Seth's Blog

Medical ghostwriting is plagiarism with a bullet: not only do med-school profs get the benefits of a published article they didn’t write, that published article — written by a drug-company hack — is inevitably misleading, causing doctors to prescribe a drug that is worse than they think. (Which is the whole point.) Patients who take the drug are the big losers.

This sort of thing is so patently awful — especially the harm done to millions of sick innocent people — that you’d think everyone finds it repulsive. Quite the opposite. Living breathing med school professors, such as New York University professor Lila Nachtigall, have trouble seeing what’s so bad about it. The practice appears so common that Senator Grassley asked the ten top medical schools, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, to say their policies about it. He’s asking them: Do you consider plagiarism wrong? Except it’s much worse than plagiarism. Although several say on their websites that it’s wrong, Duke University says that “Severe and/or repeated offenses will result in formal disciplinary action”– in other words, non-severe examples are okay! At least the first time. “Formal disciplinary action” can be as mild as a letter. At Duke, at least, they have trouble grasping how awful it is.

This might seem to have nothing in common with self-experimentation. Self-experimentation can be done by anyone, costs nothing, and is a way to figure out helpful truths; whereas almost no one can get a drug company to write a paper for them (you need to be at a top medical school), drugs are a hundred-billion-dollar/year business, and this sort of ghost-writing is done to hide helpful truths. In a better world, they really would be worlds apart. But you are reading this not because I did self-experimentation but because I did self-experimentation that found out something useful and surprising — the Shangri-La Diet and new ideas about sleep and mood. A big reason it did so was that the experts in those fields — such as the relevant med school professors  — were utterly and completely asleep, so to speak. They were incapable of making significant progress. Extreme careerism — putting one’s career ahead of everything else — is no doubt one reason. They could have done what I did. Fat weight-control profs could have tested different diets on themselves, for example. But doing good research would be harmful to their career (e.g., not enough publications), so they don’t do it. Medical ghostwriting helps their career, so they take advantage of it. So what if millions of sick people are harmed by these decisions.

My surprisingly-productive self-experimentation and the staggeringly careerist decisions of med school profs are two sides of one coin: the profound stagnation in health care. The complete inability of those in charge to innovate effectively. Drug companies are businesses that make drugs. They are not going to explore non-drug low-cost solutions, such as those I explored. Nothing, however, prevents med school profs from doing so — at least, nothing except their extreme careerism. My self-experimentation shows what could have been done. It shows that the health questions we face (e.g., how to lose weight) have solutions much better than a new drug. The widespread practice of medical ghostwriting is one indication why those solutions haven’t been found. Failure to find new solutions means problems have stacked up unsolved, getting worse and worse (the obesity epidemic, the allergy epidemic, etc.). It’s usually called a healthcare crisis — but it’s really a health crisis.

• kombucha experiments
• photos of restaurant food from all over
• using one’s own seizures to treat depression
• narrow vehicles (“the economy and footprint of a motorcycle and the comfort and safety of a car”)

In an earlier post I linked to a poll at This Is MS that asked if there is a correlation between getting red in the face after exercise and having multiple sclerosis. Such a correlation would support Paulo Zamboni’s idea that MS is due to poor blood circulation in the brain.

A poll at This Is MS is likely to be answered by people who have MS. Nancy Lebovitz realized she could help get answers from people who don’t have MS — crucial to learning if there is a correlation — by posting the poll on her LiveJournal page.

The two polls taken together show a strong correlation. Out of 40 people with MS, 72% get red-faced. Out of 27 people without MS, 22% get red-faced. Thanks, Nancy.

A year and a half ago, Charles Richardson was given antibiotics for an ulcer. He writes:

When they put me on the course of antibiotics for the ulcer, my digestion absolutely went south. Stools became runny and smelly and irregularly timed. Even though I took a lot of supposedly high-end probiotic capsules, that went on for months after the antibiotics.

Six months ago — a year after the antibiotics — he started drinking kefir because of this blog. “After about a month [of kefir], I was back to normal,” he writes. He got the starter culture from kefirlady.com (where they cost $20 cash).

More recently he has seen further improvements:

I had a number of food allergies, particularly wheat. If I ate any wheat, I’d get hemorrhoids immediately, and sometimes what looked like a herpes outbreak.

I’ve had that for 30 years or so, but it appears to have gone away in the last month. I had to eat some pasta at a formal dinner, and was expecting a reaction, but had none. I was shocked. I also have a similar reaction to chicken, and had the some non-experience with some of that recently.

I don’t know to what I can attribute that change. The kefir could have helped,and possibly the Vitamin D [about 4000 units/day]. I also started take an amino acid dipeptide of L-glutamine/L-alanine. http://www.kyowa-usa.com/brands/sustamine.html) [about 10 g/day]

This is informative for several reasons. First, the bad effects of the antibiotics lasted a really long time (a year). This indicates how bacteria-poor a normal American diet is. Richardson probably ate healthier than normal given that he once owned a health-food store. Second, expensive probiotics didn’t help. This is why I make kombucha and yogurt, to have more quality control. And yogurt is surely closer to what our ancient ancestors ate to get bacteria than probiotic capsules. Third, the kefir took about a month to solve the problem. This gives an idea of the time it takes to repopulate your intestine with bacteria. And thus how long you should try this or that solution before giving up.

Most people look at my research and see self-experimentation. I see a new way to understand diseases of wealth (often called diseases of civilization). We get sick because we live differently than our long-ago ancestors. Self-experimentation is powerful enough to sort through the thousands of differences between modern life and long-ago life to find those that matter.

In an experiment about the value of circadian rhythms to chipmunks, Patricia DeCoursey, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina, found that their value was revealed by stress created by wealth:

In one experiment she discovered that chipmunks without an internal circadian clock appear quite normal at first. They can survive in optimal conditions; during the first year after their internal clocks were disabled, “predation by weasels was minimal,” she says. But then the chipmunk population increased strikingly due to two successive years of abundant acorn crops in the forest. The weasel population also increased, following the growth of the chipmunk population. Under these more crowded conditions, the restless nighttime movements of the arrhythmic chipmunks in their burrows clued the weasels in to their locations, and predation increased dramatically. The weasels killed all but four of the 100 chipmunks in this population.