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Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#121

Post by code_duck »

Fnoord wrote: post #9

Ayahuasca is a South American brew consisting of two plants one consisting of a MAOI and another of DMT (the exact plant genus differs). DMT without a MAOI gets broken down by the blood brain barrier, so its not efficient without the MAOI. The MAOI however puts dietary restrictions before the drug is being administered, and also makes the drug last vastly longer. Without the MAOI, the DMT wouldn't last long (IIRC eve…

DMT is extremely powerful and short-lived when taken via smoking or injection. It is interesting because it is an endogenous substance, and it is essentially the root of all of the related hallucinogens like Psilocybin or LSD - . Psilocybin is turned into psilocin, which is 4-hydroxy-N,N-DMT, and then DMT in your body shortly after you ingest it. Compare the chemical structure to LSD, too.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#122

Post by dang »

borski wrote: post #89
dang wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. That argument leads nowhere new and therefore nowhere interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: whoops I misread that one and broke the site rules in the process. Sorry and carry on!

dang, apologies, but the parent didn't seem to be taking this on a generic tangent. The OP has a very interesting anecdotal story to tell, related directly to a group of people that take ayahuasca for healing, and I, too, am curious about how it worked for them, specifically.

Uh oh, on a proper reading I see that you're right. Thanks for pointing it out.

I overhastily ascribed the comment to the "western medicine, you mean real medicine?" meme that doesn't belong here. Perils of pattern-matching. Retracted!

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#123

Post by hutzlibu »

hal9000xp wrote: post #35
virtualwhys wrote: post #13

> Could psychedelic drug ayahuasca have health benefits? Certainly, anecdotally I kicked a very strong 20 year coffee and sugar habit after doing a 3-day retreat in Latin America this past winter. Just happened naturally, oh, I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore. On the flip side, as the article mentions, the psychedlic tourism industry as a whole doesn't have formal safe guards in place for when the…

> I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore. In the same way, some people just stop being "addicted" to life in general after strong trip. Some of them decide to commit suicide. Just yesterday, I've been in party and one guy told story of his friend who committed suicide after such trip. The big problem with psychedelics is that you can't predict in which way a trip could change you.

"Just yesterday, I've been in party and one guy told story of his friend who committed suicide after such trip."

unpleasant theory: maybe in some cases it is even better, that a person just kills himself after a drug-triggered insight - instead of years of drowning everybody around them into their black hole - and still suicide in the end. (or worse, go amok)

But sure, I am not saying at all, that this was the case in your story. What I know is, that Psychedelics are no miracles. The "insights" you get, might be also totally wrong and misleading.

I see Drugs as "tools" for the mind. You can use them right, or wrong.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#124

Post by bigbugbag »

dnc wrote: post #74

While I was on a retreat this year in a Peruvian village, I was told by several natives (Shipibo people) that, by their tradition (some estimations are that Shipibo tribes have been using Ayahuasca for millenias), Ayahuasca is orally taken in healing ceremonies by their shamans only. Traditionally, in the normal course of a healing ceremony, it is not a patient who takes 'the medicine' or 'the plant teacher' (Ayahuas…

French director Jan Kounen made a documentary with the shipibo tribe while he was filming his blueberry adaptation.

This documentary is called other worlds and you can watch it on googletube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAaCUyCWPRU

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#125

Post by jmcgough »

leggomylibro wrote: post #18

It might be easier to find out, if rigorous research into psychedelics weren't so arbitrarily difficult compared to other medicines.

We're actually in the middle of a renaissance when it comes to psychedelic drug research. Research essentially ended after the panic in response to Leary's misuse of drugs, and the association of drugs with counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s... and then in the 80s and 90s we had the much maligned War on Drugs.

Now that it's become more widely accepted that psychedelic drugs are comparatively harmless next to opioids, there's been a HUGE amount of new psychedelic drug research. I attended Horizons (annual NYC conference on psychedelic drug research) several years ago when I was doing my neuroscience undergrad, and was really impressed with how many new studies were coming out. Interesting enough, a lot of it was focused on psilocybin (e.g. treating anxiety in end of life cancer patients), because LSD still has a bit of a bad reputation after Leary. Probably the most interesting researcher I met was a professor in Europe who was doing fMRI scans of grad students on psilocybin. Nowadays, MDMA has been receiving a lot of attention for its potential to treat those with PTSD.

Anyways, super rambling response, but there's reason to be more optimistic about psychedelic research compared to decades past.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#127

Post by ssijak »

Yes :

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161207124115.h...

http://beckleyfoundation.org/ayahuasca-stimulates-the-birth-...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v12n2/12225mab.html

http://beckleyfoundation.org/resource/exploring-the-therapeu...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4773875/

http://www.maps.org/research/ayahuasca/ayahuasca-canada

http://beckleyfoundation.org/resource/long-term-use-of-psych...

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/article/ayahuasca-may-act-agains...

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v08n3/08312rib.html

http://www.trnres.com/ebook/uploads/rafael/T_12998350813%20R...

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v06n3/06324aya.html

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v06n3/06327tak.html

http://www.trnres.com/ebook/uploads/rafael/T_12998352185%20R...

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v11n1/11125hof.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=evidence%20of%20hea...

http://www.maps.org/research-archive/html_bak/kristensen.htm...

https://qz.com/963683/the-ayahuasca-ceremony-is-going-under-...

http://www.iceers.org/docs/science/ayahuasca/ICEERS2012_Ayah...

more here : https://www.globalayahuascaproject.org/ayahuasca-research/ay...

many new research presented here also : https://www.youtube.com/user/mapsmdma/videos

etc, etc..

And aslo from anegdotal evidence answer is - YES.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#128

Post by SwellJoe »

borski wrote: post #92
SwellJoe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Certainly, anecdotally I kicked a very strong 20 year coffee and sugar habit after doing a 3-day retreat in Latin America this past winter. Just happened naturally, oh, I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore." Isn't three days about how long it takes to get over caffeine withdrawal symptoms, regardless of whether one has retreated to Latin America and taken psychedelic drugs?

That's the peak. It can last about a week.

Is there reason to believe ayahuasca shortens that period?

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#129

Post by freeloop2 »

ianai wrote: post #39
nicodjimenez wrote: post #34

Psychedelics provide a incredible jolt to the system (at least that's what they tell me) but if they do provide health benefits I believe they are short term, similar to traveling to another country or doing something unusual with your life. On the other hand, people that take psychedelics too often tend to have long term negative consequences such as anxiety or become dysfunctional in other ways. It's very hard to h…

Considering the US still throws people away for going near drugs I’d say the pendulum doesn’t need to swing further the same direction.

Most countries do this. I don't know why people always pick on the US in this regard.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#130

Post by openfuture »

computerex wrote: post #111
openfuture wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nadishodana. My reasoning: The idea of energy in the body is a very general concept that many different traditions have discovered independently (prana and qi are examples). Most people scoff at the concept but if you progress far in yoga or martial arts the metaphor makes sense and from a western perspective cells need energy to do their thing and that energy requires oxygen, nutrition and blood flow or some means o…

Are you accounting for confirmation bias in your anecdotal experiences? There is no "western" perspective, there is only reality and falsehoods. Whilst I am a proponent of meditation and mental health, I don't think prana or qi exist as real physical entities in the real world because their presence has not been detected in reproducible, controlled settings. There are many religions in the world, all of them false wh…

When I say western perspective I'm talking about the words I'm using not some different world... i.e. "cells need nutrition" ... but in meditation I feel a lot of the progress is changing your understanding of what it means to breathe. I kept (unwillingly) redefining the word until it had essentially became synonymous with the concept of "running lines of energy" (to whichever body part I wish to breath into).

Ultimately these words (prana, life energy, qi) are just metaphors to assist you with your own bodily awareness (so they are subjective) and maybe if you are some expert these metaphors can work for deciphering the body of someone else but trying to relate them to some object is not going to work. What I wish to say is that I don't consider these concepts to be objective truths in the same way I don't consider stories to be objective truths. However it does not impede my ability to learn from them.

Objective science is great for physics and is constantly improving our understanding of the human body as a machine but as individuals living in these machines we must also conduct our own subjective science, experimenting with our behavior to find how best to care for our unique body, mind and soul (a dubious concept at best but I like the rhythm of naming all three).

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