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- Hacker News
- If it was my grandma I would treat her to some shrooms, I've taken them many times and I find them quite safe, I can't see harm in trying. If it would really works I don't know, but I would find value in the experience and consider it safe. Though the challenge would be explaining it to her and potentially dealing with her tripping.by hmokiguess
- Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420481
- Good riddance - this kind of thing needs to be experimented with more. But 5 grams! This reads like witch doctor science; I’m surprised it passed ethics
- "good riddance"? What went away?by foobarbecue
- While it’s a fairly good sized dose, it’s not one that would typically produce a nightmare trip scenario.
As far as ethics go, I would absolutely sign a document that gives the right for experimentation in the event I become incapacitated to some degree.
by Aboutplants - 5 grams isn't a high dose though, I'm not sure why it's described as such. Shops sell doses starting at 15g, although they recommend newbies take only half of that.
Example of a shop which describes 5g as a "light dose": https://www.sirius.nl/atlantis/
by WhyNotHugo - Yeah this story was on HN before a few weeks ago and I raised similar - it’s nuts to give that to someone who probably doesn’t have the mental state to be able to comprehend what is going on. Don’t understand how it is possibly ethical to do.
Especially with the effects being temporary - can you imagine how awful it must be to regain lucidity outside of your control and then lose it again for the sake of an experiment like this? Awful experiment.
by dwroberts - It's not just 5 grams of some random cubensis, it's 5 grams of the enigma strain, which is ridiculously potent.by archonis
- The Johns Hopkins studies have been administering high doses for 20+ years now. The difference is that they use synthesized psilocybin instead of mushrooms (which makes the dosing more consistent since potency can vary a lot across strains and individual mushrooms).by trio8453
- > n=1
> pay to publish journal
> no clear Alzheimers diagnosis ("[...] were considered clinically most compatible with advanced Alzheimer’s disease")
> administration of a heroic dose of street-quality drugs vs. a controlled sample
> no university or hospital affiliation?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, hence I remain skeptical
by sva_ - Good criticism but be aware that acreditated authors and institutions are a bunch of crooks on the whole who cook their results, do p-hacking to the death, badly document their protocols, don't release their datasets not their analysis, and have no problems getting paid by big pharma and not disclosing it fully. The field is more joke than science at this stage.by ekianjo
- Not only that but the author has appeared on Joe Rogan - that tells me all I need to know.by fred_is_fred
- That's fair, but research into psychoactive substances remains difficult due to legal constraints; N=1 but it will have piqued interest by others, they may want to repeat the tests on a larger scale.
That, or individuals will science on the ones they care for. I for one would write something like that down if I were to start developing dementia/alzheimers.
by Cthulhu_ - It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.by 40four
- I think it’s funny to describe a drug as “street-quality” while using a slang term “heroic dose” in the same sentence.by bitmasher9
- Psychedelics are one of my favorite classes of drug. I used to take LSD recreationally every few weeks or months, until one bad vomiting episode caused me upper-esophageal sphincter dysfunction somehow. Ever since then, I can't seem to take any without throwing up (and generally having a terrible time due to stomach contents backing up into my throat constantly). Nobody can seem to figure out why my throat stopped working properly all of a sudden or how to fix it. :(
I'm glad that psilocybin research is picking up. I really think its potential benefits deserve to be more widely known and available. Hopefully without the spontaneously appearing dysfunction though
by LoganDark - It might be coincidence. Hiatal hernia affects more than 50% of the population over age 50, though not everyone shows symptoms.by sowbug
- >upper-esophageal sphincter dysfunction
If you've never read a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Confederacy of Dunces would be a personally-relatable disaster (to start with; it's great).
>Psychedelics are one of my favorite classes of drug.
Your initial description of usage was probably a bit wreckless, but I do maintain that most people would probably benefit from a single (or few) psilocybin experiences (preferably an initial high-dosage with a well-trained sitter).
Microdosing is a fantastic long-term strategy, before starting more-prescribed methodologies towards happiness. Probably not useful without an initial high-dosage, first (or much cloudier/ineffective).
YMMV £¢¢£
- This case report is being shared widely across social media but it’s full of red flags from top to bottom.
It’s a case report (n=1) that a group of 3 people from Brazil wrote up and pushed into the publishing world. The report is full of big words and tables, but barely says anything more than the abstract: It’s basically “an 80 year old Japanese women received mushrooms and was better afterward” expanded with as much medical jargon as they could apply without accidentally getting too specific. No mention of how the Alzheimer’s disease history was documented or diagnosed or even if she was a patient of one of the authors.
I’m surprised how much it’s getting people to let their guard down and accept the result. Normally when studies get posted with only 100 to 500 participants the comments everywhere are full of doubters calling out the small sample size. For some reason this n=1 story written vaguely about extraordinary claims with a complete absence of pre-treatment documentation or standardize testing/scoring hits all the right notes to convince a lot of people that mushrooms can reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
I know it’s something that a lot of people would like to be true, but this is a domain where anyone in the world can make any claims they want and find a journal who will publish it if you pay them. People write and publish papers like this all the time claiming to have treated major diseases in a single patient or group of patients with different drugs or herbs.
by Aurornis - This article at least "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" as it shows that even among HN audience there's plenty of relatively dumb people. 200+ in this case. 200 people who not only fail to see a pile of horseshit for what it is, but in their ignorance spread it bringing even greater harm to people who are less equipped to critically review information like this.by lostmsu
- Sure, It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. Actual scientists understand this. People on social media don’t ands that’s annoying I get it.
On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
by 40four - How is this ethical? The ethics section of the summary simply asserts it was OK, but I don't see how this being done in a private practice excuses them from normal strictures. They say this wasn't an experimental protocol, nor research, so I guess they dosed grandma for shits and giggles?
Ethics statement
Ethical approval was not required for this single case report conducted in routine private clinical practice, in accordance with local legislation and institutional requirements. No experimental protocol or prospective research procedures were conducted. Written informed consent was obtained from the patient’s legal guardian for the publication of this case report.
by tasty_freeze - > Written informed consent was obtained from the patient’s legal guardian
They didn't even get consent from the person being drugged. That is absolutely insane.
by malfist - > They say this wasn't an experimental protocol, nor research, so I guess they dosed grandma for shits and giggles?
Medical doctors have a veeeeery wide leeway when it comes to the question of what they are allowed to do to patients. If nothing goes wrong or no one complains, pretty much everything goes - ethics reviews are only a thing for large-scale studies.
The exception tends to come from drug laws - in countries like Germany, for example, psilocybin is completely banned from manufacture, possession or prescription outside of highly regulated and specially permitted academic studies, but in countries with more relaxed attitudes, as a doctor you can do individual therapies as long as you find someone willing to pay for it.
In fact, that is a common issue with cancer and rare diseases. A bunch of therapies popular in that space run either with approved medication that gets used for another purpose or in higher/lower dosages (=off label treatment) or with completely new, untested and unapproved substances - that one was an issue here in Germany with a doctor inventing his own COVID vaccine, it ended up being dragged through the courts, with a recent acquittal [1] as the court considered this as an individual therapy.
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/lg-luebeck-corona-imp...
by mschuster91 - Not to comment on the overall ethical situation (dunno what constitutes informed consent for an alzheimer's patient in Brazil, presumably it involves some legal guardian), but this is a doctor reporting on an individual treatment of their patient. It is not a research study. Doctors have wide latitude in treating their own patients, they do not require board approval to do so.
- So, I'm not making any accusations or decelerations of "bad science", I've only read the abstract and this isn't my field.
That said, some relevant context here is that:
(1) Case studies are some of the most easily fabricated journal outputs
(2) This is published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, which is listed by some as being a predatory journal [0]. The Frontiers publishers are the fine folk who published an AI generated anatomical figure of a rat that not only was obviously incorrect to anyone you'd stop on the street, it'd give them nightmares [1].
So I'm not saying this paper is bunk, but that I reserve a healthy degree of skepticism pending some clinical trials or replication in animal models.
[0] https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-frontiers...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/scientists-aghast-at...
by jszymborski - They do add:
> Generative AI statement
> The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
> Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.
Which is good.
But it makes me wonder about “wherever possible”. In which case wouldn’t it be possible and why would it remain if it’s not possible?
edits: formatting
by repple - I would not trust predatoryjournals.org. Beside the site looking much like the worst predatory journals, they have no transparency in who they are and how they evaluate journals. It seems just to be Beall's old list, with some newer things thrown in.
I'm not saying that Frontiers in Neuroscience is not predatory, but its not a proper argument for it to be predatory, to point to a random list as proof. As Beall couldn't understand being crap publisher is not predatory in it self.
by tokai - This exact case study came up on a recent Rogan episode with Dean Radin, PhD. While the result is very interesting and perhaps illuminating about the unexpected biological mechanisms, apparently the effects were very short lived.
Even more interesting, Dr. Radin discussed one of his companies is working on a new drug that uses the same brain receptors as psilocybin, that has the potential to induce similar effects (with no psychedelic side effects) with a nasal delivery system that crosses directly into the brain. The benefit of that, he says, is the effect would last for much longer, months perhaps, and patients would only have to take it a few times per year.
by 40four - please go find better resources over Rogan come onby Marciplan