Agency: Another Benefit of Self-Experimentation

The placebo effect matters.

It is well-documented throughout numerous short-stories in the mythological PubMed Anthology that the placebo effect is powerful (and, perhaps, getting stronger? hat tip to Dave Lull).

Self-experimentation, I suspect, harnesses the positive placebo effect (by selecting for and collecting 'cheap health options') quite well.

But, what is the placebo effect; psychophysiologically, that is? On some level, the positive experiences that stem from the placebo effect result from increased agency: the physiological (emotional, physical, etc.) responses to feeling better able to shape your destiny and health state. Perhaps, the hope (expectation) of uncovering a novel solution on your own terms drives beneficial hormonal responses (dopamine release, for instance) -- through self-experimentation the Patient of One becomes an active player, an agent for restoration, maintenance, and enhancing change.

Agency matters to the Patient of One.

As I have said before, in healthcare, there exists a spectrum of medical care and services. This spectrum runs from complete patient agency on one pole to medically-assisted agency on the other end. It's a messy spectrum, but a rough conceptual approximation that helps me think about the moral role that medical practitioners should play in ethical partnerships with their patients. The Patient of One, at some point, as he/she approaches the pole of emergencies and disasters, yields some individual agency (autonomy) for medically-assisted agency in partnership with trained healthcare professionals. It's not a black and white proposition; shades of grey color this epistemocracy. Physicians, nurses, and the entire gamut of healthcare professionals train for years to act professionally in the face of uncertainty, but patient agency should never leave the front of this health scene.

For epistemocrats, then, the question becomes where do 'safe' tinkering spaces (with clipped downside risk) exist along this healthcare spectrum? As we move closer to the emergency / catastrophic end of the medically-assisted agency realm, tinkering, I suspect, carries more and more risk (although, it could just save your life). However, in our daily lives, as we shop for nutrition, as we move about and rest in our environments, and as we reflect about the meaning of it all, plenty of safe tinkering spaces emerge that we could explore in hopes of restoring, maintaining, and enhancing our health states. And, the term 'our' is doubly appropriate here, since we can help each other through our self-experiments by providing possible solutions to problems, ideas for new tests, and negative results from trial-and-error. As ever-evolving biological beings, each day, we are all presented with an open lab for experimentation.

Going forward, as medical resource constraints increase, healthcare practitioners could participate in the self-experimentation process with their patients in the lifestyle (basic Facets of Life like nutrition, exercise, etc.) domains to solution-search in creative, resourceful, and practical ways. Some experiments will surely start well, thanks to the placebo effect, but may quickly taper off -- these results may not signal long-term solutions, but they may yield short-term relief and improvements. Others, though, may produce replicable results that help people transform their health and wellness tremendously (in cost-effective ways).

[Tinkering is searching and acting in action; it's the agency modus operandi that epistemocrats engage as solution-searchers, as positive Black Swan treasure-hunters.]

"If I could only get my patients to experiment with Ancestral Fitness," a doctor may one day say. "Once they feel better and feel like they have a foundational platform for experiencing health in new, enhanced ways, who knows what fascinating gems they will discover about their minds, bodies, and souls. I know Mark Sisson tells a good (Primal) story (mythology is self-experimentation venture capital), perhaps I should send some of them his way ..."