Month: October 2008

A Few Things America Can Learn From China

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From this discussion. The speaker is Noriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor:

In U.S. the total consumption’s about $9.5 trillion. Take the entire consumption of 1 billion Chinese, it’s about $1 trillion.

The average American thinks: We’re rich, they’re poor. It’s more complicated than that. The Chinese, in hundreds of ways, do more with less. They pay less for the same quality of life. Here are some examples:

1. The lights on the stairs to my Beijing apartment are sound-activated. Works well, saves electricity. In Berkeley I pay $4/month to light the stairs to my apartment and why should my landlady install sound- or motion-activated lighting?

2. The water-heating system in my apartment is flash heating, that is, just-in-time heating. It works just as well as an American-style water heaters and there’s no heat loss when you aren’t using it.

3. My washing machine doesn’t use heated water. Incoming water is heated to room temperature by a set of baffles.

4. The doors to campus cafeterias are a set of hanging plastic strips. It gets cold in Beijing in the winter. When someone enters there is much less heat loss than when a door is opened.

5. Bicycles are everywhere (in my part of town, the university district, at least) and are easy and safe. They are also very cheap. I could have bought a used one for $15 but instead a friend gave me hers — she takes the bus to work. While bicycles are basically transportation for people who live close to work, as students do, electric bicycles — in which China leads the world — are far more powerful and could probably replace a lot of cars if downtowns were safer for them.

6. The better you cook, the cheaper ingredients you can use and achieve the same result. The Chinese, who are great cooks, use lots of vegetables, which are cheaper than meat and of course easier on the environment.

A New Way to Prevent Migraines

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Michael Solberg, who works at the State Department, has had migraine headaches for about 10 years. He recently wrote me about how he discovered a new way to prevent them.

They’d been slowly getting worse and worse as I got older. [He’s in his early thirties.] About 4 years ago, I was getting about 3 or 4 a week. Fortunately, I had abortive medication, so when I get a migraine, the medication (Zomig) makes them go away in 1-2 hours.

Doctors tried to put me on all kinds of preventive medication – Amitriptaline (sp), Atenolol, Propanolol, and finally Neurontin (which gave me severe chest pain). Finally, I called it quits with the medication and decided to go at it on my own. I knew what my triggers are (lack of sleep, dehydration, low blood sugar, neck and/or eye strain mostly).

Quite independently, while I was living in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug 2005 to July 2008, I took up rock climbing. There’s not a lot to do in Jakarta, and rock climbing — on a rock climbing wall at a mall in Jakarta — was a way to be active. It was essentially a trainer-led workout. Wall climbing in Jakarta isn’t like anywhere else I’ve ever been — the instructors do all the belaying, and if you go in the evenings, they’ll run you through drills and exercises to build strength. A couple of times, I had to do 15 consecutive climbs in 10 or 15 minutes — hence the fatigued muscles and intense sweating (it was all outdoors).

After climbing for 2 or 3 months, I noticed that I wasn’t getting migraines any more. It was weird — I was getting a stockpile of my medication because I wasn’t using it nearly as often. I went from getting migraines 3 times a week to less than 3 times a month, and the ones I did get were very weak. I began to figure out that for about 7 to 10 days after I did a hard rock climbing training session, I would be migraine free! I’d only get them if I traveled somewhere and stopped the training for a week.

At first, I narrowed it down to three possible causes:

1. When rock climbing, I would sweat profusely, so maybe I was sweating out toxins from the body.

2. When rock climbing, I was building all kinds of muscle (and, in fact, I lost about 30 pounds when doing this, and I was already pretty skinny).

3. When rock climbing, you are exposed to a lot of magnesium in the form of the chalk climbers use keep their hands dry. I’d read a lot about how some migraine suffers were shown to have magnesium deficiencies in their blood stream. A lot of us take magnesium supplements along with multivitamins.

Towards the end of my time in Jakarta, I had less time for rock climbing, so I began a training program at home. I’ve pretty much convinced myself that it was the muscle-building component of the training that made the difference.

I’m not sure when I finally decided that hypotheses 1 and 3 were wrong, but I noticed that if I do a simple workout in the gym focusing on arms, upper back, and chest, the effect is the same — migraine free for 5-7 days. When I work out in the gym, I don’t sweat nearly as much as I did when I climbed. Because I got the effect by working out in the gym, I decided that muscle building exercises was the likely culprit.

When I was at home in Arkansas a few weeks ago, I spoke to a friend of mine who’s an holistic healer. He said that when you build strength in the shoulders, upper back, and arms, you stimulate the liver to rid the body of the toxins that can build up and trigger migraines.

But no holistic healer has come up with this prevention strategy as far as I know — if you know otherwise, please let me know.

I don’t know if that’s the case, but even now when I’m not rock climbing, I go to the gym once or twice a week to work on my shoulders, chest, and arms, and I’m more or less pain-free (about 1 or 2 per month).

Incidentally, I wrote to the National Headache Foundation, but they never wrote back. I also posted on a migraine message board, but got absolutely no response. I suppose it sounds too good to be true — free therapy for migraines — but I’m not selling anything and have nothing to gain or lose if people try this or not. It’s worked for me and has kept me pain-free. When climbing, I lost all kinds of weight, and probably paid out the same amount of money per month [for climbing] that I paid for all the drugs and vitamins.

If you try this to prevent migraines, please let me know what happens.

Chinese Transportation Economics (continued)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

In China, when a journalist comes to cover your event, you are expected to give them 200 yuan ($30) in an envelope to cover the transportation cost. To put this in context, the 30-minute cab ride from the airport to my apartment cost 85 yuan.

In Beijing, a subway ride from anywhere to anywhere costs 2 yuan. The minimum price for a cab ride is 10 yuan ($1.50), which will get you about a mile.

My New Job

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I am starting a new job as a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University, Beijing. My particular task is to help everyone in the Psychology Department — newly reestablished this year — write their papers in English. At a department meeting today, introducing myself, I said, “To help you with your English will be easy, learning Chinese will be hard” — but I didn’t get to the second part (“learning Chinese…”) because everyone laughed after the first part.

Chinese Cell Phone Economics

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In China, you get a cell phone number by buying a SIM card (a small plastic chip) that you put in your phone. Yesterday I bought one. I was shown a page of 12 possible numbers. At the top of the page it said 168 yuan ($25). But one of the numbers was cheaper: only 120 yuan ($18). Why the difference? I asked. The cheap number was “hard to remember,” I was told. I studied the 12 numbers; they looked equally hard to remember. So I got the cheap one.

Hard to remember was a euphemism, I learned later. Some digits (8, 6) are considered lucky, others (4, 7) unlucky. My number: 1170784.

This is related to self-experimentation. I suppose few scientists believe in lucky and unlucky phone numbers but many believe in “good” and “bad” ways of doing science. One example is a belief that self-experimentation is bad, another is a belief that Bayesian tools are “ irrelevant to the business of science“; a third is the blue-ribbon panel that would only use data from double-blind experiments when deciding nutritional requirements. Scientists (and the rest of us) pay more than 48 yuan ($7) for such beliefs, which pervade science. Their effect is that scientists fail to use tools that would help them with their research; the rest of us suffer from the lack of progress that could have been made (e.g., discovery of better ways to treat depression). At the end of a paper about my self-experimentation I made this point:

Belief that something is bad makes it hard to learn what it is good for.

What Does It Say About Psychiatry?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

It isn’t just GlaxoSmithKline (who called Emory professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff “a recognized world leader in the field of psychiatry”). It’s also the Emory University administration. According to a presumably well-thought-out statement:

Dr. Nemeroff is recognized internationally as a leader in psychiatric research, education and practice. He has made fundamental contributions to the field over many years.

What this says about the moral compass of the Emory administration is clear — that they are unable to grasp the awfulness of what Nemeroff did. (As Emory dean Claudia Adkinson revealed in spades.) If they did, they wouldn’t spend a millisecond defending him. The harder question is: What does this say about psychiatry?

Professor Charles Nemeroff Predicts the Future

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The case of Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff, the Emory University professor of psychiatry, is a touchstone in the sense that it reveals something about the morals (or lack thereof) of those who brush against it. That GlaxoSmithKline (which called Nemeroff “a recognized world leader in the field of psychiatry”) is amoral we already knew — a kind of positive control. The responses of Emory dean Claudia Adkison (“ grateful” that a reporter didn’t know enough to fully expose Nemeroff) and the Emory administration (which called him “a leader in psychiatric research, education, and practice”) are more interesting.

But Nemeroff is also a touchstone in reverse. Not only can we learn about X and Y by seeing how they react to Nemeroff, we can also learn about X and Y by seeing how Nemeroff reacts to them. In a 2006 New Scientist series called Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years, Nemeroff wrote this:

In the next 50 years, we can expect several breakthroughs. Identifying gene variants that confer vulnerability [to major psychiatric disorders] will result in the emergence of a new field, preventative psychiatry. Elucidating the causes of mental illness will lead to novel treatments. We will also see breakthroughs in understanding the biology of resilience, now poorly understood. And in contrast with our largely trial-and-error-based system, treatments will be individualised, based on genomics and brain imaging.

That Nemeroff likes these ideas suggests they are wrong. Supporting what I’ve said earlier.

Academic Horror Story (Emory University)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From Claudia Adkison, Emory University dean, to Charles Nemeroff, Emory University professor of psychiatry, in a 2006 memo:

I have been grateful that the reporter was not sophisticated enough to ask all the right questions.

Grateful. She was grateful. Ugh. Double ugh. Professor Nemeroff, you’ll recall, took vast sums of money to advocate the prescription of dangerous drugs to millions of people and hid this fact, even after several warnings. Dean Adkison was grateful, let me repeat, that a reporter didn’t ask “all the right questions” to expose this.

This is why New York Times reporter John Schwartz’s lack of understanding matters.

Diet and Acne (continued)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I’ve blogged several times about environmental causes of acne, especially diet. Cynthia Graber, a science journalist, wrote a whole article about diet and acne, a link that dermatologists deny much more strongly than the evidence warranted. Why do they act so sure? I asked Graber. Because, low on the medical totem pole, they want to appear more scientific, she said. Genetics and drugs — that’s science. Diet — that isn’t science.

Here is more data on the subject, from two widely-different sources. The first is a comment on Dennis Mangan’s blog:

I had some acne when I was a teen. I was considered a very “pretty” teenager, but was painfully shy whenever my face “broke out”. I remember going to a dermatologist who put me on a sulfur cream and antibiotics for it. He emphasized over and over that diet “had absolutely nothing” to do with it, and that I should eat whatever I wanted and that “only by eating huge amounts of fish” could I actually aggravate it.

I still had some breakouts even until my twenties every so often. Because I was basically bodybuilding as a “hobby”, I switched to diet colas and started eating a great deal of tuna and canned chicken around this time. Guess what? The acne completely went away at about 21 and didn’t come back until about 26. At 26 I had some hard bumps under my chin like boils. The dermatologist said they were folliculitis and told me to make sure my razors were dry and my sink was super clean. But I noted that I had drifted back to a fast food diet and was drinking regular colas again–and kind of power-lifting a couple of days a week but not hitting it hard.

I got back into it at the gym, and wanted a six-pack again. I went back to diet cola and started dieting again. The result? The acne completely went away. This time I made a connection.

I have sworn up and down to some of my friends that I think our diets might lead to acne when we’re teens. One of my pals, Myron, took his kids (both teens) off cokes and instant soups and started cooking for them and making them drink orange juice and apple juice and tea. Their faces completely cleared up (they were 14 and 16) in about two months. No trips to the doctor, no anti-bacterial soaps, nothing. Just diet. They have had lovely clear skin ever since.

I have another friend at work whose teenage daughter “got off” colas and he started cooking for her (single parent). Her face cleared up. He mentioned it. She was a pretty girl but used to break out fairly badly. According to him, she’s on top of the world now that her skin is cleared up and is confident (and she should be because she really is a cutie).

I read a little bit about the study doctors cite about acne and diet. They fed a big chocolate bar to one group and fed another a CANDY bar that didn’t contain chocolate to another group. Since both groups had acne at the same levels, they declared that diet had nothing to do with acne. WHAT HOGWASH!!!!! If they were both drinking sodas, both eating tons of refined white flour, white pasta, and both eating a big candy bar (so what if one was toffee and one was chocolate) every day, they still were eating a “western diet”.

Anyway, I’ve read about the severe uptick in acne in newly “Westernized” populations. I’ve read about the rate of prostate difficulties of Asian-Americans versus rural Asians. Diets do INDEED affect much more about ourselves than we’d like to admit. I can guarantee you, because I’ve seen it on my own face and have friends who I trust who have seen it on the faces of their children, that diet does indeed influence acne and that high glycemic index foods and colas and sugars certainly worsen it at the least.

The thing that REALLY got me thinking this was a few years ago, I saw a couple of very Indian-looking Mexican teenagers. They didn’t look like they had a drop of European blood in them. They had BAD acne on their cheeks. Hell, I thought those people never broke out, yet there they were at a convenience store buying two colas and potato chips–looking like Oxy poster-children.

The second source is Arbor Clinical Nutrition Updates, an excellent Australian publication aimed at nutrition professionals. The latest update, which I cannot link to, is about acne and diet. From its conclusions:

For many years the conventional wisdom dispensed by physicians on the relationship between diet and acne vulgaris has been that there is none. In a recent study, the fact that nearly a half of a group of final year medical students believed that diet was an important factor in acne was held to be an unfortunate misconception “likely to perpetuate misinformation in the community.”

The “expert view” from doctors is in stark contrast to what their patients think. Many studies have shown that the average person is under the distinct impression that diet can indeed affect acne, particularly fatty foods and chocolate.

A careful look into this question reveals something rather fascinating — that although medical textbooks used to strongly support the idea of “acne diets”, in the last 50 years this has completely reversed. Yet experts’ current confidence that there is nothing to the diet-acne story is itself based on almost no evidence.

The update describes two studies. One found that a low-glycemic-index diet reduced acne. The other found that, in teenage boys, greater milk consumption was associated with slightly more acne.

More Maybe Graber was too kind. Confidence that diet had nothing to do with acne allowed dermatologists to prescribe dangerous and expensive drugs. I wish I could be sure no payola was involved, but — given a horrifying story in today’s NY Times about several psychiatrists’ total and dishonest disregard of conflict-of-interest rules — I can’t. From the article:

From 2000 through 2006, Dr. [Charles] Nemeroff [of Emory University] earned more than $960,000 from GlaxoSmithKline but listed earnings of less than $35,000 for the period on his university disclosure forms, according to Congressional documents. Sarah Alspach, a GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman, stated in an e-mail message that “Dr. Nemeroff is a recognized world leader in the field of psychiatry.”

What does that say about psychiatry?

Shannon Brownlee on the subject. A blog on the subject. A letter from Senator Charles Grassley to James Wagner, the president of Emory, describing Nemeroff’s behavior and asking for more information.