Seth's Blog

Several years ago, during a routine checkup, my primary-care doctor pointed to some white lines on my right foot. (Curiously only one foot had them.) Fungus, he said. I had a fungus infection. What should I do? I asked. He suggested over-the-counter anti-foot-fungus medications, sold in every drugstore.

I tried a few of them. They didn’t work. The problem persisted.

A month ago I noticed the problem had gotten much worse. Yikes. What had gone wrong? I realized that in the previous few weeks I had changed two things:

• Instead of putting my wash through an extra wash cycle without soap (to rinse it better), I had started doing my wash the way the rest of the world does it. I had stopped doing the extra cycle because I was no longer worried about becoming allergic to the soap.
• I had bought 5 new pairs of socks and had been cycling though 4 of the new pairs again and again (washing them between wearings, of course), ignoring the rest of my socks.

This suggested a theory: My skin infection was due to my socks. The infectious agents get on my socks and are not completely removed by the washing machine. They survive a few days on the shelf. To wear socks with the infectious agent already present gives the infection a boost. Maybe my new socks supported the infectious agent better than the socks they replaced.

Based on this theory, I did three things:

• Resumed putting my wash through an extra cycle without soap.
• Took off my socks earlier in the evening.
• Bought 12 new pairs of socks and made sure every sock went a long time (e.g., 3 weeks) between wearings.

I saw improvement right away. (The morning after I wore new socks.) A month later, the infection, present for at least several years, is entirely gone. It took about a month for it to clear up completely.

The essence of my discovery is that the infectious agent could survive my socks being washed conventionally (in a washing machine) and live for a few days without contact with my feet. Whereas a few weeks away from my skin killed it. I have been unable to find this info anywhere else. A very minor discovery, but unlike the work that won the most recent Nobel Prize in Medicine, useful right now. Cost: zero. I would have had to buy new socks anyway.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs tells about a reporter interviewing someone in an oil-rich Middle East country (Iran?). During the interview the interviewee tries to cut an apple with a knife. The knife breaks. We can’t even make knives, the interviewee says. That’s how backward our economy is. To develop economically, MIT professors had advised his country’s government to build a dam, at great expense. The MIT advisors thought that building a dam would be good for economic development. They were wrong, it turned out. Jacobs thought it was telling that after all that money invested, the local economy still couldn’t make something as basic as a good knife. Many industrial processes require cutting tools.

This is the same thing. Preventing and eliminating infection is at the core of medicine, just as cutting is at the core of manufacturing. My discovery reveals that my doctor — and by implication, the whole health care establishment — failed to know something basic and simple about this. If they understood what I figured out, there would be no need for anti-foot-fungus medicine. A gazillion dollars a year is spent on medical research, medical schools and research institutes around the world are full of faculty doing research — and they haven’t figured out something as basic and simple as this.
Gatekeeper Drugs. How to Avoid Infection: Something I Didn’t Know.

This old comment made me laugh me when I reread it recently:

It was slightly embarrassing when friends would ask how long I had been on [the Shangri-La Diet]. I lied and said a day – it had only been eight hours but, hey, without SLD, I normally would have done a great deal of damage in those 8 hours. It’s now been a week and I’ve lost three pounds. I love the luxury of choosing finer foods now that I’m no longer compelled to eat everything in sight when dinnertime comes around. The Monster has been rocked to sleep

Thumbs up: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion. Hedges writes about how Americans are delusional in their beliefs about how wonderful their country is and how rich and powerful they are. One of his targets is academia, which he says turns out graduates who are far too respectful of authority. (He doesn’t mention molecular biologists, but they’re another example.)

Thumbs down: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. Two words: runaway serfs.

This comment on a previous post deserves emphasis:

For the past 3 years or so, a co-worker and I would suffer spring allergies together. We seemed to be allergic to the same thing, because we’d start and stop at the same times. This year, we both got whacked hard late April. Desperate, I started eating yogurt (Breyers mostly, some Danactive and Stonyfield) every day, sometimes twice, after reading your blog and doing some research. About 8 – 10 days later, I noticed I had no symptoms. My friend had light symptoms, so I thought maybe it was just a lull. Then about 2 weeks later, my friend got pummeled by allergies again, very badly; he could hardly work. I had NO symptoms. I didn’t even realize it was a bad day for allergies until he showed up to work. I haven’t had any allergies since.

At first I thought the title of this article was “Taking Back The Nobel Prizes”. My eyes widened. Someone at the New York Times has a radical thought, it appeared. I was wrong. The title is “Taking Back Nobel Prizes”; the article is about the less-than-radical idea that Henry Kissinger did not deserve a Peace Prize. Then I thought it was too bad that Richard Feynman isn’t alive. If he were, I would ask him if modern biology — the sort that wins Nobel Prizes — is an example of what he called cargo-cult science in a famous graduation speech. I would be a good person to ask that question, I thought, because he considered rat psychology cargo-cult science. Yet I used rat psychology to come up with the Shangri-La Diet, which has helped many people lose weight in counter-intuitive ways.

Cargo-cult science, according to Feynman, was activities that have the superficial trappings of science but don’t actually accomplish anything. You do all the right things, or so you think, but the planes don’t land. The sort of biology that wins Nobel Prizes has a long history of this. This year’s prize went to research that found that telomeres shorten with age. The press release, forced to say how this is useful (the Nobel Prize is supposed to be for research that benefits mankind), says

These discoveries had a major impact within the scientific community. Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex [shocking!] . . . Research in this area remains intense.

. . .  It was therefore proposed that cancer might be treated by eradicating telomerase. Several studies are underway in this area, including clinical trials evaluating vaccines directed against cells with elevated telomerase activity.

Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of congenital aplastic anemia, in which insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow lead to severe anemia. Certain inherited diseases of the skin and the lungs are also caused by telomerase defects.
In conclusion, the discoveries by Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies.

Shameless. Note the utter absence of even one disease in one person cured or prevented. Not one. And this is supposed to be the most beneficial discovery in medicine. It’s the top prize in medicine and biology! Last year the prize was given for HIV. Do we have an HIV vaccine? No. The year before that, HPV. Do we have an HPV vaccine? No. A few years before that, the discovery that a certain bug “causes” stomach ulcers — the award that showed that the medical community and the Nobel Prize committee have a weak grasp of the concept of causality. The biologists think they do everything right — but the planes don’t land. The biologists who do this research aren’t able to solve actual problems. (Some people do — those who discovered that smoking causes cancer, for example — but they don’t get Nobel Prizes.) Could something important be missing from their view of the world? I think so.

Cargo-cult activities aren’t worthless, so long as you learn from your mistakes. The cargo cultists could see that the planes didn’t land and eventually figure out that something was missing. That’s actual knowledge, humble but useful. Feynman’s criticisms of rat psychology were reasonable. Those doing rat psychology learned from their mistakes, I think, and eventually the field improved and produced the research behind the Shangri-La Diet. Modern biology isn’t worthless, just as cargo cults aren’t worthless. Obviously “useless” knowledge can eventually become useful, as has happened many times. But these overblown claims for the value of modern biology truly cost the rest of us — a great deal, I believe. Because the first step in getting somewhere, as Feynman liked to say, is to confront reality. At least in their public statements about the value of their research, modern biologists are living in a dream world. It’s always “potential” this and “future” that and “insight into disease mechanisms” — without ever curing or preventing a disease.

Thanks to Eric Meltzer.