On the subject in the title: Blinding yourself: practical methods and their limits Working notes rather than a conclusion.
A methods question rather than a substantive one, about blinding yourself.
Everyone quotes the same figure and I cannot find anyone who says how it was arrived at. That is not an accusation; it usually means the derivation is somewhere obvious and I have missed it.
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.
Worth separating two things that the opening post runs together.
Multiple outcomes measured without a primary one means something will move. Nominate the primary in advance and report the rest as secondary.
Sensible. I would want the same detail before I acted on it either.
The thing about blinding yourself that took me longest to accept is that a plausible mechanism is not evidence of an effect. It is a reason to look, not a result.
On post #4 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Posting my blinding yourself numbers with the method attached so they can be discounted properly. Uncontrolled, unblinded, and collected by someone who wanted a particular answer.
This follows post #6 rather than contradicting it.
Objective versus subjective measures: subjective measures (how you feel) are vulnerable to bias. Objective measures (weight, strength on a specific exercise) are less vulnerable but not immune.
Reading it again, the caveat matters more than the finding.
I read post #8 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
One caution on blinding yourself: everything above assumes the underlying documentation is what it claims to be. That assumption is doing real work and is rarely stated.
Worth separating two things that post #7 runs together.
Careful with the language on blinding yourself. "Not detected" and "not present" are different findings and the first is a statement about the method.
Thank you for taking the time. That was more work than a reply usually is.
On post #11 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
What I want from this blinding yourself thread is the list of things that would need to be true for the claim to hold. If we can write that list, we can check it.
Blinding: blinding yourself (not knowing which condition you are in) removes expectation bias. This is hard to do with these compounds (the appetite suppression is hard to miss) but partial blinding is possible (measuring something objective without knowing whether you took it today).
Following this. I have the same question and no better information than the first post.
On post #20 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Offering a way to settle blinding yourself rather than another opinion about it. Two measurements, taken the same way, a fortnight apart. If the difference is within the noise, the question was not answerable at this precision.
Blinding yourself is harder than it sounds and is not impossible. Somebody else preparing labelled containers is the usual approach and it requires a second person you trust.
Someone should write this up properly, and it should probably not be me.
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.
Take it as a starting point and not as a specification.
Regression to the mean explains a great many personal experiments. People start when things are at their worst, and things at their worst tend to improve.
Not the whole picture, but the part of it I can speak to.
The best thing about this subcategory is that people post their protocols before their results. That order is what keeps it honest.
A rolling mean over several days is far more informative than any single reading for anything that varies day to day, which is nearly everything.
Adding the caveat now so it does not have to be extracted later.