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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - Highly editorialized title. "Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration: a case report" This is exactly that. A case report. This is not a successful treatment. Far short of that.by Teknomadix
- I was recently reading about a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where a person suffering from mental decline such as Alzheimer's spontaneously improves, recognizing loved ones, retrieving memories, and being able to carry on conversations. It's called "terminal" because the person usually dies within hours or days.
If this is a real phenomenon, then it's amazing to think that at least some of the people who suffer from Alzheimer's still have their memories inside their minds, as opposed to the disease erasing the memories from existence, which means that an effective treatment might recover their identities.
by sowbug - Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.by trumpdong