Truly personalised medicine: Self-experimentation in medical discovery

Summary 

Biomedical research need not be carried out solely by ‘Them’: distant, dissociated, enormously costly institutions and companies. It can, and increasingly in the 21st century will, be carried out by ‘Us’, the informed non-professional. Conventional clinical trials treat humans with the same experimental model as laboratory rats – regarding them as mute, variable, unreliable material from which results must be obtained as fast as possible to maximise return on investment and patent life. The alternative is longer term, self-reported clinical studies of new treatments, based on the assumption that the experimenter is informed, intelligent and aware. A wide variety of new treatments for chronic disease are available, involving elements of diet, behaviour, environment and non-prescription medication as well as ethical pharmaceuticals, and previous experience suggests that they can be enormously effective. The key is objective, quantifiable measures of outcome. These can be achieved with over-the-counter diagnostics for a variety of parameters, as well as with self-built test systems, and careful and systematic observations of symptoms. Hypothesis generation is a key part of this process.