More Acne Self-Experimentation

This post from the self-experimentation forums deserves to be reprinted in full:

After being plagued with acne for years, I took a job which caused me to work in remote bush camps for short periods in the far north. My acne would invariably disappear within a few days of exposure to this. When I returned to the city, the acne would return with a vengeance. Did not know why.

My theory: Soap residue left after washing my face with hardwater was the true acne culprit. Washing my face with ultrasoft lake water in bush camps leaves little or no soap residue, so no acne. Soap residue stimulates excessive skin oil secretions which leads to increased acne. A rich diet aggravates the problem by feeding the oil secretions.

My self-experiment
: I experimented with different types of soap and different concentrations of soap in hard and soft water.

Conclusion
: Soft and slightly soapy water only (a very mild soap) produced the least amount of acne. Never apply soap lather directly to your face! If you have only hard water to work with, then no soap at all is the best choice by far. Compensate for the lack of soap with hotter water.

Added benefit: Washing your face with no soap causes acne lesions to heal much faster – a couple of days compared to a week or more with soap.

Great work!

The same technique applied to cold sores.

Better in Google Books

I’ve heard that Samuel Beckett’s plays, written in French, are better in English. I have no idea if that’s true but I am sure that Television Without Pity: 752 Things We Hate to Love (and Love to Hate) About TV by Tara Ariano and Sarah Bunting is better in its more accessible, abridged Google Books version. I remember Sarah from when she was an especially visible fan of My So-Called Life. I got a much-enjoyed soundtrack cassette from her. Then she and Ariano started Television Without Pity, a brilliant entrepreneurial idea, which has helped me understand so many erudite HBO dramas.

More about Acne (continued)

When I was a teenager, my dermatologist gave me a long list of foods that might cause acne. It wasn’t any help at the time but later, when my acne was better, it helped me realize that drinking Diet Pepsi caused me to get acne 2 or 3 days later because “cola drinks” was on the list.

Now I learn from Tucker Max that it was probably the caffeine that did it:

I had bad acne in high school. I cut all caffeine out of my diet–cola, chocolate, etc–and about 90% of the acne went away. I got the rest with Accutane.

Very useful information. The list my dermatologist gave me was too long and too homogenous. “The acne caffeine link is well-known to dermatologists,” Tucker added. Except those who claim acne has nothing to do with diet.

Brain-Enhancing Drugs

A helpful collection of stories about the use of drugs that help you get things done. This amused me:

Individuals who experiment with these substances are on their own, testing drugs on themselves in a wild, crowdsourced, ad hoc brain-enhancement experiment. They join a scientific tradition of self-experimentation that stretches back to Santorio Santorio, a 16th-century physiologist.

If you experiment with mood-altering drugs, you join an older tradition.

More about Acne

The highlight of my recent trip to New York was a talk I gave at Landmark High School, a public high school near Columbus Circle. The students paid close attention. Afterwards, a student named John Cortez told me what he’d figured out about what causes his acne. His skin was clear so I had to believe he knew what he was talking about.

He has three rules: 1. Eat less greasy food. 2. Work out hard. 3. Wash face extremely well, especially after working out. The last rule is surprising because one of Allen Neuringer’s students found that acne got better when she stopped washing her face. John explained his reasoning like this:

When I was little I got something because of the lack of hand washing. Nothing serious — it went away — but it caused me to become sort of a neat freak. When i started to get pimples I thought it was because i didn’t wash my face well. When i started to wash my face better, my acne stopped getting worse. One day i got lazy and from there on I stopped washing. Then I noticed that I was almost covered with pimples. When I got in a gym I realized that when i sweat and as soon as possible, washed my face got less pimples and prevented those nasty huge acne.

Amount JC figured out about acne while in high school: A lot. Amount SR figured about acne while in high school: Zero.

Addendum. Another unexpected aftereffect of my talk was that Shangri-La Diet forum traffic went way up. That evening, at one point there were 307 people simultaneously reading the forums, a new record. The average daily maximum during the days just before was about 150. There were about 50 people at my talk. Go figure.

Self-Experimentation, Dogged and Useful

Studying himself, Piotr Wozniak, a Polish computer programmer, learned some useful things:

In 1985, he divided his database into three equal sets and created schedules for studying each of them. One of the sets he studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at expanding intervals, increasing the period between study sessions each time he got the answers right. This experiment proved that Wozniak’s first hunch was too simple. On none of the tests did his recall show significant improvement over the naive methods of study he normally used. But he was not discouraged and continued making ever more elaborate investigations of study intervals, changing the second interval to two days, then four days, then six days, and so on. Then he changed the third interval, then the fourth, and continued to test and measure, measure and test, for nearly a decade.

Based on his results he created a popular program called SuperMemo.

Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. . . . Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.

Thanks to John Kounios, Robert Simmons, and Navanit Arakeri.

Glimpse of the Future: Dim Sum?

The most surprising finding of my self-experimentation was that we need to see faces in the morning — every morning for most of us — to be in a good mood during the day. Morning faces push an oscillator that controls our mood. During the Stone Age, this need was fulfilled by talking to your neighbors. The function of this oscillator was to synchronize the moods of people who live together. It greased the wheels of cooperation. It’s much easier to work with someone in a good mood than someone in a bad mood.

Since I discovered this, I’ve wondered: What will this mean for everyday life? Will people chat via videophones? Watch YouTube videos (“This is my response to . . . “)? Look in a mirror? Gather in cafes? Or what? You need a community to make this work, since you need to see one or more faces for a half hour or more.

Last night at Teance, at a Slow Food event, I learned of two modern communities where people manage to get the needed face time. One is in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong Province, China. Every morning retired people get together and drink tea. Where do they meet? I asked. “Anywhere,” I was told. They may meet in a park, for example. In Guangdong they drink more tea than anywhere else in China and, I was told, have better health than the rest of China.

The other community are those Cantonese, both in Hong Kong and in Guangdong Province, who eat dim sum every day for breakfast. They gather in restaurants that serve dim sum. You can come whenever you like but the the restaurants open around 5 am and the whole thing may last four hours. (My results imply that the face-to-face conversation should happen during the first hours or so after you get up. Wait till 10 am and there won’t be any effect.) You might have three business meetings during that time. You can stretch out eating dim sum in a way you can’t easily stretch out eating breakfast that appears all on one plate at once. So it lends itself to longer meals. The longer everyone spends at the dim sum restaurant, the easier it becomes to meet there.

80% Empty or 20% Full?

A study in the latest issue of Journal of Nutrition wondered if following dietary guidelines (“eating healthy”) is helpful. From the abstract:

Few studies have found that adherence to dietary guidelines reduces the incidence of chronic disease. In 2001, a National Nutrition and Health Program (Program National Nutrition Santé) was implemented in France and included 9 quantified priority nutritional goals involving fruit, vegetable, and nutrient intakes, nutritional status, and physical activity. We developed an index score that includes indicators of these public health objectives and examined the association between this score and the incidence of major chronic diseases in the Supplémentation en Vitamines et Minéraux AntioXydants cohort. . . . Men in the top tertile [ = most adherence] compared with those in the lowest one had a 36% lower risk of major chronic diseases . . . No association was found in women.

No association in women. Suppose the guidelines were half correct — half of the advice was useless, half was helpful. You’d still expect an association because the helpful advice would help and the useless advice would neither hurt nor help.

Did the authors of this highly-informative study face their results squarely? No. The abstract concludes: “Healthy diet and lifestyle were associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases, particularly in men, thereby underlying relevance of the French nutritional recommendations.” Particularly in men, huh? The study started with about 2000 men and 3000 women. It lasted eight years.