Medicine/Healing

Is kratom safe enough for the fight against opioids?

Swogger and Walsh reviewed the combined results of 13 studies conducted between January 1960 and July 2017, using data from 28,745 individuals. “There is a clear need for more rigorous, well-controlled, prospective studies to support a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the plant,” says Swogger. “But data across cultures indicated that kratom has a legitimate role…

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Medicine/Healing

Magic mushrooms could become legal in Oregon

Oregon could become home to the legal… use of magic mushrooms. A campaign to legalize psilocybin, informally known as magic mushrooms, is making its way to voters. “Psilocybin, after all, is an off-patent, organic agent which creates change through the psychedelic experience it provides, such that a single experience often changes a person’s disposition moving…

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Medicine/Healing

People are dying because of ignorance, not because of opioids

In many countries, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, opioid treatment may include daily injections of heroin, just as a diabetic may receive daily insulin injections, along with treating the patient’s medical and psychosocial issues. These patients hold jobs, pay taxes and live long, healthy, productive lives. Yet in the U.S., such programs are…

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Medicine/Healing

DC Lawmaker wants to let people get medical marijuana without doctor approval

Under the Medical Marijuana Improvement Amendment Act of 2017, patients would be allowed to self-certify as qualifying for medical cannabis …The bill would also allow medical cannabis dispensaries to open areas where patients could consume marijuana together socially … Separately, he wrote to District health officials asking that they examine allowing safe injection facilities where…

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Medicine/Healing

9 of 10 Docters unprepared to prescribe marijuana

“Medical education needs to catch up to marijuana legislation,” said senior author Dr. Laura Jean Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. ​ Curriculum deans at 101 medical schools completed surveys about marijuana education. Just over two-thirds said their graduates weren’t prepared to prescribe medical marijuana. One-quarter said…

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Science

With a new designation for ecstasy [sassafras], the US government is finally acknowledging its potential to treat PTSD

At present, it’s difficult to treat PTSD with psychotherapy alone because often the underlying trauma is too difficult for people to relive with a therapist. But previous work suggests that MDMA helps get PTSD patients to a psychological state where they are comfortable working through those memories. In MAPS-sponsored phase II trial including 107 PTSD…

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Medicine/Healing

Your new anti-depression medication: LSD

This study is particularly interesting in that it investigates the role of the human brain’s default-mode network in mental time travel. As it turns out, those of us with an active DMN are more likely to reflect on the past and hence wax romantic about what is not present, a reliable marker of depressed states.…

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