A brief summary of my previous post is all I needed to do to cure/prevent a skin infection was buy more socks. Instead of buying 5 pairs every 6 months, buy 20 pairs every two years. That’s all. Costs nothing. No drugs. No special treatment of the socks. No special cycle on the washing machine. No following a hundred (or ten) instructions about how to avoid infection. Like my depressed friend, I had the reaction: Why didn’t my doctor tell me this? He didn’t tell me because he didn’t know, I realize. Why he didn’t know . . . is a harder question.
The whole practice of health care is called medicine, so focused is it on cure rather than prevention. There are medical schools, which turn out doctors. Schools of public health are the closest thing we have to schools based on prevention but they don’t even train nutritionists. Nor do they do experiments, in most cases. (They do little data collection besides epidemiology.) And they get much less money than medical schools. Scurvy and Vitamin C are the first examples of the new way of dealing with illness I’m talking about — finding the environmental deficiency and fixing that, which is inevitably extremely safe and extremely cheap. After the discovery of Vitamin C, similar examples were discovered and the broader term vitamin was coined. But I think there is a need for a similar term that includes non-vitamins. It would mean aspects of everyday life, food and non-food, that we need to be healthy.
Like Vitamin C, my discovery that more socks eliminates skin infection points to a cure/prevention agent that is perfectly safe and extremely cheap. So do all my posts about fermented foods. It costs basically nothing to let food ferment. You lose nothing and gain a lot. Yet bacteria are not vitamins — and it isn’t all bacteria we need, just the 99.999% that are harmless. (And other foreign stuff, like bee venom, can substitute for bacteria.) I began thinking there are non-food vitamin-like things (things we need to be healthy) when I discovered the effects of standing on sleep and morning faces on mood. So we need several things to sleep well, including morning light, and at least one thing for proper mood regulation. Insomnia and depression are non-infectious problems, like scurvy. We think of vitamins as preventing/curing non-infectious problems, so the analogy was obvious. And these examples (sleep and mood) involved the brain. So there were vitamins for the brain, you could say. But the socks/foot infection example and the fermented foods/many illnesses example both do not involve the brain and do involve infectious diseases and auto-immune diseases (which, although non-infectious, are quite different from scurvy). So the idea that there are bunch of extremely cheap, perfectly safe things we need to be healthy expands to cover more of health.
Vast amounts of money are spent on health research, much much more on the consequences of poor health, and truly incalculable suffering comes about because we don’t know what these things are. (Depression alone causes vast suffering. Now add to that poor sleep, autoimmune problems, much infectious disease . . . ) Yet because studying these things (a) will make money for no one, (b) won’t produce a steady stream of published papers and (c) is useful (= low status), they are nearly impossible to study.
Kaiser Permanente, seems like the most apt health system in NorCal–nationally, perhaps–to embrace nutritional bricolage and cheap health options since Kaiser’s model integrates the financing and delivery of medical care under one roof/feedback loop. Kaiser has a financial incentive to exhaust low-cost, high-benefit modalities.
Someone just needs to get in touch with CEO George Halvorson and get his buy-in and support. lol. They do their own internal research–published in The Permanente Journal–so that avenue exists as well.
Does using more socks cure everyone’s foot fungus? We have no idea. So we don’t know if all of the other techniques are necessary too. Having an n greater than 1 would be useful.
Jeff
Jeff, n > 1 is always useful. My telling what happened to me is one way to try to get there.
n=1 is the startup to initiate momentum for a community of n=1 self-experiments. New ideas have to start somewhere …
Most of the scientists I know (and Wikipedia editors) would say that your research doesn’t exist because it’s not published in a refereed journal.
The work that gave us the ability to solve differential equations was published by an engineer, Oliver Heaviside, in a city newspaper. It was later backdated and renamed the “Laplace transform” to sanitize it. That done, it could then be used by mathematicians and scientists.
“Doesn’t exist until published in a refereed journal.” You’re probably right, they would say that. And other evidence snobs would say it is worthless until demonstrated useful in a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. It’s just more black-and-white thinking, familiar to us from organized religion. It’s interesting the way some scientists imitate religious behavior.
I need an effective means for self experimentation at home with my Autism squad. We try new interventions every few months, but we don’t have an effective way to gather enough data to be sure about the efficacy of the things we try. We do evals every few months. We need something lighter to do daily. It needs to be better than just observing and “using the gut” and it needs to survive physical exhaustion of the researchers and little OCD hands.
Maybe we just need to measure our own well being since it is so tied to the kids’ behavior on any given day. I always know how _I_ feel.
And don’t knock my washing machine you…
Andrew, when I associate religions with black-and-white thinking, I was thinking of three things: (a) division of the world into us (believers) and them (non-believers); (b) the many rules associated with most religions: Do this, do that, you must X, you must Y; and (c) the certainty with which many statements are made — as if the truth and the difference between right and wrong were so clear-cut. Religions sell certainty. I knew someone who became an Orthodox Jew, I believe, at least partly because it told him how to live.
You’re right that each of these three things can be found outside religions, so the association is hardly perfect. And you might say that the black-and-white thinking came first, it merely found a home in various religions as well as in other places (such as in these scientists’ belief systems). But the religions I’m familiar with certainly encourage black-and-white thinking. It doesn’t fit very well with science, but there it is anyway.
Inoculations are one type of prevention the medical community does seem to have embraced. Brent the healthcare epistemocrat and you have both described consumption of fermented foods as an inoculation of sorts against bad bacteria. The Western medical community is starting to look at probiotics (judging from the increase in scientific medical literature on the subject), but Eastern medicine has embraced it for eons.
On the topic of science as religion: I constantly see scientists who are dogmatic, elitist, and condescending when discussing alternative frameworks to their own deep-seated beliefs. Sounds like a kind of religion to me. I also know many scientists, however, who are NOT like this. No black-and-white here (or in academia, or in the university setting) either.
Darrin,
“I need an effective means for self experimentation at home”
Check out Facet of Life:
https://facetoflife.com
It’s a barebones, simple platform to help you capture and track your ‘clinical trials’ at home. My friend built it.
Email me if you have any questions.
Best,
Brent
What Seth is pointing to is the invisibility of opportunity. An infected foot is a problem with a cure, a prevented infection is not a problem or a cure. Missed opportunities (or opportunity costs) are not part of GAAP accounting.
True, it’s much harder to measure prevented infections than cured infections. But in all of the cases I mention, the treatment method (used to cure) is the same as the prevention method (used to prevent). Just as Vitamin C both cures scurvy and prevents it.
My objection isn’t to doing n=1 experiments, which I agree is useful. It’s to the forcefulness with which Seth proclaims things. He cured allergies! He cured foot fungus. He cured X.
Or, every doctor is like this. Every biologist is like that. The entire field of public health is like this.
Jeff
Jeff, what’s an example? You might be right but it’s hard to know without an example.
It sounds like you’re aligning with the Natural Hygienists – whose use of the term means something like “living in a way that doesn’t make you ill”.
So your changes in sleep pattern to help with depression, changes in sock washing to help with foot fungus, standing to help with sleeping, might be Hygeinic solutions.
Although the modern use of the term means ‘sterile’ which is a bit misleadingly close.