- Self-experimentation in medicine
Self-experimentation refers to the very special case of single-subject scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. Usually this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same.
Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history inmedicine which continues to the present. Some of these experiments have been very valuable and shed new and often unexpected insights into different areas of medicine.Notable examples of medical self-experimentation
ABO blood group system
Doctor
Karl Landsteiner 's discovery of theABO blood group system in 1900 was based on an analysis of blood samples from six members of his laboratory staff, including himself.Cardiac catheterization
Clinical application of
cardiac catheterization begins withWerner Forssmann in the 1930s, who inserted a catheter into thebrachial vein of his own forearm, guided it fluoroscopically into his right atrium, and took anX-ray picture of it. [cite journal | author = Fontenot C, O'Leary J | title = Dr. Werner Forssman's self-experimentation. | journal = Am Surg | volume = 62 | issue = 6 | pages = 514–5 | year = 1996 | pmid = 8651541] Forssmann won theNobel Prize for this achievement.Thrombocytopenia
William J. Harrington was a doctor who in 1949 performed an exchange blood transfusion between him and a thrombocytopenic patient, discovering the immune basis ofidiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and providing evidence for the existence ofautoimmunity ."Helicobacter pylori"
In 1984 a Western Australian scientist, Dr
Barry Marshall , discovered of the link between "Helicobacter pylori " andgastritis . This was based on a series of self experiments that involvedgastroscopy andbiopsy , ingestion of "H. pylori", regastroscopy and biopsy and subsequent treatment withtinidazole .Cholera
Max von Pettenkofer drankcholera bacteria.Effect of forces on the body
John Paul Stapp sat in a rocket sled at almost the speed of sound, and then made an abrupt stop.Psychoactive drugs
Psychopharmacologists Alexander and Ann Shulgin synthesized and experimented with a wide array of new phenethylamine and tryptamine drugs, discovering a range of previously unknown psychoactive drug effects.
Yellow fever
In
Cuba , U.S. Army doctors fromWalter Reed 's research team infected themselves withyellow fever includingJames Carroll (scientist) ,
James CarrollAristides Agramonte , and, most notably, Jesse Lazear, who died from yellow fever complications in 1900. These efforts ultimately resulted in proof of themosquito -borne nature of yellow fever transmission and saved countless lives.Alcohol
Erik Jacobsen demonstrated the effect ofantabuse andalcohol on himself.Heavy water
Klaus Hansen drankheavy water .Neural implant
Kevin Warwick had an array of 100 electrodes fired into themedian nerve fibres of his left arm. With this in place, over a 3 month period, he conducted a number of experiments linking his nervous system with the internet [Warwick, K, Gasson, M, Hutt, B, Goodhew, I, Kyberd, P, Andrews, B, Teddy, P and Shad, A:“The Application of Implant Technology for Cybernetic Systems”, "Archives of Neurology", 60(10), pp1369-1373, 2003] .kin transplantation
Ole Jakob Malm transplanted foreign tissue onto his own skin in order to discern among different tissue types.nakebite
Tim Friede created his own vaccine against snakebite using pure venom injections from all four species of mambas, and four cobra species to achieve high immunity. He also survived IgE shock six times with mamba injections. Others have also injected venom to create immunity to snake venom; Bill Haast, Harold Mierkey, Ray Hunter, Joel La Rocque, Herschel Flowers, Martin Crimmins, and Charles Tanner. [http://sethroberts.net/self-experiment/2004-01%20Tim%20Friede%20abstract.PDF]
Weight balance
Santorio Santorio spent a large portion of 30 years living on a platform meticulously measuring his daily weight combined with that of his intake andexcretion in an effort to test Galen's theory that the respiration occurs through the skin as "perspiratio insensibilis" (insensible perspiration ) [http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-researchers-who-experimented-on-themselves.php] . The result was the 1614 publication "De Statica Medicina " ("On Medical Measurements")Eknoyan G. Santorio Sanctorius (1561-1636) - founding father of metabolic balance studies. "Am J Nephrol". 1999;19(2):226-33.] .Bartonellosis
Daniel Alcides Carrion infected himself from the pus in the purple lesion in a bart No. 1 subspecies (bartonellosis ) patient in 1885. He died from the disease several weeks later.References
"See also:"
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* cite book
last = Altman
first = Lawrence K.
year = 1998
title = Who Goes First? : The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine
publisher = University of California Press
location =
id = ISBN 0-520-21281-9
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