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Microdosing study shows the placebo effect of taking psychelics
- thebean11 6y agoany non paywalled link?
- Nbox9 6y agoTo the people illegally micro-dosing: Why would you open yourself up to the liability of committing a felony crime for a placebo effect? The risk vs reward doesn’t seem to pan out for me.
- bichiliad 6y agoPer the article, there seems to be a lot of value in doing something that you expect will improve your life, even if the actual effect is indiscernible from a placebo. (Plus, this ignores non-microdosing, which is certainly not placebo effect.)
- Tenoke 6y agoI think you greatly exaggerate the risk and ignore that people who do it don't think it's placebo.
- thatswrong0 6y agoYeah you’d have to be pretty arrogant or careless to actually get in trouble for this
- felonDosing 6y agoMicro-dosing also feels quite nice. It has a major mood-brightening effect. It's the main reason I do it. I don't even think it improves work at all. But if you're happier you might do better work.
- ketamine__ 6y agoHow's the comedown? Any anxiety?
- alacombe 6y agoPsychedelics are not all controlled substances, eg 1P-LSD is generally legal in North America.
- ketamine__ 6y agoIt's a big risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
- the_only_law 6y agoEven ignoring the federal analogue act, they can still hold you in jail while they “wait for testing” of whatever substance.
- alacombe 6y agoNorth America != United States.
- ketamine__ 6y agoAh, "generally" excludes a country with 330 million people. Got it.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThe hype around microdosing has been off the charts in the past few years. The claimed benefits range from improving mood to treating depression to improving cognition. As this study shows, that hype might actually explain some of the effect. People primed to think they were microdosing claimed to feel significant improvements, even when receiving placebo.
- hddu 6y agoIt's a felony to store ANY pills outside of their original container.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 6y agoI know a lot of people who have done psychedelics and I don’t think any of them have ever been prosecuted for possessing them. I’ve only ever heard of that happening to dealers. In my head, possession is in the same category as speeding or downloading movies. I don’t have statistics to back this up, and it could be a reflection of the privilege of my social group.
- lc3sim 6y agoI tried micro-dosing for a short time in my past, but gave it up for reasons not important here. My only parent, my mother, gave me only one rule that I had to live by. I had to abide by the law, no matter what it was or if I disagreed with it. She simply just did not want me to spend my life in jail and assured me that I would feel the same way by telling me how terrible jail is (which I did). I say this because I sympathize with your standpoint. I could have written your comment in a past life. In short, I would ask that you empathize with the concept that one's belief might exist outside the law. A little more to say... the variables at play here have a wide range of interpretation on a personal level. I infer from your comment that you perceive the risk to be high. I perceived my risk associated with microdosing, including the risk of being shipped to prison, to be low. Before microdosing, I had undergone a macrodose. That macrodosing session was a positive for me. As such, the reward and exploration of a microdose was enticing enough for me to try it.
- Bakary 6y agoThe type of person to microdose is generally from a demographic unlikely to be arrested, investigated, or convicted.
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y agoYou're overstating the legal status of simple possession. Only in some US states is possession for personal use a felony. In some it is a misdemeanor or an infraction. In some legal jurisdictions these drugs are perfectly legal and are sold at retail.
- bichiliad 6y ago> Meanwhile, those who consumed the drugs but thought they were taking a placebo experienced no significant increase in wellbeing. It's wild that there was a part of this study in which people were told that they weren't taking a psychadelic, but they were taking a psychadelic.
- theturtletalks 6y agoMKUltra vibes
- l0b0 6y agoI'm just going off of the title, but I would expect microdosing to naturally involve only small effects.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoThe thing is, psychedelics act on neurotransmitter systems that are very sensitive; a few micrograms change in dosage can be a VERY different experience.
- ranguna 6y agoApparently not
- eurasiantiger 6y agoYou base that judgment on a single study of N=191 that employs a non-rigorous methodology which does not control for the purity or even existence of a psychedelic substance. What if some of the participants were only able to source fake drugs, e.g. sugar cubes without any LSD in them?
- pas 6y agoHow would that invalidate the results? The study heavily builds on self-reported belief about group membership (placebo or treatment [microdose]) for each trial day. If someone believes they are on shrooms all the time while not, and their psychological parameters improve, it's placebo. If someone produces some arbitrary pattern of on-off while actually not on anything, that's just noise for the study. That's why there's statistical significance testing.
- mistrial9 6y agodoesn't the typo in the title here, say it all?
- seizethecheese 6y agoNo
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _Microft 6y agoAnother article on this, not paywalled: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/02/microdosing-lsd-benefits-might-be-placebo-effect-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/02/microdosing-... The actual study is here: https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878 https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878
- cmeacham98 6y agoUnless I'm misreading, the study seems to only analyze the participant's self-evaluation of their emotions. In other words it provides no evidence for/against "boosted levels of creativity, empathy".
- wyqydsyq 6y agoThe thing I find hilarious is that microdosing is literally taking a dose so small that you don't actively feel or notice the effects, and this study decided to research to what degree the subjects feel the effects of a dose intended to be unnoticeable. The conclusions this "study" reached could also be arrived at by just reading what microdosing is.
- asidiali 6y agoSo then why microdose if there is no measurable effect?
- wyqydsyq 6y agoBecause the only things it does tangibly effect are your mood and mental perspective, things that are entirely subjective and do not have concrete metrics that can be used for measurement, especially when comparing that between different subjects. The only really noticeable effect of microdosing is at the end of the day you might notice you feel it was a really good day and you're happy. The thing is though this isn't distinguishable from someone simply having a good day and feeling happy. The data collected in this study would have essentially been irrelevant noise, based more on the aggregate of day-to-day experiences of the subjects rather than whether or not they received a placebo. Microdosing inherently is indistinguishable from a placebo effect as far as empirical measurements go. If the participants who received a microdose were able to somehow measure their experience with a different result to those in the control group, then they weren't microdosing, they were actually tripping.
- ranguna 6y agoWith that logic, we can disregard any statistical study that we don't like as "noise"
- themodelplumber 6y agoJust from a look at the chart, it seems there is so a lot of room for qualitatively awesome effects from the drug itself, with the caveat being that it depends on the individual. The headline could be interpreted by some as "hey, the placebo is just as good as the real thing, losers" but this only seems likely to be true for some who are taking it, not all... ...Or am I misreading?
- ranguna 6y agoIt seems that you missed the lower bound of the placebo group was way higher than the people that thought were not microdosing.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoBut the study does not control that there actually were any active psychedelic substances. For all we know, the active group could all have been on a placebo.
- sxp 6y agoThere is a similar effect when consuming alcoholic drinks in social settings: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-020-00321-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-020-00321-0 > “Our study confirms the benefits of microdosing,..." This is really horrible phrasing since normal the normal usage of the term "benefits" in this context would mean benefits relative to a placebo. In this experiments the benefits are zero since the LSD and control pills had the same effects.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThere are arguments that the placebo effect plays a large role in the observed treatment effects of psychedelics. One of the hallmarks of psychedelics is a (drug induced) sense of profundity and enlightenment. If you tell someone that they're about to have a life-changing experience, then you give them a drug that induces the feeling of a life-changing experience, it's likely that they'll walk away thinking they've had a life-changing experience and change their behavior accordingly. I agree that their conclusion is borderline misleading. Traditional antidepressant studies also show a high placebo response rate, but approved SSRIs diverge from placebo in studies. Their success is largely measured by how far they diverge from the placebo groups. If an SSRI study showed that the medications were identical to placebo yet concluded that the SSRIs had benefit, it would be soundly rejected. Yet when the same conclusion appears in a study about psychedelics, it seems to get a free pass. I think this speaks volumes about the current bias toward psychedelic medicine.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoDozens and dozens of SSRI studies were never published because they showed no effect compared to placebo. The drug companies selectively publish the 1 in 20 studies that do give a positive result. It is essentially a scam: marketing addictive, mind- and behavior-altering drugs to desperate people who don’t know any better. The drugs don’t help, they just dull emotions and make you not care.
- renewiltord 6y agoThis makes sense to me. I've never had a benefit from a microdose and now only do full doses.
- seibelj 6y agoMy drug of choice is placebo. Minimal side effects. Inexpensive. The more I use it, the better it works. Has effects on a variety of ailments, both physical and psychological. I'm surprised they don't sell branded placebo at the pharmacy - "Super Placebo - now with organic filler". I think it could be a hot seller.
- shric 6y agoIt's called homeopathy.
- hellbannedguy 6y agoAnd Chiropractic. I would like to throw Psychiatry is there too, but they do seem to have some drugs that get people through short term misery. Read this the next time you wonder if that expensive antidepressant is really doing anything. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/
- hntrader 6y agoWhat a fascinating study. Placebo is 82 percent responsible for the positive effects of antidepressants, and the remaining effect is clinically insignificant and dominated by a change such as sleeping more, and is potentially the result of patients being able to break the blinding protocol. Why haven't we heard more about this??
- DistressedDrone 6y agoThey actually do here in Canada, I think they're mostly intended for children.
- joubert 6y agoOriginal post by Imperial College study cited in the FT article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26317408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26317408
- markdown 6y agoRelevant Mitchell & Webb microdosing alcohol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
- wyqydsyq 6y agoIncredible, who could have ever guessed that taking something in such a small dose that it's effects are imperceptible to the subject would reveal that the effects at such a dose are... imperceptible to the subject? Can we do a study on whether water is wet or ice is cold next?
- junon 6y agoThis is a pretty disingenuous take on "science".
- porb121 6y ago"imperceptible" refers to the actual psychidelic experience; microdosing is not supposed to produce the auditory or visual hallucinations of macrodosing. that such a dose would or would not have other effects is not analytically obvious.
- ketamine__ 6y agohttps://archive.is/cmA76 https://archive.is/cmA76
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/cmA76 https://archive.is/cmA76
- ddelt 6y agoWhat is crazy is, trying to now view this on my mobile device required me to fill out a captcha, which I couldn’t even view because it wasn’t completely viewable on my mobile viewport. Without venturing a positive or negative opinion either way: I clicked the original article, couldn’t see the content without paying, so I left. Clicked the link to presumably bypass the paywall, and couldn’t pass the bot detection in a few seconds as a human on my preferred reading device, so I left. Now I don’t want to bother reading the article at all, and took the time to write a comment here instead.
- justaj 6y agoAre you referring to the archive.is link or the original?
- ddelt 6y agoThe archive.is link gave me the captcha, so I’m referring to both.
- justaj 6y agoDoes the captcha still occur if you turn off JS?
- fyrabanks 6y agoHe’s talking about the captcha on the archive link, as well as the paywall on the actual article. I have the same issue with the captcha on my phone.
- poopsmithe 6y agoThis is my first hand experience. My life was a codependent mess, I was depressed and having suicidal thoughts. I took a "heroic dose" of psilocybin, and during the ~4 hour trip I fell asleep and I was convinced I had died. I re-experienced my forgotten birth and felt the pain of my circumcision. I experienced a bunch of unexplainable things, fractal patterns and music, and explored a Interstellar(2014)-like tesseract where I could choose any place in time to return to. I decided to return to myself in the present time, rather than pass on to whatever comes after my life. I awoke in a puddle of urine and vomit. My body felt like it had been hard-reset and I felt little pains here and there which I had completely forgotten about and my brain had just become used to and ignored. I immediately felt better about my mess of a life, and happy that it's what I get to work with and make better. I used that positive momentum to get pumped about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where I did a lot of good work on myself. For therapeutic effect of psychedelics, I think the uncomfortable mind-body separation experience is necessary.
- mulderc 6y agoMy experience suggests you don’t need to go that far to get good results. I was at the lowest point in my life, very depressed and just generally lost. I was likely clinically depressed but didn’t have enough money to get a proper diagnosis. I everything short of prescription drugs to deal with it and nothing worked. Then I took some LSD and had a mild trip with a friend and literally the next morning I felt happy and energetic. From that point on I have not been anywhere near the depression I had before. Now I just have the normal ups and down of life abs feel perfectly capable of dealing with the world.
- __blockcipher__ 6y agoSome people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem. But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed. And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)
- __blockcipher__ 6y agoI won't discuss the study much itself (https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878 https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878 for the link to the actual paper btw), except to point out how sad this state of affairs is: > A key limitation of the present study is the lack of verification of the nature, purity, and dosage of the psychedelic substance used for microdosing. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms were used by 23% of the sample, 14% used legal LSD analogues (such as 1P-LSD), whereas 62% sourced their substance from the black market, mostly LSD (61%). Oh, and this was interesting: > We note that according to our data the threshold LSD dose where participants guess better than random is 12 µg, see Figure 4, which is in line with the 13 µg threshold dose estimated by a recent dose controlled study So in this group 12ug is roughly where the consciously notable effects begin (for this study population). For context, it's commonly said that "if you can feel it then it's not a microdose"; I consider ~5ug to be a microdose. --- Anyway, I've got a lot of experience in this area because I microdosed ~4-5 ug LSD per day, every day, for about a year and a half. Also, this was from LSD liquid I made myself starting from raw crystal. So while I don't know the purity of the crystal itself, I at least knew how much of "my" crystal I was taking. (Getting a proper purity figure requires performing GC/MS - which you can only get done legally by sending a >=50 mg sample to EnergyControl in Spain, and I elected not to because I didn't want to have to sacrifice 50mg (= 500 doses) of crystal to send them) For someone like me who is (relatively speaking) experienced with psychedelics, I can absolutely notice 5ug (it's subtle, of course, but definitely there), so note that the ~12ug detectability threshold they found in the study depends on how attuned the user is to the effects, etc. Really when most people talk about "noticing" something they don't actually "notice" it until they hit the point where they are incapable of not noticing it (for example, someone drinking for the first time will claim they feel the same 20 minutes after taking a shot, and when they finally admit that they're "drunk" they're properly drunk and not just "buzzed") Anyway, enough rambling. Microdosing had an effect, but I took it for the same reasons (albeit smaller-scale) that I would take a full dose of LSD: increased energy, an increased "non-linearity" of thought patterns that is counterbalanced by the more traditionally stimulating effects of LSD (LSD is a Dopamine receptor D2 agonist), improved visual acuity and vibrancy of colors (well, full doses don't "improve" your visual acuity since a psychedelic dose cranks up the pattern recognition/perception transformation weights of your brain way past a functional state) That is to say, that I wasn't microdosing to miraculously change my life or anything like that. Microdosing won't do that and the annoyingly-pro-microdosing-to-a-fault crowd really needs to get that. While I'm rambling, I'll add that I personally have almost never taken LSD for a "spiritual transformation" or whatever you want to call it; I find psilocybin mushrooms to be far superior in that aspect. Basically, relatively speaking mushrooms cause much more "mindfuck" and for me I had the distinct sensation of feeling the shrooms taking over my brain (in a benevolent sense, or at least neutral), whereas LSD is a more visual experience and more energetic (likely due to the d2 receptor agonism I mentioned earlier as well as the general structure of LSD looking like a sort of psychedelic phenethylamine, phenthylamine itself being very amphetamine-like). That is to say, both shrooms and LSD are very similar; the "magic" of the classical psychedelics - LSD, psilocybin, mescaline - is primarily attributable to their action at the 5-HT2A receptor (read: "serotonin subtype 2a receptor"), and that is by far the most distinctive and noticeable part of the psychedelic experience. But comparing between the psychedelics, with shrooms it takes much more "mindfuck" to get to a certain level of "visuals", and vice versa with LSD. Note I've talked to people who claim it's the other way around for them, but frankly these have always been people with limited experience and/or who don't think about psychedelics very deeply (in the analytical sense of really trying to grok them) so I personally still consider "take shrooms for the 3-6 hour mindfuck and LSD for the 8-12 hour aesthetic, energetic, kinesthetic experience" to be canon. I've kind of accepted that I'm not going to have a coherent message with this post, but psychedelics are largely misunderstood, either by their opponents as causing "hallucinations" (no) and by the zealots as being a magical cure-all or microdosing specifically being a life-changing practice. For me, taking 3g of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms on a beach as my first real trip flipped me inside out and rewired my value structures. No longer was the (unconscious) desire for social approval vis-a-vis a prestigious/well-paying career at the top of my value structure; instead, spending a warm day on the beach with friends while wearing as little clothing as possible became what was most worthwhile and beautiful. Without trying to do so, I was analyzing my past, present and future. You see, while I meant it when I said that psychedelics are not a cure-all, they are (or more accurately, can be) the cure for many things. One of the most well-accepted findings in psychology is that, in general, your personality is incredibly non-malleable, and tends to persist across time. Well, psychedelics are the only thing I know of that can reliably and radically change one's personality, specifically the big 5 dimension of "openness to experience". Even an hour of sitting "outside" of your self can reveal things that sober you is incapable of noticing. And, just as once one human broke the 4 minute mile mark suddenly everybody started doing it, once you step outside of your "issue" du jour, however briefly - your neuroticism, your jealousy, your fear of emotional expression, your unconscious belief that you are incapable of love, etc - suddenly you've really seen that there's a different way of living. Not seen it in the intellectual sense but really consciously experienced it. So when sobriety returns, barring a day or two of afterglow, you're soon largely back to your old self - and yet having experienced that alternate way, you have a chance to see yourself right now the way you'd look back on your life on your deathbed: suddenly the things you thought were the small things - a friend's smile, the contented look on your dog when you scratch them just right - were the big things all along. And the big things, the things we tell ourselves are the serious things, the adult things - we see them for the tiny, insignificant implementation details that they are. So, psychedelics can wash away a type of sickness that most suffer from unknowingly. But they can only do so when you take enough that you cease to be capable of operating in that old mode anymore. Which means invariably there's always a period during the come-up when you realize you had no idea what you were signing up for. But they are tools - very sharp ones - and like all very sharp tools can cause tremendous damage. One of my greatest regrets was selling two very strong tabs to someone who I had assumed knew what they were doing, and so didn't spend time giving the usual disclaimers / tutorial I'd give to clients. These were very strong tabs so it'd be something like 3-4 tabs of 100ug. I can't give as much detail as I want, (let's just say that I found much of this out from the news articles after the fact), but suffice to say that they took the tabs at night and ended up in a sort of "fugue state" (not sure what the right clinical term would be) where they stripped completely naked (a surprisingly common action of those on massive doses of psychedelics), knocked on the door of a random citizen asking for help, then started attacking them when they opened the door. As I later learned, they were ex-military and had diagnosed PTSD and god knows what else (one of the many myriad "benefits" of the war on drugs is never knowing the medical status of people who you're selling powerful drugs to unless they proactively tell you). To be clear, even on ~400ug LSD it is not normal to perform violent home invasions while in a blacked-out-like state, and there were a LOT of things that had to go wrong (PTSD + probably bad at handling psychs in general + taking them in the middle of the night + other factors I'm unaware of) for such a freak incident to occur. When you move the equivalent of 10,000 hits, statistically speaking you'll end up with one of those stories eventually. So, don't drink the microdosing kool-aid too much - do it for fun and the experience if you want but don't pretend it's going to be a radical transformation - and understand that psychedelics can cause positive changes in a way that can [help] solve problems that are resistant to every traditional tool we have. But they can also be quite dangerous. I actually think the risk of a 'bad trip' is incredibly overblown and most people freak themselves out way too much about such things, but neither should one take a cavalier attitude. [/unstructured ramble]
- surround 6y agoLet’s say there’s a Facebook group of moms that enjoy using essential oils. Imagine that a study gets posted to the group showing that essential oils are ineffective at treating some disease. If I made a comment in that community about how, in my anecdotal experience, essential oils cured me of this disease, it would probably be supported over the study. Now, instead of essential oils, let’s say I did the same thing with a drug that is popular in Silicon Valley, and instead of a Facebook mom group, it’s hacker news.
- haswell 6y agoThere are studies and growing consensus that psilocybin can have positive/therapeutic effects. Are you trying to imply that the same is true for essential oils? This seems like a false equivalency/strawman situation.
- jordan_curve 6y agoThe fact that psilocybin can potentially have positive therapeutic effects in controlled environments does not mean people “microdosing” experience those effects.
- RHSman2 6y ago
- eurasiantiger 6y agoOne sentence invalidates the entire study: ”The participants acquired their own psychedelic substances”. Were the drugs tested for potency? Did they contain at all what was claimed?
- scyllax 6y agoThe limitations part sums it up, this is a study about real-life microdosing not about microdosing by itself and the lack of substance verification makes it mostly irrelevant to me. https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878#s4-1 https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878#s4-1 "A key limitation of the present study is the lack of verification of the nature, purity, and dosage of the psychedelic substance used for microdosing. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms were used by 23% of the sample, 14% used legal LSD analogues (such as 1P-LSD), whereas 62% sourced their substance from the black market, mostly LSD (61%). According to the Energy Control's drug checking service (Barcelona), LSD blotter adulteration rates were low during the period when our study was running: in both 2018 and 2019 blotters sold as LSD contained LSD only in 90% (n = 735) of tested samples [personal communication with M. Ventrua from EC, June 2020]. The exact quantity of active ingredient within a given microdose cannot be known with certainty; however, the positive relationship between dose and blind breaking (Figure 4) and that the threshold dose for psychoactivity was consistent with a recent controlled study (12 µg vs 13 µg; Bershad et al., 2019a) provide some reassurance. Nonetheless, our results should be not understood as clinical evidence, rather they are representative of ‘real life microdosing’."