About 10 years ago, a UCSD psychology professor named Ben Williams, who is in my area of psychology (animal learning), managed to successfully cure his own terminal cancer by self-experimentation. He wrote a book about it called Surviving Terminal Cancer. As this WSJ story shows, his approach — which can be summed up think for yourself— is spreading.

Just as my dermatologist was irritated by my acne self-experimentation (“Why did you do that?” he asked), Ben’s oncologist, a University of Washington med school prof named Marc Chamberlain, was against what Ben did. Chamberlain now tells the WSJ that Ben’s self-treatment “probably contributed” to saving Ben’s life. Which is like a math professor saying 2 + 2 “probably equals” 4.

A long essay by Williams about his experience.

Addendum: Williams’s book, which had an amazon rank of about 1,000,000 when the WSJ article appeared (Dec 15), is now (Dec 18) ranked about 29,000. Dec 24, ranked about 30,000.