I’m sure this has been written on extensively, but I’m not aware of the conclusions. Is it considered unethical to do medical experiments on yourself without any oversight like you would find in a typical human subject trial?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medici...
Note there are different contexts at play here. When someone says "ethics" in a scientific context, it may encompass scientific integrity, avoidance of questionable research practices, reproducibility, etc., as well as medical and moral ethics. The speaker may not even be fully aware of these distinctions, since the subject is often taught with a rule-based perspective.
Experimentation on oneself is often _scientifically_ unethical (i.e., when done with the intent to make a scientific discovery) because:
1. The result is often too contaminated by experimental integrity issues to have scientific value. As another comment in this thread notes: "sample size of 1, confirmation bias, amped-up placebo effect, lack of oversight, conflict of interest when the patient is the investigator". Lack of oversight means no one is checking the validity of your work, it's not a permission thing. Every issue that is blamed for the so-called reproducibility crisis is worse.
2. Due to publication pressure, abandoning the cultural prohibition against self-experimentation amounts to pressuring everyone to self-experiment to grow their CV by a few quick N = 1 studies, or do something risky when their career flags. Obviously, oversight to ensure that self-experimentation proceeds only in cases of terminal disease mitigates this concern.
In practice, journal editors currently provide oversight addressing point #2, which is why work like what we're discussing here still gets published. See also Karen Wetterhahn's valuable documentation of her (accidental) dimethylmercury poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn).
Experimentation on oneself in an attempt to cure your own illness by any means at your disposal, provided you do not harm others, is not _morally_ unethical IMO. It just rarely has a scientific role.
The laws that do target someone for being in an altered mental state are mostly about being that way in public.
There's probably also a crowd who want it to be illegal because they view suicide as a sin, though personally I think that justification for a law seems like a violation of religious freedoms.
If true, that sounds like survivorship bias (literally). Those who aren't happy about the failure will just try again and won't be counted in the statistics.
/s
No you can't. Maybe in your country.
For ex, it's suicide is illegal where I live. Yeah.
Uh, women would like a word.
If we found out cancer cells had souls tomorrow, exactly no one would be screaming “but their souls!” at folks walking into a cancer clinic.
Well, that's a you problem. The rest of us make decisions based on what we believe, not on what you believe.
I would hope most people have enough self awareness to not compare a foreign hostile disease that does nothing but kill its host to a human life.
That said, there are stories like Helicobacter pylori that have moved humanity forward.
„The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow.”
No it isn't.
This is an expert explaining why journals have ethical concerns publishing the paper and why those concerns matter.
>> “I think it ultimately does fall within the line of being ethical, but it isn’t a slam-dunk case,” says Sherkow, adding that he would have liked to see a commentary fleshing out the ethics perspective, published alongside the case report.
How will it calling ethical or unethical makes any difference to you biologically?