Got Ketamine in the ER to reduce my dislocated shoulder.
Fell into what addicts refer to as the "k-hole".
Felt I was falling into a complete void. All I can remember is yelling "no, no, NO!".
Highly NOT recommended.
Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
151–160 of 196 posts
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or because it's not really medicine and person specific? I've taken LSD several times in varying doses and it's never been anything more than "a really really fun time". Nothing profound, but damn fun times, the same effect as any fun memorable party Perhaps if you are looking for something profound or want a change of mindset, psychedelics might be able to help you reach it - similar to how shamans used psychedelics…
The anecdotes you give don't necessarily suggest this is person-specific. They don't refute that, in the general case, there might a good chance for a person who is depressed to have their symptoms alleviated by an LSD trip. Were you depressed (in the DSM-5 sense) any of the times you took LSD and had "a really really fun time"? A person who is not depressed obviously won't notice the mindset shift which alleviates t…
I've been "depressed" if you want to call it that based on the DSM-5 definition both before and after the LSD trips. And no not during - that's one of the benefits of fun events - you forget about depression because you're too busy with other things, at least I do anyway
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took LSD twice in my life only and it changed my outlook ever since. It's been almost 10 years. I wasn't depressed and had other benefits from it, but I can see how that experience could've fixed depression, and know of people who say it did for them even though I'm not in any hippy-like community or whatever. I think a possible reason why medical research prefers a pill that works forever for continued use is that…
Or because it's not really medicine and person specific? I've taken LSD several times in varying doses and it's never been anything more than "a really really fun time". Nothing profound, but damn fun times, the same effect as any fun memorable party Perhaps if you are looking for something profound or want a change of mindset, psychedelics might be able to help you reach it - similar to how shamans used psychedelics…
I did LSD once in the depth of grief where I was having trouble processing the loss of multiple family members. I went in with a "roll up your sleeves and clear out the garbage" mindset and it had an incredibly profound effect. Other times it was just fun, though I've also found elusive solutions to problems I've been working on, similar to dreaming.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#154As an ex-depressive, the best cure for depression I've found is a period of ketogenic dieting.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took LSD twice in my life only and it changed my outlook ever since. It's been almost 10 years. I wasn't depressed and had other benefits from it, but I can see how that experience could've fixed depression, and know of people who say it did for them even though I'm not in any hippy-like community or whatever. I think a possible reason why medical research prefers a pill that works forever for continued use is that…
It's not just about money. How do you test a medication that only needs to be taken once or twice? This is very challenging to study scientifically. Psychedelics bridge the gap between medication and therapy. A trip is not guaranteed to be therapeutic, but a trip with proper guidance it's more likely to be. How can we know which aspects of that guidance are useful, and which are superfluous? It's going to take a lot…
> How do you test a medication that only needs to be taken once or twice? This is very challenging to study scientifically.
Most vaccines you only take once, you can still test if they work or not. Same with poison antidotes and things like that. Like I said, I'm not a doctor, but the fact that it's only once doesn't seem like the problem.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does drug being approved by FDA prove its effectiveness? If you can demonstrate without reasonable doubt that it does, i.e. that it's virtually impossible for a drug to be both approved by the FDA and as effective as placebo, then that would make a good argument. In any case, any argument is better than just a "Stop spreading FUD and misinformation, you antivaxxer"-style comment.
The standard for drug approval by the FDA is that the drug has proven to be more efficient than the controls in a phase 3 clinical trial, to the satisfaction of the FDA's experts. The ESA has similar requirements, as do the NHS and other national bodies. Given this, I consider that the right prior is to believe that a drug that has been FDA, ESA, NHS and many other national bodies is actually more effective than plac…
Edit: I should have written EMA(European Medicines Agency) not ESA (the European Space Agency).
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#157Terribly misleading link-bait headline. The authors were specifically trying to determine whether the hallucinogenic effects are related to the antidepressant effects, so they blunted the hallucinogenic effects by applying ketamine while under general anesthesia. They found that in that case, there was no effect on depression. So the study showed that the hallucinations are a key part of the depression treatment, not that ketamine is no better than placebo. But now I’m sure that this will be cited by people in shitposts based on the title. Science should know better.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an issue of set and setting, and of proper education. Also, what in the world scenario have you put forth? Who is "climbing naked up power lines to steal the copper for future trips"? I've never heard that one in all the years of propaganda I've heard (like the old canard about someone taking LSD and believing after the trip that they're an orange).
You must not be familiar with the bath salt scenarios in Florida :)
Bath salts are similar to amphetamines. They have nothing to do with ketamine or other psychedelics.
You're committing the same error people did when they declared cannabis and LSD as scheduled 1 drugs in the same category as heroin.
By this line of thinking might as well avoid taking aspirine, because sounds like ketamine and is also a drug.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#159Some points:
1. Depression is measured by severity on the MADRS scale. But the Ketamine group seems to have started out less depressed than the Placebo group. Thus the placebo group had further to fall. Normally this will be adjusted away when calculating treatment effect, but seems not to have been done here. I think if it had been done ketamine would have had a slight (but highly nonsignificant) edge over placebo in the linear model.
2. Many of the patients are already on some kind of depression treatment, going into the study. This is kind of odd.
3. 5 of the patients in the ketamine group had experience with ketamine previously, but only 1 in the placebo group. Were those having experience with ketamine insensitive to it, as they seem to have become depressed again? Or did they believe they'd be insensitive to it?
4. Sample sizes are small, and usually larger sample sizes are needed to see efficacy in depression trials, even in highly efficacious treatments.
5. The so-called routine surgery may have been fairly anxiety-inducing for the patients and getting it done could have made them feel quite a lot better by itself. That effect may be stronger than any medication effect.
6. Yeah, of course, this doesn't tell anything on whether ketamine has efficacy against MDD or not. Just that it could look like the efficacy of ketamine +(extra) anesthesia is about the same as anesthesia by itself against MDD, upto 14 day post-treatment.
Re: Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for that! Having a bit of a rough morning and that was a great laugh :)
Could be another doctor that sells medical services and writes pharmaceutical prescriptions for free, as gifts. (Granting Equal Liberty, a non-delegable inalienable right that's not granted to Congress by the US Constitution either). /? Are diet and exercise more effective than pharmaceuticals (and talk therapy) https://www.google.com/search?q=are+diet+and+exercise+more+e...
You should consider re-reading the original sentence as it appears you totally missed the joke.