14 DAY TRIAL // In recent years, the medical community has taken quite an interest in researching psychedelics to see whether they might be used to address anxiety, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other mental illnesses when patients fail to respond to mainstream care.
True, most of these recent studies focusing on the use of psychedelics as a potential treatment for mental afflictions were small ones, researcher Evan Wood at the University of British Columbia and his colleagues explain in a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that, as opposed to being shunned, psychedelics are now steadily gaining ground. “The re-emerging paradigm of psychedelic medicine may open clinical doors and therapeutic doors long closed,” specialist Evan Wood said in an interview.
There is evidence psychedelics might, in fact, prove useful
In their report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the University of British Columbia team references a clinical trial that showed that LSD-assisted psychotherapy might help the terminally ill in that it could aid them better manage the anxiety that comes with having a terminal disease.
Then, another small study used psilocybin, the active molecule in magic mushrooms, to address alcohol addiction. The use of the compound was associated with a drop in the amount of alcohol that the study participants would consume and in the number of days it took them to overcome their addiction.
The University of British Columbia scientists also mention a study that was not long ago carried out in the US and that found evidence suggesting that the psychoactive drug MDMA has the potential to improve PTSD symptoms in people who failed to get better when offered conventional treatment.
“Continued medical research and scientific inquiry into psychedelic drugs may offer new ways to treat mental illness and addiction in patients who do not benefit from currently available treatments,” the research team wrote in the report detailing their work, as cited by EurekAlert.
Mind you, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome
Psychedelic drugs toy with cognition and perception, and induce what some call an altered state of consciousness. Currently, many psychedelics are illegal. However, some of them, such as marijuana or ayahuasca, are allowed in medical or religious contexts.
Before more psychedelics can be accepted and investigated as potential therapeutic agents, the research community must prove that studies involving such compounds can be as rigorous and as safe as other scientific experiments.