Stephen Hsu, who has an excellent blog, recently became Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University. Before that, he was a professor of physics. At a dinner for faculty promoted to full professor, he said:

When an attorney prepares a case it is for her client. When a Google engineer develops a new algorithm, it is for Google — for money. Fewer than one in a thousand individuals in our society has the privilege, the freedom, to pursue their own ideas and creations. The vast majority of such people are at research universities. A smaller number are at think tanks or national labs, but most are professors like yourselves. It is you who will make the future better than the past; who will bring new wonders into existence.

In this blog, in thousands of posts, I have argued a much different view: everyone can make the future better than the past in the way Stephen is talking about, by adding to our understanding. In particular, anyone — not just professional researchers, such as professors at research universities — can increase our understanding of how to be healthy. This has already started to happen. Some examples:

1. Stuart King (a musician) commented how much bedtime honey helped him sleep better. Learning about this effect is a big step forward in knowing how to be healthy — good sleep is at the center of good health. No professional researcher has come close to Stuart’s insight.

2. Katherine Reid (trained as a protein chemist but not a professor) discovered that if she removed all glutamate from her daughter’s diet, her daughter’s autism disappeared. This is more progress than any professional researcher has made. None of them has made even one case of autism disappear.

3. Many people told me about how various treatments they learned about from this blog have helped them — for example Vitamin D3 in the morning and bedtime honey. I recently posted a comment about bedtime honey, for instance. These treatments are so new and surprising that these experiences are meaningful. They help others decide if these treatments should be taken seriously. (For anyone who dismisses these reports as “anecdotes”, I have one question: What have you discovered?)

4. I have used a brain tracking test to find out new things about how my environment affects my brain, including the benefits of butter and the bad effect of tofu. At least a billion people — everyone in China, for starters — eat tofu regularly. You might think that such a popular food would have been extensively tested for safety but, shockingly, other research supports my conclusion that tofu is bad. Anyone can do the sort of tests I did. Let me repeat my offer to give my brain tracking R software (which only works under Windows) to others who want to use it. There is an associated Google Community to join.

5. Although I am a professor, my self-experimental discoveries about sleep, mood and weight were outside the area of my graduate school training (animal learning). For example, I am not a sleep expert. I made my discoveries without expensive equipment or university resources beyond the library — that is, I made them with resources to which almost anyone has access.

I am sure these examples are the beginning of something important. They are easy to explain. Who is better equipped to discover important stuff about health, professional researchers (e.g, professors) or non-professionals (the rest of us)? Although professional researchers have big advantages over the rest of us — this is the usual view — non-professionals have big advantages over professionals that few people seem aware of. Sometimes the non-professional advantages outweigh the professional advantages and the non-professionals get there first. For example, a professional autism researcher could have done what Reid did (measure the effect of removing all glutamate on autism), but Reid did it first.

The advantages of non-professionals over professionals, a topic I have discussed many times, include:

1. Ability to self-track and self-experiment. This is too humble for many professionals. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen emphasized that professors like to show off via their work. This is a disaster for science, where small (low status) and fast is much more effective than big (high status) and slow — a lesson that few health scientists have learned.

2. Freedom. Non-professionals can study anything, consider any crazy idea, test any treatment. Professionals must be respectable. Institutional rules and committees also constrain them.

3. Time. Non-professionals can study any problem for as long as they want. Professionals must publish regularly.

4. Motivation. Because they study their own problems, non-professionals are highly motivated to find the truth. For example, no one cares more about the safety of your food than you do. Professionals usually study problems whose solution gives them no practical benefit. While non-professionals care only about their own health, professionals care a great deal about their career, which makes it quite a bit harder to do the best thing for other people’s health.

5. IQ (which Stephen often blogs about). If you randomly select one professor who studies health, and compare him/her to a thousand randomly-selected non-professionals, the top IQs among the non-professionals will be much higher than the professor’s IQ.

I keep writing about this — hardly saying anything new — because it is so important, so non-intuitive (in almost every other area of knowledge, such as physics, only professionals make lasting contributions) and no one else says it.

by Bill Mitchell

Chronic right-side sinusitis came as a shock in November 2008, at age 42. For weeks both sides (left and right) were blocked. I lost my sense of smell even after my left sinus cleared. An incapacitating headache lasted months. My right sinus was often totally blocked. I had previously been in very good health. I had never been to a hospital, never taken medication, no drugs, slender, athletic, normal blood sugar and pressure, no dental fillings, etc. Some hay fever, but no other allergies.

The breakthrough was finding out about baby shampoo. In less than a week of shampooing my nose, a six-month headache was gone. It recurred occasionally until I fixed environmental causes. I tried many things, but the two that mattered were replacing the household carpet and vacuuming my mattress every couple of weeks. A couple of years later, my sense of smell returned. When you regain a sense you thought was lost forever, you appreciate even the stinkiest odors!

I found out about the use of baby shampoo to treat sinusitis from the website of a UCSD professor of medicine named Terence Davidson, who died recently. [Use of baby shampoo to treat sinusitis seems to have been recently rediscovered by an Omaha journalist named Michah Mertes.] The website no longer exists, but is archived in the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine shows that Dr. Davidson added mention of shampoo in summer of 2008, but by the summer of 2009 had removed it. Why remove mention of the only treatment that seemed to matter?

Sinusitis treatment in the U.S. is doubly silly. First, nearly all chronic sinusitis is fungal (said the Mayo Clinic in 1999), yet antibiotics are universally prescribed, with no effect on the primary infection. Second, no one ever looks for environmental causes.

• 3-week visit to the Philippines a year earlier (no obvious infection).
• 1-week camping trip in the Sierras 6 months earlier (no obvious infection).
• Exposure to smoke from the Freeway Complex Fire, the 4th largest fire in Orange County history, which partially burned a landfill, i.e. potential random toxicity. The sinusitis and headaches began within days after the fire; however, I was 10 miles downwind — pretty far.
• 1-month stay in someone else’s house in December 2008, where the central heater was later found to be leaking a trace amount of carbon monoxide. This was concurrent with the worst of the sinusitis, but it did not get better when I went back to my own home. My family stayed in the same house, with no ill effect.
• In recent years, eating crappy batter-fried restaurant food increasingly causes strange nose/throat effects, such as wheezing and temporary sinus blockage. Fried chicken at Knott’s Berry Farm is the worst — instant shortness of breath. I can think of no reason this should happen, but there it is.

More

Remember how baby shampoo disappeared from the UCSD prof’s website? Something similar happened at NeilMed’s website, and the reason may be a nasty side effect. This post says some people lost their sense of smell after using Neilmed’s surfactant additive. Neilmed makes my favorite sinus rinse product, which uses a squeeze bottle instead of gravity feed. A few years ago they briefly began selling a surfactant additive, but then pulled it off the market, and now have only an undated post saying the re-release is 2 to 3 years away. Maybe risk of side effects is why the UCSD guy removed it.

• Dangers of Splenda. Never use it in baked goods.
• Overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. “S o many medical professionals benefit from overprescribing that it is difficult to find a neutral source of information. . . . The F.D.A. has cited every major A.D.H.D. drug, including the stimulants Adderall, Concerta, Focalin and Vyvanse, for false and misleading advertising since 2000, some of them multiple times.”
• David Suzuki, prominent environmentalist, former genetics professor, founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, once voted the greatest living Canadian, is asked a question about climate change that turns out to be surprisingly hard.
• Confucius Peace Prize. Awarded to Putin because Russia makes China look good?
• Top 10 retractions of 2013. There is a website for retractions (Retraction Watch) but no website for discoveries that could have been made but weren’t, except maybe this blog. I’m not joking. I am far more alarmed by lack of progress than retractions.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Martin Feldman, a Harvard professor of economics and former advisor to President Reagan, is against a hike in the minimum wage. One of his arguments:

When low-skill labor becomes more expensive, employers have a greater incentive to mechanize or outsource their work.

He — like most economists — ignores the point that an increase in the minimum wage, by forcing employers to reexamine familiar practices, will increase innovation. (I have seen non-economists make this point.)

How you can hope to understand economics without understanding innovation is beyond me. I realize that economics is a job — that academic economists try to write papers that make incremental improvements in understanding and innovation is not always important. Yet the whole profession seems stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore innovation and okay to try to increase productivity yet not acknowledge that productivity and innovation are often at odds. (For example, almost all foreign aid programs ignore innovation.) I have never heard or read an economist make this simple and obvious point. The situation reminds me of a friend of mine. When she was in first grade, she had a lot of pennies. Now and then she would spend some. She knew how to add but not subtract, so after she spent some she had to count them all again. At least she got the right answer eventually. Economists, not understanding the effect of Policy X on innovation, really cannot predict the effects of any policy that affects innovation.

It isn’t just economists. Epidemiologists seem stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore the immune system. They act as if the immune system does not exist, except perhaps when someone asks them why smoking is so bad and they reply “maybe it reduces immune function”. Statistics professors seem stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore the question of how to generate an idea worth testing, except to grant that making graphs is helpful.

Psychology professors, at least the ones who do experiments, are also stuck that world. With few exceptions, they have no idea how to generate ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. You can read a thousand psychology textbooks and ten thousand psychology papers and end up knowing no more about how to do that than when you started. It is a methodological question, yes, but maybe you have to be a psychology professor to grasp how disabling it is to not have a good way to generate ideas (ideas plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing). It is like having a car — psychology professors know a lot about how to do experiments to test ideas — but no fuel.

Something is making a lot of very smart very capable people ignore the obvious. I have a theory of why these vast areas of ignorance — easily noticed, yet rarely acknowledged — exist. It is because science is slow and difficult and in several ways incompatible with careerism. Science is innovation, careerism is productivity. You, a professional scientist, are trying to climb up a wall of rock (= discover stuff) but you have to lift your career at the same time. Really really hard. If you can pretend to climb, that’s much easier. (My solution was to ignore my career, which suffered great damage.) Distant observers, including granting agencies, university administrators, journalists and the general public, have a hard time telling the difference between real climbing and pretend climbing.

In the New York Times, a writer named Kira Piekoff, a graduate student in Bioethics, tells how she sent her blood to three different companies, including 23andMe, for genetic analysis and got back results that differed greatly. As usual, none of the companies told her anything about the error of measurement in their reports, judging from what she wrote. So she’s naive and they’re naive (or dishonest). Fine.

I’m unsurprised that a graduate student in bioethics has no understanding of measurement error. What’s fascinating is that the experts she consulted didn’t either, judging by what they said.

A medical ethicist named Arthur L. Caplan weighed in. He said:

The ‘risk is in the eye of the beholder’ standard is not going to work.We need to get some kind of agreement on what is high risk, medium risk and low risk. [Irrelevant — Seth] If you want to spend money wisely to protect your health and you have a few hundred dollars, buy a scale, stand on it, and act accordingly.

As if blood sugar and blood pressure measurements aren’t useful. A good scale costs $15.

A director of clinical genetics named Wendy Chung said:

Even if they are accurately looking at 5 percent of the attributable risk, they’ve ignored the vast majority of the other risk factors — the dark matter for genetics — because we as a scientific community haven’t yet identified those risk factors.

She changed the subject.

J. Craig Venter, the famous gene sequencer, does not understand the issue:

Your results are not the least bit surprising. Anything short of sequencing is going to be short on accuracy — and even then, there’s almost no comprehensive data sets to compare to.

The notion that “anything short of [complete] sequencing” cannot be helpful is absurd, if I understand what “short on accuracy” means. He reminds me of doctors who don’t understand that a t test corrects for sample size. They believe any study with less than 100 subjects cannot be trusted.

I told a friend recently that I have become very afraid of doctors. For exactly the reason illustrated in these quotes, from well-known experts who are presumably much more competent than any doctor I am likely to see. The experts were unable to comment usefully on something as basic as measurement error. Failing to understand basics makes them easy marks — for drug companies, for example — just as the writer of the article was an easy mark for the experts, who managed to be quoted in the Times, making them appear competent. Surely almost any doctor will be worse.

A reader writes:

The bedtime honey treatment has been a godsend for me. I had been sleepless for several months when you first wrote about the honey, waking up many times every night and staying awake for long periods. I immediately began trying the honey, and the first night, though I still woke up a few times, I had dreams for the first time in ages. After a couple more nights I was sleeping all night. I usually wake up once a night for one reason or another, but wonderfully, get back to sleep which was impossible for so long before the honey. Sleep deprivation is so miserable, I cannot thank you enough!

In case you haven’t tried it. What did I blog about before? I can’t remember.

Mr. Heisenbug says that smoking is the best predictor of heart disease. (Not quite. A high Agatston score is a better predictor. For example.) It is the best lifestyle predictor. People who smoke, according to this, have a six-fold increased risk of heart disease compared to non-smokers.

Why would this be? Heisenbug points to a study that found that when smokers quit, the microbial diversity of their gut increased. He speculates that (a) smoking decreases microbial diversity, which is quite plausible and (b) decreased microbial diversity increases heart disease — which has some plausibility.

I commented:

It would be interesting to find other factors that have a big effect on microbial diversity and whether they are also associated with heart disease. The idea that smoking causes heart disease via its microbial effects predicts, or at least suggests, that a change that reduces microbial diversity a lot will increase heart disease.

Heisenbug replied:

The only lifestyle factor that we can safely say leads to a lack of microbial diversity is a diet that is low in fermentable fiber. And fiber intake is consistently linked (negatively) with heart disease. I’ve never seen data linking lower overall diversity to a decrease in risk for any disease. And lots showing the opposite.

I replied:

The stuff about diversity (fiber intake increases diversity and is associated with less heart disease, many associations of more diversity with less risk of Disease X, no associations in the opposite direction) is substantial support for your idea, in my opinion.

His theory, in other words, made a prediction that turned out to be correct. A large fraction of what we’re told about health hasn’t led to any correct predictions. Here is an idea about how to prevent heart disease, a major killer, that there is actually reason to believe. And Heisenbug can say whatever he wants, in contrast to a heart disease expert quoted, say, in the New York Times, who is under pressure to say certain things. So we can take what he says at face value.

Heisenbug replied:

I agree. Especially because there’s never been a good explanation WHY fiber has that effect on [he means “association with” — Seth] heart disease.

Suddenly I am a lot more interested in microbial diversity and the association of fiber and heart disease. Smoking has countless health effects — it increases many cancers, for example. Obviously it increases lung and throat cancer. This means there are many ways it could cause heart disease. Fiber is quite different than smoking and as far as I know has no effect on lung and throat cancer. If it could be established that fiber causes a reduction in heart disease (not just is associated with a reduction), that would be considerable evidence (but far from proof, of course) that microbial diversity influences heart disease.

• Stephen J. Gould, evolutionary theorist: appearing to be smart
• “ A revolution is when you change your thinking.” I agree. Via Danielle Fong.
• Brain glycogen. Not all glycogen is in the liver.
• Ethiopians (in Ethiopia) don’t eat dessert. Evidence that traditional diets may not be optimal.
• Katherine Reid on how dietary changes eliminated her daughter’s autism (talk)
• The Floyd Leg. A shockingly simple great idea.
• Eric Lander, a professor at MIT and Harvard, says we should spend a lot of money on genomics without providing examples where it has been helpful. “The rate of progress is just stunning,” says Lander, again without examples. Perhaps he borrowed this style of argument from the Nobel Prize press office. I am sorry to see James Fallows, the interviewer, be so credulous. Dear Dr. Lander: Why is it that doctors have no clue what causes heart disease or diabetes or depression or a dozen other major diseases — but think they do? Is more money for genomics going to help with that?

Thanks to Edward Edmonds and Bert Sutherland.

It isn’t well known that eggs (large amounts) can cause insomnia nor that caffeine — in special cases — can reduce insomnia. But a reader named Baeo Maltinsky recently made those discoveries:

Back around July 2012, I was trying to improve my diet but I didn’t want to give up my vegetarianism, so I started to eat a LOT of eggs, usually in the range of 10 to 14 per day. Not long after, I started having awful insomnia. I could lie awake all night just unable to fall asleep. There were suddenly just too many thoughts buzzing through my head keeping me up. I assumed that it was a result of ketosis disturbing sleep. I tried reintroducing carbs, but when that didn’t work I gave up on dietary modifications. I started cycling through OTC sleep aids, but I developed tolerance to anticholinergics very quickly.

By October 2013, I was going crazy. I couldn’t sleep well. It was making me depressed and seriously impairing my academic performance. I was exhausted constantly, but then I noticed something. I slept better when I consumed a lot of caffeine in the morning. I noticed there was a clear dose dependent relationship between how much caffeine I consumed and how well I slept. I had a hunch that the caffeine was depleting my acetylcholine levels, serving a similar function as OTC anticholinergics like diphenhydramine and kava.

I wondered what would happen if I sharply reduced my intake of acetylcholine precursors. A lot of people advertise eggs as “choline packed”, so I cut back to less than 3 per day. Suddenly, I was sleeping much better. Now, it could be something else in the eggs (I’m not really attached to my choline hypothesis), but either way I feel confident blaming them for my sleep troubles. My insomnia returns whenever I start eating them again.

I asked him why he hadn’t realized earlier that eating so many eggs was the problem. He replied:

I just didn’t think there was anything special about the eggs. I googled around for it and the only things I could find were about ketosis induced insomnia, so it didn’t occur to me that eggs specifically were likely to be problematic. I tried consuming enough carbs to knock myself out of ketosis, but when that didn’t improve the situation, I just assumed that something else was going on aside from diet. Eggs seemed like the perfect food. Cheap, nutrient rich, paleo, easy to prepare, and compatible with my (then) vegetarianism. It would have been hard for me to find a suitable replacement, so while the idea of testing it probably occurred to me, performing the test itself wouldn’t be trivial and the results wouldn’t be actionable.

As it got worse, I tried treating it more aggressively with OTC sleep aids, and that worked well enough that I stopped worrying about it. I wasn’t sleeping great, but it was enough to get by. Eventually they stopped working, but not long after that I made the caffeine connection and decided to try removing eggs. It was easier to do at that point because I had given up on paleo and vegetarianism and could just substitute chicken and sprouted lentils, and I had a (probably
incorrect) neurochemical explanation to support it. Moreover, it had become VERY difficult to eat the eggs. My body just didn’t want to consume them and I had to slowly force them down. Something seemed to know it was bad for me, but I wasn’t listening to the signs. My behavior was not at all rational, and believe me after I discovered eggs were the problem I was kicking myself for not trying it sooner.

I asked him what he learned from this, apart from how to sleep better. He replied:

1. Costly experiments sometimes need to be performed.
2. Sometimes your values are bad for your health.
3. Don’t give up just because there’s no evidence to support a hypothesis.
4. Simple things can easily go unnoticed.

Those are good lessons.