Category: personal science

Deborah Estrin on Top and Bottom versus Middle

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Deborah Estrin is a computer science professor at UCLA. Commenting on my recent post Top and Bottom versus Middle: Schools, China, Health? she said “amen to that”.

I asked her why she agreed. Because she sees the same thing a lot, she said. In particular, performance metrics are often devised by people in the middle, and those metrics tend to serve their interests — and not the interests of everyone else. She gave three examples: 1. Fee for service. Doctors are paid per office visit and per surgery, for example. The bad effects of this are obvious. For example, surgeons are pushed to recommend ill-advised surgeries. 2. Financial instruments, such as derivatives. They were sold to outsiders as ways to reduce risk but we all now know they had the opposite effect. As Michael Lewis puts it, “extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets.” 3. Publications. Professors are rated and promoted and to some extent paid based on how many publications they produce. This pushes them toward “safe” projects that are likely to produce a publication within a reasonable time and away from harder, more important problems.

When you measure yourself you can use whatever metric you want — and thereby a metric that serves your interests.

 

 

More Migraine Headaches Caused by Cleaning Products: From N=1 to N=2

Seth Roberts12 Comments

At Thursday’s Quantified Self Silicon Valley Meetup (where I gave a talk called QS + Paleo = ?), Alexandra Carmichael introduced herself with the three words “no”, “headache”, and “today”. About five days earlier, she had started having migraine headaches every day. Before that, she hadn’t had a migraine headache in a year. After the headaches began, her husband, having read my Boing Boing story (about a woman whose migraines were mostly from cleaning products), suggested that her headaches might be caused by the Febreze they had just started using. They stopped using it. Because it can linger in carpets, etc., they cleaned their whole apartment with vinegar and baking soda, to get rid of all traces. That’s when Alexandra’s headaches stopped. When they started using Febreze, one of their daughters became very cranky. After they stopped using it and cleaned their apartment, she returned to her usual self.

Other people have found that Febreze gives them migraines. For example, R. Haeckler:

[Febreze] gives me terrible migraines. . . . Whenever I go to someone’s house who uses it I get a headache almost immediately that lasts the rest of the night.

And this woman (“No Febreze EVER. Gives me a headache and makes me dizzy”).

This is a good example of why n=1 experimentation is so important. The woman I wrote about for Boing Boing (Sarah) figured out, beyond any doubt, that certain cleaning products caused migraines. Yes, Sarah’s results were unusual. They “don’t generalize” to most people in the sense that most people don’t get migraines from cleaning products. But, as Alexandra’s story shows, they were still helpful — they helped Alexandra avoid migraines.

My writing about n=1 experimentation has emphasized learning widely-applicable truths — how to lose weight, sleep better, and so on. But this other use — learn stuff that is true only for you and perhaps a small subset of people (1%?) — is also important. Sarah’s n=1 experimentation doesn’t fit in the standard healthcare system. It was not suggested or encouraged by her doctors. No professor or researcher could write a paper about it — it’s too small. But it made a difference — first, to herself, now, to Alexandra. The results of n=1 experiments can be spread, however, in the new patient communities, such as the ones at PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, and CureTogether (started by Alexandra and her husband).

When I submitted for publication my long self-experimentation paper, one of the referees decided he would find out if fructose water would help him lose weight (one of my examples). He discovered that fructose water made his fingers ache — he had a sensitivity to fructose he hadn’t known about. In his review, he said that these sorts of individual differences were not an argument against my method but actually favored it: We need n=1 experiments to fully understand human variation in health.

Top and Bottom Versus Middle: China, Schools, Health?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My explanation of the Ten Commandments is that someone at the top (Moses) was trying to convince people at the bottom to join him. People at the bottom were being preyed upon. “Thou shalt not steal” meant, to Moses’s audience, “no one will steal from you — or at least we, your leaders, will discourage it.” At the very beginning of the Code of Hammarabi, another ancient set of rules, it says one purpose of the rules is “so that the strong will not harm the weak”.

I keep seeing this pattern — people at or near the top of the hierarchy making common cause with people on the bottom against people in the middle. I was reminded of it by this story:

One anecdote described a Hu Yaobang [top Chinese leader] visit that Mr. Wen arranged with Guizhou Province villagers — secretly, he wrote, because Hu Yaobang did not trust local leaders to let them speak freely.

In the 1960s, the U.S. civil rights movement gained considerable force and accomplishment when the very top of the government (first, President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, later President Johnson) weighed in on the side of the protesters (bottom) against the various state governments (middle).

The practical value of this alignment of forces is illustrated by How to Walk to School, a book about school reform (which I reviewed here). Two mothers of young children, Jacqueline Edelberg and another woman, wanted to improve their neighborhood schools before it was too late for their own children to benefit. On the face of it, this was impossible. But they found common cause with the principal of a local school (Susan Kurland). It goes unmentioned in the book but my impression, reading between the lines, is that the main thing that happened is that the worst teachers were shamed into leaving, above all by parents sitting in their classrooms. The principal alone could do nothing about terrible teachers; the parents alone could do nothing; together they did a lot. I spoke to Edelberg about this and she agreed with me.

I point out this pattern because it works. Judaism (Moses) still exists; people still read the Old Testament. Even more powerfully, all governments have lists of laws (Hammurabi). Jacqueline Edelberg’s neighborhood school is much better. The next big revolution in human affairs, I believe, will be health care. The current system, in which people pay vast amounts for drugs that barely work, have awful side effects, and leave intact the root cause (e.g., too little dietary omega-3), will be replaced by a much better system. The much better system will be some version of paleo. As Woody Allen predicted, people will come to believe that butter is health food.

How will it happen? I suspect this pattern will be the driving force. People at the top and people at the bottom will put pressure on people in the middle. Self-experimentation, self-quantification, and personal science (which overlap greatly) are tools of people at the bottom. They cost nothing, they are available to all. When you track (quantify and record) your health problem, and show your doctor, via numbers and graphs, that the drug he prescribed didn’t work, that puts pressure on him. When you bring your doctor numbers and graphs that show a paleo solution did work, that puts even more pressure on him. The point, if it isn’t obvious, is that numbers and graphs, based on carefully collected day-after-day data, amplify what one person can do. Not just what they can learn, not just how healthy they can be, but how much they can influence others. And this amplification of influence, which I never discuss, may ultimately be the most important.

Personal Science in Japan: Radioactivity Measurements

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Personal science isn’t just self-measurement. In Japan:

Kiyoko Okoshi had a simple goal when she spent about $625 for a dosimeter [that measured radioactivity]: she missed her daughter and grandsons and wanted them to come home. Local officials kept telling her that their remote village was safe, even though it was less than 20 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But her daughter remained dubious, especially since no one from the government had taken radiation readings near their home.

So starting in April, Mrs. Okoshi began using her dosimeter to check nearby forest roads and rice paddies. What she found was startling. Near one sewage ditch, the meter beeped wildly, and the screen read 67 microsieverts per hour, a potentially harmful level. Mrs. Okoshi and a cousin who lives nearby worked up the courage to confront elected officials, who did not respond, confirming their worry that the government was not doing its job.

With her simple yet bold act, Mrs. Okoshi joined the small but growing number of Japanese who have decided to step in as the government fumbles its reaction to the widespread contamination, which leaders acknowledge is much worse than originally announced.

Maybe it is obvious that a woman who wants to see her grandchildren yet keep them safe is far more motivated to find the truth than a local politician or even surveyors hired by the government. Personal scientists who study other things have the same motivational advantage. As I have said more than once, I care far more about improving my sleep than any professional scientist.

Mrs. Okoshi misses her daughter and grandchildren very much. Her husband recently died and her daughter’s family left, afraid of nuclear fallout.

“Our life was so lively when the four boys were running around the mountains in the back of the house,” she said.

Personal science channels her emotion in a way that helps everyone around her.

The Comments on “Finding the Source of Migraines…”

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Nowadays, far more than ever before, people can do useful science (collect data, draw conclusions) about their own health. This personal science can produce much better results than expert advice. For example, I found ways to sleep better and raise my mood superior to what sleep and mood experts know. I wonder how others are using this new power. This is why I wrote a story for Boing Boing about a woman (Sarah) who figured out what caused her migraines after conventional doctors failed to help her. She was eventually helped by an expert (a naturopath) but most of the improvement came from self-experimentation showing that cleaning and skin care products caused migraines.

The story got many comments. A surprising number were eerily dismissive. You might think it was a good thing that Sarah got rid of frequent crippling migraines after doctors failed to. Nope: “Anecdotes are not data” (56 likes). The same person also said “data is data”. Both are examples of preventive stupidity. “Big Brother loves you,” replied Mark Frauenfelder, and I agree. Another surprising comment was “Don’t encourage these people” (= people like Sarah). One of the dismissista s came to his senses. “I’d simply like to close with an apology, as on reflection little I’ve posted here has been useful or expansive,” he wrote.

Some comments nicely summed up the main points of the story. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” was a good description of Sarah’s conventional doctors. They acted as if their only tool was the ability to write prescriptions — so every problem called for a prescription. When the first 10 drugs didn’t work, they tried more drugs. When the first 30 drugs didn’t work, they tried more drugs. Surely this is bad medicine, yet, as far as I can tell, that’s what they learn to do.

Some comments asked questions it would have helped if I had anticipated. How could Sarah have tried 50 different migraine drugs and 13 different birth control pills in one year? I wasn’t puzzled by this but details would have clarified things.

Above all, the comments supported my belief that Sarah’s problem was common. Many commenters said they had migraines caused by environmental triggers. Only one said his migraines turned out to be caused by a tumor. In spite of this pattern of causality, the comments also suggested that conventional doctors generally prescribe drugs for migraines. (“They had the prescription typed into the system before I was even finished telling them what was going on.”) It’s like trying to enter a room by breaking through a wall (prescribing a drug) instead of using the door (finding the triggers). It’s as if all they have is a sledgehammer.

 

Science in Action: Why Energetic?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Last night I slept unusually well, waking up more rested and with more energy than usual. I slept longer than usual: 7.0 hours versus my usual 5.1 hours (median of the previous 20 days). My rating of how rested I felt was 99.2% (that is, 99.2% of fully rested); the median of the previous 20 days is 98.8%. Because the maximum is 100%, this is really a comparison of 0.8% (this morning) with 1.2% (previous mornings); and the comparison is not adjusted for the number of times I stood on one leg to exhaustion, which improves this rating. During the previous 20 days I often stood on one leg to exhaustion six times; yesterday I only did it four times. Above all, I felt more energy in the morning. This was obvious. I have just started to measure this. At 8 am and 9 am, I rate my energy on a 0-100 scale where 50 = neither sluggish nor energetic/energized, 60 = slightly energetic/energized, 70 = somewhat energetic/energized, and 75 = energetic/energized. My ratings this morning were 73 (8 am) and 74 (9 am). The median of my 9 previous ratings is 62. The energy improvement (73/74 vs 62) is why I am curious. I would like to feel this way every morning.

What caused it? I had not exercised the previous day. My room was no darker than usual. My flaxseed oil intake was no different than usual. I had not eaten more pork fat than usual. However, four things had been different than usual:

1. 2 tablespoons of butter at lunch. In addition to my usual 4 tablespoons per day.

2. 0.5-1 tablespoons of butter at bedtime. Again, in addition the usual 4.

3. 1 tablespoon (15 g) coconut butter at bedtime. Part of a longer study of the effect of coconut butter. Gary Taubes suggested this. I had eaten 1 T coconut butter at bedtime 13 previous days. On the first of those 13 days, I had felt a lot more energetic than usual in the morning. On the remaining days, however, the improvement was less clear. I started measuring how energetic I felt in the morning to study this further. Last night was Friday night. On the previous two nights (Wednesday and Thursday) I had not eaten the coconut butter. Maybe absence of coconut butter followed by resumption of coconut butter is the cause.

4. Fresh air and ambient noise. Following a friend’s suggestion, I opened one of my bedroom windows.

My first question is whether the improvement is repeatable. If so, I will start to vary these four factors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assorted Links

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  • The Practice of Personal Science (talk by Gary Wolf)
  • fingerprints predict mental abilities (might be gated).
  • “When compared with nondepressed individuals, both medically ill and medically healthy patients with MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] have been found to exhibit all of the cardinal features of inflammation.” Article here.
  • “A professor of physics [from Australia] told me: Brian [J. O’Brian, a professor of physics], I completely support what you’re saying [about lack of evidence for man-made climate change], but I’ve got 65 researchers in my laboratory and the only funding I can get for them and to get their PhDs is greenhouse funding from Canberra or wherever. Twenty years people have been indoctrinated.”. Excerpts here.

Thanks to Mark’s Daily Apple.

Assorted Links

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Thanks to Dennis Mangan.

Health Care Stagnation

Seth Roberts38 Comments

In December, the Los Angeles Times reported — very briefly — that from 2007 to 2008, life expectancy in the United States declined by 0.1 year. It should have been the lead story of every newspaper in the country with the largest possible headlines (“ LESS LIFE“). Did 9/11 reduce life expectancy this much? Of course not. Did World War II? Not in a visible way — American life expectancy rose during World War II. I can’t think any event in the last 100 years that made such a difference to Americans. The decline is even more newsworthy when you realize: 1. It is the continuation of trends. The yearly increase in life expectancy has been dropping for about the last 40 years. 2. Americans spend far more on health care than any other country. Meaning vast resources have been available to translate new discoveries into practice. 3. Americans spend far more on health research than any other country and should be the first to benefit from new discoveries.

Maybe I’m biased (because my research is health-related) but I think this is the biggest event of our time. It is the Industrial Revolution in reverse — progress grinding to a halt. For no obvious reason, just as the Industrial Revolution had no obvious reason. Health researchers have been given billions of dollars to improve our health, the whole system has been given tens of billions of dollars, and the result is … nothing. Worse than nothing.

No journalist, with the exception of Gary Taubes, seems the least bit aware of this. It is a difficult story to cover, true. But several journalists, such as health writers for The New Yorker (Atul Gawande, Michael Specter, and Jerome Groopman) are perfectly capable of covering it. They haven’t. With a few exceptions, they write about progress (e.g., Peter Provonost’s checklists). It is like only reporting instances when Dirk Nowitzki missed a free throw. Each instance is true but the big picture they create — he misses all free throws — is profoundly false.

Among academics, the stagnation has received a tiny amount of attention. In a recent paper (gated), two University of Southern California professors, considering a wider time period, point out that there has been some improvement in how long you live after you get sick, but no improvement in how long you live before getting sick. Here is how the discussion section of their article begins:

There is substantial evidence that we have done little to date [meaning: from the 1960s to the 1990s] to eliminate or delay disease or the physiological changes that are linked to age. For example, the incidence of a first heart attack has remained relatively stable between the 1960s and 1990s and the incidence of some of the most important cancers has been increasing until very recently. Similarly, there have been substantial increases in the incidence of diabetes in the last decades.

Here is my explanation of the paradox of: 1. Enormous and increasing health care costs. 2. Vast amounts spent on research. 3. No better health. Health researchers, such as medical school professors, shape their research to favor expensive treatments, such as expensive drugs. In fact, the best treatments would cost nothing (e.g., the Shangri-La Diet). To make the expensive treatments seem worth studying, they invent utterly false theories and claim to believe them. For an example (research about depression), see The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch. Because health researchers are forced to worship absurd theories, they are incapable of good research. Absence of good research is why there is no progress. The health care supply chain — everyone between you and the research, such as doctors, nurses, drug company employees, hospital employees, alternative medicine practitioners, medical device makers, and so on — is happy with the situation (useless research) because it ensures that little will change and they will continue to get paid. They are the supposed experts — and remain silent.

It is human nature that everyone in the supply chain remains silent. They are protecting their jobs. But the silence of the journalists is The Emperor’s New Clothes writ large. To explain why smart journalists fail to notice the stagnation, I think you have to go back to studies of conformity. When everyone you talk to — people in the supply chain — says black = white (i.e., that progress is being made), you say the same thing.

Why is personal science, the main subject of this blog, important? Because it is a way out of this stagnation.

Mercury Damage Revealed by Brain Test

Seth Roberts20 Comments

For several years I have been doing simple daily tests to measure my brain function. I got the idea when I noticed that a few capsules of flaxseed oil improved my balance. Flaxseed oil also improved other measures of brain function, such as digit span. I wasn’t surprised I could do better; what was surprising was how easy it was. It revealed a big gap in our understanding of nutrition. I do the daily tests not only to improve brain function but also to improve the rest of my body. I think the brain is like a canary in a coal mine — especially sensitive to bad environments. Learning what environment was best for the brain would suggest what environment is best for the rest of the body. When I started taking an optimal amount of flaxseed oil, my gums turned from red (inflamed) to pink (not inflamed), supporting this assumption.

I tried six or seven mental tests and eventually settled on a test of arithmetic (how fast I could do simple problems such as 5-3). I hoped that now and then my score would change (in either direction, faster or slower) and that these changes would point to new things that control brain function. No one had/has done such a thing. I had no idea if unexpected changes would show up or, if they did, how often. I didn’t know what the score changes would look like (their size and shape) nor, of course, what would cause them. Would all of them involve diet? Would all of them make sense in terms of what we already know? (Flaxseed oil makes sense because the brain contains lots of omega-3.)

The first two surprises were these: 1. My score suddenly improved a few days after switching from Chinese flaxseed oil to American flaxseed oil. This made sense: It is easy to destroy omega-3 if flaxseed oil is kept at room temperature. 2. My score suddenly improved when I switched from pig fat to butter. This was counter-intuitive: pig fat is more paleo than butter.

Last fall, there was another surprise: My score greatly improved since the summer. I was much faster than ever before. At first I thought the improvement was due to moving to Beijing. I had moved from Berkeley to Beijing in early September. My Beijing life differed in a thousand ways from my Berkeley life. I had three ideas about which differences might matter. 1. Walnuts. Perhaps I ate more walnuts in Beijing. Walnuts are supposed to be good for brain function. 2. Heat. It was much hotter in Beijing than Berkeley. Maybe that improved brain function. 3. Vitamins. I took less vitamin supplements in Beijing. Maybe they harmed brain function.

I tested these possibilities. 1. I stopped eating walnuts. My arithmetic score did not clearly change. 2. Winter came, it got much colder. The improvement did not go away. 3. I took the same amount of vitamins I’d taken in Berkeley. My arithmetic score didn’t change. So all of these ideas were wrong.

Because they were wrong, I considered a fourth possibility: The improvement was due to removal of two mercury amalgam fillings on July 28, 2010. They were replaced with non-amalgam fillings. I’d had them removed for precautionary reasons. I wasn’t suffering from any signs of mercury poisoning. Hair tests had repeatedly shown mildly high amounts of mercury in my hair (75th percentile of an unspecified sample). Measurements of the mercury in my breath had come out higher than usual but it was hard to be sure the machine was working correctly.

I looked again at my data. It showed something I hadn’t noticed: the improvement started before I went to Beijing. It started very close to July 28. That was good evidence that the mercury explanation was correct. Now the evidence is even stronger. I’ve returned to Berkeley and thereby made my life quite similar to the situation when my scores were much higher than now. The improvement has remained.

The evidence for causality — removal of mercury amalgam fillings improved my arithmetic score — rests on three things: 1. Four other explanations made incorrect predictions. 2. The improvement, which lasted months, started within a few days of the removal. Long-term improvements (not due to practice) are rare — this is the only one I’ve noticed. 3. Mercury is known to harm neural function (“mad as a hatter”). As far as I’m concerned, that’s plenty.

A long Wikipedia article describes evidence on both sides of the question of whether mercury amalgam fillings cause damage. In 2009, the American Dental Association stated in a press release “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence supports the safety and efficacy of dental [mercury-containing] amalgam.” As recently as 1991, Consumer Reports told readers “if a dentist wants to remove your fillings because they contain mercury, watch your wallet.” (Dental insurance will pay most of the cost of removing my remaining amalgam fillings.) In an essay last revised in 2006, Stephen “Quackwatch” Barrett explained at length why mercury toxicity is a “scam”. According to Barrett, “there is overwhelming evidence that amalgam fillings are safe.”

Ask your dentist some pointed questions.