User:Dan833

Current data sources

• MySymptoms iphone app
  • food
  • supplements
  • symptoms (as free text)
  • exercise
  • body weight
• Blood tests
  • Complete Blood Count
  • Comprehensive Metabolic Panel
  • serum copper
  • serum zinc
  • iron
  • vitamin D
  • homocysteine
• Doctor's Data Hair Elements test
• Nebula Genomics whole genome sequence

Past data sources

• iButton_temperature_logger
• estimated fat, water, and muscle from Etekcity smart Bluetooth scale
• Gulf Coast Data Concepts logging accelerometer

My approach to quantified self

Usual QS approach	My approach
Don't track food	Assume that anything I eat or fail to eat could be causing symptoms until I've proven otherwise.
Don't track minor symptoms	Assume my body's self-communications are relevant and understandable.
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 The Tagged Self.

My personal science approach to health

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?

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...)