…you might want to read this webpage by a Brazilian woman about the Shangri-La Diet. And feel free to tell me what it says.
More. The Portuguese edition of The Shangri-La Diet is titled A Dieta Shangri-la. Its ISBN number is 978-85-7684-168-5.
Month: August 2008
Unreported Side Effects of Powerful Drugs (part 3)
A comment on the previous post in this series — thanks, Vesna! — led me to a horrifying story about what happened to someone whose doctor prescribed statins (an expensive and nearly worthless class of drugs) because his cholesterol numbers were bad. (My friend and collaborator Norman Temple has written about the true value of statins.) The doctor did not warn him of the dangers, which were great. When his troubles began, he should have simply stopped the drug. What actually happened was that his doctor prescribed another dangerous drug. And his troubles got worse. Shades of Jane Brody!
I know a similar story. The elderly mother of a friend of mine was taken to the emergency room of a hospital because she had some sort of attack. It was the third such attack in a year. Her children were concerned. She was not of sound mind. Heroic measures to help her? Or a peaceful death? They chose a peaceful death. She was moved to a hospice. By mistake, her six prescriptions failed to be transferred. A clerical error. So she wasn’t able to take her usual drugs. She soon got better! Within a week or two she returned home. The drugs her doctor had prescribed had been killing her. Nobody had noticed.
First do no harm is a scary motto because it shows that those who take it seriously — supposedly the entire medical profession — aren’t thinking clearly, as I’ve heard Robin Hanson point out. It’s like English teachers having a motto with a word spelled wrong. And the consequences of doctors not thinking clearly — not doing something as obvious as stopping dangerous drugs when the patient gets worse — can be terrible. My suggested replacement motto: Learn something from everyone who comes to you for help.
This is closely related to self-experimentation, of course, which is all about figuring out for oneself what effect something has. I got a lot more interested in self-experimentation when it showed me that an acne drug I’d been prescribed was worthless.
How Should We Fight Infections?
In the latest New Yorke r, an article by Jerome Groopman is about the emergence of even-more-antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
I asked him what we should do to combat these new superbugs. “Nobody has the answer right now,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that we have found all the easy targets” for drug development. He went on, “So the only other thing we can do is continue to work on antibiotic stewardship.”
All the easy targets, huh? Here’s an easy target that hasn’t been exploited: Why are colds more common in the winter? Many diseases are more common in the winter. I believe it’s because sleep is worse in the winter. While you are asleep is when your body does its best job of fighting off infection. When I vastly improved my sleep — by standing much more, and by getting more morning light — I vastly reduced the number of easy-to-notice colds that I got. I still got cold infections, I think, but they merely caused me to sleep more than usual for a few days.
Several years ago I noticed an introductory epidemiology course in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health was taught by someone I knew. I called him. “Is your course going to cover what makes our ability to fight off infection go up or down?” I asked. No, he said. That is the usual answer. The question of why colds are more common in the winter is not part of the traditional study of epidemiology.
The connections between sleep and fighting off infection are so strong I’m pretty sure I’m right about this (that colds are more common in the winter because sleep is worse). Why, then, haven’t sleep researchers looked into this? Strangely enough, they may not have thought of it; I haven’t come across this idea in any book about sleep I’ve read. (If you’ve seen it somewhere, please let me know!) Justifications of sleep research tend to revolve around car accidents, which are often caused by too little sleep.
More. My point is not that poorer sleep causes more colds in the winter; it’s that it’s an easy target. Suppose you think the colds/winter connection is caused by less Vitamin D in the winter. An experiment in which one group gets Vitamin D supplements in the winter and another group doesn’t is easy to do, given the great health implications.
My Humor Research
[Rosie Shuster] did have one quality she could privately lord over her classmates: her father was a comedian. . . A life in comedy meant that Frank Shuster nodded, rather than laughed, at jokes that worked.
From American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent, pp. 62-3. When I was in college I came up with a theory: Laughter is caused by sudden pleasure. Obviously we enjoy jokes, and jokes have punchlines. People laugh in lots of situations not involving humor and as far as I can tell they always involve sudden pleasure — unexpectedly seeing an old friend, for example.
Which is only to say, as this passage implies, there should be a limited number of joke categories and they should be far from mysterious. I once wrote a bunch of jokes from the TV show Cheers on cards and sorted them into categories. Later I classified six months of New Yorker cartoons and Spy accepted it. It was my first submission and I was thrilled.
More. Mike Kenny put it better than me. That I was able to get my research published in a magazine I adored was “ a fusing of the intellectual with the practical.” I was going to say it was a practical application of pure research.
Research Assistant Needed in Cognitive Science Lab
Saul Sternberg, whom I interviewed about research design and research strategy,is looking for a research assistant:
A full-time research assistantship is available in Saul Sternberg’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Â Applicants should be college graduates with computer programming skills and an interest in the study of human behavior. Current research topics include (1) interaction of brain and biomechanics in the control of timed actions (as in music performance), and (2) how visual information is encoded, transformed, and retrieved within the first two or three seconds after it is displayed. Details.
Saul is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won the American Psychological Association’s award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution.
He and I have written four papers together, three about Ranjit Chandra’s research and one about reaction time and mental models. In the Acknowledgments section of The Shangri-La Diet, I wrote, “I have learned more experimental psychology from Saul Sternberg, a research scientist at Bell Labs and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, than from anyone else.”
The Bechdel Test and Denise Richards
I loved Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. It was one of the best books I read in 2007. So I was pleased to learn of the Bechdel Test, which can be applied to TV and movies:
To pass it your movie [or TV show] must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
Few movies or TV shows pass it, said Jennifer Kesler.
I came across this test after spending a pleasant morning analyzing data while listening to the first six episodes of Denise Richards: It’s Complicated which I found on YouTube. (Such as part 1 of Episode 1.) The show consisted mainly of two named female characters — Denise and sister, Denise and friend, Denise and daughter — talking to each other about something other than a man.
I was surprised how much I liked it. When Denise and her dad (who lives with her) interview people to be her assistant, it was amusing (Denise has about 20 pets; one applicant said she didn’t like pets); when she gets mad at an entertainment journalist, it was forgivable; when she enters her nephew’s room to find him and his friends looking at a Playboy with her on the cover, it was unforgettable. The entertainment journalist wants to know why she is doing the reality show. “My [recently dead] mom wanted me to do it,” Denise says. The journalist can barely keep from laughing. “A deathbed wish?” she says. Denise got upset, so let me answer: The better you know almost anyone, the more you like them.
More. Gillian Flynn, one of Entertainment Weekly‘s TV reviewers, hated the show — gave it a D. Could reviewers be overly negative because they are forced to watch?