Category: personal science

Why Self-Track? The Possibility of Hard-to-Explain Change

Seth Roberts8 Comments

My personal science introduced me to a research method I have never seen used in research articles or described in discussions of scientific method. It might be called wait and see. You measure something repeatedly, day after day, with the hope that at some point it will change dramatically and you will be able to determine why. In other words: 1. Measure something repeatedly, day after day. 2. When you notice an outlier, test possible explanations. In most science, random (= unplanned) variation is bad. In an experiment, for example, it makes the effects of the treatment harder to see. Here it is good.

Here are examples where wait and see paid off for me:

1. Acne and benzoyl peroxide. When I was a graduate student, I started counting the number of pimples on my face every morning. One day the count improved. It was two days after I started using benzoyl peroxide more regularly. Until then, I did not think benzoyl peroxide worked well — I started using it more regularly because I had run out of tetracycline (which turned out not to work).

2. Sleep and breakfast. I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit because a student told me he had lost weight eating foods with high water content (such as fruit). I did not lose weight but my sleep suddenly got worse. I started waking up early every morning instead of half the time. From this I figured out that any breakfast, if eaten early, disturbed my sleep.

3. Sleep and standing (twice). I started to stand a lot to see if it would cause weight loss. It didn’t, but I started to sleep better. Later, I discovered by accident that standing on one leg to exhaustion made me sleep better.

4. Brain function and butter. For years I measured how fast I did arithmetic. One day I was a lot faster than usual. It turned out to be due to butter.

5. Brain function and dental amalgam. My brain function, measured by an arithmetic test, improved over several months. I eventually decided that removal of two mercury-containing fillings was the likely cause.

6. Blood sugar and walking. My fasting blood sugar used to be higher than I would like — in the 90s. (Optimal is low 80s.) Even worse, it seemed to be increasing. (Above 100 is “pre-diabetic.”) One day I discovered it was much lower than expected (in the 80s). The previous day I had walked for an hour, which was unusual. I determined it was indeed cause and effect. If I walked an hour per day, my fasting blood sugar was much better.

This method and examples emphasize the point that different scientific methods are good at different things and we need all of them (in contrast to evidence-based medicine advocates who say some types of evidence are “better” than other types — implying one-dimensional evaluation). One thing we want to do is test cause-effect ideas (X causes Y). This method doesn’t do that at all. Experiments do that well, surveys are better than nothing. Another thing we want to do is assess the generality of our cause-effect ideas. This method doesn’t do that at all. Surveys do that well (it is much easier to survey a wide range of people than do an experiment with a wide range of people), multi-person experiments are better than nothing. A third thing we want to do is come up with cause-effect ideas worth testing. Most experiments are a poor way to do this, surveys are better than nothing. This method is especially good for that.

The possibility of such discoveries is a good reason to self-track. Professional scientists almost never use this method. But you can.

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.

Fibromyalgia Improved by No Longer Eating Fruits and Vegetables

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A British doctor in her 40s suffered from a range of problems that all started around the same time:

My legs ached and tingled, I felt tired and my mood was flat. I slept badly — I suffered from restless legs and my muscles kept twitching — and couldn’t concentrate during the day. . . I stopped enjoying going out and couldn’t get enthused about seeing friends. . . . In December 2010, I had great trouble climbing into the loft to get the Christmas tree, having neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for it. . . . I longed to retire early, so I could stay in bed all day.

She diagnosed herself as having fibromyalgia, a disease usually said to have “unknown cause”. Treatments for fibromyalgia include “painkillers, antidepressants, anti-epilepsy drugs, and cognitive behavioural therapy,” wrote the doctor. She noticed her symptoms varied with what she ate:

The muscle pains were worse after eating carrots, potatoes and parsnips. My son’s girlfriend made a delicious parsnip soup for a dinner party last year, and I enjoyed a big bowlful. The following day my legs were aching worse than ever, and I felt terrible. . . . [Using a food diary, I learned] I was also badly affected by potatoes, green beans, carrots, almonds and tomatoes. I searched the internet and found that, among many different theories, some suggested a link between fibromyalgia and dietary oxalate, though this isn’t recognised by the medical profession.

Many vegetables contain a lot of oxalate, which acts as a pesticide.

I tried a low oxalate diet, cutting out virtually all ‘healthy’ food — I avoided most fruits and vegetables, salads, beans, nuts, wheatgerm, soya — as well as tea, coffee and chocolate.I could eat meat, fish, dairy, cheese, white rice, white pasta and only low-oxalate fruit and vegetables, such as bananas, peas, mushrooms, onions and cauliflower. Within a few days the symptoms were totally gone; I could walk without pain and sleep normally. My motivation came back — in the eight months since starting the diet I’ve painted the house, landscaped the garden and booked a holiday. Having suffered from the need to pass water frequently, my nocturnal trips to the bathroom have ceased. And, bizarrely, my teeth have felt clean all day long. . . . I’ve found eating any high-oxalate food results in tingling legs and muscle pains within a matter of hours. I’ve become so adept at noticing the signs I can tell what foods and drinks have oxalates in a short time after ingesting them.

Would her discovery help others? She suggested the diet to five women in her practice.

They had all presented with at least four of the following [eight] symptoms: muscle pain, tingly legs, fatigue, irritable mood, bladder irritation, poor concentration, restless legs and poor sleep.
I asked them to score the severity of these symptoms before and after changing to a low oxalate diet. . . . . Out with bran-based cereals, nuts, spinach and smoothies, and in with Rice Krispies, sausages, shortbread and cola! . . . All the patients improved significantly — on average their symptom score halved after three weeks of the ‘unhealthy’ diet.

This surprises me. I would have thought that a condition as vaguely defined as fibromyalgia would have more than one cause.

In any case, this is extraordinary progress — published in The Daily Mail. Surely more important than any of the 7000 peer-reviewed articles on fibromyalgia I found via PubMed. A PubMed search for “fibromyalgia oxalate” turned up nothing.

More about a low oxalate diet. Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

The Non-Obvious Value of Self-Tracking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A New York doctor named Jay Parkinson is skeptical about the appeal of self-measurement:

There is a very, very small subset of people who want to document their life according to their health— the quantified selfers. But this group is tiny because it’s just data geeks who are obsessed with data. They are people who truly believe data changes behavior.

As caricatures go, this is fair. The audience and speakers at Quantified Self meetups do appear to be “data geeks who are obsessed with data” and, yes, this is a tiny subset of people. I don’t put myself in that category. I have zero interest in “documenting” my life. I record a tiny amount of stuff and only stuff I think will make a difference. For example, I stopped measuring my blood pressure after it became clear it was low enough.

Parkinson continues:

Data gets old after a while. After about a month, for those who are not obsessed, it becomes meaningless. That is, unless you have an obsession with data. . . . Good luck trying to build a viable business around that group.

Yes, and “there is a world market for about five computers”, as the president of IBM supposedly said in the 1940s. I have measured myself for so long (decades) not because I am obsessed with data but because I reaped huge benefits. In the beginning, self-measurement showed me how to reduce my acne considerably more than my dermatologist’s advice alone. Later it led to all sorts of improvements: better sleep, better mood, lower weight, fewer colds, healthier gums, better balance, better brain function. Life-changing benefits. The fraction of adults who would like to sleep better, be in a better mood, lose weight, get fewer colds, and so on is very large — perhaps 99%. Is Starbucks a “viable business”? It is built around people needing stimulants (caffeine). An enormous number of products and services are about losing weight. One of the world’s most “viable business” is illicit drugs. I believe a large fraction of illicit drug use is self-medication for depression. (More: The day I posted this, I came across this: “She said heroin helped her fight depression.”)

There is nothing obvious about how I managed to improve my sleep, mood, weight and so on. The solutions I discovered via self-measurement were exceedingly surprising, at least to me. So there is nothing obvious about how to use self-measurement to improve one’s sleep, etc. Self-measurement is needed, yes, but it’s not the only thing that’s needed. I needed: 1. Wise choice of what to measure (e.g., measure the problem, not the solution — I don’t have a FitBit for example.) 2. Wise choice of what to change. (To improve my sleep, for example, I needed a good understanding of sleep research. “Common sense” was not enough.) 3. Experimental design skill. 4. Data analysis skill. To say data is boring (to most people) is like saying tires are boring (to most people). By themselves, tires have little use, just as data alone has little use. But they are part of something very useful.

Consider literacy. For a long time, the notion that “everyone would benefit from literacy” seemed ridiculous. Books were too expensive! There were so few of them. Only a tiny fraction of people (e.g., monks) knew how to read. It was hard to learn to read. Good luck basing a business on literacy! But eventually everything changed. Right now, few quantified selfers, as far as I can tell, seem to know how to learn something useful from their measurements. (When I had been doing it for a short time, I didn’t know either.) For example, Stephen Wolfram appears to have learned nothing of use from a huge amount of self-measurement. New measurement devices, like FitBit and so on, are like books — it is as if few people know how to read. But that can change.

Is Crohn’s Disease Really “Incurable”?

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I recently came across two different people who, diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, repeated the standard line that it “has no known cure”. Really? Never? The people who said this were just repeating what they had been told. Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, however, it is easy to do one’s own research. The people who said this gave no indication they had done any research. Because Crohn’s is so unpleasant, their passivity was curious.

I knew that calling Crohn’s disease “incurable” was an overstatement because I had written about Reid Kimball, who had found a way to eliminate via diet essentially all the symptoms. For practical purposes, he was cured. (Reid objects to the word “cure”.) I knew he was hardly the only one. But what if I started from ignorance? How hard would it be to challenge the conventional “incurable” line?

Not hard at all. I googled “Crohn’s success” (without quotation marks in the search query). The top search result (titled “Crohn’s Disease: Success with Diet and Probiotics”) included this:

I learned of a pediatric gastroenterologist, Dr. J. Rainer Poley, who had conducted extensive studies on the effect of certain sugars and starches on people with intestinal diseases. My husband and I decided to take our daughter to see this doctor for another opinion. When we asked him if there was any other treatment she could try besides medications, he explained that at a recent medical conference in Europe, he had learned of success medical doctors were having with probiotics. He instructed our daughter to eat plain yogurt every day and to take a specific probiotic capsule called Culturelle® containing Lactobacillus GG [Gorbach and Goldin] twice daily. Based on Dr. Poley’s research, he wanted her to limit the consumption of concentrated sugars (specifically table sugar, technically known as sucrose). The intent of the sucrose-restricted diet was to starve the harmful bacteria by taking away their major food source. The yogurt and Lactobacillus GG would help replenish the “good” bacteria. Since it has been well documented that an overgrowth of bacteria is prevalently seen in people with Crohn’s disease, this treatment sounded like a plausible solution.

Our daughter, feeling drained from the effects of Crohn’s disease, felt motivated to try the doctor’s recommendations. . . . After about two weeks, she began to feel better in general. At the follow-up doctor’s appointment three months later, she had gained six pounds and her lab work was ALL NORMAL! . . . She continues to remain well [over 7 years later] with normal lab work and without clinical symptoms.

I asked Ms. Kalichman how others had fared with this treatment. She replied:

Periodically, I hear from others who have tried the treatment that my daughter does, and it seems that many have been helped a lot. Unfortunately they don’t always continue to keep in touch, so I don’t have any idea how many are totally well. Our daughter continues to be well as she has been for almost 9 years now…no meds and no clinical symptoms.

That took about 5 minutes, including emailing Kalichman. She referred me to a video about it.

More About Pork Fat and Sleep

Seth Roberts22 Comments

One day in 2009, I ate a large amount of pork belly (very high in fat — pork belly is the cut used to make bacon). That night I slept an unusually long time. The next day I had more energy than usual. This led me to do an experiment in which I ate a pork belly meal (with lots of pork belly, about 250 g) on some days but not others. I compared my sleep after the two sorts of days. I kept constant the number of one-legged stands I did each day because that has an effect. During the first half of the experiment I kept this constant at 4; during the second half, at 2. I originally posted the results only from the first half.

Now I’ve analyzed the results from both halves. Here are ratings of how rested I felt when I woke up, on a scale where 0 = 0% = not rested at all and 100 = 100% = completely rested.

The two halves were essentially the same: pork belly produced a big improvement. Here are the results for sleep duration.

No clear effect of pork belly in either half of the experiment.

The main thing I learned was that pork fat really helps. The effect is remarkably clear. With micronutrients, such as Vitamin C, the body has considerable storage. It may take months without the nutrient to become noticeably deficient. With omega-3, which is between a micronutrient and a macronutrient, my experiments found that it takes about two days to start to see deficiency. With pork fat there seems to be no storage at all. I needed to eat lots of pork fat every day to get the best sleep. That repletion and depletion are fast made this experiment easy. How curious we are so often told animal fat is bad when an easy experiment shows it is good, at least for me.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Adam Clemens, Melissa McEwen, and Navanit Arakeri.

Morning Faces Therapy: More Good Results

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Navanit Arakeri, who is 31 and lives in Bangalore, sent me the following email about the effect of looking at faces in the morning:

Thank you, it’s the most extraordinary thing. It’s taken my average daily mood from 6/10 to about 8/10 [on a 1-10 scale where 1 = very, very bad mood, 5 = neutral, and 10 = amazingly good mood. 6/10 = just better than neutral and 8/10 = very good. Note: if 5 = neutral, then a 1-9 or 0-10 scale will work better than a 1-10 scale] It has made me officially “happy”. And much more emotionally resilient to irritants and bad news.

I do it on waking at around 8:00 AM every day. I play “morning news” videos on mute on my iPad with no zoom (so it’s much smaller than life-sized). Example video

I do it for only 20-40 minutes, usually around 25 minutes. I’ve been doing it for about 45 days now.

I’m seeing a few interesting differences compared to your experience:

1. I don’t get the evening irritability at all. In fact, sometimes I get a Big Mood Improvement (see #2) in the evening (around 8:00 PM). The evening effect doesn’t happen every day, while the morning improvement is much more consistent.

2. Sometimes the mood improvement is so strong that I have an involuntary smile on my face. I can sit and stare into space feeling very happy. . . .

Sleep quality has been good throughout.

What led him to try it? “I wanted a simple self-experiment to test my lifelogging iPhone app and this fit nicely. I had read your original self-experimentation paper several years back, but never got around to trying it,” he said.

How long before he could tell it was working? “It was very clear by the 3rd morning,” he said.

He recorded the “involuntary smile” states, which lasted 30-60 minutes, on his iPhone. This graph shows how often they happened versus time of day over a 33-day period:

A value of 8, for example, means that there was roughly a one-quarter chance that during that time period he would be in the “involuntary smile” state. Before this the likelihood of involuntary smiles was zero.

Effect of Niacin on Restless Legs Syndrome: The Importance of Dosage

Seth Roberts6 Comments

K. Thomas Packard, who works in the healthcare industry, recently studied the effect of niacin on his Restless Legs Syndrome. He had read how a megadose helped Dennis Mangan’s mother. He gave a talk about his results and posted at Genomera.

The niacin didn’t help him. However, the highest dose he tried was 500 mg/day. Mangan’s mom, who surely weighs less than Packard, took 1000 mg/day. He doesn’t explain why he thought a much lower dose would work. Perhaps he weighs twice as much as Mangan’s mom, so 500 mg/day, in terms of body weight, may have been only 25% of the dose that worked for her. It’s too bad he went to all that trouble and used a maximum dose that could easily have been too low.

Part of the study “hypothesis” (= idea to be tested?) was

The “medium” dose may generally be more effective, than both the “low” and “high” doses, in eliminating symptoms of RLS and avoiding side effects of niacin.

Why this might be true isn’t explained.

After Week 3, Packard wrote “The niacin was not working, so I abandoned the experiment on Wednesday. I went back to my original medication and am doing OK.” He says nothing about side effects.

Packard later found that his ferritin was low, apparently a side effect of this study. If his RLS persists after he improves his ferritin level, I hope he tries niacin again at better dosages.