Seth's Blog

• More about radiation hormesis. Introductory.
• Fungus improves violin tone. Combines fermented foods and global warming.
• The New Yorker ran a cartoon that the editors didn’t understand. Added later: Now that I know where the cartoon came from (see comments), I’m afraid this is the most tasteless cartoon I have ever seen in the magazine.
• How modern medicine killed my brother. “I turned to her and asked, “Well, do you tell your patients to avoid glutamate?” She looked puzzled and said, “No one told us to.”"

Thanks to Paul Sas and Gary Wolf.

In a recent interview, Tim Harford, the Underground Economist, said,

That’s what makes medicine such an effective academic discipline.

By “that” he meant certain methodologies, especially randomized experiments. I disagree with this assessment. My opinion is that health care is in a state of profound stagnation, unable to make much progress on major problems.

Here are six signs of the stagnation in health care (by which I mean everything related to health):

(more…)

I have put a requested R workspace on my website so that you can download it. The percentile feedback workspace compares your productivity (time spent working/time available to work) today to previous days. When I started using it, I became more productive. Here is an introduction. Here are all posts about it.

This is not for everyone. You need R installed to use it (of course) and you’ll need to know at least a little R. You must edit a function called save.ws so that the workspace is saved in the right place. I have used it under Windows XP.

In yesterday’s post, a friend of mine with bipolar disorder told how he used my faces/mood discovery. It allowed him “to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life,” he wrote. Partly because it allows him to stop taking the usual meds prescribed for bipolar disorder, which have awful side effects.

What do I think about this?

(more…)

In 1995, I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning I felt better on Tuesday — but not Monday. The delay was astonishing; so was the size of the effect. The faces not only made me cheerful, they also made me eager to do things (the opposite of procrastination) and serene. This is the opposite of depression. Depressed people feel unhappy, don’t want to do anything, and are irritable. Eventually I found that the mood improvement was part of a larger effect: morning faces produced an oscillation in mood (below neutral then above neutral) that began about 6 pm on the day I saw the faces and lasted about a day. As strange as this may sound, there was plenty of supporting data — the connection between depression and insomnia, for example.

After I had observed the effect on myself hundreds of time, I urged a friend with bipolar disorder to try it. Recently he wrote me about how it has helped him.

Here is the very short story of my experience with this treatment.

I have used your treatment since 1997. As an indication of its effectiveness, from 1999 to 2003 I was completely off of medications, and now I’ve been off again since August of last year. (more…)