This digital ethnographic study investigates how online health communities use self-experimentation to determine their treatment protocols by examining the case study of clusterbusters, a platform that came into being when a self-experimenter reported that LSD had prevented his usual cluster headache cycles on an internet forum. This example typifies how a rare disease being responded to with an even rarer form of intervention is cultivated through the collective experimentation of patient communities embedded in social networks who engage in collective forms of knowledge production.
- Published
- Journal
- Social Science and Medicine
- Authors
- Kempner, J., Bailey, J.