Health
Related: About this forumResearchers are giving psychedelics to cancer patients to alleviate their despair, and it's working
by Linda Marsa
On a bone-chilling morning in February last year, Nick Fernandez bundled up and took the subway from his Manhattan apartment to the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, which is located in an art deco-style building on the Upper East Side. A 27-year-old graduate student in psychology with dark, wavy hair and delicate, bird-like features, Fernandez was excited and nervous. He had eaten a light breakfast consisting of a bagel and industrial-strength coffee in preparation for another journey he was about to take. Fernandez had signed up to be a subject in a New York University study into the use of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, to relieve mental anguish in people with terminal or recurrent cancer.
Fernandez hoped that the drug would lift the shroud of melancholy and free-floating anxiety that had enveloped him ever since he was diagnosed with leukemia in 2004 during his senior year in high school. Two and a half years of almost continuous chemotherapy vanquished the disease, but left him drained and traumatised. The former soccer star dropped more than 50 lbs from an already lean frame. It was pretty brutal and forces you to grow up fast, said Fernandez, who became intensely interested in spiritual philosophy during this period, and went on to dabble in psychedelics in college. For years afterward, every sneeze and sniffle, every day that he felt tired or out of sorts, filled him with an unshakeable dread that the cancer had returned. When he heard the study mentioned on a radio show, he immediately signed up.
Jeffrey Guss and Erin Zerbo, the two NYU psychiatrists who would quietly monitor Fernandezs progress throughout the day, greeted him when he arrived. After they took his vital signs, Fernandez changed into sweat pants and a shirt, and settled into a converted dental exam room that had been transformed into a hippie-style sanctum: tricked out with fresh flowers and fruits, a comfy sofa littered with plush pillows, Buddhist and shamanistic totems, and a high-tech sound system. Stephen Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU and the lead investigator for the study, made a brief appearance in the trip room. He was holding a glass vial that had been retrieved earlier that morning from a massive safe located inside a high-security storage room. It contained a single white capsule, and no one could be sure if it was a placebo a dummy pill or a 30 milligram dose of synthesised psilocybin.
Good luck, Ross said, handing Fernandez the pill, which he washed down with water that he drank from a large antique chalice. Then he slipped on the headphones, put on a face mask to block out the light, lay down on the couch and waited.
more
http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/psychedelics-relieve-cancer-patients-despair/
Warpy
(111,254 posts)treating alcoholism with the peyote ceremonies. I have no reason to doubt them, I've seen pee-on-themselves drunks get sober after a weekend with the tribe and manage to maintain it, probably with a few tuneups now and then from ceremonies.
I think there are a lot of things that can be treated with psychedelics if we can just kick the moralists out of our way. I'm not certain that sensory deprivation insures a good trip, though.
I know they profoundly changed me for the better back in the 60s. If I could go back and change it, there is no way I would, something my folks never understood.
phil89
(1,043 posts)Please.
Warpy
(111,254 posts)I'm just reporting what I've seen from time to time
Did you read the entire article? It's making claim to pretty much the same.
NaturalHigh
(12,778 posts)Control-Z
(15,682 posts)with, I believe, the same or same type of drugs. I could never find any active trials, though. Would love to see this become an accepted treatment.
flamingdem
(39,313 posts)but it's interesting to hear that some benefit.