Month: July 2013

Butter and Coffee

Seth Roberts12 Comments

In Perfect Coffee at Home, authors Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez, who have started a digital publishing company, say that the Buttermind experiment influenced them to start adding butter to their coffee. In this excerpt, they say that their cholesterol went down 25 points during the period they drank it (their lives changed in many other ways at the same time). At the end they say:

Later, we would learn that Ethiopian warriors had drunk buttered coffee to energize before battle as far back as 600 CE. But that was after we had stopped regularly drinking it. When we transitioned out of the Marine Corps and our days became less frenetic, it just didn’t seem as necessary.

The mention of Ethiopian warriors reminds me of how, after discovering that pork fat (from pork belly) improves my sleep, I learned that Mao Tse-Tung praised a certain pork-belly dish (红烧肉), calling it “brain food”. I don’t drink coffee but I have tried tea with butter. It tasted good, but I didn’t like the residue it left on the tea cup. Cream doesn’t leave a residue. I haven’t noticed that butter gives me energy. The benefits I believe in are better brain function and better sleep. Maybe more calmness.

How to Detect Dementia

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Dementia is common. You might think that doctors and neuropsychologists would have a good understanding of how to detect it. Judging from a recent New York Times article, they don’t. The article is based on a study that found that people who report memory problems not detected by a standard test turn out to be more likely to end up with dementia (measured by a standard test) than those that don’t. This isn’t surprising; what’s more revealing is how people who report memory problems have been treated in the past: their complaints have been dismissed. For example:

Patients like this have long been called “the worried well,” said Creighton Phelps, acting chief of the dementias of aging branch of the National Institute on Aging. “People would complain, and we didn’t really think it was very valid to take that into account.”

Doctors had no idea whether these complaints were valid but rather than admit this ignorance they . . . confabulated. They claimed, based on nothing, that the complaints were not valid. It reminds me of a surgeon telling me that research supported her claim that I needed surgery (for a hard-to-notice hernia). No such research existed. When I asked her what research? she said she would find it. She was bluffing, in other words. That’s just one doctor making up evidence. Here it has been a whole group of doctors.

The problem isn’t just confabulation. Apparently doctors in this area fail to understand basic principles of measurement. When Patient Y visits Doctor X and complains of memory problems, Doctor X gives Patient Y a series of memory tests. Only if Patient Y scores below normal range does Doctor X think that Patient Y’s complaint is “real”. For example:

The man complained of memory problems but seemed perfectly normal. No specialist he visited detected any decline. “He insisted that things were changing, but he aced all of our tests,” said Rebecca Amariglio, a neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Amariglio apparently fails to understand that a series of measurements on one person — which is what the man’s complaint was based on, comparing himself now to himself in the past — is going to be vastly more sensitive to change than a comparison of one person to other people. A reasonable response to a complaint of memory loss would be: This is hard to detect with a one visit. Let’s give you a sensitive test and have you come back in six months to see if you decline more than normal. Judging from the Times article, doctors still haven’t figured this out.

Speaking of memory decline, Posit Science still hasn’t sent me the data they promised to send me.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Anesthesia Dolorosa Mirror Cure Update

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I recently posted about using a mirror to cure anesthesia dolorosa, a painful skin condition similar to phantom limb pain, whichi is always caused by surgery. Beth Taylor-Schott, the inventor of the technique, told me what’s happened since she last blogged about it:

Since then, David is still pretty much pain free and off Neurontin. Just a twinge now and then that he takes care of with Lidocaine, if anything. Have not had to re-do the therapy or anything like that.

I have been contacted by two researchers in the UK, and as I understand it, they’re doing research based on the blog, though I have not heard what there results are. Also, someone in Australia wanted to fly us out to do a demonstration and be at a conference, but I couldn’t get enough time off work to make it worth it.

I have heard from people who have read the blog and who want to do the therapy and who have questions, which I always answer, but only a very few of them ever come back to tell me that it’s worked, and no one has ever come back to say it hasn’t, so I’m not sure what to do with that. I don’t really see this as my crusade. I put the blog out there, and I figure the people who are meant to find it will find it. We ourselves only discovered this through a weird series of coincidences, after all.

She explained what she meant by “weird series of coincidences”:

It was by no means certain that I would read it. I think it had been sitting in my in-box for three or four months when I went back and read it. That is one coincidence. Another is that I came across it because, given that David had just flatlined twice in the hospital, I was in no shape to do anything BUT clean out my inbox, not something I did at all frequently at the time (like MAYBE once a year or every two years). And then too, I read it at a moment when his cardiologist had just told us that probably David needed to not only go off the stimulants he’d been taking to counteract the Neurontin, but also the Neurontin itself. His pain was being kept under control in the hospital with injections of Toradol, and there was no way they would let me give him that much when he was at home and not being monitored. So what would we have done if the mirror therapy hadn’t worked? He would not only have been non-functional, but in constant, excruciating pain. And yet I did not go into the inbox looking for answers, I went into it to distract myself from the fact that I seemingly had no answers. So the whole thing had a very deus ex machina quality to it.

And then there’s the fact that I happen to be the kind of person who is resilient enough to actually try something like this despite years of frustration with the condition and our treatment at the hands of the experts. What are the chances that I’d be in a situation like this, especially given the rarity of David’s condition? (Last I heard, M, the woman in the piece by Gawande, did not pursue the therapy, even after it was suggested to her.)

In a list of things that made the discovery less likely (e.g., rarely cleans out her inbox) she includes something that made the discovery much more likely, namely “what would we have done if the mirror therapy hadn’t worked?” She and her husband were incredibly motivated to make it work. More motivated than professional scientists ever are. This is an enormous advantage of personal science over professional science: the much greater motivation of the personal scientist.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Thanks to Nicole Larkin and Tim Beneke.

My Heart Watch: Bay Area Health Measurements

Seth Roberts7 Comments

For many years I have used the services of Heart Watch to measure my cholesterol and other health-related things, such as HbA1c. The couple that runs Heart Watch, Sandy and Glen, travels up and down California. I was able to get tested only every three months. Feeling that this was inadequate, just as I did, a man named Karl Corbett recently started a business called My Heart Watch that allows much more frequent tests in the Bay Area, at similar price. My Heart Watch uses the same portable testing devices as Heart Watch.

The Berkeley location is almost across the street from Whole Foods. I signed up online (I was the first person to use their online sign-up service), which was very convenient.

Corbett told me that he greatly improved his cholesterol numbers by changing to a Caldwell-Esselstyn “plant-based diet” that included lots of vegetables, some fruit, no oils, and no animal-based products. (Since the usual oils, such olive and soybean oil, are plant-based, this is a curious feature. Esselstyn seems to ignore bad effects of cholesterol lowering.) The more often you can test yourself, the more easily you can determine what controls what you’re measuring. When you can test yourself often enough to be sure whether a dietary (or other) change has made a difference, you can begin to ignore large clinical trials and their many limitations, which include poor choice of control group, poor statistics, incomplete reporting, biassed reporting, publication bias, confoundings, investigator fraud, on and on. They are the fool’s-gold standard. If I can determine if alternate-day fasting improves my HbA1c, I can ignore what clinical trials say about it.

Before writing this post I spoke to Corbett about getting discounted testing in return for publicizing My Heart Watch.

Anesthesia Dolorosa Mirror Cure

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Anesthesia Dolorosa is a very rare condition in which part of the skin that is numb feels pain. It is a side effect of surgery for trigeminal neuralgia. “No effective medical therapy has yet been found,” says the Wikipedia entry. Whoever wrote that meant that no entirely effective therapy has been found. Some surgical treatments are helpful some of the time.

In a series of blog posts, an art historian named Beth Taylor-Schott wrote about using a mirror to eliminate her husband’s Anesthesia Dolorosa, which was on his face. She got the idea from a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande about V.S. Ramachandra’s use of mirror therapy to treat phantom limb pain. I mentioned this years ago but it is worth mentioning again as an example of non-medical-professionals finding a solution to a medical problem much better than anything professionals came up with.

Here’s a brief description of what happened:

My brother-in-law sent me an article by Atul Gawande from the June 30th [2008] issue of the New Yorker. Using the information from the article, we came up with a non-reversed mirror therapy to try to reduce David’s AD-related pain. . . . We started doing the therapy on the 23rd of July, 2008. Within 2-3 days, his pain was down to zero, and as long as we continued to do the mirror therapy 3-4 times a day, it remained that low. This was the lowest it had been since he had had the sympathetic nerve blocks, and it stayed low for much longer periods of time than it had after the blocks.

Once the pain was stabilized at 0, we started to reduce his Neurontin, first by 400 mgs each time, then once we got to 1200 mg, by 200 mg at a time. Typically, we reduced it every 3-4 days. The first or second day after the Neurontin was reduced, the pain would typically start to go up somewhat, although it rarely went above a 5, and that was under extreme circumstances. But if we kept doing the mirror therapy, it would go back down and remain at zero, so that we could reduce the Neurontin again, and so on.

Today is the 27th of August. David’s pain has been under control all day. Tonight, for the first time, he did not take any Neurontin when he went to sleep. As of tomorrow morning, it will have been 36 hours since he has had any Neurontin. . . .

[Details of the treatment] David can look either into the mirror in his hand, or into the reflection of that mirror in the mirror on the wall, and in both of them he sees a non-reversed image of himself (unlike a regular mirror image, in which the image is reversed.) The therapy depends upon the brain not realizing that the images it sees are non-reversed images, but assuming that they are regular, reversed mirror images. . . . standing behind the chair, I would reach around and touch/massage the right side of David’s face for the length of the session while he watched in the non-reversed mirrors. Yes, you read that correctly. The affected side is the left, but I would massage the right side, the one that still has feeling. Since David’s brain thought it was looking into a mirror, it saw me massaging the left side of the face and so actually experienced sensation in that left side when I was actually touching the right side. In this way, it contradicted the brain’s theory that since it was not getting any signals from the nerves, something must be terribly wrong, so that it needed to invent pain signals to alert David to its state.

That ordinary people can do so much better than experts on an enormously important problem (if you have AD) is either wonderful or depressing if you believe, as I do, that this will turn out to be common. I have written to Taylor-Schott to ask what has happened since then.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • self-tracking neuroscientist. I have only learned from tracking when I am adventurous — when I change stuff, such as what I eat. I will be curious to see if the same thing happens here. The initial thought when tracking yourself is “keep things constant” so that the data from different days will be more comparable. This makes sense if you are doing an experiment where different days get different treatments. It does not make sense when you are not doing an experiment. This self-tracker doesn’t seem to be doing any experiments, so he should allow his life to be messy if he wants to learn more.
  • Interview with Renata Adler
  • Alternate-day fasting thread at Mark’s Daily Apple
  • An essay on the effect of immigrants on “economic freedom” (via Marginal Revolution) does not mention the fact that immigrants bring new ideas and skills. This is an example of the way economists usually ignore innovation, which benefits from new ideas and skills. Innovations usually derive from new combinations of things. To open a new business (an instance of economic freedom) it really helps to have a new good or service. New cuisines (immigrants open restaurants) is just the beginning.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Congratulations, Morex! Shangri-La Diet Success

Seth Roberts5 Comments

The photo on the left was taken summer 2011; the photo on the right was taken June 2013. He lost 75 pounds in 5 months. Morex writes:

All my life I had been the fat guy. I was that kid in school that couldn’t run or go out and play because I was too heavy. You know how that is.

My teenage years and all my adult life I had been the fat guy. Until today.

I tried every kind of diet to my knowledge. I exercise since I have memory. But I never could lose enough weight or maintain the little weight loss I could achieve.

Until I read Freakonomics, which led me to research about Seth and SLD, which led me to these forums and to reading the book.

So last January [January 2013], after reading a little about how SLD works, I decided to give it a go.

He gives details here.

The History of Human Chromosome Number Reveals Constraints on Professional Scientists

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Why does personal science matter? One reason, as I’ve said many times, is that personal scientists (who do science to help themselves) are free to speak the truth. Sometimes professional scientists (for whom science is a job) are not.

The history of human chromosome number is a good example. Starting in the 1920s, humans were said to have 48 chromosomes. In fact, the correct number is 46. From the soon-to-be-published book The Truth in Small Doses by Clifton Leaf (copy sent me by publisher), which is about cancer research, I learned that in 1955 two Swedish scientists, Tjio and Levan, established the correct number. After their article appeared,

Several researchers wrote [them] to confess that they, too, had spied only forty-six chromosomes but had thrown out the results because they were in conflict with established knowledge.

“In conflict with established knowledge” was euphemism for we were worried what would happen to us.

The Truth in Small Doses begins with this story. Leaf’s point is that cancer researchers have a similar problem: They too cannot tell the truth, which is that progress against cancer has been poor, in spite of billions of dollars spent on research.