December 2011 • Avoiding Rx

30Dec 2011 by Marjorie 3 Comments

Scientific American article series on self-experimenters

While investigating insomnia I came across this 2008 series of Scientific American articles on eight people who've been experimenting on themselves to investigate a variety of hypotheses. The subjects include a cybernetics professor who's wired his nervous system to a computer, the playwright who made the movie "Super Size Me," and a cardiologist who tried an obscure drug to stop his alcohol binging. The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting, finally resolved his insomnia by moving breakfast back a few hours. He also curbed his overeating by ingesting several tablespoons of vegetable oil a day and as a result lost a significant amount of weight. Then he wrote a diet book about it and gained a significant amount of attention. One expert's…

Remembering our vitamin-popping progenitor

nutritional therapy, self-experiment

by guest author M.E. Editor's note: I am actually the third generation of my family to believe that nutritional deficiencies play a major role in health problems and that anyone with knowledge of the scientific method can treat him/herself. Here our guest writer and 2nd-gen orthomolecular self-experimenter M.E. -- aka Mom -- presents a brief bio of my grandfather. When vitamins weren't even a thing yet Back in 1909, a very excited five-year old boy was given a ride in the first automobile in his small Midwestern town. Little Jimmy grew up to be an engineer and remembered this “horseless carriage” in detail for the rest of his long life. He also remembered that the car’s owner, the town doctor, told him that day about a new discovery that would…

Another unexpected side effect of repletion: expanded horizons

nutritional therapy, The Weird

(Originally posted December 2011) I wrote earlier of some unexpected side effects of correcting a deficiency, and here's a new one: you learn a lot about Japanese culture. After I started researching iodine deficiency and decided to experiment with that, I was visited with cravings for sushi and Japanese movies. What with their seafood-laden diet, the Japanese ingest about 50 times more iodine than we do every day. They also have a surprisingly low incidence of a few ailments associated with modern lifestyles -- breast cancer, for one -- which got Western researchers thinking about what big doses of it might do. As to why the sushi craving appeared...maybe my body, after years of deprivation, had forgotten it ever needed iodine, and when reminded of it with a flood of…