Self Experimentation? You betcha!

I have mentioned several herbs at different times in my blog, and that I am trying them, have tried them or want to try them. Once they get past me without causing harm, I may give them to someone else (brave and trusting family members) to try. The key to this is 'may' or in the more likely realm-'may not'. I know that every body is similar yet different, so if I share a substance with someone else, I am courting a huge risk. But, one subject does not make for a satisfactory study. What a dilemma! I believe that I have the right to tinker with my own body and existence however I see fit, but that to do such a thing to another person is rather foul and unconscionable if I don't know everything about whatever substance or idea I might present for tinkering, or at the very least that legitimate evidence supports the notion that it is harmless. I don't believe that I have enough time left on earth to reach satisfactory conclusions about many herbs that I have read about. How frustrating! I should have started all of this when I was two, but mastering bowel and bladder control was most prominent at that time. I believe that the most ethical way to obtain information about these herbs in the time frame that I have to work with is by testing the recorded knowledge about them on myself. Oh yes, how I love such experimentation! I'm O.K. with the risk involved, and I have to admit that I am not very scientific about it either. I don't keep rigid records, or set up experiments in strict accordance with scientific method as others have done: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenters Self experimentation has quite an interesting history and a few deaths along it's back trail: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/  It's my mission not to permanently damage my precious old bod or to die on this quest for knowledge.  Any substance that has been recorded as causing definite harm or any substance that contains compounds that have been recorded as causing definite harm by reliable sources is not going into or on me. I spend a lot of time sifting sources and determining the interests of sources because that is the absolutely crucial first step. I'm not the only person engaged is such activities and actually, we all do this to some degree at some point in our lives. When we are prescribed a medication, are we not giving it a go to see if it will work for us? We try new diets, fitness programs and all sorts of other things in our lives to find out how they will affect us. Although, happily, a lot of the outcomes of these self experiments have been predetermined to a satisfying degree by others, the bottom line is that whatever it is has not been tried on the self and there is always the possibility that the result when applied to the self may yield different results. So, brave self experimenters, let us continue and may we all sift our sources and the knowledge that they present very carefully!