Why Self-Experimenting on Your Own Health Became “Fringe” — The Real History

Ever wonder how we got here, where messing with your own body and trying new compounds gets called fringe, but anything from a pharmacy gets called legit? Turns out there’s an actual start date for that, and it’s not even that old.

Before 1910, medicine in America was all over the place. No real standard, no set science requirement, people were out here trying plants, sunlight, electricity, whatever seemed to work. Messy for sure, but there wasn’t this hard line yet between “real medicine” and doing your own thing.

Then this guy, Abraham Flexner, not even a doctor, gets hired to grade every medical school in the US and Canada. His report in 1910 set a new bar, real labs, set curriculum, hospital training. Sounds fine on paper. What it actually did was wipe out about half of medical schools in like 15 years, and a lot of those weren’t bad schools, they just couldn’t afford the new labs.

Here’s why this matters for us. That report is the reason there’s this permanent wall now between “official medicine” and everything else. Self-experimenting, compounding, research peptides, tracking your own body, none of that went anywhere, it just got pushed to the other side of that wall. We’re all still living in the space that got carved out over a hundred years ago.

Doesn’t mean either side’s automatically right. Just explains why what we do in here still gets side-eyed, and why it’s actually been around way longer than people think.

Anybody else find it wild this whole insider versus outsider medicine thing traces back to one report from 1910?