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Magic Mushrooms Injected into Man's Veins Started to Grow in Blood
- ktpsns 6y agoMushrooms growing in humans is nothing special at all: It is called Mycosis or Candidiasis, and there are (generally) antifungal drugs. Deliberately self infecting with fungus is something very stupid... Did he survive?
- michaelmcdonald 6y agoDidn't read the full paper, but according to a Reddit comment here they say he survives: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/comments/kvmcsb/a_trip_to_the_icu_intravenous_injection_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/comments/kvmcsb/a_trip_to...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Jeff_Brown 6y agoBut in the blood?
- sk5t 6y agoYes - and systemic fungal infections are medically serious.
- Pet_Ant 6y agoBut surely not all fungi are capable of it? The fact that this is one is capable of both surviving and producing hallucinations seems like an incredible fluke.
- TeaDrunk 6y agoIf I had to name a life form that has immense survivability in multiple environments and also causes hallucinations or other toxic-like effects in brains, I'd definitely point to fungi. Fungi is nature wilding.
- rightbyte 6y agoI wish that was true for chanterelles. Many fungi need very specific conditions.
- magneticnorth 6y agoI'm surprised that a mushroom adapted to growing in dirt was able to grow in human blood - I was under the impression that the growing medium matters quite a lot to mushrooms, and dead plant matter vs living animal matter seems like a big difference.
- cogman10 6y agoDepends on the fungus. Some are far more picky than others. Magic mushrooms, in particular, love cow dung as a growing medium. That being said, fungus tends to be nigh indestructible. The guy boiled it before injection which really speaks to just how hardy those spores can be.
- sonotmyname 6y ago> The guy boiled it before injection No, he poured boiling water over the mushrooms - big difference. Plenty of time for boiling water to cool before killing all of the spores.
- Alex3917 6y ago> Magic mushrooms, in particular, love cow dung as a growing medium. This is a myth. Most magic mushrooms grow in wood, moss, dirt, etc. The media just likes hyping up p. cubensis first whatever reason.
- capableweb 6y ago"Magic Mushrooms" is ambiguous, so yeah, anything around it is a myth. When it comes to Cubensis, it's commonly found in the places you mention. I think the "myth" you mention, is about Liberty Cap (Psilocybe semilanceata) which you can find basically anywhere in the northern hemisphere, very common all over Europe. While Liberty Caps don't directly grow in the dung, they do love cow and sheep pastures and is more commonly found there. If you're an adult, never experienced psychedelic drugs before but would like to, and live in Europe, try looking for Liberty Caps in a nearby pasture once temperatures went down to between 0-10 degrees. I'm sure you'll find some.
- ta988 6y agoLast info they give, he was still treated with antifungals
- vondur 6y agoIf I remember correctly, Anti-Fungal drugs can have some pretty serious side effects.
- compsciphd 6y agoI think the point of the OP was that its pretty common for fungi to grow on and in humans, so much that there is a well known class of drugs meant for it.
- shakezula 6y agoHad to take anti-fungal drugs for a rash. They were crazier than the rash but got rid of it. They made my eczema flare up really badly, and I was insanely sensitive to sun exposure, which is apparently a quite common side effect. Anti-fungals really are no joke.
- Kronmonker 6y agoBut in the article says they grew in his blood, which is different of what you saying.
- WraithM 6y agoThis is an instance of fungemia, which is the fungus growing in the blood. Candidiasis is a kind of fungemia caused by a particular fungus family that isn't Psilocybe Cubensis (the particular kind of magic mushrooms in this case). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungemia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungemia
- gumby 6y ago> there are (generally) antifungal drugs. I used to work in drug development specifically on anti fungal medication and they are all extremely hepatotoxic. They tend also to be pathogen specific. I doubt this fellow will live long enough to get a liver transplant.
- andor 6y agoInteresting, does this also apply to externally applied over-the-counter antifungals such as Clotrimazole or Bifonazole?
- gumby 6y agovery much so, but the dosages are low and your skin is pretty good at keeping bad stuff out. Don't eat a tube of Clorimazole or drink a bottle of Head and Shoulders.
- fallingfrog 6y agoSo wait.. are we saying that Lenin might have actually been a mushroom? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-russia.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/l...
- McDyver 6y agoNon-amp link: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-russia https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-ru...
- ajcp 6y agoam...am I a bot?!?!
- ajcp 6y agoNon-AMP link: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-russia https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-ru...
- 0goel0 6y agoBefore calling the person "stupid", read the article. He has bipolar disorder, and it's agony trying to live with it so people will be desperate to take measures to ease the pain.
- loudtieblahblah 6y agoi mean...he could have tried to drink the tea or eat the mushrooms first. i understand the desperation. i do and have great empathy for him. but unfortunately, i know have even greater empathy for him, b/c he made a really dumb choice.
- loudtieblahblah 6y agonow*
- grayhatter 6y agoDesperation doesn't make acts intelligent, just understandable. Someone who wasn't stupid would have filtered the 'tea' better before injecting it to make sure it wouldn't cause sepsis, and organ failure. Or you know maybe drink the tea instead of injecting it into a vein.
- Jtsummers 6y agoDo you understand why your comment has been downvoted? If not, it's this part: > Someone who wasn't stupid Being bipolar/depressive doesn't make someone stupid, or necessarily ignorant. Not knowing the individual I can't make any judgements regarding this. But I have experienced severe depressive phases. During those (and similarly with manic phases) you can lose control of your mind and understanding/beliefs about the world. You may act stupidly (but do not become stupid) based on how your beliefs about the world change or the general loss of control over yourself you're experiencing. You're being downvoted because there is a qualitative difference between these statements: "Someone is stupid" vs "Someone is acting stupid" or "Behaving stupidly". Though many people don't hear the difference when it's directed at them, there is a difference in sentiment and intent. The former is about the person themselves, the latter about their behavior. The former is hard to correct if true, the latter is something someone can alter about themselves (assuming they have some degree of control over their faculties and behavior).
- mc32 6y agoThis reminds me of the Lenin was a mushroom hoax[1] where Lenin, a psychedelic afficionado, consumed so much mushrooms that he turned into one. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom
- rpastuszak 6y agoLet us not forget about the fungus among us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr...
- mensetmanusman 6y agoFor science fiction writers, it is interesting to think about this on an epoch time scale as a means for creating different human-alien like hybrids. Imagine a trillion alternate earths where some percentage of humans try this but some survive and gain superior evolutionary improvements becoming a human-mushroom hybrid creature.
- philipov 6y agoReplace mushroom with virus, and maybe that's what actually happened in real life.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoBacteria too, gut biome is a thing and an interesting symbiosis. In a sense one can argue that all the processes going on in the body (thinking of e.g. white blood cells) is also a form of symbiosis.
- jtsiskin 6y agoMost people are probably already aware, but that’s likely exactly what happened with mitochondria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis
- gliese1337 6y agoA better example is the mammalian placenta. That actually was enabled by viral genes, while mitochondria developed from free-living organisms.
- 0-_-0 6y agoHmm, there was a sci-fi book about this where a billion years into the future plants have developed sentience and humans are given intelligence by symbiotic fungi. Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)
- breck 6y ago> the case highlights the need to educate the public on the dangers of using drugs in ways that they are not prescribed. Over 5,000 people died last year from antidepressant overdoses thanks to the medical establishment. I view people like mushroom guy as heroes who risk their lives to pursue leads and try and save millions while the medical establishment stumbles it's way around, being careful never to stray too far from the bank. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/895959/antidepressant-overdose-deaths-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/895959/antidepressant-ov...
- whoomp12342 6y agoLets not glorify self harm.
- breck 6y agoPretty sure I'm doing the opposite. Now I think there should be a safer, collaborative way to do biohacking, but BigPharma and the medical establishment is absolutely awful at making us healthier, so turning to them is not the answer. Source: spent a couple years in medical research.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoJesus. The only medical professional in the thread is being downvoted. Fuck this gay ass website full of fucking morons.
- edoceo 6y agoMaybe they are glorifying the scientist who did the experiment on themselves, knowing the risks? That kind of glory has been directed at other researchers.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoIt isn't heroics. It's desperation. There are ways to self experiment that make some sense and there are a lot of ways to self experiment that are a good way to get harmed with little hope of upside and describing people who get badly messed up this way as "heroes" is probably a good way to increase the odds of more people getting badly messed up. I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation as an alternative to "You are so completely and thoroughly fucked and no one will help you" but I really don't want to see something like this glorified as heroics because that will tend to get a lot of pushback against more reasonable methods of self experimentation and make it harder to find a constructive path forward.
- Ericson2314 6y agoSomeone should combine this with a placenta to prevent septic shock and then we can have the psilocybin equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-brewery_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-brewery_syndrome
- gosuri 6y agoHe prepared it for injection by drawing it through cotton before injecting the concoction into his veins. I don't think I understand this. And the fact the injected juice of boiled mushrooms made mushroom grow in his veins... It's beyond my sub-mediocre understanding.
- sandworm101 6y agoSome bit of non-dead mushroom survived his amateur purification process.
- pier25 6y agoI imagine he got the idea from heroine users. I know nothing about biology either, but I'm guessing some spores survived the boiling and simply passed through the cotton.
- ixwt 6y agoI've dipped my toes a bit into mycology. Spores can survive atmospheric boiling temperatures of water. Often a pressure cooker is used to sanitize substrate (wheat, and many other things) to grow mushrooms on. This ensures the only spores that exist on your substrate is the ones that you want.
- abyssin 6y agoI believe you're referring to a mushroom growing technique called PF Tek. But following this technique, you are supposed to wait until the substrate is done boiling and has come back to room temperature before inoculating it with spores.
- TacticalMalice 6y agoMost fungal spores have only moderate heat resistance and die at temperatures below 80 degrees Celsius. Substrate sterilization with a pressure cooker prevents bacterial growth and inactivates fungal virus that may ruin your harvest.
- dave_sullivan 6y agoShould have just drank the tea... Or if he absolutely must inject a psychedelic, then DMT.
- ErrantX 6y agoSounds like a prequel to the novel "The Girl with All the gifts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts) (great book by the way!)
- ryanmercer 6y agoIt doesn't surprise me, some fungus even thrives in radiation (a well known example being at Chernobyl) thanks to radiosynthesis.
- itronitron 6y agoHe sounds like a real 'funguy'
- deegles 6y agoThe impressive part is that doctors were able to save him!
- kyleblarson 6y agoHe sounds like a fun-guy.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoWasn’t there a ‘50s sci-fi movie? Invasion of the Mushroom People? People stranded on an island started eating random mushrooms and turned into giant human hungry mushrooms? Life imitates art?
- tim333 6y agoThis maybe "Attack of the Mushroom People Official Trailer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWNAX2DlmTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWNAX2DlmTI Go to the last 10 seconds or so for the good bit. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057295/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057295/ "Shipwrecked survivors slowly transform into mushrooms." Directed by the guy who did Godzilla.
- chmod775 6y agoThis is half a story. What treatments were tried and did the patient survive? The letter is here but I can't access it from my phone: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729602030015X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729602... Bummer.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoHe survived but was still beging treated when the report was published (11 January 2020): Initial exam was remarkable for O2 saturation on room air of 92%, heart rate of 100, and blood pressure of 75/47. He was noted to be ill-appearing with dry mucous membranes, mild cyanosis of the lips and nail beds, and jaundiced skin. His abdomen was diffusely tender to palpation without rebound or guarding. He was grossly confused and unable to meaningfully participate in an interview. Laboratory studies revealed thrombocytopenia, hyponatremia, hyperkalemia, hypochloremia, hypocalcemia, acute renal insufficiency, and acute liver injury. Cardiac workup revealed elevated cardiac enzymes and his electrocardiogram was remarkable for sinus tachycardia and early repolarization. Mr. X was then transferred to the ICU for evidence of multi-organ failure and he was started on intravenous fluids, multiple vasopressors, broad spectrum antibiotics, and anti-fungal medications. His hospital course was further complicated by septic shock and acute respiratory failure requiring intubation on hospital day two and disseminated intravascular coagulation requiring plasmapheresis. Cultures confirmed bacteremia (ultimately cultured as Brevibacillus) and fungemia (ultimately cultured as Psilocybe cubensis – i.e. the species of mushroom he had injected was now growing in his blood). He was treated for a total of 22 days in the hospital with eight of them in the ICU. At the time of writing, he is currently still being treated with a long-term regimen of daptomycin, meropenem, and voriconazole. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729602030015X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729602...
- voodooman 6y agoAldous Huxley had his wife inject him with LSD right before he died. Maybe that's where this guy got the idea. https://theplaidzebra.com/aldous-huxleys-wife-wrote-this-letter-about-injecting-him-with-lsd-right-before-he-died/ https://theplaidzebra.com/aldous-huxleys-wife-wrote-this-let...