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.
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 have kept the units in throughout, for the obvious reason.
The arithmetic in post #2 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
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.
Answering the question the opening post raises rather than the one it answers.
Multiple outcomes measured without a primary one means something will move. Nominate the primary in advance and report the rest as secondary.
Bookmarking this. I will come back when I have something worth adding.
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.
Everything in post #4 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
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.
Worth separating two things that post #8 runs together.
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.
Everything in post #7 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Careful with the language on blinding yourself. "Not detected" and "not present" are different findings and the first is a statement about the method.
On blinding yourself the community has more anecdote than the confidence in this thread implies, and I include my own contribution in that.
I read post #11 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
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.
If you are new and reading this thread for the answer to blinding yourself: the answer is conditional, the conditions are in the third reply, and the rest of the thread is worth skipping.
Where I part company with post #19, and it is a narrow parting.
Generalisability: a robust n-of-1 result applies to you. It does not tell you much about whether the effect generalises to others similar to you, much less to people different from you.
Seconded. It reads as careful rather than confident, which is the right register.
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.
Take it as a starting point and not as a specification.
The best thing about this subcategory is that people post their protocols before their results. That order is what keeps it honest.
Not the whole picture, but the part of it I can speak to.
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).
Order effects matter. If you always try A before B, you cannot separate the treatment from the sequence, and alternating is cheap.
Adding the caveat now so it does not have to be extracted later.