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Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: moonflower on May 20, 2012, 11:38 pm

Title: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: moonflower on May 20, 2012, 11:38 pm
anyone who is familiar with shamanism knows that psychedelics have incredible healing potential, but do any of you have personal experience with this? i ask because this is the path that's been chosen for me. to clarify, i have been sick for a decade. doctors are no help, as no one really understands it... and besides, western medicine isn't concerned with healing anyway. through psychedelics, i have overcome all my emotional issues (severe depression, ptsd, social anxiety, etc.) and now i'm working on the physical aspect. i'm learning more about my mind and body than i ever have before, and becoming aware of the root causes of my illness. i just wanted to express my gratitude. for without silk road, i would not be healing... what more could i ask for? peace and love to all my fellow travelers. :)
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: war on May 20, 2012, 11:55 pm
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary. 
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Gary Oak on May 21, 2012, 12:04 am
Personally, I'd say I've really gotten to know my body better through using LSD and DMT. I wouldn't exactly say the drugs themselves have helped me medically, but they've given me appreciation for life and the motivation to improve myself. I eat healthier, I exercise more, and I've made some solid connections to those I love. If used with the right mindset, I honestly believe psychedelics have the power to heal both body and soul. :)
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: 4l| on May 21, 2012, 12:21 am
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary.

Er... I really, really doubt this is what happened.  Either the guy never had cancer, or he still does and doesn't realize it.  Did they interview any of the doctors involved in his diagnosis?
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Gary Oak on May 21, 2012, 12:31 am
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary.

Er... I really, really doubt this is what happened.  Either the guy never had cancer, or he still does and doesn't realize it.  Did they interview any of the doctors involved in his diagnosis?

Agreed, this I find hard to believe. There's no way he had a legitimate form of cancer! :o
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Tryptamine on May 21, 2012, 01:02 am
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary.

Er... I really, really doubt this is what happened.  Either the guy never had cancer, or he still does and doesn't realize it.  Did they interview any of the doctors involved in his diagnosis?

Agreed, this I find hard to believe. There's no way he had a legitimate form of cancer! :o

It sounds plausible to me. Why are you so quick to discount it? If I told you I 'cured' someone's cancer by injecting them repeatedly with toxic amounts of taxol, would you believe me? What makes pacific yew extract medicinally 'legitimate' but mimosa hostilis/paganum harmala not? Double blind placebo controlled studies?


OP, you'll like this:

http://leftinthedark.org.uk/sites/default/files/Left%20in%20the%20Dark%20free%20edition.pdf

Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: neckdanby on May 21, 2012, 05:59 pm
Quote
It sounds plausible to me. Why are you so quick to discount it? If I told you I 'cured' someone's cancer by injecting them repeatedly with toxic amounts of taxol, would you believe me? What makes pacific yew extract medicinally 'legitimate' but mimosa hostilis/paganum harmala not? Double blind placebo controlled studies?


Sometimes my viewpoints are humbled, this is one of those.
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: 4l| on May 21, 2012, 09:15 pm
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary.

Er... I really, really doubt this is what happened.  Either the guy never had cancer, or he still does and doesn't realize it.  Did they interview any of the doctors involved in his diagnosis?

Agreed, this I find hard to believe. There's no way he had a legitimate form of cancer! :o

It sounds plausible to me. Why are you so quick to discount it? If I told you I 'cured' someone's cancer by injecting them repeatedly with toxic amounts of taxol, would you believe me? What makes pacific yew extract medicinally 'legitimate' but mimosa hostilis/paganum harmala not? Double blind placebo controlled studies?

Yeah, well-run clinical trials would be a good start.  Also some explanation or observation of the mechanism of action would be nice, which I'd assume exists for taxol (without knowing anything about it specifically).

I am also skeptical because the source is a documentary on Vimeo.  If a link is provided I'll watch, but one guy claiming that it happened isn't going to do a lot to convince me.  Another possibility is that he was concurrently receiving some legitimate form of medical treatment, but failed to mention it or recognize it as the true cause of his remission.

Also, how many times have you seen christian televangelists claiming to have cured someone of their cancer?  Or natural cures types that have infomercials on at 3:00 am?  Lots of people claim that lots of things cure cancer, but when they're wrong or lying, it becomes a particularly harmful piece of disinformation.

Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Tryptamine on May 21, 2012, 10:34 pm
There's a documentary on Ayahuasca on Vimeo where the guy talks about taking Ayahuasca and becoming a spirit and going inside and getting rid of his cancer (i think it was cancer).  Before he did this ritual doctors told him he would die in 2 weeks.  Really, really interesting documentary.

Er... I really, really doubt this is what happened.  Either the guy never had cancer, or he still does and doesn't realize it.  Did they interview any of the doctors involved in his diagnosis?

Agreed, this I find hard to believe. There's no way he had a legitimate form of cancer! :o

It sounds plausible to me. Why are you so quick to discount it? If I told you I 'cured' someone's cancer by injecting them repeatedly with toxic amounts of taxol, would you believe me? What makes pacific yew extract medicinally 'legitimate' but mimosa hostilis/paganum harmala not? Double blind placebo controlled studies?

Yeah, well-run clinical trials would be a good start.  Also some explanation or observation of the mechanism of action would be nice, which I'd assume exists for taxol (without knowing anything about it specifically).

I am also skeptical because the source is a documentary on Vimeo.  If a link is provided I'll watch, but one guy claiming that it happened isn't going to do a lot to convince me.  Another possibility is that he was concurrently receiving some legitimate form of medical treatment, but failed to mention it or recognize it as the true cause of his remission.

Also, how many times have you seen christian televangelists claiming to have cured someone of their cancer?  Or natural cures types that have infomercials on at 3:00 am?  Lots of people claim that lots of things cure cancer, but when they're wrong or lying, it becomes a particularly harmful piece of disinformation.

'well run clinical trials' do not bestow a substance with biological activity. They are, at best, rough estimates of the effects that are being studied, but more often are merely multi-million dollar advertisements for pharmaceutical products intended to discourage legitimate criticism. In the US, pharmaceutical companies are allowed by the FDA to select the studies they would like to submit when a drug is being approved; out of 10 studies, the 2 that showed a positive effect may be published, and nobody would ever see the 8 studies that showed no effect or adverse effects.
As for mechanism of action, this usually amounts to testing whether or not the substance in question binds to the proteins being studied, and quantifying the changes in amounts of metabolites being studied. The mechanism of action is an idealized abstraction, which justifies names like "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor" or "COX2 inhibitor" or "HMG-CoA reducatase inhibitor" as if these were precisely targeted, surgical interventions rather than arbitrary compounds that were empirically determined to have certain effects.  Every substance has innumerable effects on living systems, by binding to many sites on many proteins with varying affinities, and by reacting with other metabolites. They do not bind to a single 'receptor' like a lock and key and then disappear having finished their job, as is implied or explicitly stated by pharmaceutical researchers. The reality almost never matches the theory; but that's not a problem for them, since anything that isn't explained by the mechanism of action becomes a 'side effect', even if it occurs more frequently than the desired effects. 'Skeptics' who blindly praise modern medicine and denigrate anything they perceive as 'alternative' vastly underestimate the role of drug advertising and biological dogma in constructing their mental realities, and it is they who spread (and have always spread) disinformation.

That said, I haven't seen the documentary, and I'm not exactly sure what's being proposed, but MHRB is inconceivably powerful, and saying its impossible because you don't know how it would work, or because it's not amenable to double-blind-placebo-controlled studies, is nothing more than an embellished appeal to ignorance.
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: 4l| on May 21, 2012, 11:40 pm
'well run clinical trials' do not bestow a substance with biological activity. They are, at best, rough estimates of the effects that are being studied, but more often are merely multi-million dollar advertisements for pharmaceutical products intended to discourage legitimate criticism. In the US, pharmaceutical companies are allowed by the FDA to select the studies they would like to submit when a drug is being approved; out of 10 studies, the 2 that showed a positive effect may be published, and nobody would ever see the 8 studies that showed no effect or adverse effects.

I am aware that the FDA operates this way, and I disagree with it too.  I am not claiming that the FDA carries out well run clinical trials, or that they interpret the data from these trials correctly.


That said, I haven't seen the documentary, and I'm not exactly sure what's being proposed, but MHRB is inconceivably powerful, and saying its impossible because you don't know how it would work, or because it's not amenable to double-blind-placebo-controlled studies, is nothing more than an embellished appeal to ignorance.

I didn't say it's impossible, I said that I really doubt it, because right now no one has presented any evidence that MHRB treats cancer. 

What is your reason for thinking that the compounds in MHRB are more likely to treat cancer than any other random compounds?  That they are "powerful"?  How would you propose to establish that MHRB is effective at treating cancer if not by a controlled study?



Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Tryptamine on May 22, 2012, 12:14 am
'well run clinical trials' do not bestow a substance with biological activity. They are, at best, rough estimates of the effects that are being studied, but more often are merely multi-million dollar advertisements for pharmaceutical products intended to discourage legitimate criticism. In the US, pharmaceutical companies are allowed by the FDA to select the studies they would like to submit when a drug is being approved; out of 10 studies, the 2 that showed a positive effect may be published, and nobody would ever see the 8 studies that showed no effect or adverse effects.

I am aware that the FDA operates this way, and I disagree with it too.  I am not claiming that the FDA carries out well run clinical trials, or that they interpret the data from these trials correctly.


That said, I haven't seen the documentary, and I'm not exactly sure what's being proposed, but MHRB is inconceivably powerful, and saying its impossible because you don't know how it would work, or because it's not amenable to double-blind-placebo-controlled studies, is nothing more than an embellished appeal to ignorance.

I didn't say it's impossible, I said that I really doubt it, because right now no one has presented any evidence that MHRB treats cancer. 

What is your reason for thinking that the compounds in MHRB are more likely to treat cancer than any other random compounds?  That they are "powerful"?  How would you propose to establish that MHRB is effective at treating cancer if not by a controlled study?

I have no reason to think the compounds in MHRB are 'likely' to 'treat cancer' than 'random compounds'. I also have no reason to believe that whoever claimed that ayahuasca enabled them to overcome their cancer must have been mistaken or lying simply because I hadn't heard of it before. Why do you think ayahuasca would be less effective at 'treating cancer' than any 'random compound'?
I think something like ayahuasca is not amenable to study in a clinical or lab setting; if you gave MHRB and PH to random, naive patients in a hospital the results would not reach statistical significance. That does not discount the possibility that in another set and setting, or with years of experience, the results may not be different.
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: The Romantic Era on May 22, 2012, 02:07 am
i Love you, moonflower
Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: 4l| on May 22, 2012, 02:17 am
I have no reason to think the compounds in MHRB are 'likely' to 'treat cancer' than 'random compounds'. I also have no reason to believe that whoever claimed that ayahuasca enabled them to overcome their cancer must have been mistaken or lying simply because I hadn't heard of it before. Why do you think ayahuasca would be less effective at 'treating cancer' than any 'random compound'?

I don't think it would necessarily be less effective, I don't think anything about it at all since there is no evidence one way or the other. 

I use the word 'doubt' for two reasons.  First, it's just statistically unlikely that a substance picked at random (MHRB in this case) will end up being effective as a treatment.  I'm not doubting that it's possible, I am doubting the positive claim that MHRB cures cancer.  And second, people often have ulterior motives when they make claims like "X cures cancer".  That's all.


Title: Re: psychedelics = medicine for the soul
Post by: Horizons on May 22, 2012, 02:30 am
Good vibes, moonflower.

I have psychedelics to thank for showing me how ridiculous the rat race is, a realization that counter-intuitively made me better at it than I was before. At the same time, it made me a lot less stressful about it.

The net result, after a few years of turbulence, is that I work fewer hours, make more money and donate a good chunk of it to charitable institutions.  8)

MDMA was also very helpful in my life, as it helped me to understand emotions, mine and others', a lot better, and thus get along better with myself and my fellow mammals. I say "mammals" instead of just "humans" because after rolling with three cats and two dogs, you will gain a certain mastery of non-verbal communication that really helps getting along with all sorts of furry critters.