alt Hacker NewsNon blinded self experimentation is not a useful branch of empiricism.
I had an ME/CFS patient that had tried 100s of things and documented the effects thoroughly. She had a quite impressive list. Roughly 30% had had an effect to begin with, but the trend she observed was that it lasted for around a month at most. Placebo was her overall conclusion, but she occasionally got relief anyways so we both agreed that there was no harm in continuing. I'm sure several "peptides" is on her list by now.
There is nothing new under the sun, and fad cures for diffuse conditions have come and gone many times before. This is especially the case for conditions involving pain or tiredness, which are extremely sensitive to both placebo and nocebo.
What would be revolutionary would be 2-3 double blinded RCTs showing a lasting effect. Which would be great if someone did! But you have to actually bother to do it. And personally I would put money on the outcome being "no effect".
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> Non blinded self experimentation is not a useful branch of empiricism.
Amen to this. The plural of anecdote is not data.
People have been hawking snake oil for centuries, and people have been believing snail oil cured them for centuries.
What do you think about the mis-alignment between goals here?
For medical research, the goal is to find general practices that will broadly help, and identify risks with the intervention. Even then, with many interventions, it's understood that they will effect people differently.
For individuals, they don't care about variation in communities, or standard medical practices, they are looking for relief for their specific condition.
Of course, declaring that just because something worked for one person, it should work for others, is wrong in both camps.
I feel like a big part of the disconnect here, and a big reason why people are talking past each other, is that they actually have different goals, and aren't really aware of that difference.