Gary Wolf’s article about self-measurement in the New York Times Magazine is here. I am quoted in it. The story I identified with most is Bo Adler’s. He has sleep apnea:
“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,” Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ’Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.'”
I started long-term self-experimentation because I woke up too early in the morning. The notion of taking drugs for it — what a doctor would prescribe — was too horrible to take seriously, just as Adler resists the idea of surgery before less harmful solutions have been ruled out. Adler hopes he can learn something about sleep apnea his doctors don’t know, just as I hoped I could learn something about early awakening nobody knew. Eventually — ten years later — I managed to.
Bo Adler’s on to something. The technology for tracking at home is becoming more readily available / affordable – and research indicates that there are some new ideas that might prove useful for self-experimenters, e.g. tongue exercises (available on youtube – link below) and anti-inflammatory agents (Gozal uses medication on children – Adler might use turmeric / asperin / diet, etc.).
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-apnea/news/20090507/tongue-exercises-may-ease-sleep-apnea
tongue exercises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB3nCDA1uic
https://louisville.edu/medschool/pediatrics/research/kchri/Faculty/lgozal
Seth, this is a really wonderful blog. I’ve learned a lot about how to solve my problems without relying too much on doctors. I don’t depend on them as much as I used to, and that has really changed my life. Your ideas have helped me do better and I enjoy sharing your ideas with other people. I like the reactions they get and I have made so many friends just by talking with others about your self experimentation. I have even told other professors about your website. They were excited to know about it. Thank you so much.
Hey Seth, are you going to comment on the “chilling effect” of the Harvard dean’s attack on her own student for the student’s private reflections on race:
https://abovethelaw.com/2010/04/the-harvard-law-school-racist-email-controversy-dean-minow-weighs-in/
vic, the Dean’s statement is horrible, yes. Free speech is supposed to be accompanied by “responsibility,” the Dean says, but doesn’t make clear what “responsibility” means. It’s always awful when someone with great power (in this case the Dean) picks on someone with much less power (the student). Not only was the Dean’s statement unnecessary, it amounts to name-calling: She is calling the student “irresponsible”. It’s barely different from calling the student a jerk. For expressing an opinion the Dean dislikes. A reasonable statement by the Dean would have been to condemn the student who leaked a private email.
I have very much reduced my UARS/sleep apnea through a variety of lifestyle changes and self experimentation. You might peek at CPAPtalk.com where there are many patients taking control of their therapy and solving problems together. Some solutions that worked for me: writing my own sleep quality questionnaire and adjusting my cpap levels based on my own assessment of my sleep quality. Learning to sleep with my mouth shut and my tongue on the roof of my mouth, learning to sleep only on my stomach, and using anti-inflammatory herbs and an ancestral diet to reduce the swelling in my airway that caused my problem. I have been off CPAP for a year now and am doing very well. I would never have guessed how much reducing inflammation improved my sleep disorder, I was told it was a purely structural result of my narrow airway. But the reduced inflammation gives my airway enough space to breathe easily. If I drink too much, or eat grains I immediately swell back up and have to use my CPAP or suffer a headache and fatigue the next day.
I think this work is important, and Gary’s piece was seminal. These ideas generalize into a wider life-as-experiment perspective, and I’d like to link to my response and outline of how it all might fit together here: The Experiment-Driven Life (https://www.matthewcornell.org/2010/06/the-experiment-driven-life.html). Also, we’re working on a tool for self-experimenters, called Edison (https://edison.thinktrylearn.com/). Great stuff!