171–180 of 196 posts
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If you're gonna accuse someone of posting lies and FUD, at least have some sort of reference [0] to point to, please. Otherwise you're just participating in a "uh-huh!", "nuh-uh!" pissing contest. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
No one needs to reference decades mature globally established best practice.
Terribly 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…
> They gave volunteers ketamine while they were under general anesthesia, theoretically preventing the participants from going on a trip. Maybe it's the trip that helps.
I see so many studies trying to somehow distill trippy drugs into an isolated, side-effect free, take a pill and get back to work treatment. Maybe there's something to be found there, would be huge, but my hope is that we don't waste all the will and funding down this path without more fully exploring the path where we admit that yes, the trip helps, and we'll just need to deal with the lack of blinding.
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The burden of proof is on the person making the initial claim, ie that SSRIs are no better than placebo.
If I say there's no teacup flying in orbit of Saturn, is the burden of proof on me? Or on the person telling me to stop spreading FUD and misinformation, because everyone knows there's a teacup orbiting Saturn?
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Do it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuowang
I've always been very interested in taoism, but never took it much further than reading the Tao Te Ching and a few other related things like The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. This form of meditation seems exactly right for me. Do you have any recommendations for how to pursue it? Thanks.
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> Depression can have many different causes, Then why this singular focus on ketamine and psychedelics all the sudden? If it has many different causes why focus on activating a single serotonin receptor? > and people have many different biological variables, so it should not be surprising that a given treatment isn't 100% effective. Yes, and that is why we need to stop recommending mediation to people without knowing…
> Then why this singular focus on ketamine and psychedelics all the sudden? If it has many different causes why focus on activating a single serotonin receptor? Because it does work really well for a lot of people for whom other things don't work really well. Why would that be controversial?
What you are really hearing is the massive marketing that is flooding the airwaves so some corporations can make a profit off of sick people and when it does not work they can say "Oh well" and walk away with the money and all you get is rebound depression.
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In which case, the headline would be correct. If ketamine can only treat depression by inducing a trip, then it's the trip that treats the depression, not the ketamine, which suggests future avenues of research into trips themselves, possibly excluding ketamine altogether.
Isn't this true of most drugs? It's not the NSAID that treated the pain, it's the reduction in inflammation...
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I see so many studies trying to somehow distill trippy drugs into an isolated, side-effect free, take a pill and get back to work treatment. Maybe there's something to be found there, would be huge, but my hope is that we don't waste all the will and funding down this path without more fully exploring the path where we admit that yes, the trip helps, and we'll just need to deal with the lack of blinding.
The problem is real, though. Drugs with overt recreational effects very frequently distract the patient from the therapeutic effect in unproductive ways. The recreational effects generally disappear quickly as tolerance develops, which can give patients the false impression that the medication “stopped working”. A common example would be ADHD stimulants, where the early stimulating and mood-boosting effects disappear…
I'm not sure, isn't that kind of what's being shown by this study? Or like, is there levels of disassociation that you're distinguishing between? Are you able to enumerate those levels for those of us who are unfamiliar with disassociation?
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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.
How do you measure depression? How do you know what changed it, or how much?
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If you're gonna accuse someone of posting lies and FUD, at least have some sort of reference [0] to point to, please. Otherwise you're just participating in a "uh-huh!", "nuh-uh!" pissing contest. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
There's a simple reference that doesn't even need to be quoted: SSRIs are approved for treating depression in all major countries on Earth. And this approval required they pass phase 3 clinical trials, demonstrating effectiveness over placebo. Also, given that they are typically preferred over other classes of anti-depressants (try-cyclics etc), we also know they have demonstrated better effectiveness than other drug…