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johnlawrenceaspden comments on The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions - Less Wrong Discussion
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On the basis of this:
http://www.mybasis.com/en-GB/technical-specifications/
Hell yes!
If it does what they're claiming, and does it accurately (let us say 0.1C for skin and ambient temperature), it should give you a great proxy for sleeping metabolic rate, as well as all sorts of other data about how you sleep, which is probably going to be affected in all sorts of ways.
I'd imagine not-too-much machine learning applied to this data should fairly cleanly separate hypometabolic and normal persons.
I would expect it to pick up all sufferers rather than just CFS, as well as people on diets and people with slowed metabolism for other reasons, but apart from starvation I don't know of many things that will slow the resting metabolism. And it might fail to pick up people with fevers.
But if it's built with accurate bits, and can record the data as time series we can examine, then if that doesn't make a good test for hypometabolism, I'll give up and probably never think about this again.
It's probably relatively easy to get a dataset of a few healthy people as a control. Recruiting people with CFS would be more effort but still in the realm of what's possible with realistic effort.
If you think your illnesses has a lot to do with temperature regulation it might be valuable for you get a MyBasis Peak yourself. With 129€ the cost isn't prohibitive.
I'll consider it, definitely. At the moment I have my trusty thermometers, and they have proved reliable guides. But it is actually quite tricky to take a reliable temperature, especially with the modern digital things (ironically because they are so speedy and sensitive). I had to practise lots, so I can quite see how they fool people.
I think the old mercury ones were a bit of a pain, but on the other hand, they force you to do it right, and it's much less easy to bugger up armpit temperature than mouth temperature, which is why Barnes was keen.
In his book he speculates that the reason that all the other doctors hate the idea is that they can't charge patients for taking their own readings! He really did think it was much better than anything else.
It's especially tricky to take a temperature with a thermometer while you sleep .
There's certainly economic pressure for a doctor to order a blood test and the test getting written into standard care guidelines but not for costant self-measurement of temperature.