Blinding yourself: practical methods and their limits — the long version

Blinding yourself: practical methods and their limits — the long version Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.

A narrow question about Blinding yourself, deliberately narrow, because the broad version has been asked here four times and produced four long threads and no answer.

One question, stated units, stated method, and what I have already ruled out.

The opening post is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.

Nothing in a personal experiment is medical advice to anyone including yourself, and several people here have found that a prescriber will happily discuss a well-documented one.

Sample size in n-of-1: you are the sample. Repeated measurements (weekly weighings, daily mood scores) increase the power to detect a real effect even though n=1.

The conclusion is tentative; the arithmetic underneath it is not.

Reporting rather than recommending, on Blinding yourself. What happened is above. Whether it should have is a different question and not one I am qualified to answer.

Duration should be set by how long an effect would take to appear rather than by patience. Stopping early is the commonest reason a personal experiment answers nothing.

I checked the source rather than the summary, and they differ.

Following this. I have the same question and no better information than the first post.

The best thing about this subcategory is that people post their protocols before their results. That order is what keeps it honest.

Same experience here, different supplier, so it is at least not unique to one of them.

Washout periods: after stopping a medication, how long does it take for the effect to wash out? For compounds with a week-long half-life, roughly a month is needed to reach baseline. Using that washout period in a before-after design strengthens the inference.

That is my reading. Someone else read the same page differently and was reasonable.

Appreciated. The plain phrasing does more work here than a longer post would.

Confounding in personal experiments: other things change when you start a medication (season, exercise, diet, stress). Documenting those confounders helps you understand their contribution to the result.

I am describing what is, rather than arguing for what should be.