- Dennis Mangan makes great progress against chronic fatigue syndrome
- More Dennis Mangan: statin dangers.
- Statins fail to save lives. “Statin therapy for an average period of 3.7 years had no benefit on all-cause mortality in a high-risk primary prevention population.” About 60,000 subjects were involved.
- Probiotic tested with cyclists. The men benefited (less sickness), the women did not.
“Stuff of Seth”: Faces/Mood and Anticipatory Waking
After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:
Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.
At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).
I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.
The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.
Assorted Links
- Low-level radon exposure appears to reduce lung cancer
- Dubious science of climate crusaders. “The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed.”
- Graduate school in the humanities is for the already-privileged. What’s especially interesting about this column is that it appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you might expect to be pro-establishment.
- Rediscovery and opposition to the ketogenic diet for childhood epilepsy. “One of the reasons that the ketogenic diet is not popular at this point is because there’s not a big drug company behind it, selling it to doctors.”
Health Care Stagnation: Sleep
The January 2011 issue of Bottom Line/Health has an article called “Dirty Drugs” about popular drugs with bad side effects. It is based on an interview with an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard named James Rudolph. It contains the following:
Insomnia. Most OTC drugs taken for insomnia, including the allergy medicine Benadryl and sleep aid Sominex, contain diphenhydramine. It can cause constipation, difficulty concentrating, urinary retention, and trouble with eye focus — and stays active in the body for 12 to 18 hours, which can cause next-day grogginess.
My advice. Avoid taking diphenhydramine for insomnia.
Better. Practice good sleep habits. Examples: Go to bed at a reasonable hour, and maintain the same schedule every night. Exercise regularly but not within two hours of bedtime — it will make falling asleep more difficult. Take a warm bath before bed to help you relax.
I agree, insomnia drugs are bad news. But the “better” advice could be a hundred years old.
Effect of one-legged standing on sleep. Six signs of the profound stagnation in health care.
Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder: A Story (Part 1: Background)
In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday — not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood — in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.
In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder. After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me — that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way — successful or not — it should be revealing.
I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.
My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age. (I am now 37.)
I was a civil engineer working for the government in an Eastern State. I had self-diagnosed myself as having Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), also known as the morning blues. The symptoms are mild to severe depression, lethargy, apathy and weight gain. A form of treatment for SAD is the light box. Mine is an Apollo GoLite Box. As soon as I read about this device, I was excited. It came via UPS. I plugged it in during my lunch break soon after it arrived. By the end of the work day my mind was in overdrive. I was a total motor mouth, with racing racing thoughts and unusual activities such as inventing things, writing songs and books for the first time. Friends knew I was totally not myself. I went without sleep for days at a time. I began drinking heavily and not going to work. My mind could not rest. Alcohol or extreme exercise were the only medicine. I stopped eating, lost about 30 pounds in 30 days. I became paranoid and shut everyone out of my life including my friends, family, and co-workers. I was buying hundreds if books and dozens of bottles of supplements. Overall I was turning into a different person with new interests.
Finally my parents stepped in because of my isolation and irresponsible behavior. This led to a three week outpatient clinic stay in Illinois. Right away I was diagnosed as Bipolar I. I was vaguely familiar with it, but was quite stunned I had it. On the other hand, it was a huge relief to have a name to this craziness I was feeling. I was put on four medications and went through extensive therapy, including talk therapy, group therapy, family talks, and letter writing. It was a wonderful experience that helped me to deal with painful past experiences. It had an excellent scheduled program with early-morning group therapy and prayer. [Note the morning exposure to faces.] This was a Christian-based psychiatric clinic. Then daily small classes on mental health issues, then one-on-one discussions with a licensed therapist and plenty of other group activities and meals on the town. Lots of love, support and scheduled work.
That was an ideal setting. After three weeks I came home. I slowly went back to those sad, frustrated days. The drugs seem to stop working. My moods began turning sad or mad, for no particular reason. [Note that this downturn happened soon after exposure to morning faces — via group therapy — stopped.] The frustrations of an unfulfilled, boring and dead-end career grew worse. Maybe the worst was a lonely life. Silence in the mornings and only late-night television before bed.
The disappointments of my life were bad, but the bipolar manifestations of the highs and lows seemed to magnify all emotions to the nth degree. My medications were replaced by the new ones, without expired patents. Perhaps I have been prescribed ten different anti-depressants overall, sometimes in combinations, but I only found relief in narcotics such as prescription xanax or klonopin.
They truly numbed the pain, but led to regrettable behavior. I took to cutting myself as a sort of punishment for the unwarranted guilt and self-absorption (for feeling depressed and angry) and to ease the pains with the endorphin releasing that was given by cutting with a razor blade. It seems insane now, but at the time it was the quickest release. These cuttings not only led to my first surgery, but led me back into a different psychiatric hospital in Vanderbilt at age 31. I had a tendon transfer surgery from my the top of my wrist to closer to my thumb, where I had severed my tendon. It was very embarrassing to my family and myself. I came clean to my employer and became eligible for FMLA (The Federal Medical Leave Act).
During these last couple of years, my manias have been much rarer and weaker. I faithfully take my medication daily. I still experience mild depression, but to a lessor extent, a more numbing feeling. I still feel sad but not the weepy, nostalgia I felt overwhelmed with previously.
To be continued.
Percentile Feedback R Workspace Updated
I fixed a few problems and eliminated the one Windows-specific function so it can be used with Macs.
The new version is here.
Assorted Links
- More about radiation hormesis. Introductory.
- Fungus improves violin tone. Combines fermented foods and global warming.
- The New Yorker ran a cartoon that the editors didn’t understand. Added later: Now that I know where the cartoon came from (see comments), I’m afraid this is the most tasteless cartoon I have ever seen in the magazine.
- How modern medicine killed my brother. “I turned to her and asked, “Well, do you tell your patients to avoid glutamate?” She looked puzzled and said, “No one told us to.””
Thanks to Paul Sas and Gary Wolf.
Six Signs of Profound Stagnation in Health Care
In a recent interview, Tim Harford, the Underground Economist, said,
That’s what makes medicine such an effective academic discipline.
By “that” he meant certain methodologies, especially randomized experiments. I disagree with this assessment. My opinion is that health care is in a state of profound stagnation, unable to make much progress on major problems.
Here are six signs of the stagnation in health care (by which I mean everything related to health):
1. The irrelevance of Nobel Prizes. Year after year, the Nobel Prize in medicine is usually given for research that is so far useless (e.g., teleomere research) or irrelevant to major health problems.
2. The obesity epidemic. Starting in 1980, obesity rates climbed fast. Thirty years later, doctors seem to know no more about how to cure obesity than in 1980. Low-fat diets, popular in the 1980s, are still popular! Low-carb diets are ancient — the Banting diet became popular in the 1860s.
3. Ancient treatments for depression still popular. SSRIs were introduced in 1988. Cognitive-behavioral therapy began in the 1980s, combining earlier ideas. Neither works terribly well — and notice how different they are.
4. The high cost of ineffective care. Americans pay much more for health care than people in other rich countries, yet American health is no better. All that new technology that Americans are paying for isn’t helping. In an article complaining about our education system, Joel Klein, the former head of New York City schools, wrote, “unlike in health care . . . in education, despite massive increases in expenditure, we don’t see improved results.” Actually, that’s exactly what we see in health care when we compare America to other countries. Tyler Cowan makes this point in The Great Stagnation.
5. Statins. A defender of modern medicine would claim that statins were an important innovation. They are heavily prescribed, yes. Yet in recent tests they have been stunningly ineffective — so much so that the earlier favorable evidence has been questioned.
6. The stagnation has become invisible — the normal state of affairs. Allowing Harford to make that comment. Harford, like Dr. Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre (whom Harford praises), believes you judge science by whether it follows certain rules. By making various rules (e.g., the need for placebo controls) and then following them, medical researchers have drawn attention — at least Harford’s and Goldacre’s — away from lack of progress. They’re making progress, they say, because they’re following self-imposed rules. Well, what if the rules make things worse? (For example, placing high value on placebo controls may draw attention away from non-pill treatments.) Better to judge by results.
What do you think are the clearest signs of health-care stagnation — if you agree with me about this?
Percentile Feedback Workspace Available
I have put a requested R workspace on my website so that you can download it. The percentile feedback workspace compares your productivity (time spent working/time available to work) today to previous days. When I started using it, I became more productive. Here is an introduction. Here are all posts about it.
This is not for everyone. You need R installed to use it (of course) and you’ll need to know at least a little R. You must edit a function called save.ws so that the workspace is saved in the right place. I have used it under Windows XP.
Comment on “Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder”
In yesterday’s post, a friend of mine with bipolar disorder told how he used my faces/mood discovery. It allowed him “to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life,” he wrote. Partly because it allows him to stop taking the usual meds prescribed for bipolar disorder, which have awful side effects.
What do I think about this?
To begin with the obvious, I am very happy that something I discovered has helped someone else. Practically all science has no obvious use. (A tiny fraction is eventually helpful.) In experimental psychology, my field, I can’t think of a single finding that’s helped many people. Because of this background, managing to help someone via science seems like a fairy tale. It’s too soon to say the story has a happy ending — it isn’t over — but it is beginning to have a happy ending.
Thank heaven for blogs. Something like my faces/mood discovery is difficult to publicize, yet without accumulation of evidence it will go nowhere. It wouldn’t be easy to publish in a psychiatric or psychotherapeutic journal because I’m not a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. Even if published, the chances of interesting psychiatrists and psychotherapists are low because it doesn’t involve a treatment you can make money from (gatekeeper syndrome). It should greatly interest persons with bipolar disorder but they are not the typical readers of the scientific literature on mood disorders. However, like all sufferers, they search the Internet.
In my internal calculus, the story provides what I think of as “ industrial strength” evidence. Industrial-strength evidence is evidence that something works in practice, not just in the lab. In a laboratory setting, which to some extent includes me studying myself, you try to keep things constant. You want to reduce noise. Noise reduction makes signals clearer. An effect you can see easily in a lab experiment, however, may be too small to matter outside the lab, where more powerful forces push people around. Whether your lab experiment — in which you have managed to control Force X — has practical value depends on the size of Force X relative to other forces at work outside the lab. An example is the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. Does that theory tell us anything useful about why people are fat? Does it explain the obesity epidemic, for example? I knew the theory had plenty of truth because it had led me to several new ways of losing weight and had helped me lose considerable weight and keep it off forever. But that was far from showing (a) it was the only thing that controls weight or even (b) one of the big things. Lab experiments can’t do that. It’s been claimed that obesity is due to a virus. Experiments support the idea. Yet the idea is irrelevant to everyday life, I’m sure. No one has written How to Lie With Laboratory Science but it could be written. The only way to find out if a “true” idea explains enough of reality to be useful is to use that idea in real-world situations. Which is what my friend did.
But that isn’t the biggest thing. The biggest thing, from my point of view, is that what my friend has done helps keep this idea alive. When it comes to ideas, grow or die. My friend’s story keeps the idea alive by expanding it. It gives it a new and personal dimension. It isn’t just about mood measurements, it’s about living a reasonable life. I’ve given talks about this idea, but this story makes it much easier to talk about to a general audience.