of several types of pills passed relatively undigested. Yours is the first from the medical community, claiming it is common with pills that are not time-released.

I have chosen to print your letter in the hopes it will help my readers, especially those using calcium supplements. Perhaps more medications should be made into liquid form in order to combat this potential problem.

Your suggestion to use liquid allergy medication is also an excellent one. There are several over-the-counter liquids, such as Benadryl, that may be beneficial. To the best of my knowledge, Allegra makes an oral suspension only for children.

DEAR DR. GOTT: In response to the person who woke up deaf after a hysterectomy, I feel you are totally WRONG. This individual has obviously had ear problems before and knows what will correct the hearing loss. Why should any patient go through three office visits, which cost about $100 a visit, just to train a physician? Did the physician review her chart before forcing her to come back repeatedly for three visits? The physician, whom we pay for medical advice, should not be using his patients as testing grounds or beta testing at our expense. If he didn't know what the problem was, he should have said so and recommended an ENT physician immediately instead of milking patients or their insurance companies for unnecessary visits. I feel this physician should be reported and his practice should be reviewed. I am so frustrated with incompetent doctors.

DEAR READER: I have to disagree. If you had looked more closely at the letter, you would have noticed that the patient claims to have gone back repeatedly because she was not receiving the answer she wanted rather than because she had to. She was so convinced that the penicillin shot would work that she likely did not listen to the physician.

I am confident that this physician tried to recommend other options. Because the writer was so upset that she wasn't given what she wanted, when she wanted it, she failed to say what, if anything, her primary care physician recommended. As far as telling her to see an ENT, he did, at least in his letter to her, and most likely tried to refer her during her repeated office trips.

You state that this physician used the patient has a testing ground. I would like to know how you came to this conclusion based on her letter, since she says nothing about testing or other treatments.

Doctor Gott is a retired physician and the author of the book "Dr. Gott's No Flour, No Sugar Diet," available at most chain and independent bookstores, and the recently published "Dr. Gott's No Flour, No Sugar Cookbook."