Month: September 2012

The Growth of Personal Science: Implications For Statistics

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I have just submitted a paper to Statistical Science called “The Growth of Personal Science: Implications For Statistics”. The core of the paper is examples, mostly my work (on flaxseed oil, butter, standing, and so on). There is also a section on the broad lessons of the examples — what can be learned from them in addition to the subject-matter conclusions (e.g., butter makes me faster at arithmetic). The paper grew out of a talk I gave at the Joint Statistical Meetings a few years ago, as part of a session organized by Hadley Wickham, a professor of statistics at Rice University.

I call this stuff personal science (science done to help yourself), a new term, rather than self-experimentation, the old term, partly because a large amount of self-experimentation — until recently, almost all of it — is not personal science but professional science (science done as part of a job). Now and then, professional scientists or doctors or dentists have done their job using themselves as a subject. For example, a dentist tests a new type of anesthetic on himself. That’s self-experimentation but not personal science. Moreover, plenty of personal science is not self-experimentation. An example is a mother reading the scientific literature to decide if her son should get a tonsillectomy. It is personal science, not professional self-experimentation, whose importance has been underestimated.

An old term for personal science might be amateur science. In almost all areas of human endeavor, amateur work doesn’t matter. Cars are invented, designed and built entirely by professionals. Household products are invented, designed and built entirely by professionals. The food I eat comes entirely from professionals. And so on. Adam Smith glorified this (“division of labor” — a better name is division of expertise). There are, however, two exceptions: books and science. I read a substantial number of books not by professional writers and my own personal science has had a huge effect on my life. As a culture, we understand the importance of non-professional book writers. We have yet to grasp the importance of personal scientists.

Professional science is a big enterprise. Billions of dollars in research grants, hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure and equipment and libraries, perhaps a few hundred thousand people with full-time jobs, working year after year for hundreds of years. Presumably they are working hard, have been working hard, to expand what we know on countless topics, including sleep, weight control, nutrition, the immune system, and so on. Given all this, the fact that one person (me) could make ten or so discoveries that make a difference (in my life) is astonishing — or, at least, hard to explain. How could an amateur (me — my personal science, e.g., about sleep is outside my professional area of expertise) possibly find something that professional scientists, with their vastly greater resources and knowledge and experience, have missed? One discovery — maybe I was lucky. Two discoveries — maybe I was very very very lucky. Three or more discoveries — how can this possibly be?

Professional scientists have several advantages over personal scientists (funding, knowledge, infrastructure, etc.). On the other hand, personal scientists have several advantages over professional scientists. They have more freedom. A personal scientist can seriously study “crazy” ideas. A professional scientist cannot. Personal scientists also have a laser-sharp focus: They care only about self-improvement. Professional scientists no doubt want to make the world a better place, but they have other goals as well: getting a raise, keeping their job, earning and keeping the respect of their colleagues, winning awards, and so on. Personal scientists also have more time: They can study a problem for as long as it takes. Professional scientists, however, must produce a steady stream of papers. To spend ten years on one paper would be to kiss their career goodbye. The broad interest of my personal science is that my success suggests the advantages of personal science may in some cases outweigh the advantages of professional science. Which most people would considered impossible.

If this sounds interesting, I invite you to read my paper and comment. I am especially interested in suggestions for improvement. There is plenty of time to improve the final product — and no doubt plenty of room for improvement.

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Thanks to Anne Weiss and Dave Lull.

Writer For Rookie Paints Too Pretty a Picture of Her Treatment For Bipolar Disorder

Seth Roberts3 Comments

It was generous of Sady Doyle, a New York writer in her thirties, to use her real name when writing about her bipolar disorder for Rookie, the website for teenage girls. (“Because of this article, you’ll always be able to Google me and find out that I have this sickness.”) It is what I expect from Rookie to post this sort of thing — I was a big fan of Sassy, an earlier magazine for teenage girls that tried hard to be truthful. But I was surprised to see this:

Here’s the part of the story that matters: once I got the diagnosis, got the pills, and got in touch with a therapist I really liked, I woke up in the morning. And I was happy, genuinely happy, for the first time in a very long time. That’s what matters about my nervous breakdown—or yours, or anyone’s. When I got the help I needed, I was able to recover.

Okay, that’s what happened, as Brave New Worldish as it may sound. But is it true “that’s what matters” — meaning that’s all that matters? No, I don’t think so. I think it also matters (a lot) that Doyle has been told she must take pills (such as lithium) for the rest of her life and those pills usually have bad side effects (lithium causes weight gain, for example). It is seriously misleading for Doyle to fail to make these points. Doyle vaguely implies she has been told she will need to take pills for “a long time”, which is an understatement, and says nothing about side effects. Maybe she omitted this stuff because she didn’t want her readers “to be afraid to seek treatment” (as she might put it). That is the opposite of truth telling.

Here’s something about current treatments for bipolar disorder (a comment left on an article about drug company deception) that is as true now as when I quoted it three days ago:

Thirty years of bipolar disorder taking virtually every possible anti-depressant over time, and at times when hospitalized, forced to take them under the duress of threatened sectioning under the Mental Health Act. Throughout those years I told the psychiatrists that the drugs didn’t work beyond an initial “placebo effect” lasting about 2 weeks, and that the side effects were often awful.

I am not saying bipolar disorder drugs are worthless. I am saying they have bad side effects so often that any description of what it’s like to have bipolar disorder that makes claims of universality (“That’s what matters about my nervous breakdown—or yours, or anyone’s”) should point this out.

The Complex Flavor of Fermented Foods

Seth Roberts5 Comments

One of the main reasons I think we need to eat fermented foods to be healthy is that their flavors correspond neatly to the flavors we like. Fermentation of fruits and other sweet foods changes sugars to acids, making the food taste sour — and we like sour food. Fermentation of proteins produces glutamate, which produces an umami flavor — and we like umami-flavored food. With many foods, their fermentation produces many microbial byproducts, giving the food a complex flavor — and we like complex flavors.

The connection between fermentation and complex flavor is well-put in a Saveur article about fermented foods:

[As a child] I only knew Claussen and other vinegar-cured pickles, the kind you buy in jars off the supermarket shelf, and I liked them just fine. But when I finally tasted a real pickle—the kind made the old-fashioned way, fermented with nothing more than salt, water, and time—I realized what I had been missing. A vinegary pickle plows through your palate with its tartness (often in a most pleasing way), but a live-cultured, salt-cured, fermented one tells a more multifaceted story. It is sour, to be sure, but it tastes of something more, something elusive: It’s the flavor of Middle Europe captured in one bite. When I started cooking for a living, I realized that the complexity I’d tasted in that pickle is the hallmark of well-made fermented foods, which include some of my very favorite things to eat and drink: not just pickles, but aged cheeses, tangy sourdough breads, blistering kimchis, tart yogurts, winy salamis, and of course, wine itself.

 

Secrets of a Long Life: Butter, Pork Belly, No Medicine

Seth Roberts15 Comments

The New York Times recently ran a story about a 107-year-old woman named Juliana Koo, who lives in New York City. Her longevity secrets are remarkably close to what I say on this blog:

“Somebody asked her the secret of long life,” said Ying-Ying Yuan, a step-granddaughter of Mrs. Koo. “She said, ‘No exercise, eat as much butter as you like and never look backwards.’”

Shirley Young said her mother also likes pork bellies, “especially the hot part, but she doesn’t overdo anything.”

“And she doesn’t take any medicine,” she said. “When doctors give her medicine, she usually hides it, or when she takes something, she takes half a pill. People keep on giving her Chinese herbs, things like that. She never takes them.”

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Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Drug Companies Hide Unfavorable Evidence

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Ben Goldacre, a British epidemiologist and newspaper columnist (“Bad Science”), who used to attack homeopathy (trivial), has now written about something important: drug companies hide vast amounts of unfavorable evidence. I already knew this but many details were new to me.

I liked some of the comments:

We live in France and used a traditional GP for five years. Every time one of us went [to see him] he or she would come back with prescriptions for three or four medicines. Over that time he prescribed our family of five an estimated 60-80 medicines. We only ever took one, and everyone always got better without using these medicines. . . .This same GP also would refer us to thoroughly incompetent specialists. A few years ago I had a frozen shoulder. I went to see a ‘specialist’ who yanked my arm and shoulder about, clearly having no idea how an arm actually moves, and he then suggested operating. . . . Instead I looked on the Internet for info and found some exercises I could do and also underwent some Bowen technique treatment. A year later I was fine.

As a business consultant, I was approached many many years ago by a company who wanted help to set up an independent research institute evaluating farm pesticides. They’d found the doses prescribed for actual application were many times the amount actually needed (for obvious profit reasons), sometimes efficacy was in doubt, and loads of hideous ecological side effects were buried.

Speaking of “many times the amount actually needed”, I attended a talk about lighting standards in office buildings in which the speaker said the standards were too high (e.g., desks were better lit than necessary). His explanation was that the more lighting there is, the more air conditioning you need. The more air conditioning, the more cost, and architects are paid a fixed percentage of the cost. One of his slides showed that someone in the industry wrote down this rationale.

My GP often says the pharmaceutical industry wants to see everybody on prescription. He does prescribe tests, a lot of them, but drugs very rarely, and most of his recommendations are targeted at patients’ lifestyle: diet, exercise, work, relationships. When he does prescribe drugs, if it is an antibiotic or an antifungal, you have to come back after 1 week so that he can see if the treatment has worked/is working. If you need longer term treatment, for example physiotherapy and painkillers for back pains, or if you have a long term condition such as diabetes, he insists on seeing every month, to check that you are treatment compliant. . . . I have to thank him for a lot. Until fairly recently, I was stuck in a really unhealthy work environment, and could not find another job. I had done a Psychology course which had nothing but praise about antidepressants, so I asked him if he would prescribe me one of the newest tricyclic ones. He was extremely angry, told me I needed a new job, not tablets, and that if I ever got that drug elsewhere and he found out, he did not want to see me again (he would probably have found a blood test to check up I was ‘clean’). So I did not go down the tablet route, and he was right: all I needed was to change job.

Two or three years ago, I was working in Germany and went to see a German doctor. He looked at the list of daily medications my British doctor had prescribed (5 different drugs), ostensibly to help me survive middle age. He looked shocked, and told me that the British medical profession is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry, and he advised I stop taking three of the drugs prescribed. Now, having come back to the UK, every time I visit my GP, I am bullied once again to take this or that. If I try to resist, I receive very patronizing lectures about this or that risk.

Thirty years of bi-polar disorder taking virtually every possible anti-depressant over time, and at times when hospitalized, forced to take them under the duress of threatened sectioning under the Mental Health Act. Throughout those years I told the psychiatrists that the drugs didn’t work beyond an initial “placebo effect” lasting about 2 weeks, and that the side effects were often awful. Now it seems I may have been right all along. . . . Big Pharma, [you] made a difficult life a lot worse.

Maybe Goldacre will someday grasp that “evidence-based medicine”, which he often praises, also hides a vast amount of unfavorable evidence.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • American-Afghan detainee dispute. “The conflict over the Americans’ insistence that some detainees should continue to be held without charge had [become] public.” Via Ron Unz.
  • Hydrogen therapy
  • How to improve doctor performance. “Without telling his partners, Dr. Rex began reviewing videotapes of their [colonoscopy] procedures, measuring the time and assigning a quality score. After assessing 100 procedures, he announced to his partners that he would be timing and scoring the videos of their future procedures (even though he had already been doing this). Overnight, things changed radically. The average length of the procedures increased by 50%, and the quality scores by 30%. The doctors performed better when they knew someone was checking their work.”
  • Pistachio miso and other unusual fermented foods.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Alex Chernavsky, Patrick Vlaskovits, Chuck Currie and Bryan Castañeda.

Last Weekend’s Quantified Self Conference

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Last Saturday and Sunday there was an international Quantified Self Conference at Stanford. I attended. In Gary Wolf’s introductory talk, he said there are 70 Quantified Self chapters (New York, London, etc.) and 10,000 members. I was especially impressed because I recently counted about 50 chapters. One new chapter is Quantified Self Beijing. It has its first meeting — in the form of a day-long conference — in nine hours and I haven’t quite finished my talk (“Brain Tracking: Why and How”). Please indulge me while I procrastinate by writing about the Stanford conference.

Here are some things that impressed me:

Office hours. A new type of participation this year was “office hour”, meaning you sit at a table for an hour. My office hour, during which two people showed up, was the most pleasant and informative hour of the whole conference for me. I thank Janet Chang for suggesting I do this.

Robin Barooah used a measure of how much he meditated, which he collected via an app he made, to measure his depression. When he was depressed, he didn’t meditate. Depression is half low mood, half inaction. It is very rare that the inactive side of it is measured. It is so much easier to ask subjects to rate their mood, but this has obvious problems. Robin inadvertently found a way to measure level of activity over long periods of time. He also found that participation in an experiment that tested a PTSD drug caused long-lasting improvement, another idea about depression I’d never heard before. At dinner, Robin told me that his partner, when they’re at a restaurant, has sometimes said “God bless Seth Roberts” for allowing her to eat butter without guilt.

Steve Jonas, from QS Portland, told me that he spent a long time (many weeks) doing some sort of mental test. During one of those weeks, he consumed butter a la Dave Asprey, in coffee. Much later he analyzed the results, computing an average for every week, and noticed that during the week with butter his performance was distinctly better than performance on other weeks. I hope to learn more about this. Steve also gave a talk about learning stuff using spaced repetition. He noticed that learning new stuff increased his curiosity. After he used spaced repetition to learn stuff about Mali, for example, he became more interested in reading news stories about Mali. I think this is an important conclusion about education, the way rote learning and encouragement of curiosity are not opposites but go together, that I have never heard before.

Larry Smarr, a computer science professor at UC San Diego, gave a talk called “Frontiers of Self-Tracking” centered on his Crohn’s disease. I was struck by what was missing from his talk. He began self-tracking before the Crohn’s diagnosis and clearly the self-tracking helped establish the diagnosis. However, you don’t need to self-track to figure out you have Crohn’s disease, roughly everyone who has gotten this diagnosis did not self-track. I couldn’t figure out how much the self-tracking helped. Crohn’s is generally associated with frequent diarrhea, which is exactly the opposite of hard to notice. Larry said nothing about this. Later he talked about massive amounts of personalized genetic data that he was getting. I couldn’t see how this data could possibly help him. Isn’t self-tracking supposed to be helpful? If I had a serious disease, I would want it to be helpful. At the same time, judging from his talk, he seemed to be ignoring the many cases where people have figured out how to better live with their Crohn’s disease. I would have liked to ask Larry about these gaps at his office hour but I had an eye problem that caused me to miss it.

I asked Nick Winter, cofounder of Skritter, what he thought of the recent Ancestral Health Symposium at Harvard (August 2012), which we both attended. He didn’t like it much, he said, but it more than justified itself because Chris Kresser’s talk about iron led him to get his iron checked. It turned out be off-the-charts high. Partly because oysters, partly because of red meat. I think he said he has since donated blood and it came down. I hadn’t previously heard of this danger of eating red meat. Again I discussed with Nick why he found that butter had a bad effect on his cognitive performance, the opposite of what I found. One possibility is that the butter slowed digestion of his lunch, thus reducing glucose in his blood at the time of the cognitive tests. But this does not explain why a certain drug eliminated the effect of butter.

In his talk, Paul Abramson, a quant-friendly San Francisco doctor, said that mainstream medicine is “riddled with undisclosed conflicts of interest”. I hope to learn more about this.

Jon Cousins contributed a neat booklet about what he had learned and not learned from starting Moodscope. What he hadn’t learned was how to make a sustainable business out of it. I suggested to him that he might be able find professors who would apply for grants with him that would use Moodscope as a research tool. The grants would pay Jon a salary and might include money for software development. Mood disorders are a huge health problem — depression is sometimes considered the most costly health problem of all, worldwide — and Moodscope is a new way to do research about them. Paying Jon a salary for a few years would cost much less than assembling a similar-sized sample (Moodscope has thousands of users) from scratch. I wonder how professors who do research on mood disorders will see it.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments