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Self-experimentation refers to the very special case of single-subject ''scientific'' experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on him- or herself. Usually this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same. It is a special case of single-subject research. ==History== The earliest example of self-experimentation may go back to 605 BCE when Daniel and several other Jewish captives of Nebuchadnezzar were offered positions in the government and a diet of the king's own rich meats and wines. Refusing to violate the Jewish dietary laws, they declined the food and asked for a diet of legumes and water instead. The officials had a serious concern that such a limited diet might be unhealthy so Daniel offered to conduct a "clinical trial" (of sorts). He conducted a diet study as a self-experiment (along with three others: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah). After 10 days on the abstemious diet, the subjects appeared even healthier than the controls eating the king's food and they were allowed to continue. Details of the Bible stories can be found in Wikipedia, on the web and elsewhere. There is an interesting evaluation in the context of clinical trials and program evaluations in: David E.K. Hunter, "Daniel and the Rhinoceros", ''Evaluation and Program Planning'' Volume 29, Issue 2, May 2006, Pages 180-185 (Program Capacity and Sustainability). (Link - DOI ) Sanctorius of Padua provides another early documented case of self-experimentation—living on a balance for 30 years in the early 17th century, weighing himself, his daily food, liquids, and combined excretions, leading him toward the discovery of metabolism. Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology, broadly conceived. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. In psychology, the best known self-experiments are the memory studies of Hermann Ebbinghaus, establishing many basic characteristics of human memory through tedious experiments involving nonsense syllables. Recently, Dr. Seth Roberts and Dr. Allen Neuringer have advocated the broader use of self-experimentation, arguing that its low-cost and ease (compared to traditional large-sample experiments with human subjects) facilitate conducting a very large number of experiments, testing many treatments and measuring many things at once . This allows considerable trial and error and can lead to the generation and testing of many ideas. Self-experimentation provides superior evidence to mere anecdotal evidence, because the entire experimental is explicitly designed to test a hypothesis, but is subject to observer bias. Self-experimentation could be considered a useful adjunct to large-sample experiments in scientific research. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Self-experimentation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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