Category: acne

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • natural acne remedies
  • A mainstream climate scientist has doubts. “We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem.” What would Bill McKibben say?
  • Personal Experiments, a research site where you can sign up for experiments.
  • Trouble at GSK Shanghai. The defenses of the accused strike me as plausible.
  • Sleep disturbance in a hospital. “Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., I did not go more than an hour without some kind of interruption.” As ridiculous as cutting off part of the immune system because of too many infections (tonsillectomies) and the view that acne has nothing to do with diet.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Acne Club: A New Way to Fight Acne

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Recently I posted that my work resembles the work of the artist Hong Yi. Her work shows that profitable beautiful art can be made from the cheapest materials; my work shows that non-trivial useful science can be done by anyone. A reader named David commented:

Your work and discoveries, just like Hong’s, are very inspirational. . . . They send a message that every individual has the potential to contribute something to society even with no or limited budget.

This hadn’t occurred to me. It should have. I could have made this point in talks, for example. Beyond the obvious point, David was saying that the more your personal science could help others, the more likely you would be to do it. The prospect of helping yourself and others will surely be stronger motivation than the prospect of helping only yourself.

How can one person’s personal science help others? This doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be arranged. My Journal of Personal Science and the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group are two ways of facilitating this. What about other ways?

David’s comment made me think of another way: Acne Club, that is, a high school club for people with acne. The purpose of the club is to promote personal science about acne. Members of the club try to find the causes of their acne, partly by self-experimentation. They meet to share results and ideas (e.g., treatments to try, how to measure acne) and encourage each other. The discovery of two groups of “primitive” people who have no acne suggests that all acne has environmental causes. If a high school group could identify even one environmental cause, it would be a huge contribution to human well-being — especially the well-being of high-school students. I think this is quite possible.

I had acne as a teenager. If you start such a club, I would be happy to help you however I can. For example, I could give advice about measurement and experimental design and could publicize what you learn.

 

The Rise of Personal Science: One Example, About Acne

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Looking around for evidence connecting glutathione level and acne (it has been proposed that low glutathione causes acne), I found this at acne.org, from a 20-year-old woman:

As a personal choice research and viewing other people’s experiences with supplements is safer than taking my doctor’s advice. My doctor insisted I go on the pill, insisted I get on antibiotics [a common prescription for acne], insisted nothing was wrong with me and even did a hormonal test…said I was “healthy and normal” and to leave the office because my hormones were normal as well as everything from the liver onwards. I stared at him and told him he was wrong: 1. hormone tests will lie if I’m on the pill and 2. I have acne, never had it before in my life and it came about too fast … If acne is a symptom then something is wrong. I personally don’t trust doctors because they generalize [too much] and from personal experiences [where] I’ve been laughed at and dismissed and even told “leaky gut doesn’t exist”. Personal research goes a long way and it’s so great to have communities like this where everyone can help each other out.

This is personal science in the sense of trying to learn from other people’s data. What’s interesting is that she says this. Nobody forced her to. She isn’t try to sell something or look good. Her discovery of the power of “research and viewing other people’s experiences” — better than trusting a doctor — (a) interests her and (b) she thinks will interest acne.org readers. Her own experience certainly supports what she says.

Long ago, it was discovered that the Earth is round. Before the discovery, nobody said that. After the discovery, people discussed it for a while (“Have you heard? The Earth is round.”), maybe a few hundred years. When knowledge of the Earth’s roundness became part of everyone’s belief system, people stopped discussing it.

In other words, this comment suggests that a new truth is coming into being. Her experience is the same as mine with regard to acne: Can’t trust what a doctor says. My dermatologist prescribed two medicines. Studying myself showed that only one of them worked, a possibility my dermatologist seemed to have never considered.

Progress in Reducing Acne

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A new study has found that persons with Laron Syndrome (a kind of dwarfism) get almost no acne. Persons with this syndrome, because of a mutation, are insensitive to growth hormone. As a result, they produce much less IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor) than normal. When given synthetic IGF, they may develop acne; when the dose is reduced, the acne goes away. The authors say: “The findings suggest that an interaction between IGF-1 and androgens is necessary for the development of acne.” This is great progress because people with Laron Syndrome are different from everyone else in just one tiny way (albeit a tiny way with many consequences).

The first important step in understanding the cause of acne was finding two (“primitive”) groups of people with no acne. This suggested that acne has an environmental cause. There were thousands of differences between the lifestyle of those people and “modern” people, so this was just a start. It was hard to know which differences mattered. The Laron Syndrome finding is consistent with the earlier result (no acne in two groups of “primitive” people) because a “Western diet with [its] high intake of hyperglycemic carbohydrates and insulinotropic dairy over-stimulates IIS” (insulin-like/insulin signaling).

This view predicts that if you replace hyperglycemic foods with foods lower in glycemic index acne should be reduced. This study did that and, indeed, acne decreased (compared to a control group) after ten weeks. The study ended after ten weeks. The patient who reduced his/her glycemic index the most saw the greatest decrease in acne. A second study found the same thing: a low-glycemic-index diet reduced acne. It lasted twelve weeks. With longer follow-up, there might have been even more improvement.

Thanks to Paul Nash.

 

 

 

Acne Caused By Pasteurized Dairy: How One Person Figured It Out

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A reader of this blog named Tony Mach explains how he figured out that his acne was caused by pasteurized dairy products:

In summer 2010 my health problems got noticeably worse (unrefreshing sleep, strange pains, strange sensations in the skin and other stuff I don’t want to share here :-P ), and I had to do something. Furthermore I was gaining weight, so I was suspecting something along the lines of diabetes or other metabolic problem.

As I was looking into dietary changes, I stumbled over Wolfgang Lutz’s and Robert Atkins’ work. Being an engineer by training, I figured that if blood sugar might be the problem (which, as it turned out, wasn’t the case for me), then reducing carbs might be a solution (stop fueling the problematic sub-system) – so both Lutz and Atkins appealed to me. I thought let’s give it a try. I was a bit frightened about such an radical change of diet – you read all kind of BS – but hey, I felt like I was going to die anyway.

Before the change, I ate a lots of white bread, some milk chocolate and drank lots of milk. First I reduced carbs – like Lutz suggested, I tried to aim for 6 bread units – but within days I noticed that some problems (like the strange pain and skin sensations) diminished right away. The acne cleared up noticeably. So I thought why bother with low-carb, let’s go full no-carb (like Atkins suggests for some month).

And voila, with no-carb everything got better. I started to feel healthy for the first time in my life. I lost over 30 pounds, all health problems either went away or were almost gone, and life started to become enjoyable. This was a period of about two months over with most problems went away, some fast, some slower.

So for over half a year I was focused on the carbs=evil scheme, started eating cheese again (hey, no carbs!), when slowly some of the health problems returned and my weight started to rise again.

At that point I panicked a bit and made a huge mistake: I thought I can figure this one out too, I have to do something right away. So I trusted what some doctors had written about a pathogen (which I tested for with borderline results), how to cure it (with over the counter medications like Vitamin D and NAC and other stuff) and I thought let’s try this too! The things I took made me worse, but as it was supposed to be a “die off”/”herx” reaction, I wasn’t too alarmed. Turned out that experiment cost me almost an year until I got better again. So for about a year I was not in the mood for big experiments and personal stuff like moving to another city kept me busy.

But slowly I introduced “safe starches” into my diet (like plantains), because I kept reading one should not go too much low-carb. I tried out self-made sourdough rye bread (makes me enormously hungry, so I stopped again) and at one point I thought: What the heck, I’m going to eat ice cream today. Three hours later I got slightly noticeable pimples and local inflammation (I think they are called nodules) and after another roughly 3 hours the acne was prominent.

After that, my suspicion was that milk might be bad for me, but maybe some properly “ripe” cheese like hard cheese (properly digested by bacteria) might be OK. So I waited for the acne inflammation to go away and tried again with a Parmesan cheese. Bingo, acne again, and again in the 3 to 6 hour time frame.

So I didn’t touch milk or dairy again, but now I looked for raw milk cheese, as I read something about it being possibly better. After a while I found raw-milk-cheese, tried it – and got no acne. Tried again, after some time, with another brand – again no acne. Tried cheese from pasteurized milk – acne.

As I still have health problems, I am still in the process of figuring out things. Next up for me is trying to get rid of beef for a week or two, to see if that might be a problem for me.

In summary:
– I was not very systematic in my experiments, and had some lucky moments.
– All the macro-nutrient ratio paradigms are IMHO BS and not applicable for the majority (might make sense if someone has real/major metabolic problems like T1DM, etc.)
– Having said that, in my view some carb foods come with baggage: e.g. cereal grains and (pasteurized) milk
– A quickly reacting, non-dangerous, clearly visible (objective) surrogate health marker (in my case acne) is worth its weight in gold [I agree, canary in coal mine. In this case it isn’t clear what else besides no acne was gained by avoiding pasteurized dairy. — Seth]– With such a marker, one should completely eliminate suspicious foods (in my case *ALL* dairy) and then introduce it again (two or three challenges)
– For me, pasteurized dairy = acne, raw dairy = no acne
– Milk chocolate is dairy [A friend’s mother said, “If I’m ever in jail, bring me some chocolate.” She’ll break out.– Seth]– Some surrogate health markers (e.g. weight) reacted “funky” for me: I changed my diet to no-carb, my weight went down, and without any big changes [in diet or exercise] my weight started to climb again. [Same thing happened to Alex Chernavsky. — Seth]– For most of the health problems that went away, I don’t know exactly what food (Cereal grains? Dairy? Vegetable oils? etc.) caused what problem
– As I felt like I was going to die on my old diet, I am not particular keen on going back full scale to my old diet to see if after one or two month all my old symptoms return, to determine which food caused which symptom… [Better to test the old foods one at a time. — Seth]– Medical science and several MDs helped me diddly squat
– Paleo blogs were much more helpful than the medical community

I can only guess why raw milk and cheese are less harmful than pasteurized milk and cheese. Maybe milk and cheese contain acne-causing chemicals that leak into the blood. Maybe raw milk, which contains bigger entities than pasteurized milk, does a better job of plugging the holes from digestive system to blood.

Doctor Logic: “Acne is Caused by Bacteria”

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Presumably Dr. Jenny Kim is a good dermatologist because the author of this NPR piece chose to quote her:

UCLA dermatologist Dr. Jenny Kim says many people don’t realize it’s bacteria that cause acne. “Some people say your face is dirty, you need to clean it more, scrub more, don’t eat chocolate, things like that. But really, it’s caused by bacteria and the oil inside the pore allows the bacteria to overpopulate,” Kim says.

If I were to ask Dr. Kim how she knows that acne is “caused by bacteria” I think she’d say “because when you kill the bacteria [with antibiotics] the acne goes away.” Suppose I then asked: “Is there evidence that the bacteria of people who get acne differ from the bacteria of people who don’t get acne (before the acne)?” What I assume Dr. Kim would answer: “I don’t know.”

There is no such evidence, I’m sure. It is quite plausible that the bacteria of the two groups (with and without acne) are exactly the same, at least before acne. If it turned out, upon investigation, that the bacteria of people who get acne is the same as the bacteria of people who don’t get acne, that would make it much harder to say that acne is caused by bacteria. As far as I can tell, Dr. Kim and apparently all influential dermatologists have not thought even this deeply about it. To do so would be seriously inconvenient, because if acne isn’t caused by bacteria, it would be harder to justify prescribing antibiotics. Which dermatologists have been doing for decades.

It isn’t just dermatologists. Many doctors believe that H. pylori causes ulcers — wasn’t a Nobel Prize given for discovering that? The evidence for that assertion consisted of: 1. H. pylori found at ulcers. 2. Doctor swallowed billions of H. pylori and didn”t get an ulcer. (Not a typo.) It was enough that he got indigestion or something. 3. Antibiotics cause ulcers to heal. That was enough for the two doctors who made the H. pylori case and the Nobel Prize committee they convinced. The doctors and the committee failed to know or understand that H. pylori infection is very common and almost no one who is infected gets an ulcer. Psychiatric causal reasoning has been even simpler and even more self-serving. We know that depression — a huge problem — is due to “a chemical imbalance”, according to many psychiatrists, because (a) antidepressants work (not very well) and (b) antidepressants change brain chemistry.

Dr. Kim’s false certainty matters because I’m sure most people with acne don’t know what causes it. I didn’t. Dr. Kim’s false certainty and similar statements from other dermatologists make it harder for them to find out. I wrote about a woman who figured out what caused her acne. It wasn’t easy or obvious.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Acne: Reality is Not a Morality Tale

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Someone named Red Fury made an interesting comment on my Boing Boing article about acne:

I had acne on/off for years. . . . In my mid-thirties, I tried the Retin-A at night, antibiotic gel for day regimen for about 2 years – no effect. . . . Then, I was talking to a co-worker whose daughter was taking ‘modeling classes’ to become a teen model. She casually mentioned her acned daughter had to give up rice, potato chips, and bread, all of which are high-glycemic index foods. My quack-radar went off, and I looked around for something scientific behind that advice. https://www.ajcn.org/content/86…

Huh. I guess those nutrition-bashing dermatologists actually did a study and published the scientific results in a peer-reviewed journal. . . . My acne disappeared completely as soon as I eliminated rice and potatoes.

He finds a study that supports the casual advice, he follows the advice, his acne disappears. By convincing him to follow the advice, the scientific study helped him get rid of his acne. Which is impressive.

The interesting twist is that the study was published twice, clearly breaking the rules. Bad scientists! Who did something really good.

How Martha Rotter Cured Her Acne By Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Several months ago I posted about how Martha Rotter figured out that her acne was caused by cow dairy products. Now a longer version of her story (by me) is on Boing Boing. There is a ton of useful information in the comments. Some examples:

“ Dairy is what caused my acne.” Someone replied: “Same here, specifically milk. I switched to soy milk in high school and my moderately-bad acne went away very suddenly. . . . If I eat a lot of cheese at once, like having pizza more than a couple days a week, my backne gets worse and I get acne inside my ears.” Someone else misunderstands genetics: “I do have tumor-forming disease (fortunately stable, and partially corrected with surgery) so I do have some sympathy when it comes to this sort of thing, but my condition is so well established as genetic I never even saw hope in trying to control it with diet.” Aaron Blaisdell had a well-established genetic condition (porphyria) that went away when he changed his diet.

Someone else found that dairy mattered:

I had terrible acne as a teenager and I drank almost a carton of milk every day. . . . When I moved out on my own, I no longer had milk delivered at the door and I fell out of the habit of drinking it altogether, switching to tea and water instead. My face cleared within weeks. . . . Whenever I indulged in cheese, the break-outs returned.

Someone else discovered multiple causes:

I have had strikingly similar experiences with a very particular form of acne, for years. Multiple doctors with no results until I got frustrated with it. I heard that the four most common causes of skin reactions can be wheat, milk, peanut butter and eggs – so I took all of them out *and* meat.

And watched my skin slowly return to normal.

After playing with my food by putting one thing in, seeing what happened, and then taking that out and trying something else, I found that wheat in particular is the trigger for me with dairy as a close second.

Someone else: “I took wheat from my diet, and my skin cleared up. If I allow wheat back in for one day, the next day I have acne.”

Not all solutions were dietary:

My wife and I found the only thing that worked reliably–even including a couple of different kinds of antibiotics–was “the regimen” as described on acne.org. Basically you use a low-strength (2.5%) benzoyl peroxide every day and moisturise like mad afterwards.

These are just examples. There are many more helpful comments.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Anne Weiss, Phil Alexander and Dave Lull.

Ten Interesting Things I Learned From Adventures in Nutritional Therapy

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A blog called Adventures in Nutritional Therapy (started March 2011) is about what the author learned while trying to solve her health problems via nutrition and a few other things. She usually assumed her health problems were due to too much or too little of some nutrient. She puts it like this: “using mostly non-prescription, over-the-counter (OTC) supplements and treatments to address depression, brain fog, insomnia, migraines, hypothyroidism, restless legs, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bunch of other annoyances.” In contrast to what “the American medical establishment” advises. Mostly it is nutritional self-experimentation about a wide range of health problems.

Interesting things I learned from the archives:

1. Question: Did Lance Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs? I learned that LiveStrong (Armstrong’s site) is a content farm. Now answer that question again.

2. “If you return repeatedly to a conventional doctor with a problem they can’t solve, they will eventually suggest you need antidepressants.”

3. “When I mentioned [to Dr. CFS] the mild success I’d had with zinc, he said it was in my mind: I wanted it to work and it did. When I pointed out that 70% of the things I tried didn’t work, he changed the subject. Dr. CFS’ lack of basic reasoning skills did nothing to rebuild my confidence in the health care system.” Quite right. I have had the same experience. Most things I tried failed. When something finally worked, it could hardly be a placebo effect. This line of reasoning has been difficult for some supposedly smart people to grasp.

4. A list of things that helped her with depression. “Quit gluten” is number one.

5. Pepsi caused her to get acne. Same here.

6. 100 mg/day of iron caused terrible acne that persisted for weeks after she stopped taking the iron.

7. “ In September 2008 I started a journey that serves as a good example of the limits of the American health care system, where you can go through three months, 15 doctor visits, $7,000 in medical tests, three prescriptions and five over-the-counter medications trying to treat your abdominal pain, and after you lose ten pounds due to said pain, you are asked by the “specialists” if you have an eating disorder.” I agree. Also an example of the inability of people within the American health care system to see those limits. If they recognized that people outside their belief system might have something valuable to contribute, apparently something awful would happen.

8. Acupuncture relieved her sciatica, but not for long. “By the time I left [the acupuncturist’s office] the pain was gone, but it crept back during my 30-minute drive home.”

9. Pointing out many wrongs does not equal a right. She praises a talk by Robert Lustig about evil fructose. I am quite sure that fructose (by itself) did not cause the obesity epidemic. For one thing, I lost a lot of weight by drinking it. (Here is an advanced discussion.) In other words, being a good critic of other people’s work (as Lustig may be) doesn’t get you very far. I think it is hard for non-scientists (and even some scientists) to understand that all scientific work has dozens of “flaws”. Pointing out the flaws in this or that is little help, unless those flaws haven’t been noticed. What usually helps isn’t seeing flaws, it is seeing what can be learned.

10. A list of what caused headaches and migraines. One was MSG. Another was Vitamin D3, because it made her Vitamin B1 level too low.

She is a good writer. Mostly I found support for my beliefs: 1. Of the two aspects of self-experimentation (measure, change), change is more powerful. She does little or no self-tracking (= keeping records) as far as I could tell, yet has made a lot of progress. She has done a huge amount of trying different things. 2. Nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. 3. Fermented food is overlooked. She never tries it, in spite of major digestive problems. She does try probiotics. 4. American health care is exceedingly messed-up. As she puts it, “the American medical establishment has no interest in this approach [which often helped her] and, when they do deign to discuss it, don’t know what the #%@! they’re talking about.” 5. “Over the years I’ve found accounts of personal experiences to be very helpful.” I agree. Her blog and mine are full of them.

Thanks to Alexandra Carmichael.

More Her latest post mentions me (“The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting . . . “). I was unaware of that when I wrote the above.