[ck113]

Seth Roberts has made his entire reputation on self-experimentation. (Partly on the strange things he claims to have learned by doing it, and also partly on his defense of it as a methodology.)

He's written some papers that talk about the methodological concerns. Here are two that Google churned up:

http://sethroberts.net/articles/2010%20The%20unreasonable%20...

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xc2h866

I can't honestly claim that he has successfully made n=1 experiments respectable, but I think it's safe to say he's very well aware of the criticism on these grounds and is not ignoring it.

[Tyrannosaurs]

This is interesting and I'll have a look at them, though in this case my issue isn't with n=1, it's with the wider design of the experiment and the failure to be clear about it's limitations.

[beagle3]

The guy is a prof. of psychology at berkeley, and knows his statistics much better than most researchers in medicine or nutrition.

I don't respect your skepticism, unless you are just as skeptical about advice you get from your Doctor or pharmacist.

Roberts looks for effective, simple treatments that you can try yourself without requiring a large budget or large lab, publishes everything without trying to make money of it -- including a diet-free diet that works remarkably well, that flies in the face of all "nutrition science" common sense. He is not the crackpot you think he is.

[Tyrannosaurs]

I'm sceptical about things in so far as you can be and actually achieve stuff - obviously certain things have to be taken at face value because the effort in not doing so massively outweighs the benefits you might gain from a more detailed assessment.

But if you read an article (as in this case) which has obvious flaws, not to point them out just because you can't research every drug or treatment a doctor gives me would clearly be absurd.

And I'm not saying he's a crackpot, I'm saying that in this instance he's carried out an experiment with a flawed methodology and drawn overly strong conclusions from it. The can be a (former) professor at Berkeley or a high school drop out, it doesn't change the weaknesses in what he's written in that article.