Over the next couple of years, we’ll see a furious battle between those who divide medicine sharply between scientific and personal approaches. My experience tells me there is a place for both, and usually they work best in combination.
Proactive personal experimentation sometimes reveals a change you can make to improve your own health and well-being even if the mechanism has not yet been validated through science.
When you learn something new, share the discovery generously. The placebo effect alone can actually be very powerful, and sometimes you open a door to scientific discovery as well.
Just remember that while a test population of one, two or even 50 may reveal a pattern worth exploring, the conclusions you can draw are limited and overreach can be risky.
Don’t assume that what works for you will work for everyone else. Rather than exclusively promoting what has worked for you, help others figure out what works for them. It may or may not be the same thing.
Remember to keep safety guardrails in place for yourself and others. Legal and medical boundaries are there for good reasons. If whatever you are doing is potent enough to have a significant impact on your health and well-being, it may also have potent side effects for others or perhaps eventually even for you.
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About 30 years ago, I developed acute asthma when I was training for a marathon after the Kobe earthquake. For months I pretended this was just a passing problem that would heal itself, but eventually when I got to the point that I couldn’t sleep at all and I could only take a few steps before becoming dizzy, I felt the hand of death and resolved to get help from a doctor.
He put me on an IV and a nebulizer, and when my lungs had loosened up a bit, he had a chat with me. He warned me that although death from asthma was rare, I had allowed my lung capacity to deteriorate to the point (less than 20% of my normal full capacity) where I was at significant risk of puncturing a lung, and that that might indeed kill me. He started me on the medicines (steroids and bronchial dilators) that would keep me from puncturing a lung and put me on the road to recovery. At the time, standard medical practice dictated that I’d be on steroids for the rest of my life, but I didn’t want to rely on steroids forever. I started searching for factors that had sent me into the spiral that left me with less than 20% of my normal lung capacity.
Through amateur research (books and magazines since there was no internet yet) and experimentation, I discovered that a wide range of factors from diet, hydration and exercise to mental and emotional hygiene to social connection seemed to be playing a role in making and keeping me sick. As I made adjustments in the way I lived, I started to reduce the dosage of the steroids while paying close attention to the condition of my lungs and the factors that seemed to trigger attacks. When I told the doctor that I was making these judgments on my own, he surprised me by telling me that as long as I stayed asymptomatic, it might be okay for me to reduce dosage. He just asked that I do it gradually and keep him in the loop so he would be able to help me make adjustments when necessary.
It took a few years, but I was eventually able to manage my asthma without medications and I was even able to play tennis and run long distances (albeit at a slower pace than before).
Over time, standard medical practice also changed. It turned out that many of those with adult-onset asthma didn’t need to use steroids for the rest of their lives after all. When I had a bit of a relapse during a period of extreme stress in my 40s, I learned from another doctor that I would only need to use the medicines at times when I knew I was going to be exposed to triggers that could start a negative spiral. I used the medicines to prevent the negative spiral, and when I moved passed that period of extreme stress, the symptoms disappeared. While I still occasionally feel tightness in my lungs, I can now catch the symptoms early enough to go through a checklist of adjustments I can make to prevent the symptoms from spiraling into a full-on asthma attack. I haven’t used steroids or bronchial dilators for more than a decade.
I learned a lot about what had been making me sick, and I began to experiment with different techniques to help me monitor and modulate certain beliefs, mindsets and behaviors that seemed to determine whether I could keep my asthma in check or if I was doomed to another bout of suffocation. In the process, I became a much more mindful person, an easier person to live and work with, and I learned to manage myself in ways that enhanced my emotional, cognitive and physical resilience as well as my professional performance.
I do not by any means presume that my story is universal. It is, nonetheless, reflective of real experience.
When integrated carefully, personal experimentation and scientific medicine can both play a role in helping you figure out what makes you sick and what keeps you well.
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Just remember:
– You are the owner of your own body. There are certain factors that you can control in ways that do enhance your health and well-being.
– Humans share certain traits, but we each have a unique combination of those traits.
– Though you have some control, you don’t have complete control. Sometimes you absolutely do need the help of doctors. As scientific professionals, they know things that you don’t. They keep you from hurting yourself or dying.
– Even when you do rely on the expertise of a medical professional, you are still the owner of your own body.
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The following comes from an NPR feature on the search for scientific connections between keto and mental health:
Ian Campbell felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.
“I hadn’t experienced that in a really long time, probably since I was a kid,” says Campbell, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“I didn’t know what was going on at the time, but I thought this might be what it feels like to be normal.”
As Campbell searched for ways to launch a proper clinical trial to test the diet’s effectiveness, he became discouraged.
“It was really like you were considered wacky,” he says. “At one point, I thought nobody’s going to pay for this research.”
He put together a 45-minute video summing up the biological rationale for using the ketogenic diet in bipolar disorder and posted it on social media, not expecting much after that.
But some doctors had already started researching it after seeing the potential in their practice, among them Chris Palmer, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital.
Palmer had his own revelation about the diet a few years earlier, which he detailed in a 2017 case report. Two patients with schizo-affective disorder had “truly dramatic, life-changing improvement in their psychotic symptoms,” he says.
In early 2021, he started working with the eldest son of Jan and David Baszucki, a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Their son Matt had bipolar disorder and had been on many medications in recent years.
Jan Baszucki enlisted Palmer’s help as her son gave the ketogenic diet a try.
“Within a couple of months, we saw a dramatic change,” she says.
Inspired, she started contacting clinicians and researchers, looking to bring more visibility — and funding — to the treatment. Since rigorous data on the diet is still lacking, she wants to see researchers conduct large clinical trials to back up anecdotes like her son’s recovery.
© Dana Cogan, 2024, all rights reserved.