I spoke with the researchers on this particular study a few months ago at a local conference. This study is interesting to me due to a few factors: Ibogaine is almost never studied in the medical...
I spoke with the researchers on this particular study a few months ago at a local conference. This study is interesting to me due to a few factors:
Ibogaine is almost never studied in the medical context because a small number of individuals experience an adverse reaction involving the heart which can result in death
The researchers theorized you could counter this rare but life threatening side effect by co-administering magnesium, suggesting that afib is behind the heart-related problems and that ibogaine may cause some kind of imbalance with Ca, K, and Na.
Ibogaine is a schedule 1 controlled drug in the US meaning that it cannot be studied for medical purposes. Unlike MDMA and psilocybin which have had the power of MAPS arguing for decades for the use in research and allowing medical research despite the scheduling status of the drugs, ibogaine has not received this special status, meaning that the researchers had to have a rather unique study design in which patients were recruited in one country and sent to another country for treatment. I've quite literally never seen a study do this, let alone one which is working with a population that is federal in nature (veterans) and is a fantastically creative way of ensuring medical research can continue amongst draconian law.
Also, here's a direct link to the article in nature
Many people don't know this, but there is a small industry of people using this drug to cure heroin addiction. Young American men travel to Mexico to do this. A battle rapper named Holohan did it...
Many people don't know this, but there is a small industry of people using this drug to cure heroin addiction.
Young American men travel to Mexico to do this.
A battle rapper named Holohan did it and claims to have cured his heroin addiction entirely.
I was curious what the difference is between this substance and psilocybin, it looks like this substance they checked how it affected some kind of "World Health Organization Disability Assessment...
Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have discovered that the plant-based psychoactive drug ibogaine, when combined with magnesium to protect the heart, safely and effectively reduces PTSD, anxiety and depression and improves functioning in veterans with TBI.
Since 1970 ibogaine has been designated as a Schedule I drug, preventing its use within the U.S., but clinics in both Canada and Mexico offer legal ibogaine treatments.
I was curious what the difference is between this substance and psilocybin, it looks like this substance they checked how it affected some kind of "World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule" metric, which I assume is used to calculate rate of TBI.
The referenced study does acknowledge other psychedelic drugs:
Although outside the context of TBI and veterans, our findings are consistent with previous studies suggesting benefits of treatment with psychedelic substances across several psychiatric disorders. Recent studies of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-facilitated psychotherapy, for example, showed promise in the treatment of PTSD. Similarly, psilocybin has demonstrated improvements in depression, substance use and anxiety. Other substances such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and ayahuasca have also shown notable improvements in depression and anxiety for most patients.
I hate to sound like a "hippie druggie," but would it not be possible that psilocybin aka magic mushroom, which are cheap to grow and relatively safe, could possibly have similar effects on that "World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule"? Mainly because of the concern that another user mentioned about "Ibogaine is almost never studied in the medical context because a small number of individuals experience an adverse reaction involving the heart which can result in death", which I have not heard of happening with psilocybin.
Overall though, this is good news and interesting to learn about. I hope we make more progress on this front.
Psilocybin and psilocin are both drugs which have relatively limited receptor profiles in that they almost exclusively act on serotonin receptors. Ibogaine, on the other hand, has a wide profile...
Psilocybin and psilocin are both drugs which have relatively limited receptor profiles in that they almost exclusively act on serotonin receptors. Ibogaine, on the other hand, has a wide profile of receptors it interacts with and has been used in alternative medicine as a treatment for drug addiction for some time. Notably, a high number of the individuals enrolled in this study had substance abuse problems as well, and of important note their treatment with ibogaine showed significant reduction of scores on clinical addiction scales. Ultimately the simple answer to your question is that medical research on compounds which are novel in some fashion is extremely important because it helps us to understand these receptors better, how they interact with humans and their behavior, and how the interaction between different receptors can provide synergistic or antagonistic effects.
I think it's also very important to draw a distinction between a symptom, a disease state, and the underlying mechanism. Disease states are loosely categorized based on a set of symptoms - not everyone who has depression has a depressed mood, for example, but everyone who has clinical depression has at least a certain number of the symptoms/characteristics of this disease state. While these symptoms can at times be linked directly to the underlying mechanism, most of the time there are multiple possible underlying mechanisms for the symptom. That is to say, being sad doesn't mean your serotonin is out of whack, it could be attributable to many potential factors and mechanisms of action. Given all of this it's extremely important in medicine to have multiple drugs to treat a single disease state, as the mechanism for each individual patient's disease may vary from others and need a different treatment.
Despite some overlap in subjective effects, ibogaine does have significantly different pharmacodynamics (i.e. differing targets, activities) compared to common psychedelic drugs like psilocybin...
Despite some overlap in subjective effects, ibogaine does have significantly different pharmacodynamics (i.e. differing targets, activities) compared to common psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD. It's also got more disassociative elements, mainly mediated by NMDA activity. Other disassociatives, such as ketamine, have also been shown to have substantial medical benefits in similar populations as this study.
For conditions like these, we need a variety of tools at our disposal. What works well for some is ineffective for others. If these researchers have well and truly identified and nullified the mechanism of the adverse reaction, then perhaps ibogaine itself could be more safely studied going forward.
I spoke with the researchers on this particular study a few months ago at a local conference. This study is interesting to me due to a few factors:
Also, here's a direct link to the article in nature
Many people don't know this, but there is a small industry of people using this drug to cure heroin addiction.
Young American men travel to Mexico to do this.
A battle rapper named Holohan did it and claims to have cured his heroin addiction entirely.
He made this very moving song about his struggles with heroin if anyone is interested. Pretty heavy but man, he can tell a tale.
I was curious what the difference is between this substance and psilocybin, it looks like this substance they checked how it affected some kind of "World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule" metric, which I assume is used to calculate rate of TBI.
The referenced study does acknowledge other psychedelic drugs:
I hate to sound like a "hippie druggie," but would it not be possible that psilocybin aka magic mushroom, which are cheap to grow and relatively safe, could possibly have similar effects on that "World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule"? Mainly because of the concern that another user mentioned about "Ibogaine is almost never studied in the medical context because a small number of individuals experience an adverse reaction involving the heart which can result in death", which I have not heard of happening with psilocybin.
Overall though, this is good news and interesting to learn about. I hope we make more progress on this front.
Psilocybin and psilocin are both drugs which have relatively limited receptor profiles in that they almost exclusively act on serotonin receptors. Ibogaine, on the other hand, has a wide profile of receptors it interacts with and has been used in alternative medicine as a treatment for drug addiction for some time. Notably, a high number of the individuals enrolled in this study had substance abuse problems as well, and of important note their treatment with ibogaine showed significant reduction of scores on clinical addiction scales. Ultimately the simple answer to your question is that medical research on compounds which are novel in some fashion is extremely important because it helps us to understand these receptors better, how they interact with humans and their behavior, and how the interaction between different receptors can provide synergistic or antagonistic effects.
I think it's also very important to draw a distinction between a symptom, a disease state, and the underlying mechanism. Disease states are loosely categorized based on a set of symptoms - not everyone who has depression has a depressed mood, for example, but everyone who has clinical depression has at least a certain number of the symptoms/characteristics of this disease state. While these symptoms can at times be linked directly to the underlying mechanism, most of the time there are multiple possible underlying mechanisms for the symptom. That is to say, being sad doesn't mean your serotonin is out of whack, it could be attributable to many potential factors and mechanisms of action. Given all of this it's extremely important in medicine to have multiple drugs to treat a single disease state, as the mechanism for each individual patient's disease may vary from others and need a different treatment.
Despite some overlap in subjective effects, ibogaine does have significantly different pharmacodynamics (i.e. differing targets, activities) compared to common psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD. It's also got more disassociative elements, mainly mediated by NMDA activity. Other disassociatives, such as ketamine, have also been shown to have substantial medical benefits in similar populations as this study.
For conditions like these, we need a variety of tools at our disposal. What works well for some is ineffective for others. If these researchers have well and truly identified and nullified the mechanism of the adverse reaction, then perhaps ibogaine itself could be more safely studied going forward.