Category: astonishment

Even More Astonishingly Bad Dreamhost Support

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Dreamhost supplies a way to backup your website. You click a button, a few hours later you get an email telling you to go to a certain place to download a set of files. Those files are supposed to be the backup. That’s what I did. I got a message that said:

Ta da! Â Your ENTIRE DreamHost account has been backed up now here: . . .

Note the emphasis: ENTIRE. Now it appears those files don’t work. They aren’t a complete backup of my website!!!

In spite of this astonishing fact, someone in Dreamhost Customer Support told me ” We havent had any users report issues with the backups that we create.” Amazing. No users ever!

I want to hire someone to fix the problem. If you have the technical skills to (a) repair the SMF forums (which will require upgrading) and (b) help me transfer to a new hosting service, please contact me. You can reach me at twoutopias ..[at]…. gmail.com.

More Someone kindly offered to help me and the problem has been fixed. I still hate Dreamhost. When I complained bitterly about their bad backup, in reply they sent me an email that implied it was my fault! If you send me your stories about bad experiences with Dreamhost, I would be happy to post them.

Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 4)

Seth Roberts21 Comments

I blogged earlier how I suddenly got better at an arithmetic task. The apparent causes of the improvement were butter and standing. I’m not sure this is right; I will do more tests.

While I was trying to figure out the cause something even more extreme happened:

Notice the last two points. The previous anomaly was slightly below 600 msec. The new one is close to 550 msec. After observing it, I repeated the test 20 minutes later and got essentially the same result.

I’m blown away. I’ve been doing tests like this — simple measures of mental function — for about two years. Nothing like this happened during those two years.

My scores on this particular test averaged about 640 msec. Sometimes they’d be lower (as low as 610) but I had no idea why. The average stayed around 640. Now, within days, the average goes down to about 600 (presumably because I was eating butter regularly) and then down to almost 550. In other words, that 640 could be improved almost 20%! The improvement has nothing to do with practice; I was extremely well-practiced on this task. (And practice doesn’t produce such a sudden improvement.)

This is something we care deeply about — how well our brains work. Unless I’m a lot worse at arithmetic than everyone else, this suggests that for many people great improvement is possible. In an astonishingly small way. (I didn’t make any big changes during this time.) In a week.

Breakthrough in Treating MS

Seth Roberts10 Comments

When Paulo Zamboni’s wife came down with MS (multiple sclerosis), he was in an unusual position: He was a professor of medicine. Not only did he have technical expertise, he was going to care far more than than most MS researchers about finding a cure. (Likewise, when I suffered from early awakening, I had both technical expertise and cared more about finding a solution than any sleep researcher.)

Using ultrasound to examine the vessels leading in and out of the brain, Dr. Zamboni made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with multiple sclerosis, including his spouse, the veins draining blood from the brain were malformed or blocked. In people without MS, they were not. [emphasis added] . . . More striking still was that, when Dr. Zamboni performed a simple operation to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of MS disappeared. . . . His wife, who had the surgery three years ago, has not had an attack since. . .
The initial studies done in Italy were small but the outcomes were dramatic. In a group of 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS (the most common form) who underwent surgery, the number of active lesions in the brain fell sharply, to 12 per cent from 50 per cent; in the two years after surgery, 73 per cent of patients had no symptoms.

Clearly Dr. Zamboni has discovered something very important. Perhaps no true health breakthrough would be complete without appalling responses from powerful people within the biomedical establishment. The American MS society issued a comment on these findings that the rest of us can marvel at. According to them, people with MS should not get tested for malformed or blocked veins!

Q: I have MS. Should I be tested for signs of CCSVI?
 A: No, unless you are involved in a research study exploring this phenomenon, since at this time there is no proven therapy to resolve any abnormalities that might be observed, and it is still not clear whether relieving venous obstructions would be beneficial.

Persons with MS cannot be trusted with the dangerous knowledge of whether or not their veins are malformed or blocked! The Chairman of the Board of the National MS society is Thomas R. Kuhn. The President is Joyce M. Nelson. I would love to know how they justify this position. I wrote to the National MS society asking how Kuhn justifies this. The Canadian MS society is far less negative, perhaps due to public pressure.

Over at This Is MS, the National MS position is derided. Someone has made the shrewd observation that if there is something to Zamboni’s idea, persons with MS should get a red head after exercise more often than persons without MS and is collecting data to see if this is true. There seems to be something to it.

Not only is this a wonderful discovery but it is wonderful how the National MS Society can simply be ignored. There are now much better sources of information.

Thanks to Anne Weiss, Charles Richardson, and James Andwartha.

JAMA Editors Continue to Display Staggeringly Poor Judgment

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In an earlier post I called a certain JAMA editorial “the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read.” Perhaps the authors reluctantly agreed; the editorial, which used to be here, is gone. Since I quoted from it, you can still see what I was talking about. The BMJ has an article about the disappearance, which includes this:

The BMJ sent emails to JAMA‘s editor, Catherine DeAngelis, and the journal’s media relations office asking about the disappearance of the March editorial. The BMJ also asked whether Dr DeAngelis could explain why the new July editorial had toned down the policy outlined in the March editorial.

The response from a JAMA spokeswoman was “no comment.”

Correct: It is indefensible. What I said earlier still holds: The whole incident — self-righteous editorial, trash-talking by DeAngelis to a WSJ blogger, deletion of the editorial, failure to explain the deletion — “sheds a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.”

What Causes Asthma? Not What the Tovars Think

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From Joyce Cohen’s The Hunt column:

For reasons unknown, Florida didn’t agree with little Noah Tovar. Since his toddler years, Noah, now 7, had suffered terribly from asthma. His parents, Jari and Selene Tovar, moved their family several times, trying to escape the mold or pollen or whatever it was that caused his breathing problems. Nothing helped much.

Noah’s parents didn’t know, I can tell, about a 1992 study of childhood asthma and allergies in Germany. Maybe childhood asthma is caused by air pollution, the researchers thought. Let’s test that idea by comparing a clean West German city (Munich) with a dirty East German one (Leipzig). Here’s one of the results:

The lifetime prevalence of asthma diagnosed by a doctor was 7.3% (72) in Leipzig and 9.3% (435) in Munich.

Less asthma in the dirty city! It wasn’t a significant difference but similar differences, such as hay fever and rhinitis (runny nose), were in the same direction and significant. Hay fever was much rarer in Leipzig.

Noah’s asthma cleared up, to his parents’ surprise, on a trip to New York. So the family moved to New York.

Even though “everyone was under the impression that New York would cause him more distress, it was just the opposite,” Mrs. Tovar said. “Not one doctor nor myself can explain what it is.”

Mrs. Tovar’s doctors are badly out of date. The hygiene hypothesis has been around since the 1990s, supported by plenty of data that, like the German study, shows that childhood allergies are better in dirtier environments. Noah is better in New York because New York air is dirtier than Florida air — that’s the obvious explanation.

In The Probiotic Revolution (2007) by Gary Huffnagle with Sarah Wernick, which I’ve mentioned earlier, Dr. Huffnagle, a professor of immunology at the University of Michigan, describes a self-experiment he did:

Could probiotics relieve something as tenacious as my lifelong allergies and asthma? I decided to take a probiotic supplement and make a few simple changes to my diet to my diet, just to see what happened. Yogurt became my new breakfast and my new bedtime snack. I also upped my intake of fruits and vegetables. Whenever possible, I substituted whole grains for processed ones. And I tried to cut back on sugar. [Why he made the non-probiotic changes is not explained. In another part of the book he says he also increased his spice intake.] No big deal.

Because I doubted this little experiment would work, I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my wife. And I didn’t bother to record my allergy symptoms. . . My “aha” moment came after about a month: I’d spent the evening writing a grant proposal, a box of tissues at my side. After all these years, I knew to be prepared for the inevitable sneezing and runny nose caused by my mold allergies, which kicked up at night. But when I finished working and cleared the table, I realized I hadn’t touched the tissues. And as I looked back on the previous month, I could see other changes. This wasn’t my first sneeze-free evening; I hadn’t needed my asthma inhaler for several months. To my astonishment, the experiment had been a great success.

This is a great and helpful story. Only after I read it did I realize I’d had a similar experience. I’ve never had serious allergies but I used to sneeze now and then in my apartment and my nose would run a lot; I went through more than one box of Kleenex in a month. Maybe 4 in one morning. In January, I made just one change: I started to eat lots more fermented foods (yogurt, kimchi, kefir, etc.). My sneezing and Kleenex use are now almost zero.

The Tovars can live wherever they want, I’m sure, if they feed their son plenty of fermented food.

Previous post about childhood allergies and fermented food.

More After the column appeared, someone wrote to the Tovars:

Funny, same thing happened to me. I moved from England where I had chronic asthma, to New York City where I had none. Stayed in NY for twenty years asthma free, then moved back to England with my wife for the last ten years and my asthma has returned all the time I’ve been back.

JAMA Editors Go Nuts

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Emory University professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff was, you should remember, a respected psychiatric researcher. One of the most respected. What this says about academic psychiatry — and perhaps all academic medicine — is scary to think about.

Now comes a second episode along these lines: JAMA editors attack Jonathan Leo, a professor at Lincoln Memorial University, for daring to publish an article pointing out an undisclosed conflict of interest — exactly Nemeroff’s problem. In the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read, Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA‘s Editor in Chief, and Phil Fontanarosa, the Deputy Executive Editor,

  • say that Leo should not have contacted the New York Times
  • “A telephone conversation intended to inform Leo that his actions were inappropriate transformed into an argumentative discussion as Leo continued to refuse to acknowledge any problem with his actions.”
  • tell Leo to never submit anything to JAMA due to “his apparent lack of confidence in and regard for” the publication
  • “We felt an obligation to notify the dean of Leo’s institution . . . We sought the dean’s assistance in resolving the issue . . . “
  • “Our tone in these interactions was strong and emphatic . . . seriously . . . responsibility . . . fair process . . . integrity of science . . . We regret . . . “
  • make it more difficult to report future conflicts of interest

To make sure everyone understood this wasn’t temporary insanity, Catherine DeAngelis made similar comments to the Wall Street Journal:

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

Yes, nothing is less important than an unreported conflict of interest in JAMA.

The JAMA editorial, published a week after the WSJ article, claims that DeAngelis didn’t call Leo “a nobody and a nothing” but since the WSJ has not fixed the supposed error I conclude that the editorial claim of quote fabrication is wrong — not to mention highly implausible.

In their editorial, the JAMA editors write that “a rush to judgment [that is, Leo pointing out the conflict of interest himself rather than deferring to them] . . . rarely sheds light or advances medical discourse.” Au contraire. This “rush to judgment” has shed a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.

John Updike, RIP

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I was 15 or so when I first read a John Updike novel. To my amazement, it was fun to read. The novels I’d read in English class, such as Oliver Twist, had never been fun to read. I read a lot more Updike and figured out he liked Nabokov. So I picked up Pnin. I loved Nabokov, it turned out. You could say Updike was an easy-listening version of Nabokov. He was the first person who taught me to enjoy literature. He was the bridge.

For a long time I read almost everything he wrote (except The Poorhouse Fair) but around S. I stopped. Maybe because I was watching more TV. I continued to read all his stuff in The New Yorker, but maybe it is fitting that, in his entire career, the thing he said that I like best occurred on TV. In a National Book Award acceptance speech (1998) he said, “A book is beautiful in its relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.”

Things That Work Much Better When Broken (part 2)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

If six months ago you had told me such things existed I would have been very skeptical. But since then I have come across two examples. Example 1: contact lenses. Forced during a trip to wear just one lens (leaving one eye without a lens), I realized my sight was much better than when I wore two. I had sharp vision both close and far away. And the unlensed eye got more oxygen than usual.

Example 2 I also discovered by accident. My bike lock no longer locks. It is hard to see this, so if I fake-lock my bike — which I got for free — it is still sufficiently protected. My bike lock is now much easier to use. No more worry about the key. No way it can become impossible to unlock, which has happened once in two months. (To any Tsinghua students reading this: Please don’t steal my bike.)

Corruption of Doctors by Drug Companies

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Several books about this have appeared recently and are reviewed by Marcia Angell here. It’s a good review, especially a good summary of the books, but I was really surprised by this:

Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.

She expects a researcher who depends on drug companies for research support to be honest? Why? If you don’t get favorable results your grant won’t be renewed. Under this system it will be survival of the most corrupt. A reformer proposed this.

I think it’s a lot like too much humanitarian aid. Supply free milk to a needy area for too long and you wipe out the local dairy industry. Judging from this stunning proposal, the drug companies have wiped out whole medical schools. The doctors who work in them are no longer capable of doing independent research. This is worse than corruption, it’s enfeeblement.