By Alfonso Serrano — 2017
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy readies for phase III trials, a last step before possible prescription use in PTSD patients.
Read on www.scientificamerican.com
CLEAR ALL
In Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, down the hall from the cancer day unit, there's an unassuming room known simply as "The Retreat". This is where a select few volunteers are offered a unique opportunity: to confront their deepest fears under a heavy dose of a psychedelic.
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Last month, Ian McCall told HBO’s Real Sports that his 17 years in mixed martial arts led him to a painkiller addiction. “I was medicated and so numbed out from such a young age, I turned into a monster,” he told correspondent David Scott.
Now, as a handful of patients and more recently doctors and therapists have been granted exemptions to use psilocybin, the nation’s federal health agency is considering making changes to existing policies that could open the door to much more than magic mushrooms.
For hundreds or thousands of dollars, you can get certified to administer mind-altering—and some say, mind-healing—drugs.
Those of us who are professional counselors are perhaps most likely to recognize psychedelic drugs by their recreational or street names — acid, magic mushrooms, ecstasy — and to consider them to be drugs of abuse that may be dangerous to our clients.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the design of two Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA for treating PTSD, according to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is funding and leading the clinical trials.
My first psilocybin journey began around an altar in the middle of a second-story loft in a suburb of a small city on the Eastern Seaboard.
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A new generation of research into psilocybin could change how we treat numerous mental health conditions.
Study participants at some of the country's leading medical research centers are going through intense therapy and six-hour psychedelic journeys deep into their minds to do things like quit smoking and worry less.