On the Freaknomics blog, a piece on challenging the accepted medical wisdom about zits (and by extension, other hard-to-treat common ailments) through self-experimentation. Inspirational!
I did more little experiments varying the number of pills per day. The results kept indicating the pills were useless. One day I ran low on pills, so I started to be more careful about using the cream, which I considered useless. My acne suddenly improved two or three days later. It was cause and effect (speaking of delayed causality). You could just look at the time series — one number per day, the count of new pimples — and see this. Just once, if I remember correctly, I stopped using the cream. Two or three days later, my acne got worse. I resumed the cream. Two or three days later, my acne got better. :-)!
That was even better than learning that something was useless. Consistent use of the cream helped a lot. Over the next several years, I only made two further advances. First, I found that a Vitamin B pill helped, probably a multi-B pill. Second, based on the idea of a two- or three-day latency, I discovered that certain foods caused pimples. If my acne suddenly got worse, I tried to remember what I had eaten two or three days earlier. Diet Pepsi and pizza were the main culprits. Taking all this together, I reduced my acne about 90%. Then, as predicted, it faded away.
(via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
