Seth's Blog

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.

From the SLD forums:

It has been two years since I started [SLD], and I just couldn’t think about changing this simple, natural way of life that has given me such peace and freedom.  I often think of a comedy skit I saw on t.v. some time ago where this guy was given a new electric sander as a gift, but kept using it without plugging it in.

To try to lose weight without SLD is like not plugging in an electric sander. Other weight-loss methods work; they’re just much harder, like a sander versus an electric sander.

In her sig file she describes her method and results:

48 years old, 5 feet 4 inches
March 7 160
May 8 119
May 9 116
1-2T OIL/day AND/OR N.CLIP 300-500 calories food.
CFF daily.
To sustain weight loss: Eat fewer calories; enjoy the food you eat; low G.I.; only highest quality.
Don’t assault your precious body with empty calories.

N.CLIP = noseclip. CFF = calorie-free flavor. See the SLD forums for more about them.

To lose 25% of your weight and go a year without regain is a huge accomplishment.

I just got a spam email from a company in China offering to sell me crystalline fructose. I have bought far more than my share of crystalline fructose (that’s how I originally did the Shangri-La Diet) and I live in China part of the year. How in the world did they know?

Someone who lives in the southwestern US posted this on a helmenthic therapy forum:

One [scorpion keeper] reported how a pain in his leg from a motorcycle accident that had been with him for years spontaneously resolved after getting stung by some fairly nasty [scorpion] . . . .  It’s fairly well-known that beekeepers don’t face the same risk from arthritis as the general public.

I haven’t managed to find support for this “fairly well-known” idea. But it’s quite plausible because bee stings are used to treat arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In this video, an Indonesian therapist says that 85 out of 100 sufferers are “cured” by the treatment.

“A therapy most of us would find taboo,” says the narrator of this video. I wonder. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

There is no known cure for [multiple sclerosis].  . . MS medications can have adverse effects or be poorly tolerated, and many patients pursue alternative treatments, despite the lack of supporting scientific study.

Multiple sclerosis and some forms of arthritis are autoimmune disorders. My “umami hypothesis” says that autoimmune disorders and other immune disorders, such as allergies, are deficiency diseases. They are caused by not enough immune-system stimulation — stimulation that long ago we got from bacteria-laden food. This suggests a new interpretation of what’s going on with bee-sting therapy. Their healing properties have been attributed, at least in these videos, to special properties of the venom. The umami hypothesis suggests that the foreign proteins in venom calm the immune system and that quite different foreign substances would do just as well. I don’t know of anyone treating arthritis or MS with fermented food — but before the Shangri-La Diet, I didn’t know of anyone drinking sugar water to lose weight. The fact that such hugely different agents as hookworms, bee stings, and fermented foods have similar effects is considerable support for the hypothesis. Without the hypothesis, no one would have grouped them together.

Now I wonder about acupuncture: Could it work, at least some of the time, because it injects foreign substances? Surely acupuncture needles put plenty of bacteria into the body. This line of thought explains why stabbing a knee with a scapel apparently helps arthritis (and involves a lot less hand-waving than calling that result a placebo effect). Keep in mind that this is the hallmark of deficiency diseases: They get a lot better, almost miraculously and without side effects, if you supply even a little of what’s missing. The cure rate can be very high.

People in power, by and large, are terrible problem-solvers. They like the status quo — it brought them where they are. They have a hard time seeing the benefits of change. The bigger the change, the less they like it. Thus self-experimentation, a new way of solving health problems, offends med school professors.

But sometimes people in power make a wise choice — possibly by accident. An example is how the City of San Francisco is encouraging solar power. They are giving huge subsidies to homeowners and renters who install electric power. The program is about a year old. If your income is low, the subsidy is so large that your power becomes almost free. This is a use of government money that encourages change and new solutions. It will help the local solar power industry grow. It might create a solar power hub near San Francisco the way defense department subsidies helped create Silicon Valley.

Why is this happening? Because the responsible department in San Francisco government gets $100 million/year by selling electricity from hydropower. (Which they don’t like to talk about, for obvious reasons.) The money can’t be transferred to other departments; it has to be spent in energy-related ways. On its face, the restriction seems cruel — why not use the money to help social services? But more money for social services is unlikely to improve the local economy. Whereas this use of the money helps poor people and the local economy. It does so in the basic way Jane Jacobs recommends: It empowers those who benefit from change — in this case, the solar power industry.