02 Dec There’s something in magic mushrooms that’s shown to ease anxiety and depression in cancer patients in one dose – Los Angeles Time
Two separate studies report trial subjects who received psilocybin got substantial and lasting relief from profound distress.
“In findings that could pry open a door closed for nearly half a century, researchers have found that psilocybin — a hallucinogen long used in traditional healing rituals — eases the depression and soothes the anxiety of patients contending with serious illness and the prospect of imminent death.
In two separate studies published Thursday, researchers report that trial subjects who received a single moderate-to-large dose of psilocybin got substantial and lasting relief from their profound distress. Among 80 cancer patients who participated in the two trials, as many as 4 in 5 continued to feel measurably less hopeless and demoralized six months after taking the drug than they had upon their recruitment.
And even years later, many reported they had gained — and retained — a profound sense of peace and meaning from the experience. Of 29 cancer patients who got psilocybin in a trial conducted at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, 20 rated it as “among the most meaningful” events of their life.
“This drug saved my life and changed my life,” said Dinah Bazer, a Brooklyn, N.Y., woman who was administered a single dose of psilocybin at a New York treatment center in 2011.
In the wake of treatment for ovarian cancer, Bazer said, her anxiety at the prospect of its return was “eating her alive.” Under the influence of a single high dose of psilocybin, Bazer said Wednesday, she became “volcanically angry” as she visualized her cancer as a dark mass bearing down on her. With an epithet, she then saw herself throwing it off.
“I was bathed in God’s love” for hours after that, said Bazer, who describes herself as an atheist. When the psilocybin’s hallucinatory effects wore off, she said, two years of intense anxiety were simply gone.
“This is a groundbreaking result,” said Dr. George Greer, medical director of the Heffter Research Institute, the nonprofit organization that funded the two trials.
Greer suggested that the “existential anxiety” of the terminally ill is only one of many conditions that psilocybin may one day treat. Others may include treatment-resistant depression, addiction to cocaine, alcohol or tobacco, obsessive-compulsive disorder and “demoralization” in long-term survivors of HIV, he said.
Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Dr. Roland R. Griffiths, the lead author of one of the two studies, said the enduring relief provided by a single dose of psilocybin makes such treatment more akin to surgery than it does to the plodding, labor-intensive treatments that remain the mainstay of his profession.
“I really don’t think we have any models in psychiatry that look like” the effects demonstrated in the two trials, said Griffiths. “Something occurs and it’s repaired and it’s better going forward … very plausibly for more than six months,” he added. “In that sense it’s a new model.”
The publication of the two early trials, in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, marks an American return to research on the therapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs after a hiatus of 50 years.”
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