Category: health care

Coconut Oil Cures Foot Fungus

Seth Roberts12 Comments

About ten years ago my doctor pointed to a thin white line on my foot: That’s fungus, he said. Huh. He prescribed an antifungal medicine, previously available only by prescription, that had recently become over-the-counter (OTC). I tried several OTC remedies from my drugstore. None worked. According to the directions, they were to be applied twice per day. My doctor said the reason for the failure was that I hadn’t precisely followed the directions. This reminded me of a doctor who said that fat people know what to do about being fat (eat less) and simply fail to do it.

Years later I discovered that socks matter. With a much larger number of socks, my foot fungus got much better. Apparently the fungus died if it didn’t come in contact with my foot within a week or so. (I had it only on one foot.) With a large number of socks, my foot fungus never got really bad. But it did not entirely go away.

I discovered that tea tree oil works. When my foot fungus got noticeable I would put on some tea tree oil and it would get better.

In January I went back to Berkeley for a month. Without doing anything, my foot fungus seemed to vanish. Apparently being away from my apartment for 4 months was enough to get rid of the fungus. When I returned to Beijing in February, the fungus returned within a day or two. The shape of a particularly bad spot matched exactly where a plastic sandal touched the upper part of my foot. A sandal I’d worn in the shower to prevent foot fungus.

All this is to show how little I know about foot fungus in spite of having it for years.

In November (3 months ago) a reader of this blog named Chuck Currie wrote me:

Sometime in the spring I noticed that I was getting what looked like a rash around the large toe of my right foot. It began spreading, first under and between my toes and then across the top and then under my foot. There was a definite line with little bumps that showed it progression. And, it itched really bad – like bad athlete’s foot.

In July I was prescribed Nystatin and Triamcinolone Acetonide cream. [I tried this — Seth] I was told to put it on twice a day, which I did. Because I wear flip flops all summer, I didn’t need to cover it. The cream did not work at all. It actually seemed to make it worse.

I have been interested in coconut oil since going paleo, even though I can’t eat it, or coconut milk – they really upset my stomach. I was reading an article on coconut oil that mentioned its anti-fungal properties and I remembered reading this before. So I thought I would give it a try on my foot.

After showering, I cover my foot with coconut oil, place a plastic bag over my foot (the kind you put produce in) to keep it from being wiped off and then place a sock over the bag to hold it on. I leave it on for two or three hours and then take everything off and lightly wipe my foot with a paper towel and go to bed.

I do this three or four nights a week and have been doing it for three months. I knew immediately that it was doing something. My foot became very warm, almost like it was on fire, the first time I did this. It didn’t have this effect the second time. My fungus/rash started to retreat. My skin would dry out and flake off between sessions, like I was using an exfoliate.

Then I noticed that my [toenail fungus] started to clear up and I could see the nail growing from the cuticle on my big toe was clear, not yellow and thick. By now the line has progressed two thirds of the way up my toe. At this rate, it should be completely clear in another couple of months.

I still get small flare ups of the rash/fungus on my foot, but it has almost completely cleared up. You can still see where it had been. The skin is dryer and lighter in color than the rest of the foot.

I think if I had done this every night the progress would have been faster. I’m now starting to put a small amount of coconut oil on the top of my foot in the morning and letting it air out for a while before putting on my socks and shoes. When the fungus was on the bottom of my foot this was not possible, but now that it only seems to be on the top, this works and I think this will speed up the process. The best thing is there are no bad effects. I use extra virgin, cold pressed, unprocessed coconut oil. My understanding is that heat processed coconut oil does not have the same anti-fungal properties.

Pretty convincing, huh? In Berkeley I bought Whole Foods house brand coconut oil (cold-pressed). Edible was cheaper than non-edible. In Beijing, after my foot fungus had gotten quite noticeable, I started to use it. At bedtime, I rub it all over my foot, put my foot in a thin plastic bag, and put on a sock. When I get up, I take off the sock and the plastic bag.

After doing this once, my foot was much better. After five applications, I couldn’t detect any fungus. Application is pleasant (without trying, I don’t miss a night) and, as Chuck says, obviously safe — I could eat what I am spreading on my foot. It costs a few dollars/month. Tea tree oil works, too, but it wasn’t easy to spread all over my foot, wasn’t pleasant to apply, wasn’t edible, and cost $15/tiny bottle. On the internet you can find many home remedies, such as soaking your feet in apple cider vinegar. Apparently they work. This is much easier.

If you try this, please tell me your experience, whether it works or not.

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Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Allen Carl Jackson, Phil Alexander and Navanit Arakeri.

One Doctor’s View of Personal Science: “You Won’t Learn Anything”

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Bryan Castañeda, who lives in Southern California, told me this:

The law firm I work at specializes in toxic torts. We represent people who have been occupationally exposed to chemicals and are now sick, dying, or dead. Most of our clients have been exposed to benzene and developed some kind of leukemia. We sponsor various leukemia charities, walks, and other events. [On January 21, 2012] in Woodland Hills, CA, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society held its first annual Blood Cancer Conference. Although the speakers were mainly doctors, it was a conference meant for laymen. The chair was an oncologist from UCLA Medical Center.

After introductory remarks and the keynote speaker, there were several breakout sessions. I attended a session on acute lymphoblastic leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia. The speaker was [Dr. Ravi Bhatia,] a doctor specializing in leukemia from City of Hope in Duarte, CA. His talk was almost exclusively about new drugs and clinical trials. Very dry and dull. Things got more interesting during the question period. At one point, [Dr. Bhatia] told an attendee not to experiment on his own because “you won’t learn anything and others won’t learn from it, either.”

I would have liked to ask Dr. Bhatia three questions:

1. What’s the basis for this extreme claim (“you won’t learn anything and others won’t learn from it”)? Ben Williams, a psychology professor at UC San Diego, wrote a whole book (Surviving “Terminal” Cancer, 2002) about taking an active approach when faced with a very serious disease (in his case, brain cancer). Likewise, the website Patients Like Me is devoted to (among other things) learning from the experimentation of its members. Lots of forums related to various illnesses spread what one person learns to others. MedHelp has many forums devoted to sharing knowledge.

2. What’s so bad about “learning nothing”? Why should that outcome stop one from trying to learn? It doesn’t seem like a good enough reason.

3. Do you have a bias here? In other words, what do you want? Do you prefer that your patients not self= experiment? Doctors may prefer that their patients not experiment for their (the doctors’) own selfish reasons. When a patient self-experiments, it makes their doctor’s job more complicated and makes the doctor less important. If Dr. Bhatia is biased (he wants a certain outcome), it may bias his assessment of the evidence.

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Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • One of my Tsinghua American colleagues writes an op-ed: “China wants you. Job prospects are abundant.”
  • Robert Anton Wilson’s skepticism about skeptics. “Those people claim to be rationalists, but they’re governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They’re so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic. . . . None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma.” I agree. They should be called one-way skeptics.
  • Excellent Vanity Fair article about Occupy Wall Street. Better than The New Yorker‘s article covering similar stuff.
  • The many side effects of statins. I am impressed by the new way of learning about drug side effects.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday and Gary Wolf.

Tonsillectomy Confidential

Seth Roberts23 Comments

I wrote a piece for Boing Boing about tonsillectomies that has just been posted. It stemmed from a comment on this blog by a woman named Rachael. A doctor said her son should have a tonsillectomy. When Rachael did her own research, however, it seemed to her that the risks outweighed the benefits. I looked further into tonsillectomies and found that the risks were routinely greatly understated, even by advocates of evidence-based medicine.

More Here is a page on a doctor-run website called MedicineNet that grossly understates the risks of tonsillectomies. Compare their list of possible bad effects to mine.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts9 Comments
  • More evidence that the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) diet really helps people with Crohn’s Disease. “Since starting this diet, I have had no pain. Some might attribute this to surgery, but I am convinced the diet has so much to do with it. My blood work is normal, and it hasn’t been in 8 years. The sed rate level in the blood is normal instead of elevated outrageously.”
  • How to improve on lectures when teaching physics.
  • More selenium, less risk of cancer. Contrary to what the researcher quoted in this article says, there is already substantial evidence that selenium reduces cancer risk. For example, in a county-by-county map of USA cancer rates, there is a clear rift in the north east. On one side of the rift rates are clearly higher than on the other side of the rift. The rift corresponds to geological fault line. On the low-cancer side of the rift, there is more selenium in the soil. There are also rat experiments. You certainly should take selenium supplements.
  • American health care plays a surprisingly large role in an excellent story by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker about the Japanese yakuza (mafia). 1. From 2000 to 2004, four yakuza members got liver transplants at UCLA at a time when liver transplants were hard to get. A few months later they made large donations to UCLA. The money went into a general fund at the surgery department. According to a UCLA spokesperson, there was no connection between the transplants and the donations. According to a UCLA press release, “No money or donation was offered or paid to anyone at UCLA as a quid pro quo for getting a transplant or moving up on the list.” Because a general fund is not a person, this is literally true. 2. In the early 1990s, at a Columbia, Missouri hospital, a nurse was suspected of killing patients. Hospital administrators covered it up. “Everyone took part in the coverup was promoted, everybody who tried to expose it was punished,” said someone who tried to expose it.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

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Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Casey Manion.

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.

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Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Hal Pashler, Dave Lull and Mike Bowerman.