Seth's Blog

I liked this article by Gary Greenberg about one psychiatrist’s criticism of the upcoming DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) revision. The DSM is the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

This paragraph stood out for me:

This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he’d received from Johnson & Johnson, makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal, or risperidone. (The New York Times reported that Biederman told the company his proposed trial of Risperdal in young children “will support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone in this age group.”) Frances believes this bipolar “fad” would not have occurred had the DSM-IV committee not rejected a move to limit the diagnosis to adults.

Emphasis added. Hundreds of thousands of children given brain-damaging drugs because . . . well, one big reason is that Harvard allows its faculty to do what Biederman did. Forced to choose between Harvard and drug company money, Biederman would choose Harvard. I am glad Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge computer science professor, turned down an industry request to censor a student, but I am sorry he said the person making the request had “a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work.”

American Psychiatric Association incompetence.

Via The Browser.

In a comment on a BMJ paper critical of alternative medicine (the author submitted a fictional abstract to a conference then criticized the program committee for not rejecting it), a retired chemist named Joe Magrath said:

The scientific literature tells us that acupuncture, cupping and reflexology are all nonsense.

I haven’t looked into it but I’ll take his word for it.

Around the time Magrath said that, James Fallows said this:

During our years in Malaysia in the 1980s, and more recently in China, my wife and I became unlikely converts to a lot of Asian medical practices. I had serious back pain cured by an acupuncturist (who used needles the size of aluminum baseball bats) in Kuala Lumpur. In her book, my wife describes how the gruesome-seeming therapy of fire-cupping, applied in an all-night massage parlor in the city of Yueyang, snapped her out of a serious bout of the flu. Sure, she had big red welts on her back for the next ten days, but her fever was gone!

Which do you believe?

• farm moms and allergies in their children
• 10 characteristics of a healthy city
• Long magazine articles from all over. Even better than The Browser.
• more medical ghostwriting: letters to the editor.

Alex Chernavsky writes:

I had an interesting experience recently.  On Thursday afternoon, I started feeling a little run-down.  Then I began to sneeze a lot, and my nose really started to run.  I thought I was coming down with a cold.  I took an antihistamine and felt a little better.  I woke up
Friday morning with a mild sore throat (the sneezing/runny nose had stopped).  Within a couple of hours, my throat wasn’t sore anymore — and I haven’t felt sick since then.  In summary, I believe I had a cold that lasted less than 24 hours.  This almost never happens to me.  Typically, my colds last at least a week, and usually more (and I usually get two or three colds per year).  There is only one other time in my adult life [he's in his forties] when I can remember having a very short-duration cold.

Maybe it’s the fermented foods I’m eating.  After I started reading your blog, I began to brew my own kombucha, and I drink it every day. I also sometimes eat kim chee, fermented dilly beans, fermented salsa, umeboshi plums, and coconut kefir.

This was the first cold he’s gotten since he started eating lots of fermented foods in June. I believe the correlation reflects causation — the fermented foods improve his immune function.  The microbes in the food keep the immune system “awake”. I also believe that Alex’s colds would become even less noticeable if he improved his sleep.

This graph shows results from a test of simple arithmetic (e.g., 7-3, 4*8) that I did once or twice most days. Starting in August, I improved about 9% (from 600 to 550 msec/problem).

I don’t know why I got faster. In early September I moved from Berkeley to Beijing. After the move there was an especially sharp decrease. The increase in October was due to an experiment in which I reduced flaxseed oil/day.

I noticed the decrease after I got to China. At first, I thought it was due to a dietary change — perhaps more walnuts. I stopped eating walnuts and the improvement didn’t go away. So it’s not walnuts. It’s not butter; for the first few months in China, I ate the same butter as in Berkeley.

I can’t think of any plausible conventional explanation (e.g., blueberries). Here are the most plausible explanations I can think of:

1. Less aerobic exercise. In China I get much less aerobic exercise than in Berkeley.

2. Less vitamins. In China I consume less vitamins than in Berkeley.

3. Warmer. My Beijing apartment is warmer than my Berkeley apartment. Showers in Beijing are warmer than baths in Berkeley.

In each case the change (e.g., less exercise) could have started in Berkeley. The last one (warmer) is not just the strangest, it’s also the most plausible. Unlike the other two, evidence supports it. Fact 1: When I started heavy-duty cold showers my scores started to get worse. Fact 2: When I stopped cold showers, the scores returned to their pre-cold-shower level. Fact 3: When I moved to China it was very hot, which would explain the sharp decline at that time.