Seth's Blog

Yesterday I wrote how Alexandra Carmichael’s headache story illustrated a large and awful truth about modern healthcare: It happily provides expensive relief of symptoms while ignoring investigation of underlying causes. If we understood underlying causes (e.g., causes of migraines), prevention would be easy. Let people get sick so that we can make money from them. There should be a name for this scam. In law enforcement, it’s called entrapment.

Sensible prevention research would start small. Not by trying to prevent breast cancer, or heart disease, or something like that: They take many years to develop and therefore are hard to study. Sensible prevention research would focus on things that are easy to measure and happen soon after their causative agents. One example is migraines. Migraines happen hours after exposure. The fact that Chemical X causes migraines means it is likely that Chemical X is bad for us, even if it doesn’t cause migraines in everyone. This is the canary-in-a-coal-mine idea. Migraines are the canary.

Acne is another canary. Acne is easy to measure. Figuring out how to prevent it would be a good way to begin prevention research. To prevent acne would be to take the first steps toward preventing many more diseases. A high-school student could do ground-breaking research — research that would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people — about how to prevent acne but somehow this never happens. In spite of this possibility, grand-prize-winning high-school science projects, from the most brilliant students in the whole country, are always about trivia.

A just-published review in The Lancet reveals once again the unfortunate perspective of medical school professors. The abstract ends with this:

New research is needed into the therapeutic comparative effectiveness and safety of the many products available, and to better understand the natural history, subtypes, and triggers of acne.

Actually, finding out what causes acne is all that’s needed.

To figure out what causes acne (and thereby how to prevent it) three things are necessary: (a) study of environmental causes, such as diet, (b) starting with n=1, and (c) willingness to test many ideas that might be wrong (because it’s far from obvious how to prevent acne). All three of these things are exactly what the current healthcare research system opposes. It opposes prevention research because drug companies don’t fund it. It opposes n=1 studies because they are small and cheap, which is low-status. To do such a study would be like driving a Corolla. It opposes studies that could take indefinitely long because such studies are bad for a researcher’s career. Researchers need a steady stream of publications.

High school students, who aren’t worried about status or number of publications, could make a real contribution here. You don’t need fancy equipment to measure acne.

Thanks to Michael Constans.

In this post, Alexandra Carmichael describes how she recently figured out what caused most of her headaches. She had suffered from frequent headaches for twenty years. One source was dairy. She confirmed this source when eating 1/4 stick of butter gave her a splitting headache. Another source was gluten. She got the idea that gluten might matter from the CureTogether list of migraine treatments. A final source turned out to be Febreze, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

You might marvel that conventional healthcare (e.g., doctors, the Mayo Clinic website, and so on) was no help. Or you might not. In the case of the woman I wrote about for Boing Boing, her conventional doctors actively got in the way of helping her find the source of her migraines. Alexandra takes ibuprofen for her headaches. So conventional healthcare (in this case, the makers of ibuprofen) has managed to profit from every one of her headaches but hasn’t done one useful thing to prevent them. A nasty state of affairs (provide expensive relief of symptoms, ignore prevention and underlying causes, thus ensuring that people continue to get sick and need relief) that is repeated a thousand places in our healthcare system (e.g., in depression, cancer, etc.).

At the First QS Conference, I gave a talk that included the following equation:

progress = resources*knowledge*time*freedom*motivation

I used this equation to explain why mainstream medicine was stagnating, but personal science was not. Personal scientists (individuals trying to improve their own health) seem tiny and insignificant compared to medical school professors with million-dollar grants and large labs. But the visible superiority of medical school professors — they have far more resources and knowledge than personal scientists, not to mention more prestige — masks an enormous hidden inferiority: Personal scientists have far more time, freedom, and motivation than medical school professors. And personal scientists are rapidly gaining more resources and knowledge. This is why, in terms of progress, they are catching up to and surpassing mainstream healthcare.

Alexandra’s story illustrates the pattern. In this case, personal science made progress (it eliminated most of her headaches), mainstream healthcare did not (it eliminated none of them). And the success of personal science depended on increases in resources and increases in knowledge. A new resource that helped Alexandra was a DailyBurn iPhone app that helped her track what she ate. From those records she noticed a curious pattern: that changes in how much dairy she ate caused trouble. Two new sources of knowledge also helped her. The accumulation of knowledge at CureTogether led to her to suspect gluten was one of her triggers. And my story in Boing Boing led to her to suspect that Febreze and other cleaning products were triggers.

• interview with Daniel Lieberman, who studies barefoot running. “People are looking to evolution to find out how our bodies adapted and what might be healthier for us.” I walk and run barefoot on my treadmill. During the first few months, my feet got several cuts but now they’re fine.
• “One [Ancestral Health Symposium] presentation was quick and easy to follow” (mine).
• Science reviewers find bad modelling acceptable.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

If you want to find out about using morning faces to improve your mood, go to this page, to which I will be slowly adding links. If you have suggestions about what to include, please leave a comment or email me. The page is meant to be an easy way to learn more.

I loved Ned Zeman’s new book The Rules of the Tunnel, which I read during a long plane flight. Not only does it combine three of my favorite subjects — high-end magazines, bipolar disorder, and the crappiness of modern psychiatry — but it’s very well-written and revealing. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.

Zeman once wrote for Spy, as did I. Long ago, I met him at a Spy party. I suppose I could have gotten a free copy of his book but I bought it. I wanted something great to read on the plane.