81–90 of 114 posts
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The fact that psilocybin can potentially have positive therapeutic effects in controlled environments does not mean people “microdosing” experience those effects.
It doesn't mean they don't. And it's certainly makes it reasonable that those effects could exist.
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Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24. I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontr…
Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people. For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.
Based on the anecdotes in this thread, I'm getting the impression that when you have a really bad trip, you don't make it back to tell the story in the first person. The only people left to tell are the observers.
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The thing is, psychedelics act on neurotransmitter systems that are very sensitive; a few micrograms change in dosage can be a VERY different experience.
Apparently not
Just from a look at the chart, it seems there is so a lot of room for qualitatively awesome effects from the drug itself, with the caveat being that it depends on the individual. The headline could be interpreted by some as "hey, the placebo is just as good as the real thing, losers" but this only seems likely to be true for some who are taking it, not all... ...Or am I misreading?
It seems that you missed the lower bound of the placebo group was way higher than the people that thought were not microdosing.
Unless I'm misreading, the study seems to only analyze the participant's self-evaluation of their emotions. In other words it provides no evidence for/against "boosted levels of creativity, empathy".
The thing I find hilarious is that microdosing is literally taking a dose so small that you don't actively feel or notice the effects, and this study decided to research to what degree the subjects feel the effects of a dose intended to be unnoticeable. The conclusions this "study" reached could also be arrived at by just reading what microdosing is.
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If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one... A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks. Stay safe kids.
Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open
Let’s say there’s a Facebook group of moms that enjoy using essential oils. Imagine that a study gets posted to the group showing that essential oils are ineffective at treating some disease. If I made a comment in that community about how, in my anecdotal experience, essential oils cured me of this disease, it would probably be supported over the study. Now, instead of essential oils, let’s say I did the same thing…
Are there even stories about anyone getting cured via microdosing? :o
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Apparently not
You base that judgment on a single study of N=191 that employs a non-rigorous methodology which does not control for the purity or even existence of a psychedelic substance. What if some of the participants were only able to source fake drugs, e.g. sugar cubes without any LSD in them?
The study heavily builds on self-reported belief about group membership (placebo or treatment [microdose]) for each trial day. If someone believes they are on shrooms all the time while not, and their psychological parameters improve, it's placebo. If someone produces some arbitrary pattern of on-off while actually not on anything, that's just noise for the study. That's why there's statistical significance testing.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878#s4-1
"A key limitation of the present study is the lack of verification of the nature, purity, and dosage of the psychedelic substance used for microdosing. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms were used by 23% of the sample, 14% used legal LSD analogues (such as 1P-LSD), whereas 62% sourced their substance from the black market, mostly LSD (61%). According to the Energy Control's drug checking service (Barcelona), LSD blotter adulteration rates were low during the period when our study was running: in both 2018 and 2019 blotters sold as LSD contained LSD only in 90% (n = 735) of tested samples [personal communication with M. Ventrua from EC, June 2020]. The exact quantity of active ingredient within a given microdose cannot be known with certainty; however, the positive relationship between dose and blind breaking (Figure 4) and that the threshold dose for psychoactivity was consistent with a recent controlled study (12 µg vs 13 µg; Bershad et al., 2019a) provide some reassurance. Nonetheless, our results should be not understood as clinical evidence, rather they are representative of ‘real life microdosing’."