From an article in Nature Medicine:
A British biotech entrepreneur named William Bains is proposing that self-experimenters should form collectives, pooling resources to make their findings more acceptable to the mainstream scientific community. Bains, who also lectures on the business of biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believes that the high costs and red tape associated with clinical trials have forced pharmaceutical companies to become increasingly conservative in the treatments they will test—leaving radical but potentially effective therapies out in the cold. . . . A radical alternative to conventional clinical trials, which he proposed in a paper published in April, is to have people who are willing to experiment on themselves band together and form what he calls ‘biomedical mutual organizations’ (BMOs) (Med. Hypotheses 70, 719—723; 2008). These collectives would pool resources to provide their members with more test subjects (each other), greater analytic capacity and access to more novel therapies, Bains claims.
What has become of your web trials idea?
Nothing has become of it. The first thing I’d like to do is get a few more people to do self-experimentation they tell other people about.
Reminds me of something I learned from a friend of mine when I was an undergraduate at SUNY Stony Brook. He was taking a course on parasitology and apparently, most of the significant early work (pre 1900) in the field of parasitology came from a small but dedicated group of parasitologists who studied their parasite of choice by infecting themselves with it and logging the results. They then wrote their self-experimental results up in scientific publications that the other members of this group read. So there is a precedence (probably many if we looked harder at the history of science and medicine) for Bains’ proposal.