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Sufferers of chronic conditions like fibromyalgia and cluster headaches have been raving about their ‘life-saving’ experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. Now, scientists are exploring the use of LSD and psilocybin in pain management.
In light of new findings that psychedelic drugs could transform mental health, scientists and researchers are persisting with their dedication to change our attitudes towards the medical potential of these once heavily frowned-upon compounds.
Simply put, their benefits are getting progressively harder to ignore and every day it becomes more and more apparent how game-changing it would be to rebrand and integrate them into mainstream healthcare systems.
With stigma still firmly attached, however, it’ll be a while still before we see widespread administration of LSD, DMT, and even MDMA (among others) to patients seeking treatment for anxiety, addiction, and depression.
That’s despite how far they’ve come since their hallucinogenic hippy heyday and their recent return to the media – which was marked by the cover of Newsweek’s September issue calling psilocybin the biggest advance in healing the human mind since Prozac.
So, as we wait for the era of psychedelic-assisted therapy to rear its head once and for all, let’s turn our attention to a much faster developing means of their use in modern science and one that deserves just as much hype: that of two illicit substances (both renowned for their ability to make us trip balls) being touted as an up-and-coming method of pain relief.
I’m referring here, to acid and magic mushrooms, both of which have sufferers of chronic conditions like fibromyalgia and cluster headaches raving about their ‘life-saving’ experiences with them.
‘Not only did psilocybin help to control the acute nature of the attacks, but it greatly lengthened remission times between cycles from a few months with pharmaceutical medicines to up to two years,’ says Ainslie Course, who has suffered from the latter for well over a decade.
On this note, it increasingly seems that pain management is now the next frontier for psychedelics.
And aside from psilocybin’s promising results in treating what’s often nicknamed ‘suicide headaches,’ LSD is now being investigated by start-ups for curing excruciating stiffness.
In fact, though high quality evidence remains scarce, dozens of emerging trials exploring this newfound territory are going a long way in validating the anecdotal reports that hallucinogens can play this role.
