Given that many people experiment on themselves anyway, I feel it's a pity and a loss for science that the outcomes of those self-experiments are not collected and aggregated.
The article itself raises the issue of "lack of clinical data", given that these substances are relativelly new. But the lack of data may originate from a certain stiffness, or lack of accessibility and high cost of clinical trials. An alternative source of information are these people who self-experiment, but unfortunatelly this information is mostly lost instead of being captured.
How could this proposal work in practice? clearly the data would be noisy, contain some false reporting, biased, subjective etc. But statistical processing of a large number of reports (coming from hudreds of thousands or millions of self-reporting subjects) may still extract relevant scientific information; that we're dropping on the floor right now.
An example: I'm experimenting with a radical diet. I keep observations for myself, but they're not shared with anybody and don't contribute to science.
What the altervative would be: I would enroll on a web page, where I would describe the experiment I plan to do before I start it. I would be get a code for a blood/urine work for the "before" state, with the agreement that the results, anonimized, are shared with the platform. Weekly I would report on the platform observations, such as: got sick in this particular way, wheight variations, sleep eval, or any other changes.
At the end, or periodically I would get new free blood/urine work with the results shared.
Research institutes and pharma would get access to the data, to aggregate and denoise as they can to extract the latent information.
You REALLY don't want to open the door to "compulsory self-administration." You don't even want people to think about that door. For everyone else, there's clinical trials where you may get a $50 gift card if you're part of the test group.
The article itself raises the issue of "lack of clinical data", given that these substances are relativelly new. But the lack of data may originate from a certain stiffness, or lack of accessibility and high cost of clinical trials. An alternative source of information are these people who self-experiment, but unfortunatelly this information is mostly lost instead of being captured.
How could this proposal work in practice? clearly the data would be noisy, contain some false reporting, biased, subjective etc. But statistical processing of a large number of reports (coming from hudreds of thousands or millions of self-reporting subjects) may still extract relevant scientific information; that we're dropping on the floor right now.
An example: I'm experimenting with a radical diet. I keep observations for myself, but they're not shared with anybody and don't contribute to science.
What the altervative would be: I would enroll on a web page, where I would describe the experiment I plan to do before I start it. I would be get a code for a blood/urine work for the "before" state, with the agreement that the results, anonimized, are shared with the platform. Weekly I would report on the platform observations, such as: got sick in this particular way, wheight variations, sleep eval, or any other changes.
At the end, or periodically I would get new free blood/urine work with the results shared.
Research institutes and pharma would get access to the data, to aggregate and denoise as they can to extract the latent information.