“Even Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), tried LSD after creating AA and found the drug to be revolutionary in the treatment of addiction as well as depression. Wilson actually pitched the addition of LSD to the 12-step program to the AA board, which rejected the idea.” Independent and small-scale research studies, however,…
Those who reported a “mystical experience” had the most success in breaking their addiction. Griffiths’s lab pressed ahead with their work in a 2014 study on the possibility of treating nicotine addiction with psilocybin, the psychedelic component of “magic mushrooms.” Participants had three psilocybin sessions and three cognitive-behavioral therapy sessions to diminish cravings. Eighty percent…
“What they discovered could have major effects on the way we use psychedelics to model and treat psychiatric diseases.” Rather than using LSD itself as a psychological drug — there are certainly other scientists working on that — Carhart-Harris and his team used it as a probe for understanding what they refer to as the…
Neuropsychopharmacology researcher Robin Carhart-Harris explains his LSD brain scan study and possible therapeutic uses of the drug. “We found that regions normally don’t talk to each other began to talk to each other much more. There was a much more global integration in the brain that was quite surprising.” Original Article (CNN):LSD Researcher explains brain…
The team gave 20 volunteers infusions on two days, once containing 75 micrograms of LSD, the other a placebo. Then volunteers lay in a scanner and had their brains imaged with three different techniques, which together built up a comprehensive picture of neural activity, both with the drug and without. “This is a milestone study,”…
“After three months of treatment, the frequency of all seizures was reduced by a median of 45 percent in all participants. Almost half (47%) of the participants in the study experienced a 50 percent or greater reduction in seizures and nine percent of patients were seizure-free”. Among specific patient populations, DS patients had a…
Neuropsychological investigation have found that long-term ayahuasca users had better performance than control subjects on tests of frontal function and on the WHO-UCLA auditory verbal learning test. Since the 1980s, churches in which ayahuasca is prepared and consumed have been spreading to urban centers initially in South America and then in North America and in…
“So far the studies indicate that MDMA assisted psychotherapy significantly reduces PTSD symptoms”. Although MDMA has been administered to more than 1,000 subjects with only one report of an unexpected serious adverse event (which ended when the drug wore off), the drug doesn’t come without risks. It can increase heart rate and blood pressure and…
There is no convincing evidence that moderate MDMA use is associated with structural or functional brain alterations in neuroimaging measures. The lack of significant results was associated with high methodological heterogeneity in terms of dosages and co-consumption of other drugs, low quality of studies and small sample sizes. Original Article (Elsevier): Neuroimaging in moderate MDMA…
Bilmes, who has studied the ongoing costs of the wars, estimates that treating Iraq vets with PTSD over the next 50 years will cost taxpayers $100 billion. Vets with PTSD are particularly costly to the [Veterans Affairs] system,” says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They constitute 8…
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