Category: self-experimentation

Finding The Source of Migraines

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Please read my story at Boing Boing about how a woman figured out what caused her migraines. I am always interested in cases where people figure out for themselves how to be healthy. If you have a story like that please contact me.

It has generated a lot of comments. Mark Frauenfelder, who posted it, told me he knew it would generate a lot of comments and one of the first would be “anecdotes are not data”. He was right. Preventive stupidity in action. It tells you something that scientists teach that “anecdotes are not data”, when all major scientific truths, as far as I know, began with a single observation. For example, the discovery of electricity began with a single observation that a dead frog’s leg twitched when touched with a scalpel. Why is something so at odds with reality taught and repeated by scientists, whose job is paying attention to reality? My explanation is human nature: How much we enjoy feeling superior.

Flaxseed Oil Cures Bleeding Gums in Three Days

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I am pleased by these results:

After a possibly overzealous dentist told me I need a gum graft [which may cost $3000], my husband encouraged me to start taking flaxseed oil. A few people online have reported that flaxseed oil dramatically improved their gum health, and we figured it was worth a shot.

My initial dose of flaxseed oil was two tablespoons a day, and my gums stopped bleeding and hurting within three days. This is pretty huge for me, because my gums have been bleeding since I was in junior high. [Emphasis added.] At the same time, I added using a Sonicare toothbrush and flossing a little more vigorously. Considering that I had tried these things in the past without the flaxseed oil and they only made me bleed more, I feel like the flaxseed oil is the difference maker.

I have subsequently reduced my flaxseed oil dose to one tablespoon, which I feel is more appropriate for a woman my size. I haven’t gained any weight from the flaxseed oil, which was a bit of a surprise. Taking it in the morning seems to help curb my appetite by at least the 130 calories it consumes.

The online reports she mentions are from this blog. A recap: Because of the Shangri-La Diet, one evening I took four or five flaxseed oil capsules. The next morning, I was surprised to notice that putting on my shoes standing up, which I’d done hundreds of times, was much easier than usual. This suggested that the flaxseed oil had improved my balance. I started to carefully measure my balance and varied my flaxseed oil intake. My measurements showed that variations in amount of flaxseed oil really did affect my balance. They also suggested the best dose. My balance improved up to a dose of 3 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. So the best dose was about 3 tablespoons per day. I blogged about this.

Tyler Cowen, inspired by my results, started taking 2 tablespoons/day. A month later, he no longer needed gum surgery. Knowing nothing about my flaxseed oil intake or Tyler Cowen’s results, my dentist told me my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever. My sister’s gums showed similar improvement. Tucker Max noticed his gums stopped bleeding after he started taking flaxseed oil. He’d had bleeding gums most of his adult life. Nothing else had helped. He also found training injuries healed faster. When he stopped drinking flaxseed oil, his gums soon got worse. Carl Willat noticed dramatic gum improvement. Joyce Cohen had excellent results (her gums were “in great shape — better than ever”). Tim Beneke and Jack Rusher had similar results. Gary Wolf, on the other hand, didn’t like the mental effects. A recent epidemiological study found a weak correlation between inflamed gums and omega-3 intake.

What have I learned? Above all, that such a pattern of results is possible. These results suggest there was/is a big hole in the usual nutritional ideas. Tyler Cowen, me, my sister, etc., were eating a conventionally “good diet” yet there was a lot of room for improvement, both in brain function and overall inflammation level. (I’m sure flaxseed oil heals gums because it reduces inflammation.) And improvement wasn’t hard — there was a simple fix. In other words, omega-3 deficiency is very common. The conventional deficiency diseases, such as scurvy and pellagra, were/are rare. They appeared only under extreme conditions with very limited diets (e.g., prison, long sea voyage). Yet just as scurvy and pellagra are easily cured, there is a simple cure for omega-3 deficiency: about 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. (Perhaps ground flaxseed is an even better source.)

Other facts support the idea of widespread omega-3 deficiency. When gums are very red, and bleed very easily, it’s called gingivitis. According to this article, ” estimates of the general prevalence of adult gingivitis vary from approximately 50 to 100%”. Heart disease is common. There’s plenty of evidence that heart disease is caused by inflammation (gated). For example, it’s well-known that inflamed gums correlate with heart disease. Statins may reduce heart disease — to the mild extent they do — because they reduce inflammation.

I also learned that psychology can help improve general health (too much inflammation causes all sorts of problems, as Tucker Max’s experience suggests). My background in experimental psychology made it easy for me to measure balance. I also found other mental tests were sensitive to flaxseed oil. These mental tests were like an animal model in the sense that they made helpful experiments (e.g., different doses) much easier. My friend Kenneth Carpenter, in his book about the discovery of Vitamin C (gated), stressed the importance of an animal model of scurvy. Once the best dose of flaxseed oil (for me) was known, it turned out to be easy to take a dose that produced dramatic improvement (in others).

The idea that psychology and self-experimentation can improve overall health is new. I presented my flaxseed oil results at a meeting of the Psychonomic Society a few years ago. After my talk, one member of the audience, a professor of psychology at Illinois State University, angrily complained that my talk was “pop culture” — not even pop psychology — and said I shouldn’t have been allowed to speak. He thought I had made elementary mistakes.

Flaxseed oil better than fish oil. Bad results of flaxseed oil.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull and Aaron Blaisdell.

Percentile Feedback Update

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In March I discovered that looking at a graph of my productivity (for the current day, with a percentile attached) was a big help. My “efficiency” — the time spent working that day divided by the time available to work — jumped as soon as the new feedback started (as this graph shows). The percentile score, which I can get at any moment during the day, indicates how my current efficiency score ranks according to scores from previous days within one hour of the same time. For example, a score of 50 at 1 p.m. means that half of the previous days’ scores from noon to 2 p.m. were better, half worse. The time available to work starts when I get up. For example, if I got up at 4 a.m., at 6 a.m. there were 2 hours available to work. The measurement period usually stops at dinner time or in the early evening.

This graph shows the results so far. It shows efficiency scores at the end of each day. (Now and then I take a day off.) One interesting fact is I’ve kept doing it. The data collection isn’t automated; I shift to R to collect it, typing “work.start” or “work.stop” or “work.switch” when I start, stop, or switch tasks. This is the third or fourth time I’ve tried some sort of work tracking system and the first time I have persisted this long. Another interesting fact is the slow improvement, shown by the positive slopes of the fitted lines. Apparently I am slowly developing better work habits.

The behavioral engineering is more complicated than you might think. My daily activities naturally divide into three categories: 1. things I want to do but have to push myself to do. This helps with that, obviously. 2. things I don’t want to do a lot of but have to push myself away from (e.g., web surfing). 3. things I want to do and have no trouble doing. But the recording system is binary. What do I do with activities in the third category? Eventually I decided to put the short-duration examples (e.g., standing on one foot, lasts 10 minutes) in the first category (counts as work), keeping the long-duration examples (e.g., walking, might last one hour) in the second category (doesn’t count as work).

Before I started this I thought of a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work, but it has. In line with my belief that it is better to do than to think.

Better To Do Than To Think

Seth Roberts20 Comments

The most important thing I learned in graduate school — or ever — about research is: Better to do than to think. By do I mean collect data. It is better to do an experiment than to think about doing an experiment, in the sense that you will learn more from an hour spent doing (e.g., doing an experiment) than from an hour thinking about what to do. Because 99% of what goes on in university classrooms and homework assignments is much closer to thinking than doing, and because professors often say they teach “thinking” (“I teach my students how to think”) but never say they teach “doing”, you can see this goes against prevailing norms. I first came across this idea in an article by Paul Halmos about teaching mathematics. Halmos put it like this: “The best way to learn is to do.” When I put it into practice, it was soon clear he was right.

I have never heard a scientist say this. But I recently heard a story that makes the same point. A friend wrote me:

I met Kary Mullis after high school. I knew that PCR was already taught in some high schools (like mine) and was curious how he discovered it. He said that he had some ideas about how to make the reaction work and discussed them with others, who explained why it wouldn’t work. He wasn’t insightful enough to understand their explanations so he had to go to the lab and see for himself why it wouldn’t work. It turned out it worked.

An example of better to do than to think.

Better to do than to think is not exactly anti-authoritarian but it is close. I was incredibly lucky to learn it from Halmos. It isn’t obvious how else I might have learned it. It took me many years to learn Research Lesson #2: Do the smallest easiest thing. And I learned this only because of all my self-experimentation. I started doing self-experimentation because of better to do than to think.

 

Causal Reasoning in Science: Don’t Dismiss Correlations

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In a paper (and blog post), Andrew Gelman writes:

As a statistician, I was trained to think of randomized experimentation as representing the gold standard of knowledge in the social sciences, and, despite having seen occasional arguments to the contrary, I still hold that view, expressed pithily by Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) that “To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.”

Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) (a book called Statistics for Experimenters) is well-regarded by statisticians. Perhaps Box, Hunter, and Hunter, and Andrew, were/are unfamiliar with another quote (modified from Beveridge): “Everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter; no one believes a theory except the theorist.”

Box, Hunter, and Hunter were/are theorists, in the sense that they don’t do experiments (or even collect data) themselves. And their book has a massive blind spot. It contains 500 pages on how to test ideas and not one page — not one sentence — on how to come up with ideas worth testing. Which is just as important. Had they considered both goals — idea generation and idea testing — they would have written a different book. It would have said much more about graphical data analysis and simple experimental designs, and, I hope, would not have contained the flat statement (“To find out what happens …”) Andrew quotes.

“To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.” It’s not “necessary” because belief in causality, like all belief, is graded: it can take on an infinity of values, from zero (“can’t possibly be true”) to one (“I’m completely sure”). And belief changes gradually. In my experience, significant (substantially greater than zero) belief in the statement A changes B usually starts with the observation of a correlation between A and B. For example, I began to believe that one-legged standing would make me sleep better after I slept unusually well one night and realized that the previous day I had stood on one leg (which I almost never do). That correlation made one-legged standing improves sleep more plausible, taking it from near zero to some middle value of belief (“might be true, might not be true”) Experiments in which I stood on one leg various amounts pushed my belief in the statement close to one (“sure it’s true”). In other words, my journey “to find out what happens” to my sleep when I stood on one leg began with a correlation. Not an experiment. To push belief from high (say, 0.8) to really high (say, 0.99) you do need experiments. But to push belief from low (say, 0.0001) to medium (say, 0.5), you don’t need experiments. To fail to understand how beliefs begin, as Box et al. apparently do, is to miss something really important.

Science is about increasing certainty — about learning. You can learn from any observation, as distasteful as that may be to evidence snobs. By saying that experiments are “necessary” to find out something, Box et al. said the opposite of you can learn from any observation. Among shades of gray, they drew a line and said “this side white, that side black”.

The Box et al. attitude makes a big difference in practice. It has two effects:

  1. Too-complex research designs. Just as researchers undervalue correlations, they undervalue simple experiments. They overdesign. Their experiments (or data collection efforts) cost far more and take much longer than they should. The self-experimentation I’ve learned so much from, for example, is undervalued. This is one reason I learned so much from it — because it was new.
  2. Existing evidence is undervalued, even ignored, because it doesn’t meet some standard of purity.

In my experience, both tendencies (too-complex designs, undervaluation of evidence) are very common. In the last ten years, for example, almost every proposed experiment I’ve learned about has been more complicated than I think wise.

Why did Box, Hunter, and Hunter get it so wrong? I think it gets back to the job/hobby distinction. As I said, Box et al. didn’t generate data themselves. They got it from professional researchers — mostly engineers and scientists in academia or industry. Those engineers and scientists have jobs. Their job is to do research. They need regular publications. Hypothesis testing is good for that. You do an experiment to test an idea, you publish the result. Hypothesis generation, on the other hand, is too uncertain. It’s rare. It’s like tossing a coin, hoping for heads, when the chance of heads is tiny. Ten researchers might work for ten years, tossing coins many times, and generate only one new idea. Perhaps all their work, all that coin tossing, was equally good. But only one researcher came up with the idea. Should only one researcher get credit? Should the rest get fired, for wasting ten years? You see the problem, and so do the researchers themselves. So hypothesis generation is essentially ignored by professionals because they have jobs. They don’t go to statisticians asking: How can I better generate ideas? They do ask: How can I better test ideas? So statisticians get a biased view of what matters, do biased research (ignoring idea generation), and write biased books (that don’t mention idea generation).

My self-experimentation taught me that the Box et al. view of experimentation (and of science — that it was all about hypothesis testing) was seriously incomplete. It could do so because it was like a hobby. I had no need for publications or other steady output. Over thirty years, I collected a lot of data, did a lot of fast-and-dirty experiments, noticed informative correlations (“accidental observations”) many times, and came to see the great importance of correlations in learning about causality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Support for Prenatal Ultrasound Cause of Autism

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have blogged several times about Caroline Rodger’s idea that sonograms during pregnancy greatly increase the risk of autism in the fetus. Her idea is supported by several lines of evidence, as she explains in this talk.

A new study provides more evidence. It found a high concordance rate among fraternal twins. In the general population from which the new study was drawn (California), about 1 child in 100 has autism. But if you are an identical twin, and your co-twin has autism spectrum disorder, your chance of having the same diagnosis is about 70%. The crucial point of the study is that the concordance was also high for fraternal twins: about 40%. As one commenter put it, this result “puts a spotlight on pregnancy as a time when environmental factors might exert their effects”.

Another study found more risk of autism if the mom took an anti-depressant during pregnancy. This supports the idea that a bad prenatal environment causes autism.

Thanks to Paul Sas and Gary Wolf.

Great Delusions: James Watson

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an interview, James D. Watson, co-discovery of the structure of DNA, said

Some day a child is going to sue its parents for being born. They will say, My life is so awful with these terrible genetic defects.

(Quoted by Richard Bentall in Doctoring the Mind.) Watson is implying that genetic defects matter in the big picture of human impairment. They don’t. Changes over time in disease incidence, migration studies (in all instances I know of, the disease profile of the migrating group changes to match the place where they live), powerful nutritional effects (e.g., Weston Price) and other evidence of environmental potency show that all major diseases (heart disease, cancer, depression, obesity, plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc.) are mostly caused by the environment, in the sense that environmental changes could greatly reduce their incidence. Genes are a distraction. (To say that major diseases are also “caused” by genes in the sense that genes affect environmental potency is to miss the point that we want to reduce the diseases — want to reduce obesity for example — so it is the environmental lever that matters. If a child could eliminate its obesity by changing its environment, it would not sue its parents.) If Watson was unaware of that, okay. But for him to claim the opposite is a great — and I am afraid profoundly self-serving — delusion.

As I blogged, Aaron Blaisdell had a certifiably “genetic” disease. The chromosome involved had been identified. It turned out to be under nutritional control. When he improved his diet, it vanished. Calling it “genetic” seriously distracted from learning how to eliminate it, it turned out. Another example of how “genetic” problems are not what they seem — impossible to change — is provided by lactose intolerance. The rate of lactose intolerance varies greatly from group to group. (I thank Phil Price for the link.) It is rare in Sweden, common in Asia, including China. I assume these differences reflect genetic differences. Yet Beijing supermarkets have aisles full of milk products. How can that be? Because the aisles are full of yogurt. Yogurt bacteria digest the lactose. So lactose intolerance is not a big deal. You can still drink milk, after it has been predigested by bacteria.

The dreams of geneticists.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Dennis Mangan.