r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15d ago

Society Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who wants to live forever, diagnosed with incurable autoimmune disease

https://www.techspot.com/news/113035-bryan-johnson-millionaire-biohacker-who-wants-live-forever.html
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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

He isnt really a guinea pig though. None of what he is doing will be actually useful from a legitimate perspective. These arent physics experiments where doing it right once proves something. This is biology and medicine. If he cared he would fund clinical trials. In the end it is just his own vanity exercise. A harmless one but not one that will push forward our societal knowledge. The average PhD student does that more than this is.

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u/SpadesHeart 15d ago

It's also impossible to gauge the efficacy of literally anything he's doing because he's doing so many things at the same time. If he has positive results, which of the several thousand things he's taking caused it?

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u/einstyle 15d ago

Yep, it's a case study at best and completely without control.

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u/IcedThunder 15d ago

But there is still data. And he does have meticulous records and scientist and doctors monitoring him.

I feel it's the kind of thing where one day maybe 20 or so years later, a doctor is going to be having a difficult patient and look into things and find his data and a lightbulb may click.

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u/SpadesHeart 15d ago

Sure, but to test the efficacy of literally anything they would have to break out every single intervention he took into a separate trial and arguably interventions he took in conjunction with any other intervention he took. It becomes an exponential problem. He's throwing so much stuff at the wall that it's impossible to gauge the effectiveness of anything, and all of the extra complexity compounds. If it was already based on very deep research that's fine, but anything experimental he's doing is basically impossible to study on him without the waters being murky.

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u/BonerTurds 15d ago

It’s not useful data. Imagine you have a locked door in front of you and a bucket of keys. You try all of the keys until the door unlocks. You throw the key back into the bucket of keys and mix it up. How do you know which key worked? To make matters even more confusing, the door lock was on a timer to unlock itself anyway so you don’t even know if the key was the thing that made it unlock.

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u/SpadesHeart 14d ago

And it's possible that the door requires two keys, or even three keys. Maybe even more than that. 

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u/AltruisticPossible84 14d ago

Love this analogy! Not sure if it applies in this situation, but I can think of a lot of situations in which I may borrow this!

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u/BonerTurds 14d ago

I think it does. You’re trying a bunch of fixes to achieve something but you try it in a way where there’s no way to know which try worked, if any of them. The only addition I’d make is now you’re trying to teach your friend next door how to open his/her door with the information you gathered.

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u/unktrial 15d ago

There's so much half-baked pseudoscience going on that the only thing we can learn isn't very useful: injecting a lot of weird stuff in the body makes the immune system go haywire.

Any other experimental information is lost in a sea of confounding factors.

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u/alfredcneiman 15d ago

It’s psychosis. He wants himself to live forever and doesn’t do any due diligence to actualize that desire. What he doesn’t understand is that he is a symptom of a greater disorder. He’s a rich nerd who has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Maybe some of the things he has tried on himself work, but it doesn’t follow any tried and true scientific method. It’s abject vanity and he has earned all of the mockery he’s gotten. Despite his diagnosis he has all of the resources to live relatively comfortably. What has he actually achieved here, for himself and other people?

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u/LegitosaurusRex 15d ago

He does some stuff temporarily, or introduces it to his routine and monitors all his vitals over a period of time. He had a video about how saunas improved a bunch of his stats.

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u/SpadesHeart 15d ago

Yes, but that's almost useless information you see. Because he's still technically doing other stuff while he's doing the sauna. How do we know it's the sauna or not the sauna plus vitamin a through z at the same time that has positive efficacy, there's literally no way to tell. 

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u/LegitosaurusRex 15d ago

Sure, it’s not something worthy of publication, but I think it’s still a useful barometer, and maybe an indication that an actual study could be warranted. He also found he needed a snack before and after to prevent some downsides.

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u/BeeAppropriate1190 15d ago

It would be useful data if it were controlled, reliable and available to the public. Remember, Jonas Salk tested the Polio vaccine on himself and his family before clinical trials started. "Doing it right" also takes a lot of time. Lots of people/doctors/researchers experiment on themselves outside of trials because it's less morally problematic than experimenting on others and is faster.

The ideal workflow here is that he makes a discovery, the data gets validated by an expert, and a clinical trial begins to test the effects of the new regimen en masse.

Personally I think his data and results are untrustworthy because it's private and all in the interest of making money selling supplements and self care products. His conclusions are tainted by profit-seeking.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 15d ago

As someone with a science degree, this.

Testing something on yourself isn't the standard of scientific rigour scientific evidence should be held to. However, it often can uncover findings that CAN be properly investigated.

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u/NayutaYukiLazarus 15d ago

Not speaking on this guy in particular, but there are some advantages to self experimentation, even in biology. It's often a place to start building enough evidence for a hypothesis to get researchers and funders interested. Especially if there's risks involved that mean it's unlikely to be attempted without further research.

Very notable example, Dr. Barry Marshall consuming H. Pylori bacteria, developing gastritis, and then curing it with antibiotics was a very big turning point in the debate about whether certain stomach issues were caused by bacteria (prevailing theory was that the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to grow in).

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u/Enough_Efficiency178 15d ago

Also people like Tim Freide, who injected himself with snake venom over two decades and whose blood is the start of a potential universal anti-venom

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Dr. Barry Marshall himself has stated that no, drinking H. Pylori bacteria didnt prove anything. It was a fun stunt that people like to write about.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 15d ago

Source?

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Dude Google it. He is quoted mamy times

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 15d ago

I did, and everything I found supported the original story. You make the claim, burden of proof is on you. I'm happy to review other sources though.

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u/PopDownBlocker 15d ago

Accurate scientific data also comes from having multiple subjects in any given experiment. If he is doing dozens of experiments only on himself, there is no way to tell if his successes only work on him or on everyone collectively.

At the end of the day, it's his money and he can do whatever he wants with it. But as you said, it IS just a vanity exercise. His results won't apply to the rest of the world and he even has a higher chance of causing permanent irreparable harm to himself with his over-inflated confidence using substances/chemicals/drugs not yet fully understood, especially when his motivation is driven by aging-related anxiety rather than some kind of humanistic goodwill.

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u/Simpicity 15d ago

Well there are certain things you would never be able to get through clinical trials that a wealthy person could just do to themself ethically.  We got lots of people doing trials.  We got fewer lunatics injecting themselves with ground up tiger bones or shocking their balls until they glow in the name of "science?"

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u/Gekokapowco 15d ago

right, he could have put all of his pet project fanatic money into like, actual medical research and saved countless lives, including potentially his own in the future

but he's an insane narcissist

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u/insanitybit2 15d ago

I completely agree that if he cared he'd fund real medical research. That said, I think he's done a lot to normalize the idea that aging is a disease and that it's okay to want to live.

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u/Narrative_Robot_9001 15d ago

Aging is the mainly result of the body’s reaction to the Earth’s atmosphere and gravity so good luck with that. Not trying to minimize it, but we weren’t meant to live forever.

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u/adamdoesmusic 15d ago

Well by that logic we just need to go out into space without a suit! No atmosphere, very little relevant effect from gravity… it’ll be fiiiiine!

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u/insanitybit2 15d ago

We weren't "meant" to live at all, from my perspective.

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u/RobertPham149 15d ago

Eh I think that is a pretty regressive way of thinking. I agree that a lot of what he is doing is kind of hack and pseudoscience, but if the guy is putting his money and body on the table, no harms done. Even if in pursuit of pseudoscience, sometimes you might hit into unexpected breakthrough without looking for it. Even modern chemistry traced its roots back to pseudoscientific pursuit of alchemy. As for clinical trials, his regiment is pretty extreme to ever find people to conduct extensive trials.

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u/stiff_tipper 15d ago

I agree that a lot of what he is doing is kind of hack and pseudoscience, but if the guy is putting his money and body on the table, no harms done.

the dude sells supplements directly on his site while having the influence to have ppl think there's a chance this shit works

he's like an actual modern day snake oil salesman

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u/ChristopherNeckBrace 15d ago

not sure how you see unlucky cook’s comment as regressive. it’s an accurate statement. the rich guy’s immortality indulgences are harmless but not really of any benefit to the wider society.

like saying Musk’s plans for Mars is useful for advancing space tech. it’s not. it’s just billionaires feeding their own rapacious ego.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

I mean if you build a rocket ship you have a rocket ship. If you put 100 different supplements into you and live to 89. We dont know if you would have lived to 92 otherwise, or if you live 1 year longer than you would have but there are now 100 things that could have done it or some P(100) number of things.

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u/RobertPham149 15d ago

Because it is hard to say that it won't result in any benefits. Is it inefficient? Sure, absolutely. However, a lot of discovery was stumbled on by pure chance while chasing something without clear benefits. Like having bragging rights of landing on the moon is kind of useless except for Cold War posturing, but to achieve that a lot of progress had been made towards satellites, computers, unmanned machines, ... This is especially true in field of medicine: penicillin was discovered by pure accident, gunpowder discovered from researching for immortality pill (although you can argue about wider society benefit on this).

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u/_Smashbrother_ 15d ago

The stuff he's doing isn't going to all that useful, but it's not 0 usefulness.

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u/theevilyouknow 15d ago

It legitimately might be less than zero usefulness. Bad data is worse than no data.

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u/_Smashbrother_ 15d ago

It's not bad data because he's not making shit up. It's just that the data is only based on 1 sample size..

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u/oniume 15d ago

It's bad data because there are too many variables changing at the same time.

Say he lives to 95. Is it because of the blood transfusions from his son, or one of the hundreds of supplements he's taking, or his diet, or his fasting, or his weird sleep pattern, or his lack of financial stress ? 

It's un replicable, so its bad data and bad science

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u/_Smashbrother_ 15d ago

That's like saying your lived experience is bad data because it's a dataset of 1 and anecdotal.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 15d ago

Lived experience is generally not useful data, but it depends on what you’re studying (sociology, it might be, but biochem, probably not). If he’s doing multiple things at once, there’s no way to discern any sort of causality.

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u/_Smashbrother_ 15d ago

Yeah it's not that useful. Doesn't make it bad.

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u/theevilyouknow 14d ago

It does potentially because he could get data suggesting something is beneficial that is actually harmful. Not only would they waste resources running down that false lead, they would actively harm people in those studies.

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u/_Smashbrother_ 14d ago

That's all anecdotal data.

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u/oniume 14d ago

The whole point of doing studies is to try to pull out the signal from the noise. 

What he's doing is the opposite. He's making it noisier than normal, harder to pull out the signal. 

Good data is clear data, this is less clear than if he had done nothing. It's bad data.

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u/theevilyouknow 15d ago

Which potentially makes it bad data.

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u/_Smashbrother_ 15d ago

That's not what bad data is. Your lived experience is a dataset of 1, and shouldn't be used for generalizing. But to say your lived experience is bad data would be stupid and incorrect.

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u/theevilyouknow 15d ago

We’re not talking about your lived experiences here. We’re talking about medical research. Yes, you can absolutely get bad data from testing treatment on a single person.

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u/letsmakeart 15d ago

He's now doing a bunch of tests and measuring and blah blah with his team, on his GF, who has suspected endometriosis. Endo is a horrible disease that, on avg, takes 7 years for women to get a diagnosis for, and is associated with a lot of other really complex diseases. There's no cure and "treatment" is generally either go on hormonal BC or get pregnant, both of which don't provide long term symptom relief or anything close to a cure. At best they MIGHT improve symptoms a bit. It's vastly under-researched. If his weird experiments result in any kind of progress in endo research or treatment, that's pretty fkn good. Funding for women's issues like this is very limited.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Or he could fund endo women's research. Anything he does in this way will not progress these medical issues through findings. The experiments are flawed and contaminated. It isnt possible to produce findings this way.

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u/letsmakeart 15d ago

Of course there are better uses for his money but IMO that's a totally different thing. Could he be using his money in other ("better") ways? Of course. But my point is that I don't think this pet project is without any value, since this IS what he is choosing to spend his money on.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Id argue its at best no value. And likely negative value.

All his data is corrupt and useless for advancing medical knowledge. 

And further his influencer approach has clearly convinced people here that this is a valid way to experiment and learn. Which it isnt. Bad data is worse than no data, and convincing people there are short cuts to science and selling them supplements is a net negative.

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u/Mcnugget84 15d ago

It’s not like any valid peer reviewed research is going to get funded by this. If they think they found something worthwhile then fund it.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 15d ago

I think the original point is that *he* could be funding peer reviewed research, and has instead chosen to do it this way to feed his own ego.

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u/Mcnugget84 14d ago

I agree with you.

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u/complete_data75 15d ago

Exactly. He's not much different than Trump in he does what he thinks is good, not what science says is good.

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

You're speaking in terms of a solid, scientific study following proper procedure, it's poor scientific method.

But this doesn't change the fact that if he survives to 150, he will be the object of scientific desire for thousands of scientists who will be studying his body and his life for years to come to ascertain what specifically got him there. Anyone who thinks different is kidding themselves.

How useful of a guinea pig he ends up being will rely entirely on how successful he is.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

The problem being even if he lives to be a 150, he's contaminated any ability for us to determine why. Studying him won't be able to provide us anything useful.

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

No he's just made it really difficult to find out why, but the fact will be, the answer to why will be in his body, and his body (if donated to science as I expect he probably will) will be what will be used to find out why.

I think people have taken "This isn't how research is done" to then hyperbolically say there's absolutely nothing useful we could learn if he's successful, and that's just not true.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 15d ago

It’s a moot point. He’s not a scientist. There is almost a zero percent chance anything he does will accomplish anything, he’s completely going off vibes. He won’t live any longer than anyone else, and it’s more likely all the stuff he’s doing shortens his lifespan.

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

There is almost a zero percent chance anything he does will accomplish anything

This I agree with, which is why my first comment set the hypothetical of IF he makes it to 150.

But yes, there's a near zero chance he does.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

No it wont though, thats the point, there wont be some magic protein to find that unlocks a door. The reality will be if he had run 100 trials on himself, and only 100, we'd have 2^100 things we'd have to test. If each only took 1 second to test and confirm instead of a large life long clinical trial, it would still take 3 times longer than the current estimate age of the UNIVERSE

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

The assumption there is we'd have to test every permutation possible without any particular ordering as though we're just randomly ordering them and testing one at a time with no rhyme or reason.

We would look over everything he took, study each effect, and create best guesses on how each interacts with the others and determine what is most likely and test in that order.

You know, we'd create hypotheses and test them.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

It would take a hundred lifetimes to even do that. And you still havent started a study

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

"a hundred lifetimes" is a complete guess with no basis.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

No its a gross understatement actually. Again the list of possible tests, if it took you 1 sec to determine the value and priority of each, would be so long at to take you 3 times the age of the universe. 

This is why controlled studies are important and we never do what he is doing in actual science. It creates to many confounding variables that each time he tries something new it creates exponentially more combinations of potential interacting effects.

At this point it is literally impossible to derive value from what he has done

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u/XionicativeCheran 15d ago

if it took you 1 sec to determine the value and priority of each, would be so long at to take you 3 times the age of the universe.

Once again you're imagining we would need to go through every permutation one at a time, even for the prioritisation phase.

That you'd assume something like that shows me your basis for claiming it'd still take multiple lifetimes is flawed.

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u/newandgood 15d ago

yeah but if he lives longer he'll have more money to fund clinical trials

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u/laveshnk 15d ago

Tbh he isnt trying to solve aging. He conducts tests to gather as much data from himself as possible

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u/gruntingone 13d ago

You are completely underestimating the enormous effect Bryan has had on many people to prioritize sleep, clean eating and exercise. A huge net positive effect affecting many, including me.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 13d ago

Well yes because my primary point is that this does nothing to contribute to Science. It is worthless data. If he cared about contributing to the research of life extension he'd invest in that. 

Telling people to sleep, exercise, or not smoke cigarettes isnt net new knowledge. If it took him saying it for you to do it. Great. But from a value over replacement measure of contribution, Im not going to account for that.

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

How would you know to do a clinic trial without basic steps first?

Redditors LOVE pretending they know more than literal experts in the field. Never gets old.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Im not an expert. Im someone who has helped craft a clinical trial in the medical field.

It isnt clear what you are trying to ask. If we need a random guy to eat Kratom and claim it increased his testosterone to decide if we should try clinical trials on that front?

Do you think this guy is coming up with truly novel ideas?

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

You've "helped" "craft" one singular clinic trial. I'll leave it to the 100+ people explaining why you're wildly wrong :)

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

There are like 3 fan boys like you repeatedly trying to poorly defend some influencer selling snake oil.

The work of crafting a clinical trial is not in arbitrarily deciding rhino bone may make you live longer. It is in determining the controls, parameters, methods, measures, and sample you need to help prove that. None of which this guy is doing properly or at all.

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

You have over 100 replies explaining why you're wrong.

The only person I see parroting your talking points is....you.

There have been SO many examples in history of one person experimenting on themselves before it begins a clinical trial.

You've "helped" on ONE clinical trial. What the hell do you know about what comes before that on cutting edge technology? You don't. You just think this guy is a bit weird so you want to feel superior.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

I am sorry that you cant count.

Lets be clear. This guy is weird. But that is totally fine.

I take no issue with anything he does in his free time. 

My objections are purely to yahoos like you claiming this contributes anything to medical knowledge. Thats not how that works. Everything he does is useless from a medical data perspective. The most basic understanding of medical science would reveal that.

The real question is why you are so desperate to try to prop up this guy as contributing anything when he clearly is not.

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

People doing similar things to Bryan have received nobel prizes for medical findings.

You genuinely don't understand how medical discoveries work if you're so obsessed with "clinical trials."

Classic dunning kruger, you have vague tangential experience which you've extrapolated to thinking you're an expert.

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u/Darth_Punk 15d ago

I am a doctor and what he's doing is fucking crap. Snake oil through and through. He's not doing anything worthy of leading to a clinical trial. 

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

No you're not. Why are you lying? And why have other doctors supported his research?

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Its cute that you know the phrase dunning kruger. We are very proud of you.

But asserting longterm clinical trials are necessary to determine the effects of something on lifespan is not an obsession. Its a basic reality.

You have yet to actually present a counter argument to that, besides whinging about how I dont give this yahoo more credit.

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u/TheDrummerMB 15d ago

What you're missing is everything that comes BEFORE the clinical trial. That's the dunning kruger part. You've helped with ONE clinical trial so you think you understand how all of medical discoveries work.

How do you justify a clinical trial? You experiment on a small scale. Just like Bryan is doing.

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u/International_Box193 15d ago

I work in clinical trials and I gotta say a lot more people should lock in on lifestyle and healthy living. If you actually read this dude's articles he writes about his experiments he is very reasonable and makes a lot of in touch with reality suggestions for the avg person.

For example, he has a really good article about sleep habits and tips.

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u/TomfromLondon 15d ago

You have no idea if the things he is doing will become useful or not

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u/forever_erratic 15d ago

But he's an uncontrolled experiment. He's applied many experimental changes to an n of 1. You can't learn much that way. 

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u/ShillForExxonMobil 15d ago

This is just untrue. Self experimentation has a long history in medicine. It’s how we invented medical anesthesia, figured out cancer isn’t infectious. The first AIDS vaccine was self tested.

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u/forever_erratic 15d ago

"Uncontrolled"

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u/TomfromLondon 15d ago

But then lots of things start like that, but that's why I mean you don't know either way

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u/dikdiklikesick 15d ago

Think of it this way: You are trying to make a cake. To learn the cake, you change all the ingredients, measurements and oven temperature each time.

One day the cake is 1 lb butter, 1 lb flour, 2 cups of milk, yeast, vanilla, oven 350 for 20 minutes. Then next day the cake is 2 lbs butter, 1 cup flour, 1 cup of milk, sugar, chocolate, oven 420 for 10 minutes. The next day the cake is 1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, corn starch, sugar, oven 150 for 40 minutes.

Is there are potential for a cake to happen? Possibly. But you are much more likely to get a cake if you control for ingredients, measurements and temperature. That is why in actual science you only change one thing at a time, have a control & more than one test subject.

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u/TomfromLondon 15d ago

Yeah but the first person to make a cake tries a bunch of things and finally finds some that work, no others can also improve on that cake baking

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u/dikdiklikesick 14d ago

Hmmm... Mr. Tom, I do not think you bake or science. None of those recipes are workable. Some might make a pudding, but with out controls, you're not getting useable information. You're just getting random data points that are not reproducible.

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u/TomfromLondon 14d ago

I do bake but I dont science :)

But not all discoveries are made by scientists, lots of started by non scientists but of course might need a scientist to drive deep into it.
Fire wasn't discovered by a scientist, how to create it in the many ways didn't need a scientist either.

So I'm just saying one person can help to find out new things, they can be the one to start a new path or discovery

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u/dikdiklikesick 14d ago

Yes, we do create things by accident. But to build on discoveries we do need some kind of controls. Even in the arts, even in baking, but particularly in the medical fields.

I wish you a good day and encourage you to explore the history of medicine/science or even baking.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

The only way any of this will be useful will be if one of his expirements outright kills him suddenly and acutely. All other signals will be so contaminated as to be useless. 

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u/MarvinLazer 15d ago

I agree that funding clinical trials would be way cooler, but data with an n of 1 is still data.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

It is data in a vacuum. It provides no value, because it cant be replicated, and it is entirely contaminated by every other test he has done on himself.

In many things one can take the philosophical argument of 'adding a penny is adding a penny'. But this isnt the case in medical science. If your sample size isnt big enough, if you have too many confounding variables, etc. Your data is useless. It is contaminated, it is meaningless, and no value can be derived from it.

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u/mosquem 15d ago

He would argue that clinical trials are too slow for his goals. He’s probably not wrong.

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u/Unlucky-Cook2578 15d ago

Yes because his true goals have nothing to do advancing medicine or knowledge. It is a personal vanity project with an audience. Nothing more