 Another week full of bad news you don’t need me to rehash here. In this week’s Magical Thinking exercise, Worldwatch Institute asks politicians and business to commit to a massive coordinated change program to stem global warming that they have neither the power or knowledge to implement even if they were inclined to. An international group of scientists says the same thing is needed to confront the crash of biodiversity. The US government has decided that it’s more moral for teenage girls seeking abortion to commit suicide than to get those abortions without parental consent. In Lebanon, the horrific environmental disaster that is unfolding is completely ignored in favour of the easier-to-sound-bite political disaster (thanks to James Pargiter for this link). Meanwhile FEMA, indifferent to the staggering amount of corporate and inside fraud that stole or squandered much of the New Orleans relief money, is instead concerned about individual New Orleans residents who might have tried to get a bit more than their share. When you get caught, blame the victim. Simple.
A Tiny Corner of Complex Thinking in the Vast Simplistic Monolithic Corporatist Hierarchical World: Strategy & Business describes Rabobank, a huge Dutch financial services company that addresses issues using complex, consensual, deep-understanding approaches instead of the usual expert knee-jerk top-down fiat approaches. More Evidence There is No Unified Theory of Everything: Complexity-loathing scientists were dealt another setback when a recent conference of leading physicists concluded that anomalies and inconsistencies in the current models purporting to explain the physical nature of the universe (including those embracing string theory and even more convoluted theories) are so massive that, according to the conference convener, it could take 150 years to come up with new theory to explain them, and even then they will be unverifiable experimentally. Thanks to Mariella Rebora for the link. “Can the private sector handle the complex challenges of the 21st century? Can the government? Can any combination?”: So asks Andrew Leonard in Salon’s HTWW, explaining the awesome failures of Boston’s Big Dig project. Complexity Guru Dave Snowden is Blogging: Here. Watch it evolve. Complexity Just for Fun: Andrew Campbell points us to a site that helps us envision our 10-dimensional universe. And Craig De Ruisseau points us to a site by the New Economics Foundation that meshes life satisfaction, life expectancy andecological footprint to compute, by country and even personally, a happy planet index. Thought for the week: From UN Humanitarian Chief Jan Egeland, yesterday, on the Israel-Hezbollah war: “There is something fundamentally wrong when there are more dead children than armed men” |
July 30, 2006
Links for the Week – July 30, 2006 (The Complexity Edition)
July 28, 2006
The Logic of Sufficiency
 Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency builds on the sustainable economics theory of Herman Daly, which I’ve written about before on these pages. In this book, sufficiency is suggested as the underlying organizing and decision-making principle for economic activities, replacing efficiency. After laying out the theory in Part One of the book he illustrates its application (and how it came to him) through a series of real-life case studies taken from very different economic situations around the world.
The principle of efficiency, which is currently driving our global economy over a cliff, is compelling because it is simple: even people as unimaginative, lacking in foresight, and stupid as corporate executives, politicians, lawyers and speculators can ‘get it’ and see how to make it work for them. No matter that it is unsustainable — that is not their problem. The principle of efficiency (my paraphrasing) is: Produce as much as you can of everything as cheaply as possible. Ignore or refuse all costs that can be ‘externalized’ (dumped off on others, like foreigners, breathers of fouled air, and future generations). Let the ‘market’ (i.e. those who’ve inherited the money, or who have had the guile to get it one way or another) decide who gets what’s produced, and at what price.
Can’t get much dumber than that, in either sense of the word. By contrast, the principle of sufficiency (again my paraphrasing) is: Through collective, networked community-based self-management, allow an understanding of what would optimize the well-being of all life in the ecosystem, balancing all interests and appreciating natural constraints, to decide what is needed.Agree to produce only, but generously, what is needed, accepting and addressing all costs of production. Collectively, distribute what is needed to those who need it.
Much more complex, and vastly more difficult to scale. As Princen shows, this works fine, in the absence of efficiency-cult competitive pressure, for family farms, locally owned hardware stores, owner-operated fishing boats, and timber companies with no place to expand. But sufficiency, unlike efficiency, requires broad, decentralized, consensual, networked decision-making to assess what is needed, who needs it, and how best to produce and distribute it. Messy, time consuming and, of course, inefficient. It works fine at the small, local level where the ecosystem is already sustainable and where self-management is intuitive. But what happens when you have a city of 20 million people, with no raw materials of their own for production, in a climate that is fiercely hostile unless mitigated by ubiquitous and horrifically expensive artificial environments, and surrounded by a rural area that is desertified or soil- and water-impoverished to the point that almost all production materials need to be brought in from the opposite side of the world? Princen uses three main examples (the Pacific Lumber Company, Monhegan Lobstering, and Toronto Island’s refusal to accept a fixed link or automobiles), and a host of smaller examples (Swiss dairy commons, cod fishing in Northern Norway, beef grazing on Marajo Island in the Amazon) to show that the principle of sufficiency can work and is working, and that it is consistent with human nature and collective human interest to strive for it. Alas, the Pacific Lumber example, after decades of success, has succumbed to the cult of efficiency, and, thanks to massive right-wing lobbying by huge moneyed interests, Toronto Island is being forced to accept it against its will. “Non-ecological rationalists will never be convinced. We’re talking about two fundamentally opposed worldviews. One sees human potential everywhere, irreversible decline nowhere. The other sees trends that portend permanent diminution of livability, even of life on Earth…Even the most committed environmentalists have trouble imagining approaches that do not emphasize taxes and subsidies, lawsuits and boycotts, and most prevalent perhaps, ‘environmental education’.” The most important part of this book is left unfinished: The Logic of Sufficiency lays out the beginnings of a set of principles, assumptions and connecting theory for rationally and collectively self-managing complex adaptive systems (which almost all natural and social systems substantially are). It is to be hoped that Princen will work with Snowden and other thought leaders working in the practical applications of complex adaptive systems theory to move these principles, assumptions and theory forward into something truly workable. A significant part of the book is devoted to deconstructing the well-worn arguments in favour of sticking with the cult of efficiency as the driver and decision-maker of our economy, and the related principles used to prop it up when it falters: cooperation (which is as likely to thwart sustainability as promote it), equity, sovereignty and ‘private’ property, maximization of output, productivity*, the ’sovereign consumer’, specialization, mobility. I’ll avoid trying to summarize this section of the book, since I suspect I would be preaching to the choir. I confess the elements of the theory of sufficiency come across as a bit incoherent to me, and Princen says specifically that the book offers only some ‘possible directions’ towards such a theory. But here is a catalogue of some of these elements, that presumably have a place in such a theory:
These elements together are not only practical, but inherently rational — they create a coherent economic framework that is sustainable and that works. This ‘ecological rationality’, in complexity terms, is an emergent self-organizing property of communal effort cognizant of the biophysical and social constraints of capacity and impact. In short, it makes sense, and can be proffered as a superior model to the efficiency model, as more and more people come to realize that that the efficiency model is unsustainable and no longer makes sense. The book includes a great quote from Kay & Schneider’s article Embracing Complexity from the 1994 Alternatives journal: Systems theory suggests that ecosystems are inherently complex, that there may be no simple answers, and that our traditional managerial approaches, which presume a world of simple rules, are wrong-headed and likely to be dangerous. In order for the scientific method to work, an artificial situation of consistent reproducibility must be created. This requires simplification of the situation to the point where it is controllable and predictable. But the very nature of this act removes the complexity that leads to emergence of the new phenomena which makes complex systems interesting. If we are going to deal successfully with our biosphere, we are going to have to change how we do science and management. We will have to learn that we can’t manage ecosystems, we manage our interactions with them. Furthermore, the search for simple rules of ecosystem behaviour is futile.
One of the interesting arguments of the book is that the cult of efficiency, despite its ease of grasping, implementation, scaling and exploitation, is inherently contrary to and troubling to human nature. A truly untrammeled efficient market would allow the rich, for example, to harvest vital human organs from the poor, and to buy and sell children for labour and recreational purposes, yet such ’sensible’ markets are anathema to every principle of humanity. While we do have tendencies toward self-interest, we also often show deep-rooted altruism and appreciation of thinking far beyond our own areas and life-spans. People have an innate sense of activity that is excessive and irresponsible and an instinctive revulsion to it (Bhopal, Exxon Valdez). We revile the crooks of Enron, rather than admiring them as models of self-interested economic opportunism. We don’t like clear-cut forests, strip mines and vast, relentlessly cruel factory farms. We do care about future generations, about struggling nations that accept our toxic waste out of desperation. We know that collectives, though they may not scale well, can work well on a small scale. We are inherently joiners and believers in doing the right thing, and, even, activists. We are inherently, and always have and always will be, problem-solvers, not passive consumers and not material maximizers. We have it in us to create a sustainable economy, an economy of sufficiency. Here are my two favourite quotes from the book: Today, with the imperative to translate the self-evident limits of a single planet into the limits of everyday life, the organizing principle might be sufficiency. Such a translation is unlikely, arguably impossible, under the logic of a consumer economy where specialization, large-scale operation, and consumer demand prevail. It is possible, though, when work follows the rhythms of task and nature, when the work is self-directed and generalist, and when work is more a calling than a job. It is possible under a logic of enough work and enough consumption.
Go to your local transport planning board meeting (or city council or zoning meeting) and wait for the issue of parking to arise. After all the proposals for dealing with ‘inadequate’ parking are aired, stand up and say something like this: “Maybe we have too much parking. Or we will have too much parking if present trends continue. Maybe what we should be doing, rather than planning for new garages and bigger lots, is deciding how much parking is too much, and then plan everything else around that: bike lanes, pedestrian crossings, public transit and whatnot.” Then brace yourself for the barrage.
This book is an important advance in thinking about complexity and sustainability, and I recommend it for anyone planning to create, or even thinking about creating, models of a better way to live or make a living. We need to work together to develop a theory of sufficiency and sustainability, so that, in the face of the deniers and technophiles and efficiency luddites, we can not only say that our models are intuitively superior, but also show compellingly that they are more rational. We have a lot of work to do. * The book includes a wonderful side-essay deconstructing the myths of ‘productivity’, remarkably similar insentiment and argument to my recent controversial article on the subject. |
July 26, 2006
Rufus & Quack — #2
 Thanks again for the hundreds of comments and e-mails I’ve received over the last month. I’m sorry I just can’t respond individually, either in the comments or to e-mails right now, but please know that I do carefully read, save and consider every message sent to me. It’s all good, and all appreciated. |
July 25, 2006
The Intuitive Process: Emergent Understanding, Instinct, Imagination and Hypothesis
 I‘ve always trusted my instincts, but I had no idea how much grief they have saved me, quietly guiding me behind the scenes in all my decision-making, until this disease hit me. It is quite possible that instincts that have caused me to do, and not to do, some things, even though consciously I was motivated to do otherwise, could actually have saved my life. To explain this, here’s a bit of background on some of the things I’ve done, and not done, more or less instinctively without really understanding why, in the last few months and years:
Looking back at all these ‘instinctive’ changes1, all of which had people doubting my sanity, I realize that my body was telling me I had to start taking much better care of it, and of myself, and that that was what drove all six changes. When I started the blog I knew something was very wrong, but wasn’t sure what it was — just that I needed to figure it out and take action, soon. Leaving my conflicted job was a necessary and liberating step, but I knew myself well — I needed to work quickly to find something else that was more meaningful and less stressful, since I could not afford to retire early. All the leads I have balked at since were exciting, potentially life-changing, important opportunities — all of which carried with them enormous stress, which I have always handled badly. At the time I thought I lacked courage, but now I realize I wasn’t equipped for the journey, my constitution wasn’t up to it, and my body was telling me so every way it could. What appeared to be procrastination, or opportunity squandered, was in fact the instinct of self-survival doing my ‘thinking’ for me. Giving myself a break, in 2005, becoming much more humble and focused about what I hoped and planned to do to make the world a better place, may have kept me from nervous collapse. At the same time I realized I could not allow myself to get back into jobs that were too taxing (area 4 on the chart above), unfulfilling (area 5 on the chart above), or unappreciated (area 2 on the chart above). After two years of area 2 consulting work, however, it was my instincts, not my supposedly smart mind, that told me that this wasn’t working out — that it wasn’t my lack of drive and perseverance, but simply the fact that what I had to offer was way too far ahead of the market to be recognized and valued properly, and that consulting, for me, would inevitably be 10 parts anxiety and frustration for each part satisfaction. The bad news earlier this year caused me a lot of stress at a time I was already coping with all the stress I could handle (yes, even some things I haven’t told you about, dear readers!) But I didn’t consciously give up soft drinks, caffeine and (most) alcohol. My instincts were at work, preparing to enable me to mitigate the debilitation that this stress was already starting to wreak on my system, by recruiting my diet in the healing process before the disease had even hit. Likewise the exercise, which I just suddenly ‘felt like’ doing, and which, by strengthening my body in the two months before the colitis hit full force, also allowed me to cope much better with the last agonizing month. So my instincts were right all along, and they have saved me big time. Now it’s time for ‘me’ (my brain, anyway) to start doing its share of the healing work. This starts with the realization that the body (especially the digestive system) is a massively complex system — far beyond the ability of the conscious mind to ‘manage’ or even fully understand. While most doctors at least have the integrity to admit they haven’t the foggiest notion what causes ulcerative colitis (or any of the other thousands of auto-immune deficiency and hyperactivity diseases that are one of the top health scourges of our time), coming up with some hypotheses about possible contributing and catalyzing causes (causes plural — there are no ’single’ causes in complex2 systems) is a necessary first step to identifying preventative and therapeutic treatments (treatments plural — same reason). Who knows, while the doctors are busy doing what they must, contending with patients’ symptoms by using simplistic trial-and-error treatments, we could ultimately put them out of business by making their remedial work unnecessary — finding preventions for everything from digestive illnesses to respiratory illnesses to allergies to AIDS to the rash of inadequately diagnosed immune-system disorders to, perhaps, even the ‘psychological’ disorders that are plaguing us all in this time of endless coping and forced adaptation and struggle. My hypotheses, which are initially instinctive to me, will disappoint a lot of people. I don’t think it’s likely that the causes of these diseases are principally genetic (though a predisposition to contracting them may be — that’s not the same thing). I also don’t think it’s likely that the causes of these diseases are bacterial, viral, parasitic, or prionic in origin (though exposure to such agents could catalyze onset of the diseases). I believe the causes are likely to be environmental, the chemical cocktail of artificial toxins we eat, drink, wash, breathe, brush up against and otherwise take into our bodies every second of every day. Those who are skeptical that the same poisons that are destroying the soil, the water, the atmosphere and global ecosystems everywhere are also destroying our bodies’ microspheres, should review the case against tobacco. It is quite likely that even when these hypotheses of environmental cause of most remaining illness and disease have been compellingly argued, we will not be able to do much to prevent or ‘cure’ our bodies of what we have been doing to them. We’re too late to save our planet from the scourges of global warming. And we’ll likely be too late to save our bodies from the painful, wasting deaths that the same man-made toxins are quietly wreaking on them. But at least we’ll have tried, and at least we will know. We will know that the executives of ExxonMobil and Monsanto and Koch Industries and Phillip Morris and the rest of the world’s megapolluters will ultimately be remembered in history as the most monstrous, willful and indifferent mass murderers of this civilization they have so effectively and greedily exploited. Just as Big Tobacco, with the armies of expensive lawyers and the politicians in its back pockets, will never pay for its crimes against humanity, and just as ExxonMobil will for the same reason never pay for the Exxon Valdez or any of its other environmental holocausts, we are going to have to settle for knowing, not retribution, compensation or even remediation from the corporate monsters killing us all. So, back to what I know, what I don’t know and what I imaginatively or instinctively hypothesize about ulcerative colitis, starting with three hypotheses:
This is the internal analogue of the way we use and treat the land, the external space under our ‘civilized’ care. In gatherer-hunter societies we allowed biodiversity to proliferate, we ate a staggering variety of different foods, and we at them with everything that came with them — all the bacteria, micro-organisms, parasites and ‘dirt’ attached to them. As a result, our bodies evolved to cope with this astonishing array of nutritional choices and ‘unfriendly’ substances, in minute amounts, learning to use exactly what it needed, urge the body to crave more of those needed things, and to neutralize what hurt it. Before we messed with the program, our bodies became exceedingly good, over a few million years of practice, at doing this, without the need for antibiotics or medical ‘experts’. And while few early humans lived to old age, this is because they were eaten young, in the interest of the greater Earth organism, not because they were sickly — anthropologists increasingly agree that prehistoric humans lived a much healthier, more disease-free, and usually longer, life than most civilized humans ever have.
The digestive system is the very definition of complexity: It contains more nerve cells than the nervous system, so many different enzymes and sub-processes that most of them have not been (and may never be) mapped (the genome is a snap by comparison), the enteric nervous system, chemically very similar in makeup and function to the one managed by our brain, and billions of highly specialized organisms, each evolved for some essential purpose needed to sustain human health. But today, food processing, the elimination of over 90% of varieties of food we have eaten for millennia (in the interest of agricultural efficiency) and the soaking of our foods and drinking water in chemicals deliberately designed to impoverish the richness and diversity of organisms we consume, means that this incredibly intricate and finely-honed system is largely unused, standing around ‘unemployed’ looking for something appropriate and useful to do. If you’re unemployed long enough you lose your craft, and when essential micronutrients or undesirable microorganisms finally come along now they can surprise our bodies, which may no longer be able to know, from practice, how to handle them properly. Mistakes occur and are compounded and crises are created as a result. The system staggers and breaks down from disuse caused by the malnutrition — the lack of practice — we give it. Exactly in the same way the land we plow into monoculture and soak with artificial fertilizers breaks down, unable to restore itself, starved of natural nutrients, impoverished, blows away in the wind and runs off in the rain, unable to support life at all.
When I was in my teens, before the discovery of retinoin, the drug of choice for runaway acne (which I suffered from) was tetracycline, a potent antibiotic that I consumed, on doctor’s orders, several times daily for a decade. The drug slowly cleared my acne but wreaked havoc on my digestive system, causing chronic diarrhea and frequent digestive system upsets. I was warned not to take it with milk products or antacids which would lessen its effect. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that that ten years of self-poisoning has contributed to my current condition.
Those are my first three hypotheses. There will probably be more. Since this is a complex system problem, I will never be able to prove or disprove them, but, through careful self-experimentation, I can develop persuasive evidence that, at least in my case, they appear to be valid (or invalid). I will end up with a credible theory of the causes of my disease, and, from there, I can develop an appropriate treatment program that will deal with the causes, not the symptoms. This will be a lifelong program. We can never hope to understand let alone undo all the damage we (civilized humans) have done and are still doing to our bodies, but we can learn and remediate and improve, one tiny bit at a time. My dear readers have provided me with over 100 possible elements to a treatment program, and I will work through them painstakingly. The ones at the top of the list are holistic and modest in their claims, embracing complexity. Those at the bottom of the list are the ‘miracle’ cures, drugs, herbs, magical ‘expert’ spiritual healing and other techniques that promise, all by themselves, to solve the problem, and criticize all ‘competing’ therapies. The pushers of such miracles don’t get complexity any more than doctors, and I am highly suspicious of them (especially when the pages are full of price lists, or the information is ’secret’ and only available by buying the book or the magic ingredients). Ultimately I believe this is the only way out of the trial-and-error one-size-fits-all anti-life warfare of modern medicine, the learned helplessness that has incapacitated us from taking charge of and responsibility for our own health and well-being, and the relentless poisoning of our ecosystems, macro and micro, by greedy, indifferent corporations hiding behind the inherent complexity of ecosystems that will never, to the satisfaction of our carefully-rigged laws, be able to bring them legally to account. The shock and awe drug (prednisone) I have been persuaded3 to take is just beginning to work, I think. The pain has, for most of the day, subsided from 5-7 levels to 3-5 levels and the insomnia relents for a precious 3-5 hours per day, so I feel at least sane again. Forward, ho, small steps at first. Notes: |
July 24, 2006
Comfort Music
 Saturday night as I was driving home from our daughter’s house (about the only useful thing I’ve accomplished in the last week, thanks to the ulcerative colitis and the @&%^ drug that’s supposed to alleviate its symptoms) I was listening to a CBC summer radio program called Sample This. At the end of the show they said next week’s program would be about comfort music, and invited listeners to write in with their recommendations in that genre.
Naturally, this hit home with me. I’ve been trying to listen to music as one therapy to deal with the relentless cramping and insomnia that, together, are making the drug I’m taking to try to mitigate this disease worse than the disease itself. I now appreciate how sleep deprivation and sustained pain are the torture techniques of choice in Gitmo and the world’s other info extraction centres. I went through my iTunes list and concluded that everything in my 800-song collection is comfort music, of one of four kinds:
It occurred to me that music has always been my stress therapy of choice. Alas, despite focusing on the latter two types and listening in the dark for nearly six hours, the cramps would not abate and sleep would not come. But I did come up with a ‘top 12′ list of comfort songs. I also concluded that music of the first two types is too subjective to be of use to anyone else (I happen to find I’m Going to Go Back There Someday comforting, but my wife classifies it as ‘put him out of his misery quick’ music). Even though I would guess these songs would be uncontroversial choices, it’s interesting how much our past experiences and emotions play into how we perceive music. I find most music, including a lot of classical and new age music, boring, and just want to hit the ‘forward to next’ button (not comforting). I’ve also recently come to appreciate the phenomenon (among us old fogies) of so-called ’smooth jazz’, by which they mean generally jazz that’s not too ambitious, inaccessible or loud, and which doesn’t require careful listening or a study of the genre’s history to appreciate. I prefer to have to work a little bit when I listen to music — what comforts me is needing to pay attention to the music, which distracts me from less pleasant current realities. Anyway, here is the list. I’m not especially looking for additional suggestions, though if you have a favourite of the third or fourth type I may give it a listen (and other readers may be less picky than I am and appreciate your suggestions). We could all do with less stress, especially the pointless stress that doesn’t help us cope or accomplish anything better anyway. Type 3 Calming Music (with calming melody and comforting lyrics):
Type 4 Transporting Music (instrumental):
I think it says a lot that most of the composers of these songs have struggled with more than their share of demons in their lives. Comfort, the kind that really matters, perhaps doesn’t come easy. Pass it on. PS: Lots of notes scattered everywhere for blog posts, but right now I don’t have my head together enough to compose anything coherent and useful, so you’ll have to content yourself with these silly littleposts. Hope to be back to more substantial posting soon. |
July 22, 2006
Saturday Links for the Week — July 22, 2006
 Two recent victims of Iraq death squads, via Reuters/Namir Noor-Eldeen How Not to Solve the Violence in the Middle East: A fascinating article in today’s NYT invites 7 ‘experts’ to suggest first steps to resolve the exploding violence in Lebanon. The result is seven completely unworkable recommendations — and the bigger the name, the more incompetent the proposal. This article should be required reading for (a) anyone studying Lakoff’s theory of irreconcilable frames, (b) anyone seriously interested in learning why the endless Mideast war is so intractable, (c) advocates of employing The Wisdom of Crowds instead of useless ‘experts’ and (d) anyone who wants to understand why simple solutions never, ever work to resolve complex problems. Complexity theorists will immediately understand that both sides in the escalation are doing precisely what they must. They have no alternative, and these ‘experts’ are asking them to do something utterly different. They might as well ask them to fly to the moon. Spare us from ‘experts’ of all stripes, please. Cutting Through the Bush Bafflegab: Two articles from Salon decipher the latest Orwellian newspeak from the Bushies. Brad DeLong explains that the ’surprise’ deficit reduction is neither a surprise nor a significant or real reduction, with virtually no impact on the skyrocketing overall debt. And Andrew Leonard explains that the headlines fed to the hapless MSM about ‘slowing consumer borrowing‘ disguised an alarming shift from mortgage to even riskier credit card debt as the housing bubble teeters and consumers run out of home collateral. Chronicling Iraq’s Slide into Civil War: The first of an enlightening three part insider report from Phillip Robertson, also via Salon, describes the collapse of civil order and what was left of trust in public and security institutions in Iraq. Satire from a ‘Reasonable Conservative’: Jon Swift’s deadpan satire is even better than Colbert’s. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Bill McKibben on Cuba’s Agricultural Transformation: McKibben, writing in Harper’s, provides a detailed and very even-handedanalysis of how Cuba, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rediscovered community-based, largely organic agriculture because it had no other choice. Lots of useful lessons here. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link. |
July 21, 2006
Rufus & Quack
 Artwork from public domain (clipart). Rufus & Quack’s thoughts by the author. BTW, Jeff, the human referred to in this strip, is not Dave. Dave loves his son-in-law. |
July 20, 2006
Self-Experimentation: This Time it’s Serious
| Severe Ulcerative Colitis, the condition I have just been diagnosed as having, has no known cause and no known cure. Apparently, stress causes it to flare up, and once that’s happened, you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. All the doctors know is that for some unknown reason the body’s immune system suddenly goes hyperactive. They think this happens after it’s successfully combated some harmful bacterial infection in the intestine, and the white cells begin relentlessly attacking the good bacteria in the intestine as well, damaging and inflaming (and sometimes rupturing) the intestinal wall in the process.
The medical profession’s utter cluelessness about this disease does not surprise me, because they are equally clueless about most of the diseases that, today, seriously incapacitate and kill most people. The job of the doctor today is to push the medicines hawked by Big Pharma, and if those pills don’t work, to perform surgery, taking out the disease and frequently the essential organs it is preying on at the same time, or to prescribe massive doses of toxic chemicals or radiation that indifferently kill everything they get near, good and bad. I don’t blame doctors for acting this way. This is the best they can do with the medieval tools and knowledge at their disposal. They do what they must. For most diagnoses and treatments, this is the best that medicine can offer, that science can offer, that simplistic solutions in business, politics and every other complex domain can ever really hope to accomplish in the face of complex problems. Like the Israelis in Lebanon and the Americans in Iraq and soon Iran, the strategy is do something spectacular, so the (im)patient/customer/voter thinks that something dramatic and active is being done. No matter that it is nearly as likely to make the situation worse as better. Just try something, anything. It is causing considerable consternation already among the specialists in my case that I’m not prepared to authorize Shock and Awe missions in my body. I indicated that I am prepared to treat the condition with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and pro/microbiotics, in combination with other natural treatments. That’s all. NSAIDs don’t cure the condition, of course, they just relieve the swelling and discomfort. Pro/microbiotics attempt to restore the inappropriately-destroyed bacteria in the intestine, but it’s problematic — the digestive system is so hostile to most bacteria at different points that getting the ‘good’ bacteria to the right place is a little like trying to replace a dictator with an altruist in a country at war, without the combatants noticing. The purpose of both is to make the patient feel better, relieve some of the stress of pain and discomfort, and give the body time to try to figure out how to heal itself. Doctors generally know this is a hit-and-miss proposition, so they’d rather go in, guns a’blazing, and kill, overwhelm, or remove something instead. This approach, thanks to learnings from previous victims (er.. I mean patients), actually statistically improves your chances of living longer and better, at the risk of masses of unpredictable side effects that, for some, are worse than the disease. But the point remains: there is no cure, and there is no known cause. Without either, it’s a mission of desperation. I’d rather give peace a chance, even if that chance is not great. The specialists are trained to try to psych you out when you point out these facts and risks to them. Here’s a fascinating article that shows how most doctors are humiliated and infuriated when they are unable to convince patients to be ‘rational’ about the pros and cons of organ removal, steroid treatments that shut down your body’s natural functions, and bombardment with massive doses of toxins. At least the article concludes that ultimately the patient’s decision must be respected, and that (I love this quote): “In deciding that CW’s choice should be respected, her psychiatrist reasoned that the patient’s decision is consistent with her long-term values in which self-determination is central and that it is reasonably in accord with her well-being, although her decision might not maximize her length of life. Depression is influencing her decision without making her incompetent to decide”. There is some sanity in the world after all. I’m sitting here staring at my prescribed bottle of prednisone, a powerful steroid anti-inflammatory, whose function is essentially to cripple the body’s immune system. Something stronger and more dangerous than NSAIDs is needed for my ’severe’ case, the experts insist. This is all they have. The 64 side effects are dreadful and sometimes disastrous. I am strongly leaning towards getting a second opinion, from a doctor whose attitude is a bit less partial to ‘fighting fire with fire’, even though the symptoms are now into their fourth week and have left me unable to concentrate and exhausted. I don’t want to be an alarmist with this report. My condition is serious and chronic, but not immediately life-threatening. I just think I owe it to you, my dear readers, to be honest about my situation and the fact that my reaction is not stereotypical. It is also not up for discussion or negotiation, so please save your advice, at least on this matter. Just like Seth Roberts’ attempts to find the cause and cure of his personal diseases, through slow painstaking, rigorous self-experimentation, I will be using this 5-step plan (decide on objective, select base-line data, research and imagine hypotheses, test those hypotheses through immediate feedback, improvisationally, and keep practicing what seems to work). Doesn’t this make a lot more sense to you than the learned helplessness of one-size fits-all conventional-wisdom ‘best practices’ and ’solutions’, many with no hypothesis to support them at all (justthe result of terribly limited trial and error)? We will try some things, and see what happens. No pictures to illustrate this article. You don’t want to see pictures of this. Really. Thanks to the dozens of readers who have sent me self-experimentation ideas, cases, websites and other alternatives for GI diseases. What I’d moist value right now is some hypotheses (no proof needed, just possibilities) about why white cells might suddenly turn on and kill healthy, essential bacteria. |
July 18, 2006
What’s the Question, Again? Is That the Right Question?
 Dominic over at idfuel has written a great article about the importance of knowing and keeping in mind what’s the question/ problem/ issue you’re trying to solve, before you start doing any work. We are so inclined to become enamoured with our answers/ solutions/ ideas, that sometimes we lose sight of the Question. This has so many applications to the work we need to do now, personally and collectively:
As important as staying focused on the Question is ensuring you’re focused on the right Question. Dominic describes a competition to design a mobile shelter and storage unit for the homeless. The solutions were ingenious, but almost none of the entrants tried to understand how or why the homeless use shopping carts and tents and sleeping bags now, or concerned themselves with the affordability of the solution. The real Question should have been How do we solve the problem of homelessness? Dominic concludes: In the end, the hard work of thousands of talented designers generated quite a few exciting tents, but little in the way of novel solutions for the problem of homelessness. This is the ultimate price of asking the wrong question. At least solving the right problem poorly makes a step toward a workable solution. Solving the wrong problem well leavesthe right problem completely unsolved.
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