Comment by _DeadFred_
Comment by _DeadFred_ 8 days ago
Every single person I know who died from cancer young went down this route, from trying weird cures to going and seeing John of God in Brazil. Zero cured or delayed the cancer. All delayed acceptance and GREATLY regretted wasting that time and wishing they had had more time in the acceptance phase not the 'this can't be real' 'I can't die' 'There has to be something' denial.
This can and does hurt them, and is cruel. If they want to inflict in upon themselves, that is one thing. But to do it because OP has had enough losing friends is selfish. You will never stop losing friends to death, in fact, it will only accelerate from here on out. It will never get easy. In fact, it compounds as more and more joy/light/goodness leaves the world and those you turned to for support are gone. It's part of the deal they made when our parents volunteered us for this existence.
My own view is not that self-experimentation is an appropriate, let alone likely efficacious, substitute for reconciliation to the idea of one's death. I certainly don't endorse interference in others' treatment, however well-intentioned. If you want to say: "you shouldn't treat your terminal illness like a science fair project unless you possess extreme sang froid and are precommitted to the acceptance of your death", I'd find that totally reasonable.
But my own view is rather that institutional epistemology is somewhat overrated, and self-experimentation somewhat underrated, relative to the conventional wisdom. (Though some people go too far in this direction.) This leads to general overconfidence in epistemic efficient market hypothesis arguments ("if a protocol were worthwhile, someone would have found it already") and underconfidence in the value of crowd-sourcing trying a bunch of stuff and writing it down. This view was principally informed by developing cancer drugs for a living and coming to appreciate that it's really hard, your knowledge of what's going on during a clinical trial is highly abstracted, and you can't be everywhere at once. It was secondarily informed by watching people do bro science on certain important questions and making interesting progress in large part because they could move much faster than academic or corporate research.
If we recast the point of contention as: "what is the largest effect size that could be found by an institution outside of academia or industry?", my position is that it's plausibly non-zero.
I'm sorry for your friends and I hope they found peace.