Zapping Their Brains at Home

Essentially agreeing with what you're saying, but it's important to note that there are ethics boards and regulations on medical research to prevent situations such as the data obtained by scientists during the holocaust.

A key word is informed consent. Research by its nature is conservative and small steps.

There's a whole world of bioethics out there & it's a common undergraduate major, to continue this discussion :)

There are concerns w.r.t. the scientific value of this kind of DIY experimentation though. First, there are the sample size and control problems, but more critically, the experiment is meant to change the brain of the experimenter. That's quite a bias! However, one feature of these kind of experiments is that they can push the limits past what would normally be allowed by an institutional review board...

While I'm in agreement with everything you've said, I'd like to try and play devil's advocate:

You could expand this to say that not wearing a seat-belt should be made legal or that all drugs should be made legal or many other things where informed consent should be made legal. The problem is that not only many people are less responsible or intelligent than you might be, their irresponsibility can lead to harming other people. Suppose the effects of a person experimenting on themselves might cause some temporary loss of focus or control as a direct result and this would happen while they were driving or operating heavy machinery etc. There is a certain balance between personal freedom and laws that limit it, and sometimes this balance is not in favor of a minority that don't need the law, but it has to apply to all.

Again, I don't agree with the above argument - just think one should be ready for it when it is given.

Some of them are experimenting on their children.

I cannot stop laughing.

Evolution might be dumb (i.e., non-intelligent). But it has had millions of years to optimise an electric channel. Give that some credit. We cannot sit down with current tools to push the envelope with just decades of (mis)understanding.

hahaha, I just finished reading the letter from the neuroscientists, and this sort of thing is exactly what they were talking about. very appropriate.

I'd guess that putting the brain and body in novel states would stimulate all kinds of effects. Do you know of any more general studies on novel states? Does the impact of the treatment (TMS) reduce over time (not persistent effects, but the effect from a single treatment)?

Unfortunately, if medical professionals cooperate with them, it likely violates ethical codes, and perhaps the law as well.

The closest I think they can get, is to provide normal medical treatment for the complications which arise.

I mean https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics exists. Probably very few members if any have any involvement in medicine, but there's a lot of emphasis on randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, etc., whenever available.

I'd propose modeling on the relationship between orthopedic surgeons and bodybuilders or weightlifters or perhaps athletes in general. It seems a very close analogy and has been mostly long term stable.

It seems like this would be a more viable path, as TDCS has been shown to have a negligible effect on the voltage in the brain when tested on cadavers - it doesn't penetrate.

Since the magnetic approach induces the current, it seems more likely to work.

I can understand why people with depression are drawn towards it. The very nature of the condition leads to desperation in trying to escape it. If you have had depression for a long time and conventional therapy or medication seems to have failed any avenue which can relieve it becomes viable, whether that's micro-doses of hallucinogenics or something that previously you would have considered extreme like the zapping in the article.

Most of my hobbies are past what most people would consider safe, but I am never phased by it. Statistically, I am much more likely to be injured or die than most people, but I value experiences more than safety. Everyone weighs their risk-benefit analysis differently.

Having had experience with pharmaceutical therapies for ADHD and depression, I must say that the paternalistic medical approach towards those leave a lot to be desired.

You generally need to see a doctor or prescribing nurse on a monthly basis in order to get a prescription. The value of this visit seems to be fairly low, however; all of the monitoring they do is purely through self reporting, so they are relying on someone going through complex mental issues to self report accurately about whether something is helping or hurting. I have never once had a provider actually perform any kind of testing to determine if any part of my cognition has improved or declined with the use of these drugs.

These are powerful drugs with strong side effects and withdrawal effects. Even with just self reporting, I feel like my providers frequently brush off issues I report; as long as I'm not having severe physical side effects, they figure it's fine.

Then I had my prescribing nurse quit, and my therapist quit shortly afterwards, right before I moved to a new state and had to switch primary care providers at the same time. Of course, it can take months to go through the enrollment process, wait for medical records to get transferred, wait to find an available appointment, and so on.

This gap in coverage led me not to be able get my prescriptions filled, and thus had to deal with the fairly severe withdrawal symptoms while in the middle of dealing with a fairly stressful move. I had to take some time off work because I couldn't think straight, due to the combined withdrawal effects and stress of the move, and spend a lot of time scrambling begging various people to make appointments soon to get temporary prescription refills, before eventually just giving up and deciding to finish going through withdrawal.

Given that kind of background, of how poorly managed and frustrating to deal with drug-based therapies are, I can see the appeal to self-controlled therapies that don't rely on this complex, fragile, and overbooked network of licensed medical providers.

That said, I wouldn't try this kind of thing out on myself; one of my complaints about the drug based therapies is that they are entirely based on self-reported outcomes, and I find that lack of any kind of rigorous testing of whether they are effective or whether they are having unintended consequences in other areas of cognition quite troubling. But I can see the appeal of having something that doesn't rely on this fairly unreliable and in many cases unhelpful network of medical providers.

Well I have tried it plenty of times and have never experienced any negative effects.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly-- I have tried it plenty of times and have never experienced any negative effects.

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