this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Can someone explain what ethical considerations are to be made here, except not to exclude proven treatments?
Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It's not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.
With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don't have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.
Unless you cause harm to others (like accidentally starting the next pandemic), how could you ever punish someone for treating themselves? 🤣
We don't, as far as I know, make cutting your own arm off illegal and I fail to see how this is different.
PS: I'm not arguing against you, just noodling philosophically.
Cutting off your arm isn't necessarily illegal (didn't look into that specifically, and it may well be), but from my quick googling is, legally required to be reported by most if not all medical professionals. That report will almost certainly fall well within the rules of what will put you into a 72 hour involuntarily psychiatric hold.
So... Cutting your own arm off, regardless of legality, is likely to lead 72 or more hours of imprisonment.
I don't know where exactly the line between cutting your own arm off for fun vs. to study it vs. self treating with homemade cancer drugs falls on the danger to self and others scale. My line would likely be a lot closer to 'do what you want to do' than most judges, but I do think cutting off your arm for most any reason is a reasonable bar for some outside inquiry, from a mental health standpoint.
Just noodling here as well.
N=1 self studies are somewhat common historically though, right? Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in his lab and took the first documented LSD trip. More recently, I seem to recall that one of the Modena founders took their Covid vax the moment they synthesized it in early 2020 (having trouble finding a citation on that, though).
Yes, but if a review board were to sign off on them and then someone managed to significantly hurt or damage themselves, one could theoretically apply some of the blame to the review board for not doing their job to ensure that a study was safe. The whole idea of having ethics as a part of the review board was born of some of the studies they used to sign off on that were ultimately problematic and resulted in seriously damaging some individuals, such as minorities and kids.
So it's a "ask forgiveness, not permission" sort of thing?
i feel you are confused. internal review boards, of which there are many, regularly allow human trials. they are necessary for the fda's approval as well. there are tons of ways for patients to access ethically reviewed experimental treatments, but terminal patients are extremely likely to. you are correct that experimenting on onesself is often far less troubling though
Sorry by experimental what I meant here is something which is not ready to be tested in humans - this scientist was skipping a bunch of the necessary steps to show this is a safe thing to do (in lab grown cells first, for example) to proceed to human experimentation.
Maybe the same as with drugs in sports: Self-experimentation can be an expedient shortcut, and scientists are often very competitive people. If results obtained through self-experimentation are rewarded, many scientists would be tempted to do it. Contrary to doping in sport, however, in science you need to at least do something different each time for it to be publication-worthy. That institutes a big skill floor and considerable risk, so I think a self-experimentation epidemic is unlikely. Generally I still think self-experimentation is good, precisely because it's such a shortcut.