Editing User:Dan833

== Data sources ==
*[https://www.mysymptoms.net/ MySymptoms iphone app]
** food
** supplements
** symptoms (as free text)
** exercise
** body weight
* [[Lab Tests|'''Blood tests''']]
** Complete Blood Count
** Comprehensive Metabolic Panel
** serum copper
** serum zinc
** iron
** vitamin D
** homocysteine
* [https://www.doctorsdata.com/hair-elements/ Doctor's Data Hair Elements] test
* [https://nebula.org/whole-genome-sequencing-dna-test/ Nebula Genomics whole genome sequence]

== My approach to quantified self ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Usual QS approach
!My approach
|-
|Don't track food
|See food and supplements as 75% of health.
|-
|Don't track minor symptoms
|Respect my body's communications as smarter than technology.
|-
|Use sleep tracking gadgets
|Track sleep and wake times manually, since automatic detection is unreliable.
Don't use automatic estimations of sleep quality, which are unreliable and unactionable.
|-
|Run one experiment at a time
|Recognize that deficiency symptoms can take months to emerge.  Respond to one symptom at time, trying several interventions until it resolves, then circle back and retry interventions to narrow down what works.
|-
|Rate symptom of concern on a scale of 1-10
|Track all symptoms, even those that aren't bothersome as free text notes, timestamped to when they start, since they're often related to timing of food or supplement.  Timestamps and consistency are far more helpful than regular quantities -- see my presentation [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LgLBUQFzioJMjr_o4B_YkOECGQ4p477XfaV1rLILOLg/edit The Tagged Self].
|}

== My personal science approach to health ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Mainstream advice
!My personal science approach
|-
|Eat a diversity of foods
|Regularly eat foods and supplements that I can prove resolve a symptom or improve a metric.
Intentionally eat a deficient diet consistently until symptoms emerge that clearly show the deficiency.
|-
|Follow a diet from a book with a theory
|Treat each added or removed food separately, recognizing it can have unexpected idiosyncratic effects
|-
|Get a doctor's check-up with routine lab tests
|Order my own lab tests, especially tests where I'm still out of range, whether or not a doctor has dismissed them since there's no established diagnosis and treatment
|-
|Try to eat healthy foods
|Identifying and removing problem foods as a first step.
Don't assume any food is healthy, especially so-called superfoods.

Interpret any food urge that seems "unhealthy" to me as a sign my body needs something I'm overlooking
|-
|Take supplement blends such as Vitamin B Complex
|Take individual vitamins and minerals so I learn what each one does at which dose, since doses in blends are sometimes too low (eventually creating deficiency symptoms that aren't bad enough to figure out) or too high (eventually creating major side effects)
|-
|Trust the healthy foods and supplements
|Write hypotheses of how I hope the intervention will help; update this with possible side effects; add and remove intervention over time to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses
|-
|Take medication to fix symptoms
|Assume any symptom can be helped or hurt by diet and supplements, and may require months or years of patient experimentation.
|-
|Get regular exercise
|Exercise when it feels right.  Exercising at the wrong time will set me back.  Track exercise to learn when I was feeling good.
|}

== Who would I recommend food/supplement personal science for? ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!If this describes you, maybe don't track foods/supplements
!If this describes you, maybe do track food/supplements
|-
|Believe food doesn't affect your symptoms or is simple
|Believe food affects symptoms but unclear about how
|-
|Unpredictable restaurants or diet, especially when traveling
|Predictable restaurants and diet, even when traveling
|-
|Responsible to cook for others or eat with others
|Live alone
|-
|Have little free time
|Have too much free time
|-
|Symptoms are either ignorable or require urgent care
|Symptoms are disruptive enough to be high priority,
but can be safely tolerated for days to weeks
|-
|Don't like to restrict food to fit an experiment
|Find it easy to restrict food
|-
|Agreeable personality, welcome peer influence
|Disagreeable personality, prefer to find individual truth
|-
|Hard to obtain specific foods or supplements quickly
|Live close to well-stocked health food store
|}
(Note that becoming chronically ill can change a person from left to right...)