Rodakis isn’t a scientist but a venture capitalist, investing in biotechnology startups. He started to search through the medical literature to see if he could learn more about why antibiotics might be helping his son. He found few scientific reports of children with autism improving while on antibiotics or ill with fevers. But when he spoke with parents in internet groups, he heard many such stories.

“So many parents had seen a similar pattern, but there wasn’t much in the media or scientific literature,” Rodakis says. “It was very frustrating. I had no idea why there wasn’t any follow-up.”

A self-described tech geek, Rodakis had been logging many of his son’s behaviors and their severity daily using the iPhone app Autism Tracker, so he knew he hadn’t imagined the improvements. The logs also documented the return of many of the child’s autism-related behaviors after he finished the antibiotic course. He retained his improved ability to make eye contact, although it still was not the same as that of a neurotypical child. Doctors prescribed Rodakis’s son several other courses of antibiotics for infections over the next few years. His signs of autism improved every time he took amoxicillin, but not while taking co-trimoxazole, a combination of two other antibiotics (amoxicillin and co-trimoxazole differ somewhat in the types of bacteria they target).

When Rodakis took his data to autism researchers, they urged him to publish the details as an ‘N-of-1’ case study (‘N’ refers to the number of participants). Many of medicine’s most successful treatments started off when one parent, physician or person with a condition noticed something unusual. But these types of trials, also known as ‘single-subject design,’ have also historically been scorned by clinical researchers. After all, the logic of a clinical trial is to apply the same therapy systematically to a large number of diverse people with a condition, in order to draw conclusions about the therapy’s effectiveness.

The growing interest in personalized medicine and the quantified self, in which people use technology to track their own physiological data or symptoms, is beginning to shift researchers’ views toward N-of-1 trials. The search for effective treatments for a variety of chronic conditions has led to a boomlet of N-of-1. The conditions run the gamut, ranging from speech disorders to stroke, bipolar disorder, cancer, and fibromyalgia.

Although N-of-1 trials are on the rise in every area of medicine, they have had a particularly large impact on autism research. Based on work by Rodakis and other parents, some autism researchers are beginning to explore potential causes and novel treatments they might otherwise have missed.

“Parents want to find answers, and we have to listen to them and be skeptical at the same time. N-of-1 trials can be a messy way of looking at things, but they provide important clues about what's going on,” says Richard Frye, a pediatric neurologist at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. “I think they are really under-utilized in medicine.”