| You can run double-blind studies on yourself, if you are curious. Gwern is famous for running lots of self-blinded experiments on himself. There's various ways to go about this. But basically, you need to find a way to get two different pills that look and taste the same, one containing your active ingredient and one containing a placebo. Eg you quickly crush your vitamin pill (and the placebo) and fill the result in a capsule each. Put each in an empty film canister (or so) and label the bottom. Shuffle both canisters (not looking at the bottom), and pick one at random. Consume the pill, and note down the effects over time. Keep the two canisters. Repeat for as many days as you like. After you've run your experiment, and collected all your data and wrote all your analysis software, you can unblind and actually look what you took each day (and put that in your data collection, too). Instead of varying each day, you can also randomise to vary entire weeks or months; that's especially useful for vitamins that might take a while to show any effect. (You can pick based on how fast they seem to help with your sluggishness.) If you have a friend to help you even a little bit, blinding becomes a lot easier. |
I am actually curious enough to try it but I would need to do it next semester or next year because I would need to also buy or secure enough multivitamins for the year (two cures a year, it would not be a double blind anymore if I get them just before the cure) and since some of them are prescription I'll have to talk about it with my doctor, see if he would prescribe enough and if yes, how long is their shelf life and how I would go to get placebos.