---
title: "Self-experimentation in medicine"
chunk: 2/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:45:59.502626+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Ethics ==
As already mentioned, it is an ethical principle that the researcher should not inflict on volunteers anything that the researcher would not be willing to do to themself, but the researcher is not always a suitable, or even possible, subject for the experiment.  For instance, the researcher may be the wrong sex if the research is into hormone treatment for women, or may be too old, or too young.  The ethical question for the researchers is would they agree to the experiment if they were in the same position as the volunteers?
Another issue that can lead researchers not to take part is whether the researcher would stand to gain any benefit from taking part in the experiment.  It is an ethical principle that volunteers must stand to gain some benefit from the research, even if that is only a remote future possibility of treatment being found for a disease that they only have a small chance of contracting.  Tests on experimental drugs are sometimes conducted on sufferers of an untreatable condition.  If the researcher does not have that condition then there can be no possible benefit to them personally.  For instance, Ronald C. Desrosiers in responding to why he did not test an AIDS vaccine he was developing on himself said that he was not at risk of AIDS so could not possibly benefit.  Against that, the early stages of testing a new drug are usually focused merely on the safety of the substance, rather than any benefits it may have.  Healthy individuals are required for this stage, not volunteers suffering from the target condition, so if the researcher is healthy, he or she is a potential candidate for testing.  An issue peculiar to AIDS vaccine research is that the test will leave HIV antibodies in the volunteers blood, causing the person to show HIV positive when tested even if they have never been in contact with an HIV carrier.  This could cause a number of social problems for the volunteers (including any self-testers) such as issues with life insurance.
The ethics of informed consent is relevant to self-experimentation.  Informed consent is the principle that the volunteers in the experiment should fully understand the procedure that is going to take place, be aware of all the risks involved, and give their consent to taking part in the experiment beforehand.  The principle of informed consent was first enacted in the U.S. Army's research into Yellow fever in Cuba in 1901.  However, there was no general or official guidance at this time.  That remained the case until the yellow fever program was referenced in the drafting of the Nuremberg Code.  This was further developed in the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964 by the World Medical Association which has since become the foundation for ethics committees' guidelines.

Some researchers believe that experimental research is too complex for the general public ever to be able to give proper informed consent.  One such researcher is Eugene G. Laforet, who believes that the researchers taking part in the experiment themselves is more valuable to the volunteers than a legal consent form.  Another is 1977 Nobel Prize winner Rosalyn S. Yalow who said "In our laboratory we always used ourselves because we are the only ones who can give truly informed consent."  On the other side of the coin, there is the possibility that members of a research team may be coerced into participating by peer pressure.
The question of who should be first to try the procedure in a new experiment is an ethical one.  However, according to Altman it is not a question that can successfully be legislated.  A law requiring self-test would force researchers to take risks that may sometimes be inappropriate.  A code forbidding it might inhibit valuable discoveries.

Self-experimentation has a role in medical education.  Although no longer encouraged, in former times it was perfectly standard to expect medical students to try for themselves the drugs they were going to be prescribing. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, whose own self-experiments led him to the concept of what are now called hormones, was a nineteenth century proponent of the practice:I will suggest that you should study upon yourselves the effects of the most valuable remedies. I well believe that you will never know fully the action of certain remedies, if you have not ascertained, on your own person, what effects they produce on the brain, the eye, the ear, the nerves, the muscles, and the principal viscera.

== Value ==
Self-experimentation has value in rapidly obtaining the first results.  In some cases, such as with Forssmann's experiments done in defiance of official permission, results may be obtained that would never otherwise have come to light.  However, self-experiment lacks the statistical validity of a larger experiment.  It is not possible to generalise from an experiment on a single person.  For instance, a single successful blood transfusion does not indicate, as we now know from the work of Karl Landsteiner, that all such transfusions between any two random people will also be successful.  Likewise, a single failure does not absolutely prove that a procedure is worthless.  Psychological issues such as confirmation bias and the placebo effect are unavoidable in a single-person self-experiment where it is not possible to put scientific controls in place.
Such concerns do not apply so much if the self-experimenter is just one of many volunteers (as long as the self-experimenter is not also responsible for recording the results) but his or her presence still has value.  As noted above, this can reassure the other participants.  It also acts as a check on the experimenter when considering whether the experiment is ethical or dangerous.

== Notable examples ==