Category: self-experimentation

Easy versus Hard: Hunting, Agriculture, Etc.

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Coming across this sentence

The more intensive the agricultural system, the more work required for a unit of food.

in Charles Maisel’s The Emergence of Civilization (1990, p. 35) made me think for a while and make a list:

  1. Hunting: Easy.
  2. Agriculture: Hard. In agriculture you have to start from scratch in a way you don’t when hunting.
  3. Self-Experimentation: Easy.
  4. Ordinary Science: Hard. It is much harder to discover something useful via ordinary science than via self-experimentation.
  5. Fermentation: Easy. It is easy to make yogurt or kombucha, for example.
  6. Medical Drugs: Hard. Hard to invent, hard to make, hard to sell, hard to get, hard to afford, not to mention dangerous. It is much easier to cure/prevent problems by eating fermented foods, such as yogurt.

What’s interesting is the starkness of the differences. Hunting and agriculture are two answers to the same question. I suppose we backed into agriculture because we over-hunted. In the other two pairs, I think the basic Veblenian dynamic was/is at work: The more useless, the more high status. Scientists must be elaborately theoretical and high-techy and wasteful to be high-status. Likewise with home remedies (such as fermented food) versus medical drugs: To be high-status, doctors had to promote elaborate, obscure, hard-to-get remedies.

Acne Self-Experimentation: Why It’s Promising

Seth Roberts10 Comments

This article reports that there was no acne whatsoever among the Kitava Islanders in Papua New Guinea and the Ache hunter-gatherers in Paraguay. Here is the abstract:

BACKGROUND: In westernized societies, acne vulgaris is a nearly universal skin disease afflicting 79% to 95% of the adolescent population. In men and women older than 25 years, 40% to 54% have some degree of facial acne, and clinical facial acne persists into middle age in 12% of women and 3% of men. Epidemiological evidence suggests that acne incidence rates are considerably lower in nonwesternized societies. Herein we report the prevalence of acne in 2 nonwesternized populations: the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. Additionally, we analyze how elements in nonwesternized environments may influence the development of acne. OBSERVATIONS: Of 1200 Kitavan subjects examined (including 300 aged 15-25 years), no case of acne (grade 1 with multiple comedones or grades 2-4) was observed. Of 115 Aché subjects examined (including 15 aged 15-25 years) over 843 days, no case of active acne (grades 1-4) was observed. CONCLUSIONS: The astonishing difference in acne incidence rates between nonwesternized and fully modernized societies cannot be solely attributed to genetic differences among populations but likely results from differing environmental factors. Identification of these factors may be useful in the treatment of acne in Western populations.

This implies that acne isn’t inevitable. It’s almost surely caused by something environmental — perhaps diet, perhaps something else (such as washing your face with soap). That’s why self-experimentation about acne is promising: By changing your environment in various ways, you may be able to figure out what’s causing your acne.

The Pashler-Roberts Law: Expense versus Honesty

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In this post Andrew Gelman comments on my recent post about acne self-experimentation. He makes an excellent point about drug-company studies:

How would you want to evaluate the risks and effectiveness of a new drug that was developed by a pharmaceutical company at the cost of millions of dollars? I’d be suspicious of an observational study: even if conducted by professionals, there just seem to be too many ways for things to be biased.

Right. And it’s not just observational studies. The data from any big study can be analyzed many ways. The more at stake, the greater the chance of what Andrew calls bias and I call making choices that favor the result you prefer. Independently of Andrew, Hal Pashler and I came up with what I call the Pashler-Roberts Law: The more expensive the research, the less likely the researchers will be honest about it.

You may remember that Robert Gallo, the AIDS researcher, did very expensive research. The deception (possibly self-deception) that accompanied very expensive fusion research is described in Charles Seife’s Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008).

As Andrew says, this is a big virtue of self-experimentation. Because it’s free, it’s easy to be honest, especially about failure. The cheaper the better is a broad truth about science that’s hard to learn from books or classes or even talking to scientists.

Acne Gone Thanks to Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts35 Comments

A year ago I told students at my friend’s Mohamed Ibrahim‘s school that a student of Allen Neuringer’s had gone on a camping trip and found that her acne went away. At first she thought it was the sunshine; but then, by self-experimentation, she discovered that the crucial change was that she had stopped using soap to wash her face.

Now Mohamed writes:

I told my classes about your friend who went camping without her face products only to discover that the face products were contributing to her acne, and that from that point on she only washed her face with water. It turns out that two of my students wash their faces with water! And their skin looks great! I started “washing” my face with water about a month ago, and [now] my face is acne free and soft as a pair of brand new UGG boots. [He had had acne for years.] The only additional thing I do is wipe my face with a napkin throughout the day to remove any excess oil.

So one cause of acne is using soap to wash your face.

Acne really matters. And it’s common. It now turns out that it has a pathetically easy solution, in at least some cases. Dermatologists don’t know this. Apparently hardly anyone knows it. Somehow the entire healthcare establishment, to whom we entrust our health in many ways, missed this. Dennis Mangan’s discovery that niacin can cure restless-leg syndrome is another example of a pathetically easy solution missed by experts. Likewise, the Shangri-La Diet is very different than anything an obesity expert has ever proposed.

What else has been missed?

More Imagine a med student in a dermatology class. The student raises his hand and asks a question. “I read in a blog that acne goes away if you stop using soap. What do you think about that?” What would the instructor say — after telling the student not to believe everything he reads on the Web?

The Fall of GM

Seth Roberts2 Comments

There is nothing new about large industry leaders, such as General Motors, going bankrupt; in The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen gives many examples and an explanation: complacency, also called smugness. We’re doing well, why shouldn’t we continue to do things our way? They fail to innovate enough and less-complacent companies overtake them, often driving them out of business. Complacency is human nature, true, but it’s the oldest mistake in the economic world. (I’ve studied a similar effect in rats and pigeons.) In the 1950s, complacency was surely why the big American car companies rejected the advice of quality expert Edward Deming. In less-complacent Japan, however, his ideas were embraced. This doomed the US car industry. Much later, Ford was the first American car company to take Deming seriously, which may be why Ford is now doing better than GM or Chrysler.

The further away you are I suspect the more clearly you see complacency for what it is — a failure to grasp basic economics (innovate or die):

“Chinese financial assets [in America[ are very safe,” [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner said. His response drew laughter from the [Peking University] audience.

Extreme Medical Tourism

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In this post Jasper Lawrence describes a trip to Cameroon to infect himself with hookworms. Here’s how it begins:

As my asthma got worse I became increasingly reliant on inhalers, pills and antihistamines as well as upon the oral steroid prednisone to stay out of hospital. I tried all the drugs and therapies available. As it was by the time I was in my late 30s I was a frequent visitor to the emergency room. As anyone who has experienced a severe asthma attack can tell you they are terrifying.

My use of prednisone increased, and as you may know the side affects of prednisone are quite horrible, particularly with long-term use. I started to suffer from some of these side affects, particularly obesity, and despite all this these drugs were only marginally effective in controlling my asthma.

Soon I was denied health insurance and so now I had the added burden of paying for all my medical care.

On a trip in the summer of 2004 to visit relatives in England I learned of a BBC documentary about the connection between a variety of intestinal parasites and various autoimmune diseases.

In Cameroon:

Cameroon has no tourism infrastructure, its people being so poor (your pocket change represents two or three months wages) and the insane corruption make for a very challenging environment for a western traveler, particularly a conspicuous white one. You are a walking pile of cash, a visitor from another, much wealthier, planet. One feels very vulnerable and exposed. It can be very wearing and the danger of being robbed is constant. . . . With the driver’s help (I told everyone of my quest) I was able to visit a variety of villages and with practice learned to identify where the locals would defecate.

Worm therapy.

Self-Tracking: What I’ve Learned

Seth Roberts10 Comments

I want to measure, day by day, how well my brain is working. After I saw big fast effects of flaxseed oil, I realized how well my brain works (a) depends on what I eat and (b) can change quickly. Maybe other things besides dietary omega-3 matter. Maybe large amounts of omega-6 make my brain work worse, for example. Another reason for this project is that I’m interested in how to generate ideas, a neglected part of scientific methodology. Maybe this sort of long-term monitoring can generate new ideas about what affects our brains.

So I needed a brain task that I’ll do daily. When I set out to devise a good task, here’s what I already knew:

1. Many numbers, not one. A task that provides many numbers per test (e.g., many latencies) is better than a task that provides only one number (e.g., percent correct). Gathering many numbers per test allows me to look at their distribution and choose an efficient method of combining (i.e., averaging) them into one number. (E.g., harmonic mean, geometric mean, trimmed mean.) Gathering many numbers also allows me to calculate a standard error, which helps identify unusual scores.

2. Graded, not binary. Graded measures (e.g., latencies) are better than binary ones (e.g., right/wrong).

Every experimental psychologist knows this. What none of them know is how to make the task fun. If I’m going to do something every day, it matters a great deal whether I enjoy it or not. It might be the difference between possible and impossible. People enjoy video games, which is a kind of existence proof. Video games have dozens of elements; which matter? Here’s what I figured out by trial and error:

3. Hand-eye coordination. Making difficult movements that involve hand-eye coordination is fun. My bilboquet taught me this. Presumably this tendency originated during the tool-making hobbyist stage of human evolution; it caused people to become better and better at making tools. Ordinary typing involves skilled movement but not hand-eye coordination. This idea has worked. I led me to try one-finger typing (where I look at the keyboard while I type) instead of regular typing. And, indeed, I enjoy the one-finger typing task, whereas I didn’t enjoy the ordinary typing tasks I’ve tried.

4. Detailed problem-by-problem feedback. Right/wrong is the crudest form of feedback; it doesn’t do much. What I find is much more motivating is more graded feedback based on performance on the same problem.

5. Less than 5 minutes. The longer the task the more data, sure, but also the more reluctant I am to do it. Three minutes seems close to ideal: long enough for the task to be a pleasant break but not so long that it seems like a burden.

Experimental psychology is a hundred years old. Small daily tests is an unexplored ecology that might have practical benefits.

Yes, Canker Sores Prevented (and Cured) by Omega-3

Seth Roberts21 Comments

Here is a comment left on my earlier canker-sore post by a reader named Ted:

I found out quite by accident WALNUTS get rid of [canker sores] quite quickly. The first sign of an ulcer I chew walnuts and leave the paste in my mouth for a little while (30 seconds or so).

The first time was by accident, my ulcers disappeared so quickly I knew it had to be something I ate. And the only thing I had eaten differently the past day was walnuts.

Flaxseed oil and walnuts differ in lots of ways but both are high in omega-3. My gums got much better around the time I started taking flaxseed oil. I neither noticed nor expected this; my dentist pointed it out. Several others have told me the same thing. Tyler Cowen’s gums got dramatically better. One reader started and stopped and restarted flaxseed oil, making it blindingly clear that the gum improvement is caused by flaxseed oil. There is plenty of reason to think the human diet was once much higher in omega-3. All this together convinces me that omega-3 can both prevent and cure canker sores. Not only that, I’m also convinced that canker sores are a sign of omega-3 deficiency. You shouldn’t just get rid of them with walnuts; you should change your diet. Omega-3 has other benefits (better brain function, less inflammation, probably others).

Let’s say I’m right about this — canker sores really are prevented and cured by omega-3. Then there are several things to notice.

1. Web facilitation. It was made possible by the internet. My initial interest in flaxseed oil came from reading the Shangri-La Diet forums. I didn’t have to read a single book about the Aquatic Ape theory; I could learn enough online. Tyler Cowen’s experience was in his blog. Eric Vlemmix contacted me by email. No special website was involved.

2. Value of self-experimentation. My flaxseed oil self-experimentation played a big part, although it had nothing to do with mouth health. These experiments showed dramatic benefits — so large and fast that something in flaxseed oil, presumably omega-3, had to be a necessary nutrient. Because of these results, I blogged about omega-3 a lot, which is why Eric emailed me about his experience.

3. Unconventional evidence. All the evidence here, not just the self-experimentation, is what advocates of evidence-based medicine and other evidence snobs criticize. Much of it is anecdotal. Yet the evidence snobs have, in this case, nothing to show for their snobbery. They missed this conclusion completely. Nor do you need a double-blind study to verify/test this conclusion. If you have canker sores, you simply drink flaxseed oil or eat walnuts and see if they go away. Maybe this omnipresent evidence snobbery is . . . completely wrong? Maybe this has something to do with the stagnation in health research?

4. Lack of credentials. No one involved with this conclusion is a nutrition professor or dentist or medical doctor, as far as I know. Apparently you don’t need proper credentials to figure out important things about health. Of course, we’ve been here before: Jane Jacobs, Elaine Morgan.

5. Failure of “trusted” health websites. Health websites you might think you could trust missed this completely. The Mayo Clinic website lists 15 possible causes — none of them involving omega-3. (Some of them, we can now see, are correlates of canker sores, also caused by lack of omega-3.) If canker sores can be cured with walnuts, the Mayo list of treatments reads like a list of scurvy cures from the Middle Ages. The Harvard Medical School health website is even worse. “Keep in mind that up to half of all adults have experienced canker sores at least once,” it says. This is supposed to reassure you. Surely something this common couldn’t be a serious problem.

6. Failure of the healthcare establishment. Even worse, the entire healthcare establishment, with its vast resources, hasn’t managed to figure this out. Canker sores are not considered a major health problem, no, but, if I’m right, that too is a mistake. They are certainly common. If they indicate an important nutritional deficiency (too little omega-3), they become very important and their high prevalence is a major health problem.

Yogurt Power

Seth Roberts12 Comments

My interest in fermented food started in January, at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, where I had a theoretical idea: The pleasure we get from sour, umami, and complex flavors had the effect, when it evolved, of increasing bacteria intake. This suggests we need to consume plenty of bacteria to be healthy. Three things happened at that convention that supported these ideas: (a) Someone trying to make a high-end non-alcoholic drink said he found it impossible to get enough complexity without fermentation. (b) I remembered that after a trip to Japan, I had started eating lots of miso soup. Miso (fermented soy beans) is an unusually effective flavoring agent. (c) A Stonyfield Farms employee told me that her health improved a lot when she started eating yogurt every day two years ago. (Stonyfield Farms makes yogurt.)

Recently I learned more about the health improvement. She started eating more yogurt about two years ago because she changed jobs — from an architecture firm in Boston to Stonyfield, in New Hampshire, where the employee kitchen has a refrigerator full of free yogurt. In Boston, she ate yogurt about once/week; at Stonyfield, she eats it once/day (for breakfast).

When she moved to New Hampshire, she also changed her diet in other ways. She now eats more foods that are “natural and organic” and less fast food. She doesn’t eat anything with aspartame any more; she also avoids caffeine. She eats more fruits and vegetables. Maybe the biggest change is that she eats three good meals every day instead of one meal on the run. Other changes in her life include less stress, a different atmosphere, and more exposure to nature.

In Boston, she had lots of colds and sinus infections, maybe 3-4/year. When she got sick it took a long time — 2 weeks — to get better. She also felt sick to her stomach a lot. In Boston she got mononucleosis; it took six months to completely recover. In New Hampshire, she’s had only 1 cold in the past year and it only lasted 3-4 days. No other illnesses. Another change she’s happy about is that she gained weight. In Boston she weighed about 90 pounds; now she weighs about 110. (She’s 5′ 4″ and 30 years old.)

She’s noticed that Stonyfield employees are healthier than other places she’s worked (as this study suggests). Fewer people are sick and when they’re sick they aren’t sick as long. Everyone eats the free yogurt, except the lactose-intolerant. Stonyfield yogurt contains less than half the lactose of milk; for some lactose-intolerant people that’s low enough, for others it isn’t low enough. (Stonyfield makes a soy yogurt without lactose.)

Human Sonar and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This fascinating article by Daniel Kish, a blind psychologist, describes how he navigates via tongue clicks. The echos tell him about his surroundings. I was struck by the similarities with self-experimentation:

  1. Don’t wait for experts. A blind person could wait for a sighted person (“At the time I went to school, blind kids either waited for people to take us around or we taught ourselves to strike out on our own”). Just as I could have waited for a sleep expert to figure out why I was waking up too early. But I didn’t: I struck out on my own via self-experimentation.
  2. Many little probes. Kish guided himself by clicking his tongue many times. Likewise, effective self-experimentation, in my experience, involves many little experiments.
  3. Free. Kish can go where he wants when he wants. It costs nothing. Likewise, my self-experimentation needs no grant, and allows me to study whatever I want and reach any conclusion.
  4. Learning by doing. An experiment, like sonar, involves doing something, getting feedback, and moving forward based on interpretation of the feedback.
  5. Active better than passive. “Passive sonar that relies on incidental noises such as footsteps produces relatively vague images. Active sonar, in which a noise such as a tongue click is produced specifically to generate echoes, is much more precise,” writes Kish. Likewise, I’ve learned more from active experimentation than from measuring something day after day, which relies on natural variation.
  6. Ancient. “The readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill,” writes Kish. Self-experimentation is a form of trial and error, which predates humans.
  7. Verification in other ways. “Ultimately, students verify what they hear by touching,” writes Kish. The solutions I come up with via self-experimentation I verify by using them. Do they work? Another kind of verification is with experiments involving others.

The broad similarity is that self-experimentation, at least mine, is a way of navigating a world with plenty of important cause-effect relationships I don’t know about (e.g., what makes my sleep better or worse). Rather than continually bumping into them.