My IBS

For perhaps three decades Mrs. Wolf complained about and suffered from what she called "my IBS."

Over this period of time the general symptoms were, on occasion, painful stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting.  Most of this time these symptoms would appear more or less randomly a few times a month.  Usually just one or two but occasionally all three.  It would appear and in a few hours be gone.

Being older it seemed as if this was just part of the "getting older" process until recently.

During the last half year or so a more systematic pattern began to develop.  Particular meals seemed to trigger the issue and it became more frequent and more severe reaching two or three times per week.

Also during this last year I began to notice she was struggling more physically and mentally.  Less likely to get up and do things, more likely to repeat herself.  Not good signs.  Getting up to do things was a chore.

Parallel to this Mrs. Wolf notices I as "deteriorating" as well.  Less active, fuzzier mentally, also not good signs.  During perhaps the last few month I began to have more and more stomach issues: gas, discomfort, nothing like "my IBS" but troubling.

For a while we thought "we're just getting older" and, not wanting modern medicine to kill us, we just decided to go with the flow.

But something very odd started to happen during the last six months.

Our symptoms began to synchronize.

This made zero sense at first.

Then we thought it might be food related.  We cleared out all kinds of products containing aluminum, various other things, no change.

But particular meals would trigger issues the next day for both of us.

There was also a sort of "cycling" where things would be better for several days and then a bout of misery.

Mrs. Wolf began to think about this.  Clearly we did not have any sort of "flu" and this went on for a long time. 

What could it be?

Eventually we began to suspect some form of parasite. Giardia first came to mind.  We've had dogs and chickens for years, perhaps...?

But the chickens weren't around three decades ago though the dogs were....

Then one Monday after a particularly bad morning episode Mrs. Wolf said: "I made some clove tea and I am going to try it..." (I later asked what triggered this? "Divine intervention" was the reply.)

Hmmmm... Okay.

The recipe: 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves, 1/2 teaspoon of oregano, 1 teaspoon of raw honey.  Stuff you have in your cupboard.  Make a tea, drink it every day.

She had tried lots of things over the years, nothing seemed to work so I didn't think too much would change.

I suffered along as always.

But Mrs. Wolf had no more symptoms.  Not on Tuesday, not Wednesday, not Thursday.

By Friday this was a significant change.

So I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a try as well...

My various symptoms diminished within a day or two.

But this wasn't the end... It was only the beginning.

After perhaps a week or so after I started, two weeks for Mrs. Wolf, things began to change dramatically.

Mrs. Wolf became significantly sharper mentally.  Gone were the troubling symptoms I described above.

Then she began getting up and doing things.  Things she hand not done in years: moving around the house, complaining about things and then making changes.  Physically moving things around, lifting heavy stuff, just way more active. 

Various leg and joint pains, muscle issues, all diminishing rapidly.

I was a week behind but I began to "improve" in a similar way.

Cutting the grass, a two hour effort with both a push mower and rider, was getting harder each year.  It took a few weeks to "get back into shape" each year.  A little longer year over year.  After a session I was tired and had to sit down and rest for the rest of the day.

Suddenly I could do this job and work outside for hours more.  Not just work, run the chainsaw for an hour, weed wack, do significant work. 

My mind became dramatically clearer.

We both had less anxiety.

Small tasks which just got put off were addressed.

Let's rebuild X, not problem, we now get up and just do it.

At this point we are a couple months in on the nightly "clove tea."

The house is being systematically reorganized, cleaned, processed, reworked.

The outside work is getting done in a vastly more efficient fashion with little "tiredness".

What's going on here?

For one thing cloves contain a eugenol.

Oregano contains carvacrol and thymol.  I have written about this many times in the past (https://lwgat.blogspot.com/2012/07/oil-of-oregano.html).

Both of us have used oil of oregano extensively and without cloves - oregano alone seemed to have no affect on Mrs. Wolf's IBS so likely the cloves are the main effector.

So the results could be summarized as follows:

Mental clarity - No more mental fog weird.  Long range thinking returned.  Planning and concentration significantly improved.  Significant day-to-day actions triggering anxiety no longer do so.

Return of physical agility - Able to now actively work at physical activities for hours instead of minutes without consequences.

Termination of IBS/gastric symptoms - For Mrs Wolf 100% gone. For me, probably still some parasitic issues remaining but significantly better and symptoms do not impact daily life as they were.

Vastly improved stamina - All of the physical improvements above but now we can do everything for much, much longer.

General reduction in urinary "urgency" and frequency, improved flow - For both us.  Less getting up at night to pee and, when you do, things are much more relaxed.

Bowel changes - For Mrs. Wolf: from IBS misery to text book normal 30 second sessions on the toilet.  Generally improved digestion.

Side effects?  None that we can detect.  And since there are decades of clove use it seems unlikely there ever would be.

But we presume some kind of parasites are now dead - or at least the eggs.  We both still have "gas" but its much different.  We suspect there are still entrenched parasites that the eugenol will need time (or some other product like green hull walnut) to get rid of.

These results mirror information and data published by people such as Hulda Clark (https://drclarkstore.com/ and https://www.amazon.com/Cure-All-Diseases-Many-Histories/dp/1890035017 - I have no economic affiliation with these) and cloves is an import part of her protocols.

Needless to say "conventional medicine" and "settled science" has nothing nice to say about the use of cloves or people like Hulda Clark.

Yet the direct results we experienced, and particularly the fact that problems and results were coordinated between us, clearly indicate more than a anecdotal result.  Nothing else we did changed.  We still eat the same foods, still do the same activities, so I doubt we unknowingly did anything else to improve our health.

The deterioration symptoms certainly matched things like fibromyalgia or alzheimers and, had we not started using cloves, we could have easily believed we were experiencing something like one of those. 

Vos Savant is wrong...

I've always found the Vos Savant answer to the "Monty Hall" problem troubling and wrong.  Not because I am ignorant of odds and probabilities, but because it does not really match reality and its always posed without a clear set of assumptions.

Here's why...

As far as I can tell this paper (image right) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2683689) is the first reference to it.  (Though it's apparently a rehash of "The Three Prisoners Problem" appearing in Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American in 1959 - no direct link I can find but google "Gardner, M. (1959) Problems involving questions of probability and ambiguity, Scientific American, vol. 201, no. 4, pages 180–182.")

The table in the left column lays things out clearly.

Marylin Vos Savant in Parade magazine's 1990 answer to someone posing this question:

"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?"

Is to switch doors and implicitly you choice of two doors after one is revealed is not 50/50.

Obviously if I stay in the "green room" unable to hear the show and walk out to see only a choice oftwo doors my odds are 50/50.  So the key is what information is conveyed by one door being already open (or at least so it seems).

There's a mostly correct refutation of Vos Vasant's analysis here (Don’t Switch! Why Mathematicians’ Answer to the Monty Hall Problem is Wrong Clive Rix, University of Leicester) write up here: https://cdn.ima.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Dont-Switch-Why-Mathematicians-Answer-to-the-Monty-Hall-Problem-is-Wrong.pdf  By "mostly correct" I mean Rix's math is correct but the assumptions are not quite taken into account correctly.

The key element of this article is in Section 4 where Rix discusses how Vos Savant phrases the problem "the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize" (Rix's emphasis). Rix goes on: "Vos Savant has done what all academics do when putting this problem to students (and I do when I am putting it to mine), she has turned a real problem that mathematicians cannot answer because they don’t know what the true probabilities are into one they can answer, by making plausible assumptions. Except that it is not clear in this case how plausible the assumptions are."

I have smelled bullshit for decades.

A recent argument made be work through the issues. Rix addresses some of it in section 4 under Assumptions.  But here I think he makes a mistake.  He writes about assumptions form a mathematicians perspective.

He should be writing from the perspective of "the House" - Monty's employer.

Rix's Assumption 5 is wrong:  Monty works for a show.  The show is part of a network. The show needs to make money for the network.  The money the show makes in advertising more than pays for the prizes (or the prizes are simply provided for free to the show for advertising).  Anyone who owned a business would know this.

Further, the show cannot have all winners (boring) or all losers (also boring).  The show has to be exciting to keep its ratings up.

The show has multiple sponsors competing for product placement on the show.  Can't give away more Ford's than Chevy's, more trips to Hawaii than goats, etc.

So "the House" as three basic options: 

1. Fairly prevent the contestant from winning to the extent possible.
   
   
2. Don't care if the contestant wins or loses (makes the show more exciting).
   
   
3. Allow (or possibly help) the contestant to win.

These options throttle profits and ratings.  The odds always favor the House.

So how Vos Savant phrases this ("the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize") hand-waves away reality and replaces it with Selvin's "win/loses" table for only House option #1.

This is a bad business choice for the show.

And, as Rix says, no one can know how the show actually operated or why (in terms of profits, ratings, etc. and there for odds). Hence no one, no matter how smart they are (Vos Savant included) can "know" the true odds.

Having watched the show as a child Monty Hall could easily have offered to simply "buy" the box with the keys in it and not shown what's behind a door.  Or, if the contestant picks a losing box whipped up a huge, artificial frenzy around switching losing boxes.

So my real problem is the fact that Vos Savant creates an environment where you think she is addressing reality but has in fact neutered the problem to the point where its a simple math table tied to only part of reality.

Now take a look at the end of Selvin's "Monty Hall/Contestant" dialog:

Monty, full well knowing he has bosses, ratings and sponsors to manage, presents the odds to the contestant as 1/2.  Why 1/2?  Because only Monty or his bosses know the true configuration of how the contents is set up and why.  My guess is that somewhere there is a professional statistician under NDA that set all this up with the script writers.  Big 1960's TV networks were not manned by fools.

And the odds are 50/50 unless you remember that Vos Savant has quietly clipped out two thirds of the "House's" options.

Now if you look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem) you see this:

You'll see that accepting the "standard assumptions" is required to accept Vos Vasant's answer.  Yet there are never clearly provided not vetted.  No one every prefaces the presentation of the problem with "assumptions" because that would make it clear they did not and could not really answer the problem.

Again, anyone who suggests that the you're an idiot if you don't believe in Vos Vasant's answer without providing an agreed upon set of assumptions is the true fool.