Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study • Hacker News Board

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#171

Post by jokoon » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #26

EmilyHughes wrote: post #20

Been doing it for some months on & off, this shit is legit. Altough 0,5g has me tripping so I rarely dose above 100 milligrams. Get up early, do a workout, take cold shower, meditate and then pop a microdose shrooms, feels great. Microdosing is like steroids for meditation. Especially helpful for the programmer logic types of people like me, gets you out of your head for some time and helps you connect with your emot…

Yeah, drugs feel great, news at 11. If psychiatry was just a matter of giving people a constant buzz, it would be solved a century ago. I'm not judging you for wanting to be high all the time, I've been there myself. But be intellectually honest and call it that, at least. Because it's not some kind of psychological panacea, and I wish people would stop implying it is. And yes, I've tried it. It made me high, but gen…

Yes, those drugs can't replace SSRI

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#172

Post by jimmaswell » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #114

timthorn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's strange that we're using the term microdose, even in scientific contexts - prefixes have meanings - it should be called a decidose. Not really - its from the Greek for small, rather than a SI prefix in this context. If the suffix were quantitative then you might have a case, but we talk quite happily about microphones and microscopes. Microdose is useful because it is not conditional on a particular regular do…

While "micro" means indeed small, many people have the wrong impression that the similarly sounding "macro" must have an opposite meaning to "micro" so many incorrect terms have been coined, e.g. "macroscopic" vs. "microscopic". In reality, in Ancient Greek the opposite of "micro" was "mega", i.e. "big" (so megameter vs. micrometer was a correct addition to the metric system in 1873, like also the name Micromegas, wh…

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/macro

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#173

Post by RosanaAnaDana » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #120

EmilyHughes wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

psychoactive drugs are a whole different category. You bring your whole mental baggage with you when you take them, unlike aspirin.

Thank you for replying, but I would like to understand what "mental baggage" is and why it makes a difference. Why doesn't "mental baggage" affect aspirin? Also, just to be clear, I don't think you're saying that you have to be in a special frame of mind for psychoactive drugs to make a difference. For example, I've been told that homeopathy doesn't work for me because I "don't believe in it", but I'm pretty sure tha…

Your prior mental state, past trauma, physical state and comfort, will have a significant impact on how your experience develops.

Any neuroticism can bubble to the surface and you might find yourself obsessing over a bad habit you have instead of enjoying the mystery and pattern of the universe.

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#174

Post by jerojero » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

Enginerrrd wrote: post #127

nine_k wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this may be relevant to the usefulness of microdosing. - Assume that a microdose either improves an outcome, or does nothing. Then, averaged over a large group, such random improvements would lift the group's outcome a little. It's a microdose worth taking. - Assume that a microdose can both improve and worsen the outcome, or have no effect. If the experimental group's averaged results are indistingui…

>This, to me. means that a microdose is a gamble not worth taking. This has always been the problem with psychedelics as a therapeutic approach. It's hard to reconcile being a responsible clinician and recommending a therapy with such mixed and often-negative results. They are in charge of a person's mental well-being in a way that people evangelizing psychedelic therapy don't seem to properly appreciate. If a patien…

As far as I know experiments of CBT + psychedelics have shown very promising results for treating PTSD and certain kinds of depression, specially in people that are about to die and need to come to terms with that.

These are not microdosing experiments though. The usual way it is handled is that you get a few weeks of CBT then you get half a dose and the following week you get a full dose followed by more weeks of CBT. There is no placebo effect here that's possible because, well, it is impossible for someone to believe they have taken a full dose of pscychodelic drugs and not feel anything. But you still have a control in this case because you have a group that goes through CBT and another group that goes through CBT + drugs.

In fact, from these studies there have been very little "bad trips", mostly I guess because you have the half-dose session and then the full dose session in a very controlled environment and so on. These experiments are obviously done quite responsibly.

So I think you're mixing things up a little bit and I would suggest doing a little more research in the topic. Psychodelic therapy, at least the kind that is being explored seriously is not really done through microdosing.

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#175

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #167

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, drugs feel great, news at 11. If psychiatry was just a matter of giving people a constant buzz, it would be solved a century ago. I'm not judging you for wanting to be high all the time, I've been there myself. But be intellectually honest and call it that, at least. Because it's not some kind of psychological panacea, and I wish people would stop implying it is. And yes, I've tried it. It made me high, but gen…

> And yes, I've tried it. It made me high, but generally I was far less productive than I would be taking stimulants for my ADHD instead. I had some coworkers try microdosing several years ago. They were convinced that they were smarter and more productive on those days. Meanwhile, the rest of us could clearly see that they were just operating slower than normal and had a weirdly positive response to even slight achi…

Yeah not sure what the source of this homeopathic type logic is. It's very strange, and applies to basically nothing else. So I'd like some pretty extraordinary evidence before I believe that taking deliberately ineffective doses of anything has any effect. And, good luck producing a dose-response curve...

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#176

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #150

EmilyHughes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that. there is no clear line of course, but most people would agree that a beer influences them more than aspirin or an antibiothic.

I see. To me, it is not very useful to talk about "psychoactive" substances, since sugar, caffeine, or nicotine are also "psychoactive". I would recommend the term "entheogens" in your original post.

Entheogen is even worse, that specifically means psychoactive drugs used for religious purposes. And guess what: nicotine is an entheogen!

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#177

Post by monktastic1 » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

j_m_b wrote: post #122

I'm sort of surprised they didn't extract/synthesize psilocybin directly and administer that. Decades ago, I grew a few batches of P. Cubensis. Even amongst mushrooms from the same rice cake, the dosage wildly varies. You could have a "trip" from a tiny mushroom or eat a handful of duds.

One improvement is to take the entire batch and blend it up, so that at least doses from that batch are consistent. Still doesn't help inter-batch consistency for scientific studies, of course.

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#178

Post by jack_pp » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

Considering micro-dosing either helps you or at worst it has no bad effects I don't see why you wouldn't try it if you had access to it and the legal aspect didn't hinder you.

Personally and subjectively it did help me, I wasn't depressed but it did help with creativity and learning, I gained like 150-200 points on chess.com just from playing and reviewing games (rarely)

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#179

Post by jamiek88 » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

zosima wrote: post #123

nine_k wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this may be relevant to the usefulness of microdosing. - Assume that a microdose either improves an outcome, or does nothing. Then, averaged over a large group, such random improvements would lift the group's outcome a little. It's a microdose worth taking. - Assume that a microdose can both improve and worsen the outcome, or have no effect. If the experimental group's averaged results are indistingui…

If the natural variability is high enough, then any effect will be hidden by it. Sure, we can say with some certainty that the effect of microdosing on most scales are not that huge. But we wouldn't have expected very large effect sizes anyway, because they are almost unheard off. (Unless the subjects become really severely impaired) And there may still be meaningful treatment effects, at least judging by current sta…

Quite confident but utterly wrong.

As has been pointed out to you several times.

Science does not and cannot work by cherry picking.

Re: Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

#180

Post by tssva » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #75

henriquemaia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an uncharitable reading. OP is just sharing what works with her/him. Which is ok. From what I understood from your comment, for you it doesn't. Which is ok too, as now you know yourself a bit better. Two personal experiments with very different outcomes. There's no need for moral judgments either way.

Does "if it works for you" also go for things like aspirin, antihistamines, antihypertensives, antibiotics, etc? I've never heard anyone say "if aspirin works for you then take it, but it doesn't work for me". I've only heard this kind of thing said for things like homeopathy, astrology, accupuncture, osteopathy, and microdosing, of course. Hence, I'm very skeptical. [Edit: OK, I've heard people say that aspirin does…

It is quite common for different people have differing responses to medications like aspirin, antihistamines, and antihypertensives. For example my brother and I both have bad seasonal allergies. My brother takes Claritin for his and gets relief from the worse of his allergies when he does. If I take Claritin it doesn't reduce the impact of my allergies to any noticable degree. If I take Zyrtec my allergy symptoms are mostly eliminated.