Seth's Blog

• More about the Stapel fraud. The whole report.
• participatory action research. “A way to increase understanding of how change in one’s actions or practices can mutually benefit a community of practitioners.” More practical than most academic research. Edging toward group self-experimentation.
• At a Reed College alumni lunch, I sat next to a professor of economics. “What do you think of Jane Jacobs?” I said. “Who’s that?” she said. I am glad to learn that Elinor Ostrom, winner of a recent Nobel Prize in economics, was influenced by Jacobs. Ostrom is a political science professor.
• “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” A talk by Richard Feynman that I linked to recently. I first realized the power of self-experimentation when it showed my dermatologist was wrong.
• Monopolies of knowledge (Wikipedia entry).

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda, Lemniscate, Dave Lull and Reihan Salam.

I visited Google New York a few years ago. In conversation, an engineer used the verb to google — just like everyone else. Slightly amusing. Today I used the verb to google in an email. Gmail told me it was misspelled! Google is okay but google is not in their dictionary. Too modest!

From this comment (thanks, Elizabeth Molin) I learned of a British book called Testing Treatments (pdf), whose second edition has just come out. Its goal is to make readers more sophisticated consumers of medical research. To help them distinguish “good” science from “bad” science. Ben Goldacre, the Bad Science columnist, fulsomely praises it (“I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity”). He wrote a foreword. The main text is by Imogen Evans (medical journalist), Hazel Thornton (writer),  Iain Chalmers (medical researcher), and Paul Glaziou (medical researcher, editor of Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine).

To me, as I’ve said, medical research is almost entirely bad. Almost all medical researchers accept two remarkable rules: (a) first, let them get sick and (b) no cheap remedies. These rules severely limit what is studied. In terms of useful progress, the price of these limits has been enormous: near total enfeeblement. For many years the Nobel Prize in Medicine has documented the continuing failure of medical researchers all over the world to make significant progress on all major health problems, including depression, heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and so on. It is consistent with their level of understanding that some people associated with medicine would write a book about how to do something (good science) the whole field manifestly can’t do. Testing Treatments isn’t just a fat person writing a book about how to lose weight, it’s the author failing to notice he’s fat. (more…)

A reader of this blog who wants to be identified as Doctor’s Daughter wrote the following editorial and submitted it to KevinMD, which turned it down. KevinMD is aimed at doctors. One recent article (“Why 99% of health care should be angry“) said this: “The real top earners in health care, however, are not physicians, but executives of big corporations, non-profit and especially for profit.” Here is what Doctor’s Daughter wrote: (more…)

In response to this post, which went up three months ago, a reader named Tara has just written:

I started taking 2 TB of flax oil daily about four days ago and now my gums are barely bleeding at all after I brush and floss. My gums were red, swollen and would bleed after I brushed and flossed and are now pink and healthy looking.

I’ve had this problem for years and I could not understand why it would keep happening even though I was consistent with my dental routine. I take the berry flavored Barlean’s flax oil mainly because it tastes good and so I look forward to taking it- if it was gross I would not be consistent with taking it.

Anyhow, thanks for the information! I wish dentists would look into this but they probably won’t so I’m glad that you do.

I agree about the Barlean’s, by the way. Their Omega Swirl flaxseed oil does taste good. The Omega Swirl webpage does not list healthy gums as one of its benefits. Instead it lists a bunch of benefits, such as “Heart Health” that are nearly impossible to verify.

Someone recently told me something fascinating about flaxseed oil: It made it much easier to kneel on the floor.  Before he started taking it, his knees would hurt after a few seconds. Now they don’t. I don’t remember my knees hurting quickly but I consume 66 g/day of ground flaxseed (= about 2 T flaxseed oil) and can kneel without pain for minutes.

The tiny fact reflected in Tara’s comment — an easily-available supplement (flaxseed oil) quickly cures a common problem (bleeding gums) but hardly anyone knows this — is  a devastating comment on our health care system.

1. Dentists haven’t managed to figure this out. Flaxseed oil is not an obscure supplement. Dentists are not making money giving people much worse advice (“floss regularly”).

2. Nutrition professors haven’t managed to figure this out. Omega-3 is not an obscure nutrient. Nevertheless, the 2010 USDA Dietary Guidelines says omega-3 fats are “essential” but says nothing about how much you need. Inflammation is believed to be the cause of many diseases, including heart disease. By getting this one thing  (minimum omega-3 intake you need to be healthy) right, the USDA could do a world of good. Instead they tell people to eat less animal fat (“consume less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fatty acids”).

To be fair, professional researchers are starting to figure this out.  A 2010 study of 9000 people found that “participants in the middle and upper third for omega-3 fatty acid consumption were between 23 percent and 30 percent less likely to have gum disease than those who consumed the least amount of omega-3 fatty acids.” With the right dose, I believe gum disease becomes 100% less likely. But at least they noticed a connection.