Seth's Blog

In a New Yorker podcast, Calvin Trillin says:

I live in Nova Scotia in the summer. And I hear a lot of talk about how Newfoundlanders eat mainly pork scrap.

Hey, that’s what I eat: pork scrap. (And fermented food.) Pork scrap (large pieces of pork belly, actually) is absurdly cheap: $1/pound or less.

So soon! Nemeroff, you may remember, took large sums of money from drug companies and failed to disclose them. What is that line about teaching an old dog new tricks? Here is what the New York Times said:

The program, conducted online, had been led by Dr. Charles Nemeroff, an Emory University psychiatrist who last year was removed as department chairman and lost federal grant financing for failing to report income from 16 drug companies.

Dr. Carroll said that the program concealed unfavorable data and side effects of drugs made by AstraZeneca, which sponsored it, and played down alternatives to those drugs. In his complaint, Dr. Carroll wrote that the program “appears to make a mockery” of standards against bias.

In an e-mail message Tuesday night, Dr. Nemeroff defended the program. “The program was peer-reviewed and found to have fair balance,” he wrote.

Thanks to Michael Bowerman.

Someone broke into my gmail account. (I have regained control.) The hacker sent an email to about twenty people asking for money. To be sent to London. Here is a gchat conversation that ensued (me = the hacker, Richard = one of my students):

Apparently Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the biggest drug company in the world, needs all the bad publicity it can get. One of the last things Jane Jacobs wrote was a friend-of-the-court letter in the Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London where eminent domain was used to take property from private landowners and give it to a private corporation (Pfizer). It was just as outrageous as that sounds. And Pfizer got away with it. Now Pfizer is abandoning the site. Leaving a large empty lot where houses used to be. The CEO of Pfizer is Jeff Kindler.

If the original Milgram obedience experiment weren’t scary enough, in the 1960s a researcher named Hofling did a variant in which nurses were ordered to give twice the maximum dose of a certain drug. The drug was not on the hospital’s approved list, the order was given by phone, and the nurse didn’t know the doctor giving the order. Yet 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed. (They were stopped just before giving the drug.) Hofling concluded that of the several intelligences that might have been involved in the situation, one was absent.

I thought of this research when I learned about a remarkable case of anaesthesia dolorosa. Anaesthesia dolorosa is a condition where you lose sensation in part of your face and have great pain in that area. It’s rare; it’s usually caused by surgery. In 1999, Beth Taylor-Schott’s husband had an operation for trigeminal neuralgia that left him with this condition. In the ensuing years, all sorts of pain medications failed to solve the problem. Then he had another operation:

In January of 2008, David underwent a gamma knife procedure to ablate the sphenopalentine nerve bundle. Before the procedure, we were told that 16 other patients had had the procedure, and that all of them had experienced either complete recovery without drugs or an 80% reduction in pain. So we were optimistic going in. It was only after they had done the surgery that the doctors admitted that they had never done it on someone with AD before and that all those other patients had had atypical facial pain. The surgery had no effect as far as we could tell.

Shades of my surgeon claiming the existence of studies that didn’t exist. But that’s not the point. The point is this: After reading Atul Gawande’s article about mirror therapy for phantom limb pain, she and her husband tried it. “Within 2-3 days, his pain was down to zero.” It stayed there so long as they continued the mirror therapy. Soon after this they were able to eliminate his pain medication.

I asked Taylor-Schott what the reaction of her husband’s doctor was. She replied:

David’s actual pain doctor wrote back a single word, if I remember correctly, which was “fantastic.”

Wow. An incurable debilitating pain condition quickly and completely eliminated without drugs or danger or significant cost and . . . a pain doctor isn’t interested. Let’s call it gatekeeper syndrome: lack of interest in anything, no matter how important to your work, that doesn’t involve you being a gatekeeper.

I said that showed remarkably little curiosity. Taylor-Schott said that was typical. I agree. After I lost 30 pounds on the Shangri-La Diet, my doctor expressed no curiosity how I had done so. A friend of mine showed his doctor some data he had collected highly relevant to how to treat his condition; his doctor wasn’t interested.

Curiosity is part of intelligence. Not measured on IQ tests — a serious problem with those tests. To lack curiosity is to be just as brain-dead, in a different part of the brain, as those too-obedient nurses. Taylor-Schott speculated that curiosity was beaten out of doctors in medical school. Or perhaps much earlier. Curiosity doesn’t help you get good grades in college.

In my experience, college professors have their own problems along these lines. UC Berkeley has a fantastic selection of talks, year after year. I almost never saw a professor at a talk in a department different from his own — no psychology professor (other than me) would attend a talk in nutrition, for example. At statistics talks, I almost never saw a professor from another department. Curiosity had been beaten out of them too, perhaps. Professors who lack curiosity produce students who lack curiosity . . . it makes sense. It sort of explains why Berkeley professors had/have a such a narrow view of intelligence; to them being smart means being good at what college professors do. It also explains why the lack of measurement of curiosity on IQ tests is so rarely pointed out.

And it explains why Taylor-Schott and her husband learned about mirror therapy from a magazine article rather than from one of the many pain doctors they consulted.